Everyone just wants to be loved a bit more than everyone else. See me and not my brothers, my sisters, my bandmates. Love me and not my kid. Feel my sadness.
 
Imagine a world where you could look at others pleas for attention in your hand, endlessly. And compete with that, endlessly, too.
 
Big Bird races through numbers, forward to ten and back down to zero. I turn away as the alphabet starts. The large beveled motel room mirror over the bureau has misted over, just like in the bathroom. What is this?
 
I want to go home to Woodstock.  I want to see my boy. He still loves Muppets. Maybe he’d still laugh if I did my Cookie Monster . 
 
I drove with him strapped into the bucket seat beside me, three years old, back and forth across West L.A. looking to score from Mickey Twist. Liz thought we were off to a play date. I made up stories all afternoon for his and my benefit, frantic for a fix.
 
“Imagine if every time you talked your voice came out like Goofy’s,” I asked. Junior howled as I reached back into a cooler filled with imported beer. “What if everything on your face turned rubbery and you looked in the mirror and saw Goofy, too? Just imagine…”
 
“Yeah, like your head would turn around and everything,” I remember him saying through his laughter. But was he really talking then? Is the fog encroaching?
 
Memory a jumble, but better than everything jamming my throat. Albert gone, planes falling out of the sky, the Challenger down, AIDS,  prenups, Cinderella finally fucked.
 
“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God,” was what the President had said. His words stuck like a Ray Charles’ song in my gut.
 
Not everything’s a song. Or at least one I would feel right singing.
 
Someone knocks at the door. I’m standing in the middle of a misty room, naked as a scarecrow. I reach for a towel, wrap myself, and step forward.  I open my darkness to the light.
 
I make out a badly-shaven old imp-dude in a moth-eaten forest green sweater with a “Stand Back” baseball cap on his head, all five feet of him standing in the glare. He’s talking something fast at me, about trouble and mountains, Woodstock and my old ladies and even my kid Junior. 
 
“Man, give me a moment,” I tell him. “I feel like death warmed over.”
 
The old man quiets down in the doorway as I step back into the room to the bureau and rummage around. Keys, wallet, change, slips of paper, and a pack of matches from the Gateway. Slipping on the pair of shades my hand finally finds, I turn back to the door and ask the dude to repeat what he’d been telling me. Slower this time, please.
 
“Your kid. I’ve been told to tell you he needs you. Now. He’s hurting but bad, up north there where he’s been living with his mom the way you left them. There was some call this morning. Something’s happened, my friend. You’re needed for who you been, for who you still could be. Woodstock, man. She’ calling you.”
 
He paused and caught his breath.
 
“That Woodstock, it’s the real place?”
 
The man’s mouth didn’t seem to move as he talked, even though his words came clear and fast. He seemed to have shrunk within his clothes. Old, stained Chinos, three sizes too big. His grey eyes, one cataract-clouded, stared me down. But with this weird smile in them, like he knows something I don’t.
 
“Wait, wait,” I reply. “What you saying, man? You seen my lady, Dawn? I was just in the shower. She just went for coffee. And what’s all this about Junior and Liz? Did I miss something?”
 
“What are YOU doing down here is what I should ask,” says the little man. “Your lady friend, she drove out in a red rental car a half hour ago, back before lunch. It’s time to up and climb the mountain, she said. But your mission’s bigger than that, sir. And your time, by the look of things, has been wasted already.”
 
What can I say? Still foggy as the mirrors inside my lonely room, still climbing out of the previous night’s blackout, I’m having trouble getting a handle on the strange little dude’s words. 
 

***

 
The man in the Stand Back cap had an impish smile. Without asking, he climbed in the car as Klokko pulled his blanket tighter.
 
“Thought you’d be able to give me a ride up to the cabin,” the little guy said. “I’m just shy of a century, y’see, and the legs don’t work like they used to. We’ll be making a right turn here once she turns green.”
 
Klokko looked straight ahead, rattled by the man’s sudden appearance. He’d been on such a high and now it was starting to seep out of him. Why, he thought, did he let himself get into these situations? 
 
He turned, as the man had requested, when the light shifted green.
 
“I’m trying to get to Woodstock,” he haltingly said. “Need some things…”
 
“Good place, Woodstock, if also a bit odd. Lots of folk come up walking from there. I mean, most of them bring the car and stuff. Park it and then walk. But some actually walk,” the old guy started chattering, making no mention of the driver’s strange apparel, or lack of any besides the blanket skirted around his lap. 
 
“It’s that close?” Klokko asked, without self-consciousness for once. The guy hadn’t mentioned his nakedness. Furthermore, he hadn’t figured himself so close to his destination already. Had he always been this close? Perfect timing, given the fuel light had come on again. Should he ask the old guy for money? He’d spent what the kids gave him on tolls and forgot to get his change the last time he paid. 
 
“Used to be I could walk everywhere. Didn’t like the car and how fast it made you go,” the old guy continued. “One time I came across a boy along here. He was playing with this water snake, see, who had its teeth in his arm. Water snake was hanging straight down off that boy’s arm, blood dripping and everything. I told him I didn’t think that was wise, carrying a snake like that. So I told him to take that snake off his arm, I did.”
 
