9.

A couple of weeks pass. Life changes very little for Oddie. He goes to work, teaches his classes, goes to the park and works out a little, then drinks enough beer to pass out. May becomes June and he finds himself teaching his US History students about the Kennedy Assassination, the one in Los Angeles. He shows them pictures of the Ambassador Hotel, now razed, and they reenact Senator Kennedy’s movements through the ballroom, the pantry, the kitchen. Motives are discussed, including the recent celebration by local Jews of the one year anniversary of the Six Day War. These are the times when Oddie is at his best, bringing history alive for the kids. For a moment they stop their electronic masturbation and pay attention to this world of easy money and good times that has been built for them by the blood of others.

Q can’t meet him at the park that day so Oddie goes for a run in his neighborhood near Paramount Studios. Summer is here. The hot streets and the smell of water cooling down the asphalt. Flowers, Jacaranda and magnolia and mimosa and sweet olive, filling the LA air with the scent of romance, love, deep heat. All of that for others, however. A man without his wife is a rotten vessel steering for a fatal shore. Oddie feels tiny inside, lonely beyond belief. Only a run through the gloaming can cure his ills. He runs to laugh which he is barely able to do and he runs for gratitude of which he feels very little and he runs for the cardio of which he must do if he continues to smoke weed every day and he runs to work up a sweat because he’s getting a little fat and he runs for his legs, especially the tight hamstrings and sore foot and tight ankle and dinged knee. He’s 43 years old and he knows he should be grateful he only feels so shitty, but he feels self-pity rise in his throat as he runs, burning through his body like a swallowed gulp of rotgut tequila.

He stops at the liquor store on the way home and buys two cans of Steel Reserve beer. Cheap and strong, like me, the thinks. On the way out the door he finds a penny on the floor, face up. He picks it up. The year is 1968. He repeats this out loud.

“!968.”

He pauses, then slips the penny in the waistband of his compression shorts and exits the store. 1968. I was 1, he thinks. And Kennedy was still alive. Today is June 5^th. 42 years ago he was in Los Angeles, winning the primary. He had a matter of hours to live. If you could go back in time, what would you do? Seek out Sirhan Sirhan? Step in front of the bullet? Take one for the future President, and change history. Of course, one cannot change history. It already happened. It’s finished, done. Even the smallest adjustment might change the entire present. Like that Ray Bradbury short story. Kill a prehistoric butterfly, change the world.

The only problem with stopping at the closest liquor store on the way home is that the beer could be colder. A lot colder, especially if it’s Steel Reserve which needs to be at sub-zero if one wants to keep it down. Therefore Oddie must throw them in the freezer at home and wait. Patience, something he has little of. Still, this too can be learned. If a man wants his wife back he’ll learn any new thing he can. So, Patience.

Oddie sits on the couch. He feels a pinch at the waist. Reaching into his shorts he pulls out the penny. 1968. A long time ago, and all the things we didn’t know. His parents were still together. The war was still happening. Hippies. The Mansons. Nixon. Crazy days with more to come.

Oddie takes a deep breath, holds it, exhales.

He sees his mother holding a sign for civil rights.

Oddie takes a second breath, holds it, exhales.

He sees Kennedy on the floor, a busboy at his side.

Oddie takes a third breath, holds it, exhales.

He sees his father’s groovy sideburns and paisley patterned shirt.

Oddie takes a fourth breath, holds it, exhales.

He sees waves of people in front of the long reflection pool in Washington DC.

Oddie feels himself engulfed into the cosmic sea of time.

10.

He’s standing outside his house on the sidewalk. Everywhere he looks he sees a cool car. In the driveway, on the streets. It must be a dream. The apartment building next door to his house is gone, replaced by two bungalows. Mr. Sergio’s house next door is blue instead of tan. The condos across the street are gone, replaced by a row of homes. The streetlights are white, instead of orange. And again, nothing but cool cars, 60’s and 50’s. Nothing from the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, 00’s. Nothing Japanese. A couple VW Bugs, that’s it.

Oddie feels outside of himself. A person without a body. A head without a horseman. His limbs seems ethereal and almost weightless, indeed he isn’t standing so much as floating. A man and a woman cross the street and get into the car right next to him without acknowledging him at all. The car radio comes on. An announcer is talking about election results. A button is punched and music emerges as the car pulls away from the curb. Deep Purple’s Hush. I thought I heard her calling my name. Hush, hush, she broke my heart but I love her just the same.

The election results.

