Dog Farts and Waterbeds

Lab tests and Led Zep

It’s 3 a.m. I wake from a dream that features a flood and fish. And a sandwich.

Where did this stuff come from?

Ah…I remember.

The woman I live with at the time says, “We should get a waterbed.”

It’s late fall, 1969. I’m only vaguely aware of where I am and what I’m doing so, eager to resonate with the times, I say “Sounds like a groovy idea.” Or something like that.

“We need to make a change,” she says.

We’ve been sleeping on the floor on a ratty six-inch-thick slab of foam rubber, next to a German shepherd named Steppenwolf. The dog growls and farts when it sleeps. The situation was unacceptable by the second night. It’s been five months.

We have friends who show off their new waterbed to everyone they can. They invite people over to their apartment to “get high and meet the bed.” The bed impresses the woman I live with at the time. Owning a waterbed is snazzy and hip, cutting edge, etc. As the Flower Power Love and Peace mob veers toward capitalism, the waterbed is a status symbol; sleep on a waterbed, you’re ahead of the curve. I’ve never seen the curve, but the woman I live with at the time assures me our friends are ahead of it. Far ahead of it.

Not one to fall behind in the status race, I procure a bag.

There are too many newly-established waterbed emporiums in Denver, and a a price war is taking place. Bags are available for a song — big, heavy gauge plastic bags, some relatively well made, some not. I find it hard to tell the difference. I make the purchase at a combo head shop and waterbed showroom — “Bongs ’n Beds” — that also vends vacuum cleaners of eastern european manufacture and features a snack bar offering what the owners claim is “the world’s best tuna salad sandwich.” The sandwich is prepared by a fellow wearing a hand-crafted leather vest and no shirt, his plentiful chest hair cushioning a hand-crafted blob of a bauble that dangles to his sternum on a chrome chain. He smells like gasoline and marijuana. It is not the best tuna salad sandwich in the world, including as it does low-end canned tuna, Miracle Whip, dry rye bread, and a major load of wilted alfalfa sprouts. The capitalist wave washes all manner of debris to the shore, including fractured hippies, unreliable appliances, and sorry sandwiches. The Seventies are about to begin. It will prove to be an interesting decade.

I tote the bag home and it’s obvious that it can’t be safely filled and slept upon if it is plopped on the floor without a frame, something to contain and plump up the bulky, shapeless membrane. I hustle to a lumberyard, purchase four lengths of two-by-twelve pine, mangle the planks with a dull saw, and butt-joint a frame together, pinning the less-than-sturdy corners with long wood screws. I fancy myself a craftsman.

I attach a garden hose to the outdoor faucet, haul the hose through the house, and fill the bag. This is the first time a hose has been run through the house since members of the Denver Fire Department blow past the front door a couple months before and charge through the living room, dining room, and kitchen, and out the back door dragging a three-inch diameter hose in order fight a fire on a porch at the back of the building next to ours. In their haste they demolish my artisanal cinderblock and barn wood five-tier bookcase and trample a cherished copy of the Grove Press first edition of Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer.” To their credit, they apologize. These are not brutes, but public servants quick to the task at hand yet sensitive regarding collateral damage. If I paid taxes, I would not regret my contribution to their salaries and pension fund.

It takes six hours to fill the water bed: very old house, very low water pressure. It’s also possible that it takes an hour at the most, since I am somewhat incapacitated, out of sync with things linear. A friend scores a batch of what he claims is mescaline and asks me (“you’re an expert, man”) to run a lab analysis of sorts. It seems up to snuff.

That night, we hit the sack, or the wave, and discover that I failed to notice something that proves important: there is a bag of cold water below us, a vivid demonstration of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Body heat depleted and on the brink of hypothermia, we retreat to the foam pad on the floor. Next to a farting German shepherd named Steppenwolf.

OK, so there’s a problem: gotta warm the water. I fancy myself a problem solver.

I return to Bongs ’n Beds. The goof in the vest is behind the counter. He holds a shabby god’s eye in front of his face and turns it slowly. He is transfixed so it takes me a while to get his attention. I tell him about my waterbed problem and ask if there is a solution. He calls for help. A second employee appears and is equally confounded. He calls for help, then stares at the twirling god’s eye. The third guy has an answer.

“Gotta have a heater,” he says, failing to provide anything I didn’t know prior to the conversation.

“Got any heaters?,” I ask. He calls another fellow to the counter.

