Nothing counts but this moment, and in this moment there is nothing.
My wife Cathy says the sentence was uttered long ago by some Zen master, and then it echoed around Japan for ages and eventually came to Maine inside the head of Sedge Hanto, the bomb-burned duffer who worked the pumps and such with her down in Beasley’s Q-Hut and Mobil Mart. She says the words sustain her in a moment that’s like no other - the moment in which she has to sign her name to the infamous sheet in the rest rooms, especially the men’s, which is always viler than the ladies.’
Now I’m not saying anyone in the Mobil company, national, would ever instigate such a policy. It’s always some down-the-line dog-ass trying to win points for himself by squeezing every last ounce, and I happen to know Mobil breaks up its empire regionally into franchises to keep the local flavor over such things as hot dog toppings. Not long after Cathy found her job, some boss of the Beasley franchise, which covers about one third of Maine on the left and a patch of New Hampshire, sent down this clean restroom decree. Ragging the Lysol, plunging and swabbing, the usual stuff, all well and good, but then he went over the top and instituted this public cleanup sheet. He had it printed up and ordained that it be pinned right on the wall of both toilets. In big type it says Restrooms will be personally cleaned and inspected hourly. And then it lists every hour, from 5am on, in a long column with the heading Signature (full name) of person who personally performed cleaning and inspection.
Cathy does eight-hour shifts, sometimes longer, so every day you have these trucker guys with their loads of particle board and flaked fish rolling in to do their business - and reading eight or more times that Cathy P. Tuffley is the one hand-wiping their piss splotches and Hershey stripes off the porcelain rims. In her own handwriting. All that’s missing is Cathy including her phone number, our phone number, and now I’ve finally unlisted us, but that still doesn’t stop the ringing and the breathing in the dead of night. Or the snide abuse Cathy takes when she’s pulling a donut off the rack for one of these drooling dudes and he tells her be sure and use wax paper to touch the donut since it’s going in his mouth.
Nothing counts but this moment, and in this moment there is nothing. I stand behind the bar slicing fruit for Death Dives and fantasize about the moment the big franchise exec comes to town to inspect his inspector. It makes me slice faster and meaner. But it never happens, he never comes, life is never so neat.
When you’ve got to cut as much fruit as I do your mind wanders. The other day I was lopping off limes and wondering how many people’s photographs I’m in. I don’t mean the photographs shot by people I know or Cathy knows. I mean those pictures snapped with no thought whatsoever about me being there as a subject - when someone in Ray-Bans fresh off the slopes just wanders into the Naked Antler with their Canon or Nikon in their ski parka. And then after a beer or three they go clicking off a few shots of the stuffed moose and just happen to grab me in the background, and there I am at the edge of the frame mopping a table or hoisting a tray or capping a ketchup bottle. Back turned, collar twisted, eyes darting or shut tight. Me anonymously, a piece of human wallpaper. It’s the moose’s face they want, not mine; for all they care I could be a dirty tray station sitting there or a row of beer pulls along the bar. But I’m there with all my crooked teeth and nose hairs – in their wallets, their albums, their hard drives.
They’re all camera crazy, the skiers in winter, the climbers in summer. They’re hooked on one promontory, The Eagle’s Head. Spectacular, they say, and they’re not wrong. Let’s just say our local bird looks a lot more like an eagle than the Old Man of the Mountain looks like an old man. And it gets even spookier in the winter. The way the snow always lies on the smooth upper rock, it turns the eagle into a bald eagle, bald as a Sno-Cone, just like on a postage stamp.
Coming from a land where photography is the national sport, Sedge (orig. Seiji) was a clicking maniac when he came here. His age and the scars didn’t stop him either. He’d hike up and out on some ledge just to get a special angle on the beak. He even strapped on snowshoes and plodded up Eagle’s Ravine, a trail that appears on the maps in a line dotted with jagged arrows, the symbol for most difficult. One bitter day Sedge came off the mountain and I drew him a Harpoon, which he said he preferred to Sapporo or even Asahi. He said he was astounded by the mountain and felt it pulling at him, the way a magnet pulls at a snip of wire. Right then and there he stood up – in that way certain little guys have of standing up and looking so big you feel dwarfed, even though you’re peering down at them.
Sedge stood there and announced that he never wanted to leave this mountain, that he would live right here with us North Country hillbillies until his dying day – even though he had free health insurance for life from the Japanese government. He said there was something about our mountain – something inside, like the magma but not as hot – that did more than just remind him of the mountain that stood at the place where he was born. It radiated something that felt like it was protecting him, he said, like some giant warrior’s shield. For a while he did custodial stuff in the Delmore Inn (pets and smoking allowed – and encouraged), warming the boots of the hunters and such. Then he started buying his Old Golds and tea at the Q-Hut just when they were adding toasted grinders and a third register, and he saw the Help Wanted sign. After he and Cathy got close – because of those sayings of his, all Zen stuff I assume - he said he wanted to die as he had lived. “Like the cold, harsh ice of winter; but also like the green buds that are right underneath, eager to push up and take over.” That’s how Cathy remembers it. That’s what she put in her notebook.
Yesterday, he was burned and urned. More people than you’d expect showed up – Sedge had a following of sorts, but far under the radar. Then a few of us took the long walk and threw the ashes off The Eagle’s Head.
They make a real good machine for slicing French fries. Why can’t they make one for slicing limes? Not that many people know, much less care, how much fruit it takes to get this place through a Saturday night. The hot item is the sixty-ounce bowl drink – we have a whole menu of them – each one a swimming pool of assorted rums. Lolling all over the liquid, like Caribbean hotel guests in green trunks, are these lime wedges, one for every six ounces of liquid. The bowl drinks have these menacing names, all themed after the huge gorge that yawns right under the eagle’s beak and stretches very far below it. Death’s Dive I’ve mentioned. But there’s also Poison Plunge, Tumble of Doom, and a half dozen more. The gorge is my personal choice if Mr. Q-Hut-Exec ever shows up here looking for fun on the slopes. I know the twists and turns, the true paths and the false ones. I can draw him a map that will take him up very slow and down very fast. At the speed of gravity.
Although Sedge had a bit of the Samurai about him, he fought his last battle in the spirit of one of King Arthur’s knights. Ready at the drop of a glove to die for a lady’s honor. The Antler and the Q-Hut were both closed. It was long past the midnight hour and the three of us were at our place – in the living room, if that’s what you want to call it – sipping and smoking. These Jaegermeister goons, big as B-52s, came stomping off the rutted road. They kicked our door, they stuck their tongues out and lapped at our windows. One of them held up a sheet he had torn from the men’s room wall. He kept pointing at Cathy’s signature and roaring to be let in, like the sheet in his paw was his personal written invitation granting immediate access to any and all of her apertures. When things got hand to hand I didn’t have my lime knife but I had a home version that was just as good. A tire iron too. As for Sedge, he did what he could with his 1940’s judo. In the end it wasn’t a blow from outside that killed him, but an explosion from within – a cardiac event, as they say.
At the modest but well-attended cremation ceremony they told the story of Sedge’s earliest home. He was a little boy who happened to be living on the other side of the mountain – not the city side - when the Nagasaki bomb dropped. You’ve seen the story in pictures a thousand times; no need to re-hash it here. He didn’t die in that moment, the moment of the flash and the mushroom cloud and so on. He only suffered leg burns and some radiation sickness, not enough to stop his life.