The announcer said that Senator Kennedy had won California.

It’s 1968.

Oddie whispers it. “It’s 1968.”

He’s on his street. He can see the elementary school at the end of the street. He can see Wilton Avenue to his left. There’s no traffic light, only a stop sign. No condos, only houses. And cars, lots of cool cars.

And Kennedy is alive. He’s at the Ambassador Hotel. So is Sirhan Sirhan. And I’m the only one who knows.

Oddie starts to walk towards Wilton. His legs are dreamy, moving underneath him like an alien carriage. He doesn’t so much walk as he floats, moving down the sidewalk in spurts. People are on their porches, talking. Nobody says anything as Oddie passes. Perhaps I’m invisible, he thinks. Or ethereal. Not of this time. He wonders if he’ll be able to save the day. How can a spirit, a time traveling entity affect time? I guess I’ll find out when I get there.

But getting there takes time. Just getting down Maplewood to Western seems to take ages. Again, it’s like a dream, where one forgets how to use their legs. For a moment the walking is normal. Then the mind shifts, association becomes cognition and Oddie has to think about each step.

Meanwhile, there are the distractions. The way the people dress stands out more than anything else. The care women put into their hair. The men in slacks and dress shirts. The women in skirts and dresses. And the cars, the fat American cars honking and belching fumes. Music from a hundred speakers. A baseball game. More election news. The Beatles. Donovan. Andy Williams. Tom Jones. Jimi Hendrix. The Stones.

And it’s a whiter city, that’s for sure. This is all the more apparent when he finally makes it to Western Avenue and turns south. No Korea Town, at least not here. It’s American flags and American banks and American furniture stores and no bodegas and no BBQ and no Thai massage. It’s a white world at war with the yellow man and the black man and Oddie is a voyager through it all.

He sees a sister with an afro.

He sees a brother with an afro.

He sees a white boy with an afro.

He sees peace signs and love beads and bell bottoms. He sees a million people smoking cigarettes like it’s good for them. He sees cops looking like fascist thugs, cops on motorcycles with white helmets and ugly black batons. He sees fewer people but more cars, more traffic, people out cruising on a summer night. He passes the gas station on the corner of Beverly Boulevard. 39 cents a gallon. That would explain the cruising. And there’s more drive-throughs. Drive-through liquor, hamburgers, newspapers, fried chicken, donuts. People are driving and honking and turning on and tuning in and dropping out. A lot of men still wearing hats. Sharp divides between the hip and the square. Long hair. Crew cuts. Love it or leave it. Black power. The green ecology flag.

The images blend and seem to drag Oddie down. The litany of numbered streets passes, 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th, 6^th, at last he’s at Wilshire Boulevard. The theatre at the corner is gaily lit. Englebert Humperdinck is playing is a few days, and the Mamas and the Papas are playing next week. Oddie turns down Wilshire. Only a few blocks to go. He catches the time in the window of a watch repair shop. 11:30 p.m. Jesus, he’s been walking for hours. It’s exhausting, this world of the past, this inability to walk at a normal pace, this cacophony of voices and cars and transistor radios and opening bar doors and people talking from vehicles to people on the street and there’s more news about the election.

He crosses Normandie. Only two blocks to go. The Ambassador Hotel is lit up with a million yellow bulbs. There’s a throng of people outside. Police. The Press. Bellmen in monkey jackets. Valets. Women in dresses, men in sharp suits. Oddie moves through them like a ghost. He finds space between people and fills it, then moves again. People do not pass through him but rather around him. There’s a natural flow to the movements, like a dance, like synchronized swimming.

Oddie follows the crowd and the sound of the crowd to the ballroom. Kennedy is speaking. That Massachusetts twang. It’s almost comical, like a satirist mimicking the great man. But no, that’s Kennedy himself. His entourage. Off to the side, Rosie Greer. Kennedy’s wife, Ethel. A priest. A cop. The Press. Oddie spies a clock on the wall. Midnight. On the dot.

He is released by the cosmic pull of time.

11.

Oddie opens his eyes. He’s sitting on his couch. He looks at the clock. Fifteen minutes have passed. He looks around the living room, taking in the details of the furniture. Outside, it’s dusk. Birds chirp. Someone is hollering at their television. A basketball game is on. Oddie gets up and walks to the freezer. He opens it and removes his beers. Cold. Very cold. He pops one and takes a sip, then looks around the room again.

“What the fuck,” he says.

8.

