Already Dead: A California Gothic by Denis Johnson

of fishing-boats float in the dark: if you let them they’ll start symbolizing everything. I slow way down to light the reefer I’ve rolled, sucking in the smoke along with the damp clean ocean air. Melissa shakes her head. I jam the pedal.
    Making love to Melissa is a dangerous blessing. It’s almost all I ever want to do. But when we’ve been on a party like today’s we generally forget to sleep together. I just drive her back to Acorn Road, to the woolly barnyard where she lives in her shocking trailer, and let it go at that. Anyway you won’t too often catch me entering that little home of hers. She takes in stray cats, the place is just a litter box.
    She’s organic. I described her as drug-demented, but she eats only 36 / Denis Johnson

    untreated vegetables and gets high only on natural herbs and plants, which include most wines and certain very expensive brands of scotch whiskey and tequila; sometimes also marijuana, when it’s baked into pastries—she refuses to take smoke into her lungs. She says she once had cancer of the liver but cured it with her mind.
    I took her to the bottom of Acorn Road. The river mist met us less than halfway down. Not visible, but everywhere. “Good night, I’m going to sleep in my clothes,” she said, “and I hope I dream I’m not drunk,” and didn’t even kiss me.
    When she’d gone into the trailer, one of the rounded, aluminum ones, a Silver Stream, I laid my head, which was suddenly full of sorrows, against the steering wheel. The night wind stirred through the treetops on the ridges. The distant commotion got the sheep bleating—a word that just doesn’t invoke the aged, human grief in their voices. Across the drive the owner of this property—the Sheep Queen, a Mediter-ranean-looking woman in her fifties, a nice enough person, but perfectly crazy—sat eating dinner in the kitchen of her ranch-style home, feeding bites from her plate to a big dog that loomed over her, standing up, as it were, with its forepaws on the table.
    It’s sad to love a woman who won’t love back—it tears at a man—to love a woman who gives herself to others and uses his good intentions and sets his meaning aside. But I have a feeling that this stupid torment is the nearest thing going, for me, to what life is all about. I don’t just sense it dimly. The feeling is overpowering that this is the closest I can get to the truth behind the cloud.
    Dreaming of one woman, I drive home to another.
    Actually Winona wasn’t here lately. The ranch lay dark, the oaks like cut-outs against the smeary stars.
    And actually Winona lived here alone. We’d been separated many months, beginning just a few weeks after the house was finished. But as Winona didn’t have a lover, at least nobody anybody knew of, I wasn’t in the way, I came and went, and in her absence I tended the stables, though I rarely crossed her threshold and this would be the first night I’d slept here all summer. She’d been travelling lately up and down the coast, visiting people she didn’t, in my opinion, actually know well enough to be visiting. On some kind of pilgrimage: Going Through Changes we call it in our region, where the Haight-Ashbury dialect flourishes unevolved.
    Already Dead / 37

    I parked the Porsche out of sight in the stables because I expected, sooner or later, a visit from Harry Lally’s boys. I hadn’t set foot in my own apartment since I’d heard they were in town. Eventually they’d locate me here. But I’d see them a mile off and be down the hill, walking into the forest—my father’s forest, where my brother lives—long before they reached the house. They’d never know for sure that I’d even been here, unless they searched through all the outbuildings and found the car.
    I come and go, but this is decidedly not my home anymore. None of my stuff is here. In the bedroom Winona sleeps in a single bed now.
    My office, a shed out by the barn, has been put to a better use, she says.
    As a