“I don’t like snakes,” Klokko said. “My mother didn’t like them either.”
 
“My Ma always told me they were pure evil, she did. Told me she burned out an entire forest when she was heavy with me. She’d seen one climb up out the hole in our outhouse,” the old guy said. “One time, I saw this snake in an old chestnut tree. Thing poked his head out at me and flashed that tongue of his. Put his head back in that hole as fast as he’d poked it out. Right at my eye level, that was. Snake just kept poking in and poking out the whole time I stood there. Guess that’s when I decided I might as well not be ’fraid of no snake, even if I didn’t like them.”
 
The Delta 88 rolled past the turn off that would have led Klokko home.
 
“You make your next left, a right, next two lefts. Even with that warning light you should have plenty to get you where you going,” the old guy said. “You driven these roads a lot but never past where you’ve always gone, I take it?”
 
Klokko smiled. It hurt. But only a little, he realized, keeping with the odd feeling. He liked these changes coming over him. They seemed easy now. Especially given all those years of fear.
 

***

 
A car rolled silently into the driveway thirty feet from Klokko. Stopped his first attempt at full-throated singing since he was a kid.
 
It was not just any car, but his old green Oldsmobile. A naked man was driving. Bearded. Graying. Angry-eyed. Same dude who had been at Sid Ford’s, talking to his Lady. A man like himself.
 
Klokko darted up the lawn, not about to try for a getaway in the car he’d stolen from this guy staring him down. 
 
He started running into the forest then stopped, recalling a bicycle back by the basement doors. He’d take that.
 
He ran back towards the house and passed within ten feet of the naked man, covered in his baby blanket with the sailboats, hollering at the top of his lungs as he reached and then ran-started his ride on a girl’s Raleigh. He took off up the driveway, wobbling because it had been a couple of decades he’d been off two wheeled transportation of any. He headed for the road to Woodstock he’d just come down from.
 
 Even though he knew his naked pursuer would be coming out of the Big Pink driveway soon in the black rent-a-car, all the fear started seeping out of Klokko. This guy wasn’t after him, but somehow after the same mysterious thing he was after. He glanced over his shoulder and saw him not looking his way at all. He was staring at Big Pink. Just as he had.
 
He had heard the man call out to him, say there was no need to run. 
 
Klokko listened intently to the ensuing silence punctuated by his pedaling, his breath. He checked out the woods rising on either side of the road he was on. 
 
He could have been a good father, given the opportunities. Change could occur, he thought. Things can still happen. I can run. I can move on my own terms, of my own accord. Maybe even make a family, finally. Get a job. 
 
Acceptance is a plot twist, an action, as strong as any heroic dive into the unknown, Klokko figured. It’s just quieter, harder to tell tales of.
 
He hit an incline and stood on the pedals to get more speed. Looking over his shoulder, Klokko again looked for the car he’d just been driving. He noted the play of March light against the rock faces above him. Saw that first tinge of pink and purple in the tree branches that augured the coming of Spring.
 
Should he stop for his pursuer? 
 
His new boots, oddly comfortable, seemed to pump the bike’s pedals of their own accord. He seemed to already be in contact with this man behind him, as if in a dream. Something big was pulling the two of them down towards the valley, towards that mythical rock and roll town he’d long heard about but never visited. 
 
“That’s Overlook,” he said, aloud, motioning his head to the mountain which dominated to his right. He careened into a nearby driveway and cut across a lawn to a second driveway, then a third, as he spotted the black car speed by through the woods, the naked man’s head turning back and forth looking. The man pulled in across the way, did a three point turn, and headed back towards Big Pink.
 
Klokko took the opportunity and shot back out onto the main road and took off.
 

***

 
The two sat looking into each other.  
 
“We both fucked up,” Richard Manuel finally added. “Thought we had all the time in the world, all the love to give and take. Didn’t notice what there was around us. Or that it all catches up with you.”
 
Klokko grunted, looking down to the floor. 
 
“Fathers, sons, singers, songs. It matters shit,” Manuel said, as if suddenly realizing it useless to be angry when dead.
 
“I’m a fucking spider,” Klokko said, low and almost inaudible. “A spider just like fucking God’s an asshole spider.”
 
“A beautiful fucking spider, you mean, weaving perfect webs. Intricate designs.”
 
“Biting,” replied Klokko.
 
“Only when cornered,” Richard answered. “You do sound like Hell.”
 
“Always have,” said Klokko. “You mind if I sit next to my cat on the bench with you?”
 
“Sure, dude. It’s both of our’s cat.”
 
Klokko rose and sat down on the piano bench.
 
“I saw them slugs, too.” 
 
“I know you did. Squished a whole mess of them when you peeled out after seeing me.”
 
The wood fire blazed. The men sipped their wine, identical in pajamas, slippers, bathrobes.
 
“Why is it those like us always need more love?” Richard said. 
 
He shook his head and played a descending piano measure.
 
 
© Paul Smart 2023
 
This story is excerpted from the novel Overlook by Paul Smart, Recital Publishing 2023.