Oddie and Q are working out at North Hollywood Park. Q is doing pull-ups in which he launches himself above the bar, and then catches it. When he finishes a set, Oddie jumps up. He’s slender with a good build but he’s let himself fall out of shape in the last year. The beer fat, the bad haircut, the wrinkled and stained workout clothes. He struggles to do ten pull-ups, and then they head to the bathrooms. Q balances himself on his hands against a wall and does about 15 upside down pushups.

“What do you think it was?” says Q as he exercises.

“I’m not sure,” says Oddie. “I’ve never really had an out of body experience before. A couple of times playing football I got hit in the head and felt déjà vu but this wasn’t like that at all.”

Q drops back down to his feet and Oddie assumes the same position against the wall. He gasps out five or six, and then falls over to his feet.

“You said you felt like you were traveling through time?”

Oddie, gazing at the sunset, nods.

“That’s some heavy shit my brother. Some heavy, heavy shit. Maybe, maybe you’ve tapped into the mind, into the part of the mind that controls time.”

“The Fourth Dimension part of the brain?”

Q gives Oddie a quizzical look, knits his brows.

“The fourth dimension is time,” says Oddie. “Length, width, depth and time.”

Q says ‘time’ at the same time. “That’s deep, man. That’s very spiritual. What if, with all the stressful things that have been happening to you, what if you found a way to travel through time, using the mind? You said it felt like it was a year ago?”

“Yeah. It was the year of the coin. The time was the same but it was last year. The banner said Seniors 2009.”

“You don’t think you were just trippin'? Yo, speaking of, you wanna smoke?”

“Sure.”

“You got a wrap in your car?”

“Nah.”

“Let’s head over to the store.”

They head towards the 7-11 across from the park.

“No,” says Oddie. “I don’t think it was a ‘trip.’ I really don’t know what it was. It felt so real. Like when you’re really tired and you fall into ‘dreams’ right away. Except I wasn’t sleepy, I was just relaxed. I was doing that meditative breathing you showed me. And I was holding a penny.”

“The penny from last year.”

“Right.”

“Well,” says Q. “Maybe the penny made you travel.”

“Ha.”

“No, my brother maybe it did. Maybe you just willed yourself back in time.”

Oddie laughs. “Man, this shit is a trip. It would make a good movie.”

“It would make an excellent movie. We could shoot it. I could film it, you could write it. You’d be the guy who travels through time. We’d call it….let’s see, what would be a good title. ‘Penny for Your Thoughts?’”

“Nah,” says Oddie as they stop at the corner and wait for the light to change. “Sounds like a romantic comedy.”

“You don’t think it would be a romantic comedy?”

“Nah,” says Oddie as the light changes and they cross. “It would be a thriller. Like the guy goes back in time and tries to avert a crime. Maybe he’d try to save somebody. One of the Kennedys. And there would be people trying to stop him. Something like that. Or maybe something in his own neighborhood.”

“There you go,” says Q as they walk up to the glass doors of the 7-11. An elderly man approaches and Q holds the door for him. “What would the title be then?”

“I dunno. Maybe ‘Bad Penny.’”

“That sounds good.”

“Or ‘Penny Dreadful.’”

Q’s head snaps back in surprise. “Whoa, I like that. ‘Penny Dreadful.’ Where’d you get that title?”

“I saw it in the dictionary the other day. It’s a British word for a cheap magazine that features murder and crime and shit like that. ‘Penny Dreadful.’”

“I like it,” says Q. “What flavor blunt you want? You wanna try menthol?”

“Too dry,” says Oddie. “Get grape. Those are always fresh.”

“Check you out,” says Q. “Knowing what’s up”

4.

Oddie parks, gathers his book bag, water bottle and heads inside. Along the way he spots a penny, head up, not that it matters, he picks up all pennies. This one is battered and dirty and without looking at it too closely, Oddie tries to guess the year.

“1998,” he says softly, then looks down at the coin in his palm. 2009. Last year. Last year it was all different. He was out of work and feeling pretty low about that but he still had his wife, his family, sure it was just animals but they were always so glad to see him.

He slips the penny in his pocket and heads inside.

5.

