Sober Fun—Ep.3
never tear a baguette lengthwise
Rules don’t apply inside the Oceanside Flea Market. People sell and eat trinkets and drugs and dance with critters and do things out of accordance of laws and physics. Some of the vendors are friends. One of them, Jo, drives a 1991 Ford Ranger that can fly and float and do Pirate-y things. With it, he collects different trinkets of art from the creative world and sells/shows them at the Oceanside Flea Market.
Jo drove his 1991 Ford Ranger straight into the harbor. The whole flea market gang braced against door panels and B-pillars and grabbed at whatever their hands could find. They never really know where they're going when Jo picks them up, but none of them expected the Pacific Ocean.
"Ay, we giving this fruit to Poseidon?" said Manny as he looked through the salty foam dripping down the car window.
Jo shook the shifter to find neutral. Turning to the backseats, Jo looked at Mason. "Mace, can you reach through the window and grab the bag."
Mason obeyed with wide eyes and reached through the back window into the truck bed and pulled in a plastic bag of fruit. He'd never been in a floating 1991 Ford Ranger. They dropped off the blood oranges to the harbor bar that likes to put them in their bloody marys before continuing to bob along through Oceanside harbor. Kevin sat in the back with a jumpy chuckle as he watched the cars driving parallel to them on the dry road. In the other back corner, Manny mumbled a melodic set of curse words around his accepted fate. Sitting in the front, Louie looked out distantly and massaged the corners of his mouth to corral an unruly smile. As they passed the final jetties of the harbor and moved out to sea, Mason sat up in his middle seat for an obligatory check of the waves.
Jo sat with his bare left foot on the dash and with his wrist bone resting on the gently vibrating shifter knob. As North County continued to lose its definition behind them, their hands pulled and played with the cloth seat threads and picked up and put down the random loose items inside the cab.
"Ye Jo-ster, I can't help but notice, we're pointed toward the horizon," said Kevin.
"Is that what you see?" replied Jo.
Mason sat forward and poked his head between the two passenger seats to look further out. Jo looked over to Louie and then passed his eyes over the others in the back.
"France. We're going to France."
"Muuther fucker," said Manny as he gave a laughing shout.
Louie's shoulders bounced as he broke into a manic giggle. Mason turned to look through the back window toward the ever-thinning strip of land.
"Boyys time," said Kevin, who nodded while looking through Jo's backrest.
"Exactly, Kev," said Jo.
"But this thing does fly," said Kevin. "And we're going further west."
"First. Impressive map skills, Kev. Second. I just prefer to sail sometimes, ya know? There's something peaceful, something correct, something wholesome about moving by the power of the wind. So quiet. Makes you feel connected and remember how big the world is."
"Yeah, I can make the walk to my shitter feel big if I drag myself by my tongue," said Manny as he kicked his knee up against the front seat, slouching back.
Kevin looked in the bed of the truck to confirm what he already knew. "There's no sail you kook."
It was true there was no sail, but they went on at sailing pace. They headed south and fished when they found seaweed patties and surfed when they found waves. When they reached El Salvador, they drove back onto land and fattened up on pupusas before crossing into Honduras and heading back out to sea. They had moments of mania and moments of sanity. Jo brought only one album to play on cassette: "A Shaw Deal" by Geologist, D.S., which played on repeat and tested the spans of the ocean. They whiplashed through days of sobriety and days of rum benders. On the coast of Africa, Manny caught a Sarpa Salpa (“dream fish" in Arabic) that has psychedelic symptoms when consumed and is multiplied by twelve when mixed with rum and Salvadorian hash and too much sunshine. After they ate it, Kevin lay on his stomach on the truck hood. He pressed his chin into the metal and let his eyes get lost in the web of refracting ocean light. Manny went up on the roof with Mason and a guitar. Together, while Mason drummed on the steal and sang high-pitched and raspy, they wrote a nice, deranged little song. After Jo ate the fish, he slept for four days, so Louie had to drive. But Louie was also high, and when he drove, he thought he was back in California driving on the 395 on the way up to Mammoth Mountain. And so when sobriety finally seeped back in, they found themselves amongst ice caps, completely lost. Unsure of what pole they were at, they bobbed around for a few days before eventually meeting an outgoing Beluga whale who led them south along the coast of Norway and gave them further instructions on how to get to France. Ultimately, the trip took forty-seven days and an entire paragraph to happen. And not a single one of them got scurvy.
They landed at the coastal French city of Les Sables d'Olonnes. When they arrived, they kissed the ground and skipped along the boardwalk and dined on wine and oysters and the faces of strangers. They slept the night directly on the large sand beach. In the morning, they surfed and ate breakfast and bought cigarettes before hitting the road.
The clean-cut fields and lazy rolling hills and cicada songs stole their words for the beginning of the drive. They took in the sceneries and impressions and forgot how to say where are we going. After an hour or so, with a wand's wave of baguette through the cabin, Louie asked, "What's up with France?"
"I don't know, but they hate consonants," replied Jo.
Manny said, "Yeah, we've been coming here a lot lately."
Jo drummed on the steering wheel. "What's up with France. Well, can feral men be domesticated?" Nobody responded. "We’ll find out. Plus, I dig Paris. It reminds me of an expanded flea market. All of it is packed in tight, fractal. You can go from Beijing to Sri Lanka to Dakar to Paris all in a twenty-minute walk." Some of them nodded softly to themselves while they kept their eyes on the passing countryside. "But we're not going to Paris."
"Bombay, Bangkok, Medellin—those places are packed in tight," said Kevin after a while.
"Feral. And…” Jo let go of the wheel and twisted all the way around in his seat to face Kevin. Louie kept his legs crossed and casually reached over to steer from the passenger seat. "I'm here to buy something for my booth. It's called free dental insurance. Next trip, we can take your Tacoma though. You'll probably need to find new things to pawn."
They traversed the countryside and stopped in the Rosnay region in the small town of Le Bouchet. The area was in the middle of the "empty diagonal" (the flyover states version of France). To the boys coming from days at sea with nothing but their imaginations, the emptiness bustled. Everything, the cobbled roads jostling steps, the churches whispering out to the meadows where livestock nuzzled, the small lakes catching bird song, filled their starved sensations.
Jo drove them up to a park to stop for a picnic. Sprawling out of the truck, Manny and Kevin ran off to look at some curious mules standing in a corral. The others followed Jo up to a stone building. They entered a gift shop where they perused around, thumbing through books and trinkets, before going upstairs.
Jo had visited the small, rural gallery before. Dark ceramic sculptures sat around the open yellow room. A callow wonder stitched through each of the pieces. Created by Joëlle Gervais, the works ranging from pigs to bunnies to children, induced skips and twirling steps to its observers. Louie held his elbow behind him and spent meaningful time with each sculpture. Mason bounced around irregularly and dribbled out commentary. Jo walked straight up to the one he planned to bring back home with him.
Three ceramic girls sat on a bench with swinging legs and open stares. Normally, Jo stalked art, tiptoeing up to it with pacing steps. He remembered how he hopped right up to this piece when he first saw it. The girls' gaze reminded him of how he used to look through the car window in his youth, full of senseless questions and empty of knowing.
As he carefully plucked the piece off of its small yellow shelf, he looked out of the gallery window. Down in the corral, Manny hugged the neck of a mule as it ran with rabid kicks in an effort to buck him off. Kevin gave chase behind, bent and crippled with laughter.
When they all gathered back up for their picnic lunch, the sculpture of the girls sat in the middle of the park table. None of them objected as they tore baguettes in all the wrong ways and ate cheese crust and took apple bites out of sticks of saucisson and loaded up on their company in the unbounded air.