“Yep,” the fourth guy says, and as he turns to stare at the god’s eye he gestures in a southerly direction. I wander to a display just beyond a row of bongs and cheap brass water pipes, and to the left of the tuna fish salad sandwich stand. I spot the heaters.

I discover an obstacle: the heater must be placed beneath the bag before the bag is filled with water. My bag is full, heavy enough that I worry that the very old floor joists in the very old house might collapse. I’m not getting anything under the bag.

So, the answer seems to be: drain it.

But, how?

I purchase a heater then decide to take a day or two to think about the situation, and continue with the lab tests.

That night, the woman I live with at the time suggests that we put several layers of blankets and comforters on top of the bag. We pile on several inches of various materials and turn in for the night. A half hour later, the woman I live with at the time’s lips are blue and she shivers uncontrollably. We sleep on a ratty foam pad, on the floor, next to her growling German shepherd, Steppenwolf. I determine to find a way to drain the bag first thing the next day.

Such are plans. I am diverted the next day by Mad Tad.

Mad Tad’s best and perhaps only friend, Jerry, shows up at the front door and informs me that Mad Tad needs to see me, “pronto. Needs a convo, pronto. Really pronto.”

“Why doesn’t he come over himself?,” I ask.

“He’s workin’ on his masterpiece,” says Jerry. A breeze blows Jerry’s long, dry gray hair in front of his face. As he bites his lower lip and brushes the hair aside, I notice one of his eyes is blue, the other green, and that he focuses his gaze on anything but me. Jerry has enough metal dental work in his mouth that, if he smiles in direct sunlight, you need welder’s goggles to avoid being struck blind.

“Well, why doesn’t he call?,” I ask.

Jerry turns his back to me and stares at the street. A good thing, since he stands in direct sunlight.

“He’s ‘fraid of phones, ‘member? Gotta get over to his place, pronto. Needs to talk about the masterpiece. He says pronto. Really strange word. Who came up with ‘pronto’?,”

“Probably Basque in origin,” I say. “The Basque people have Celtic ancestors so, who knows, perhaps the Celts came up with ‘pronto.’ It sounds like something a Celt would say. Tell him I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I’ve known Mad Tad for a while. I first meet him after he serves a short sentence at the Colorado Reformatory at Buena Vista following convictions at age 18 on a cluster of drug sales offenses (“seems free enterprise is a myth”). We collide at a college that allows academic underachievers like us to enroll — a new state college, desperate for money.

Tad takes a watercolor class at the reformatory so he claims we are “simpatico” because we are both artists. Sure, why not?

Tad is the issue of Old Denver elites and upon his release from the clink he moves in with his aunt and lives on the top floor of her house, a massive stone mansion constructed in the late 1800s on Denver’s Capitol Hill by her mining magnate stepfather. The old woman is deaf, and nearly blind. Neither she nor the woman she employs dares to venture to the third floor.

I walk to the mansion. I ring the bell, the help answers.

“Is he here?,” I ask.

“Just listen, and you tell me,” she answers. She nods in the direction of the staircase. I climb.

The racket is incredible. Tad purchased the first Led Zeppelin album and is obsessed with “Good Times Bad Times.” He plays it over and over again, at peak volume, stopping whatever he is doing at song’s end to move the needle back to the beginning of the track — every two minutes, forty-six seconds. He has destroyed six copies of the album and the current vinyl is showing some wear. He gyrates and yells along with the song day and night, interrupting his performance now and then to yip and to howl obscenities. He is an artiste.

I trudge to the top floor and bang on the door. The music is so loud Mad Tad doesn’t hear me. But I hear him.

“…When my woman left home with a brown-eyed man…motherfucker!… piece of shit brush!… I don’t care what the neighbors say… sap green, yellow ochre…”

I kick at the heavy door, he doesn’t answer, so I push the door open and enter his “studio.” It smells of linseed oil, turps, Italian red sauce, and Thai stick.

Tad is dressed for work: paint stained Jockey briefs and a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots. His mane of dirty blond hair is tied in a bushy array at the top of his head with an old shoelace. He slashes at “the masterpiece” with a four-inch brush and a large palette knife.

I walk across the room, the music continues and Mad Tad yells along. It’s getting near the end of the song, so I wait.

“…Realize sweet babe, we ain’t ever gonna part…”

Mad Jack slashes to track’s end then whirls around to restart the song. He sees me standing right behind him, leaps back, drops brush and knife, and shrieks. Several times.