Oddie greets the front desk clerk, punches in, checks his mail, heads to his classroom. A sign next to the door reads ‘Mr. Smith, Dean of Social Sciences.’ Mighty impressive, Mr. Smith. Head of a Department that consists of two people including yourself. Sigh. Well hell, it’s better than not working. And after all, Oddie is good at his job. He eyes the setup of chairs, the posters on the wall, the examples of student work. Another school year almost done. The last days of May are upon us, when concentration flags and a young man spends hours of each school day battling down a semi-permanent erection. Oddie knows how these poor bastards feel. A lot has changed in the twenty-five years since he graduated. The chicks are hotter, as his buddy JJ might say. Possible. They sure wear less clothing. Oddie has learned to keep his distance when they try to get too close. They’ll slouch up next to him, their adolescent tits hanging out like sacks of meal. You have a sexual organ and therefore you must be examined and understood. The guys don’t understand why the chicks are hot for their teacher. He’s 42 years old with a gray beard and a shaved head. He looks like a stoned pirate.

That’s me, thinks Oddie as he writes the morning’s agenda on the whiteboard. A stoned pirate trying to get back to his one safe port.

The bell rings and students begin arriving. Oddie stands outside the door nodding a greeting to each as they arrive. Good morning, Mr. O. Good morning. What’s going on, Mr. O? They slap his hands or give him a pound. Good old Mr. O. If only they knew what a fucker you are.

6.

Staff meeting at lunch. It’s a team-building exercise. Everybody take out a penny. If you don’t have one, one will be provided. Oddie has one cent of cash on his person (and about zero bucks in the bank, same as always), the penny he found this morning.

“Okay,” says the Principal, an attractive married Jewish woman, not unlike his wife. In fact her first name is his wife’s Hebrew name. “Look at the year on your coin. If you were alive in that year,” (sounds from both the older and the younger members of staff, grateful chuckles from one, sighs of pain and missed opportunity from the other), “then I want you to recall what you were doing that year. Take some time to really meditate on the idea. Where was I? What was I doing? What were my dreams? Do that for a minute or two and then we’ll go around the circle and each person can say something.”

“What if you weren’t alive when your coin was made?” says the math teacher.

The Principal opens her coin purse, peruses the selection, removes a penny and hands it to the teacher.

“Thank you,” he says as if she’d just given him a kidney.

“No problem,” she says.

Oddie closes his eyes. Where was I at this exact moment last year? Probably sitting in front of the computer looking at Craigslist. Looking for a job. Sleeping off the morning’s hash trip. Jesus, what a dumbass I was, thinks Oddie. But even so, my wife was coming home each night, often with the groceries, ever hopeful that I’d have good news, listening to the tales of woe, the fool in the suit running around Los Angeles trying to convince the world that he was suitable for employment. Wasting time, money, gas.

Oddie breathes into those memories and makes them evaporate. Four breaths. If a man could only take four breaths before he acted, he would spare himself 10,000 pains. Q says that. Four breaths. One. Two. Three. Four.

Oddie opens his eyes. Something has changed. The teachers are gone, except Mrs. Art Teacher, whose room this is. She’s eating lunch and looking at the computer. A group of students, most of whom Oddie doesn’t recognize, are eating Hot Cheetos and playing around with their telephones. Texting. Sexting more likely.

Stranger is the way Oddie feels. Out of body. Yeah, that would be about right. He has a sense of his own presence but feels more like an observer than an actual being. And where the hell did the meeting go? Did I nod off and everyone went back to class? Jesus, have I been drinking that much? No. Hell No. Two beers last night, same as it ever was.

Oddie glances at the clock. 12:25. The meeting began five minutes ago. He sees the calendar below the clock. Funny, Mrs. Art Teacher hasn’t changed the calendar. She still has 2009 hanging.

Two students walk in who Oddie recognizes as seniors from the 2009 class. They’re not visiting. He can tell by the way they carry their backpacks and sip their cans of soda. It’s 2009. There’s even a banner on the wall. Seniors, 2009! Good luck! We’ll miss you!

WTF. In the language of the kids, what the fuck? What is happening? Am I stoned? Am I dead? Am I tripping balls? Has all that acid that I ate in the early 90’s finally catching up to me? WTF, WTF, WTF?

7.

“Oddie,” says the Principal. “Oddie. Oddie.”

She walks over and touches his shoulder. Oddie emerges from his state of meditation. He sees the room, sees the calendar on the wall. 2010. There’s even a banner on the wall. This one is blue. Last year's was red. Seniors, 2010! Good luck! We’ll miss you!

“Oddie,” says the Principal. “Are you okay?”

“Was I snoring?”

The room of teachers laughs.

“No,” says the Principal, smiling. “You were whispering ‘what the fuck’ over and over.”

Penny Dreadful

1.

Oddie awakens in the dark.

