Wednesday, March 16, 2016 // The Statement
6B
Fear and Self-Loathing in Santiago: A Dry Heave in the Sunshine
by Adam DePollo, Daily Arts Writer
M
y journey to West Palm Beach, Fla. began
with six hours aboard a passenger train rid-
ing out of Orlando. A sizable portion of the
travel time was spent moving in reverse, much of the
retrograde locomotion happening around a few miles
of incredibly dry-looking, cow-dotted farmland out-
side of Jacksonville. When seen through my Amtrak
car’s slightly yellowed windows, the whole place
looked as though it could spontaneously combust with
the slightest provocation. I was also reading Mark Z.
Danielewski’s metatextual psychological horror novel
“House of Leaves,” which includes sentences like this:
“My point being, what if my attacks are entirely unre-
lated, attributable in fact to something entirely else,
perhaps for instance just warning shocks brought on
by my own crumbling biology, tiny flakes of unknown
chemical origin already burning holes through the fab-
ric of my mind, dismantling memories, undoing even
the strongest powers of imagination and reason?”
My point being that all of this had me feeling as
though I would be disembarking into a sort of semi-
tropical episode of “The Twilight Zone” as soon as the
train rolled into the West Palm Beach station. I was a
little nervous, I have to admit, because I wasn’t sure if
I would be given Rod Serling’s part or William Shat-
ner’s, or if I would be the lady sitting next to William
Shatner on the plane, or if I might even be playing the
Sasquatch-on-the-wing for some Floridian Shatner I
would soon be meeting for the first time.
The train pulled into the station and I dragged
myself out of my head just long enough to shuffle over
to the parking lot. I could hear the Manhattan Trans-
fer’s “Twilight Zone” playing out of a car stereo — my
ride was waiting for me.
I climbed into the back of the bumblebee-colored
Fiat 500L and was immediately assaulted by a barrage
of excited snorts and a rather horrific chicken salad-
tinged fart. My grandfather’s French bulldogs Lionel
and Lulu were sitting in the front seat, wiggling and
staring back at me expectantly. They would be my
more or less constant companions for the next 16 and
a half days, and they were clearly looking forward to
the idea. My grandfather was sitting in the passenger
seat and his longtime girlfriend Lara drove the car out
of the lot.
The bulldogs are siblings. Lionel is all black, was
born missing his right eye and has a head which
seems slightly too big for his surprisingly muscular
25-pound frame. Lulu is fawn-colored, has an appro-
priately sized head for her equally muscular 23-pound
frame and is the more restrained half of the duo. Lio-
nel seems to have internalized my retired sportscaster
grandfather’s love of sportsball, spending most of his
days losing and getting a collection of tennis balls
caught under various pieces of furniture. Lulu, on the
other hand, has taken on her adoptive mother’s more
relaxed demeanor, spending her leisure time lounging
in sunny patches and occasionally joining her broth-
er in a tug-of-war over fallen coconuts. Both dogs, I
learned, have terrible gas and no regard whatsoever
for where or when or into whose unaware face they
unleash their odors.
Driving from the station to my grandfather’s house
in the suburbs outside of West Palm Beach, Lulu stood
in Lara’s lap and stuck her head out of the driver’s side
window while Lionel sat respectfully in my grand-
father’s lap on the passenger side. They asked how I
felt about my upcoming study abroad program in San-
tiago, Chile and I described to them a short story I’m
working on in which Mexican drug lord El Chapo’s
otherwise pleasant meeting with the American actor
Sean Penn is ruined by the fact that the sky is made
out of the same silk fabric as his button-down shirt
and his glass of Buchanan’s scotch whiskey is laugh-
ing at him. I didn’t want to seem too engaged with the
world around me; I was planning on spending most
of the trip interspersing lengthy pool-side naps with
alternating bouts of frantic fiction-writing and equally
frantic, thoroughly ruthless self-critique. Ideally, the
occasions during which I would be expected to inter-
face with reality would be kept to a minimum, leaving
me free to stew in the self-effacing juices I had brought
down from Michigan in my carry-on bag.
For a few days, at least, my plan almost worked. Lara
(a successful New York divorce attorney) flew back
to Manhattan to do some lawyering. Meanwhile, my
grandfather was happy to do crosswords in the kitchen
while I marinated in a thick broth of David Foster Wal-
lace, Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño and Saul Bel-
low out on the patio.
The dogs, on the other hand, had no respect for
creative genius. Lionel took a particularly sadistic
pleasure in distracting me from distractedly flipping
through the footnotes at the back of “Infinite Jest” by
nudging his tennis ball into the pool and barking at
it until I came over to fish it out for him. Lulu would
jump into my lap whenever she noticed I had been
staring at the same page of “Herzog” for fifteen min-
utes, snorting into my face until she was thoroughly
convinced that my writerly mojo had irretrievably dis-
sipated. Both of them would somehow jam a coconut
under the fence whenever I had finally managed to get
into the groove with my doodle-making in the margins
of a copy of “2666.”
After three days of fishing tennis balls out of the
pool, I had had enough. There was a heavy rainstorm
that day and I demanded that my grandfather drive me
a few miles down the semi-flooded road to a B-grade
Starbucks, where I sat in a corner hunched over an
iced latte and wrote this:
The Writer smelled a Metaphor, so he took off his
fake duckbill and picked up his notebook. He put his
nose to the ground and crawled around on the patio,
following the scent along the spaces between the pav-
ing stones. The gurgling of the pool focused his senses,
and he was certain to check around the corner, just
in case Jorge Luis Borges had followed him along the
train tracks out of Orlando. Convinced he was alone, he
began his search in earnest.
The Pursuit of the Metaphor took him to parts of
the backyard that it had never occurred to him to visit
before, like the Underside of the Massive Concrete
Planter northeast of the Patio Set, or the Roots of the
Bird of Paradise Tree tearing up the foundation of
the house just south of the Air Conditioning Unit. He
passed a little brown bird whose name he didn’t know
Illustration by Samuel Berlin