“Dear fucking god…what the fuck…who?… spare me…for god’s sake spare me…I’m an artist!”

“It’s me, Tad. It’s Everett.”

He collapses to a battered Morris chair next to “the masterpiece,” throws his head back, closes his eyes tight and gasps.

“You said you needed to see me, pronto,” I say. “Jerry emphasized ‘pronto’ which I figure is Basque in origin, perhaps even Celtic. Those Celts are still a real mystery.”

“I didn’t mean this much pronto,” gasps Tad as he massages his sternum. “You scared the shit out of me. I’m totally absorbed in the music, in the painting, in the moment…in creation! I think I’m having a heart attack. Or it could be the meatball sandwich I’ve had in the fridge the last few days. The fridge is on the blink. I need my aunt to buy a new one. I’m working. Eating what I can. I gotta finish.”

He points to an unstretched canvas tacked to the wall. He groans.

“The masterpiece” is Mad Tad’s “finest work,” his “gift to the world.” It is a huge canvas, eight feet by ten feet, with a turd-like raw umber ground. According to Mad Tad, when complete, it will represent “an alternate history of the American West. The noble Indian slays most of the evil white devils, then shows the few survivors mercy and a way to live in harmony with the Great Spirit’s design.”

Mad Tad fashions an image of what might be a canyon and, on the plain at the canyon’s base he paints an assortment of clumsily rendered figures of varying sizes— men, women, children, prone and supine, many mutilated, bloodied, all presumably corpses. A half circle of awkwardly crafted burning covered wagons arcs behind the corpses. On the rim of the canyon Jack creates a huge red oxide body with a too-long torso and a swollen head topped with a gaudy Plains Indian headdress. Next to this is a group of small figures in pioneer dress, their cartoonish faces turned to the gargantua before them, the captives ready to receive a lesson. The supposed chief’s disproportionate right arm extends above the corpses in the canyon and, at the end of the arm, a huge finger on what might be a hand points to a massive red-orange disc at the horizon line. Alazarin crimson and cadmium orange rays shoot from the disc, garish lightning bolts that vibrate against a pure cerulean sky. Rather than paint a second arm on the figure, Mad Tad somehow fixes the arm of a department store mannequin to the canvas and it extends out from the painting. A shopworn wig hangs from the hand.

“It’s a scalp,” explains Tad. “On the hand. A scalp. A settler’s scalp.”

“Gottcha,” I say.

Tad is convinced of the immense cultural and monetary value of The Masterpiece. He has Jerry call the Denver Art Museum (Tad is afraid of the phone) to notify those in charge that once the work is complete and mounted on stretchers, the museum will pay to have it shipped to the main gallery for immediate display to an eager public. Museum authorities have yet to respond.

“That’s why I need to talk to you,” he gasps. “I need an articulate rep, someone to negotiate with the people in charge at the museum, someone to tell them about the greatest work of art the museum will ever show. You gotta get down there and talk to them. Jerry doesn’t use the right words.”

“Sure,” I say, “first thing, right after I tend to a pressing problem. Which reminds me: do you know anything about waterbeds? In particular, how to drain them?”

“Not a thing,” says Tad. “They’re beds, and I don’t sleep all that much. Work, you know. All the time.”

“Too bad,” I say. “Do you think a smidge of mescaline might calm you down. I have some at the lab.”

“Dear god, my heart’s racing wildly,” gasps Mad Tad. “yeah … mescaline. It’ll calm me, inspire me. You brought it with you, didn’t you?

“Nope,” I reply. “But I’ll get Jerry to come over and fetch some for you. My preliminary analysis indicates it’s gold medal quality. I guarantee it, and I’m told I’m an expert.”

“Go to the museum, OK?”

“Sure thing.”

(I don’t go to the museum until 1973 when I have a couple of paintings exhibited as part of a show in a Gio Ponti addition to the building.)

Tad hits his chest with his fist. “My rhythm’s off,” he says. “Gotta get this thing beating again, You need to leave now so I can get back to work. I have to add more blood on the bodies. Put the needle on the first track of the record on your way out.”