“Five oh seven,” he says, reaching for his phone. He opens the face to check the time. It’s 5:09 a.m. Lying there, Oddie laughs. “Ha-ha.” The sound of his own voice echoing in the empty room with the half empty bed is depressing. Still, he laughs again. “Ha ha.” Intellectually, he knows this will improve his mood, what with the release of various happy chemicals into his brain. Realistically, he feels like a moron. Still, it’s a trick that his friend Q taught him the other day. ‘I can control the first sound that comes out of my body each day,’ said Q as he did his 10,000^th pull-up, his broad back and carved black abs shining in the afternoon sun at North Hollywood Park. Oddie had stood there, trying to take in all of Q’s knowledge, the stuff about meditation and the Fourth Dimension, how humans were put here to become Gods and what did he want to be, a human or a God?

“A God,” Oddie said, but he didn’t sound any more convincing than his laugh sounds now.

“Ha.”

It sounds as stupid as ever, like most of what comes out of his mouth.

“I need to learn to shut the fuck up,” he says to the ceiling.

Then he gets out of bed.

2.

Mornings are the same as before his wife moved back to Mississippi. He still gets up at 5 a.m., makes coffee, rolls a blunt, takes a book into the can and reads until his mind is gone with old, unhappy faraway thoughts. He’s reading Keegan again, the only thing that makes sense when he fucks up. He reads about Agincourt. October 25, 1415. Those lumbering men in steel. The cagy and murderous archers. The sky filled with 5,000 arrows every ten seconds. The sound like volcanic rocks exploding onto a sea of obsidian. Crash and crash again and the horses die and men fall in the mud and are killed by a knife thrust into the groin. There’s no good way to die and that’s a bad one indeed, a slow death on the French soil, thirsty, your only friend the man who comes and finishes you off. How many fortunes changed hands on days like that, when a man would give all he owned to be spared a mortal blow? Lords reduced to serfs to spare that noble head a braining.

Thoughts like these, things that he’ll never do or see keeps Odysseus Smith going through these wifeless days and nights. He looks up from the book, looks around the bathroom. Everything in here was chosen by her. The double shower curtain, white and red. He was lucky to have any shower curtain before she came along. The linen closet, full of linen. He had one set of sheets and one towel when she came along. Scented candles, rare incense, an extra case of toilet paper. All of this was from her and he threw it away like junk mail.

3.

He finishes the blunt on the drive to work. He teaches history at a high school in Chatsworth, far northwest Valley, porno town hard by a horse owning community. The connection is obvious, a world obsessed with the grossly endowed male member. And yet, thinks Oddie, most girls will tell you too big ain’t so good. Makes an average guy feel better as he pounds his pud.

Meanwhile it’s all fast action on the freeways all the time. Oddie puffs and putts along. Her car that she bought ten years ago brand new then gave to him when her mother gave her a bigger and better car, the one she loaded up and left in, taking two dogs, one cat and a heartbreaking look. Watching somebody you love walk out of your life is the second worse feeling in the world. The first is hearing somebody is dead.

Oddie speeds along the 170, sticking to the slow lanes, staying out of the way of blazing motorcycles and roaring big rigs and everybody and their mama is in a hurry. He’s not. The only good thing that has come out of this separation is he’s never late anymore. In fact he’s become somewhat obsessive about being precisely on time. The staff meeting today after school. Great. Anyway, it starts at 3:15 and Oddie will be sitting there at 3:!2, then 3:!7, then 3:20, then 3:21, watching as guilty face after guilty face walks in holding food or a Coke wearing that ‘sorry but don’t look at me gaze’, the one the kids use when they don’t know an answer to a question. If I’m not looking at the teacher then the teacher can’t see me.

The radio is boring. Oddie punches ‘play’ on the CD. Lucinda Williams. She left this too. And by the way, she has a name. Say it man, say her name. Penelope. God, just saying it is like hari-kari, like barbed wire through the guts, like a body blow. Oddie advances the tracks to number 7, ‘Down.’ Kill me Lucinda, kill me now. Cut my heart out with that guitar of yours and feed it to me. Lucinda plays awhile then she starts to sing. She says you can’t put the rain back in the sky. She says you can’t force the river upstream. She says that you know exactly what she means. She says there’s no way she’ll ever take you back. She asks if you’re down with her, babe, down with that.

“No,” says Oddie, tears running down his cheeks. “No babe, I’m not, I’m not down with that. I’m not down with that at all.”