In the days of my youth I was told what it means to be a man…

Side note: a year later, masterpiece complete, with no response from museum authorities and his supply of mescaline depleted, Mad Tad makes a key life choice prompted by an eviction notice delivered following his aunt’s not unexpected demise. He chooses a suitably insane option: he becomes Theodore, joins his father at the family’s commercial real estate development firm, oversees a project that includes demolition of the large share of lower downtown Denver’s Victorian mercantile buildings, and their replacement with acres of asphalt parking lots. He continues to contribute to cheeseball culture for several decades —shopping malls, apartment/condo complexes, cinder block franchise hotels next to highways, car dealership emporiums, theme restaurants — makes a fortune. Mutual acquaintances tell me he retires and splits his time between a palatial home in a Denver suburb and a palatial summer place in Aspen. They say he paints landscapes as a hobby. I assume the landscapes do not feature dead pioneers.

After two more nights on the floor on a ratty foam pad, the woman I live with at the time mutters regularly about visiting her grandmother. Her grandmother lives in Armenia. She threatens to leave me with Steppenwolf. I hate the dog.

I address the waterbed problem. I have to empty the waterbed and place a heater beneath it. I need the help of someone with technical skills.

Jerry comes to mind. Why, I’m not sure, but it could have something to do with the lab tests.

I contact Jerry, he comes to the house with what he calls his “tool kit,” we get to work and I discover how to tell the difference between a well made water bed bag and one that is assembled in Guatemala by disinterested children.

“We gotta pull this here plug outta this here hole,” says Jerry. I believe him, and hope he doesn’t smile.

“Then we gotta jam this here tube into that hole.” I believe him.

“Then,” he says, “it’s just like when you siphon gas from a car’s tank at three in the morning. Maybe you find the car in somebody’s driveway, maybe it’s parked on the street. Could be a truck. Gas is gas. Know what I mean?” I don’t.

“Then, the water comes through the tube into this here big jug, and we take the jug outside and throw the water on the lawn.” Sounds reasonable. We get to it.

There are a few things you don’t want to hear as you attempt to drain a waterbed. First among them is “Holy shit! That’s not good.”

It seems the disinterested children in Guatemala are careless with the valve and plug unit on the bag. Jerry yanks on the plug and the entire assembly comes out of the bag, leaving a two-inch wide opening. Water does not go down a tube to a big jug. Water gushes out, gallons per gush.

“Boy,” says Jerry, this is somethin’ isn’t it?”

Fear of losing my damage deposit overcomes me as a wave of cold water washes across the bedroom floor and begins to soak the foam pad.

What to do? After all, I fancy myself a problem solver.

If I don’t take action quickly the water will saturate the pad then makes its way out of the bedroom to the living room beyond. The living room with the new carpeting. From the living room the damage will spread to the dining room with the new carpeting, etc.

“Got a hammer and crow bar in your tool kit?,” I ask Jerry.

“You betcha,” he responds, as the water soaks his high top Keds.

Don’t let anyone tell you that someone with a degree in philosophy is incapable of dealing with practical problems.

My solution: tear up the three or four floorboards nearest the door and next to the wall, and let the water fall between the joists to the crawl space below. The water won’t reach the rest of the house and the new carpeting. The landlord will never notice that something happened once I replace the floorboards.

Turns out I can’t replace the floor boards.

The landlord notices.

I lose the deposit. And the lease.

The woman I live with at the time decides she’ll hitchhike to San Francisco and go back to living with my old bandmate, Grady. He’s playing guitar for Janis Joplin and a far more reliable option than The Problem Solver. I am not bothered, however, since she is newly obsessed with a macrobiotic diet and too many grains mess with my daily evac schedule.

One very good thing: she takes the dog with her.

So, that’s the very long way of explaining why I dream about floods and fish. It’s the waterbed and tuna salad sandwiches.

This gets me thinking about tuna sandwiches. There is nothing wrong with eating a sandwich first thing in the morning. I scurry to the store and fetch supplies.

Instead of a can of subpar water pack tuna, I buy a sushi grade Ahi steak. It’s tuna, you know. I add a small head of red cabbage to my purchase as well as a small red onion, a bottle of sweet chili sauce, and some brioche buns.

This is easy.

First, make a hefty mess of bang bang sauce: sweet chili sauce, mayo, sriracha, a splash of rice vinegar. Fine tune, to taste. Make a lot. No such thing as too much bang bang.

Second: shred some cabbage, slice some red onion, mix, dress with some bang bang, season.

Third: toast a bun, slice in half, slather with bang bang.

Cast iron skillet on medium high heat. Room temp tuna slab seasoned. Splash of oil in pan, tuna down. Flip. Slab seared on both sides, rare in the middle.

Slaw on bottom half of bun, tuna on slaw, top half of bun on.

Time to eat, and while I do I need to Google how to make a god’s eye.