Fate, Fortune, Chance, Luck
A Definitive Explanation From a Wise Old Fool
A little piece about unpredictability and how we humans deal with it.
Hurricane
They were watching a hurricane on TV, hoping someone would die.
But just a weatherman with a receding hairline blown onto his ass.
They were hoping someone would take a chance.
Suck on a downed power line or leap insanely off a pier wearing a circa-17th-century life preserver.
Which is to say wearing nothing at all.
In this poem the “they” is “you”:
The uniformed hotel doorman, the short-order cook, the seamstress, the bulldozer operator making a terrible scene at the dentist’s.
Yes, it’s you, whose better self gave up years ago, succumbing to stupidity and boredom. Hurricanes, tsunamis, massacres, droughts.
This is how you live, waiting for death to nudge you with its big black horn. “Hurricane”—from the Spanish huracán, from Taino hurákan; akin to Arawak kulakani, “thunder.”
Can you hear it?
By all rights I should be dead, imprisoned, or paralyzed. There are many occasions I could refer to, but let’s stick with the time I lived in Hermosa Beach, California between 1970-71. I had decided not to go to college and take my chances with the draft. After a stint in the steel plants in Buffalo, NY and a job as a copy boy at The Buffalo Evening News, I saved a few hundred dollars and headed off to Hermosa Beach, California, just south of Los Angeles, where some friends were living.
After a few weeks of playing volleyball at the beach, eating one-too-many taco burritos, and downing one-too-many beers and shots of tequila at an open-air bar called LaPaz, I needed money, so I was hired as a “sales associate” at Wallichs Music City in Torrance, California. What was a “sales associate”? It was the guy who sold cassette tapes and cleaned the bathrooms.
From my point of view, I was living the life: a nineteen-year-old who had never been out of Buffalo, suddenly living and working in California, a two-minute walk from the beach and only an hour away from where groups like the The Doors and heartthrobs like Linda Ronstadt performed, not to mention that nearby Redondo Beach was where the Beach Boys had hung out.
Not that I was thinking too much about the significance of all this at the time. If you were nineteen in 1970, you weren’t a cultural historian. You just grasped the psychedelic tail of the dragon called the 60s and hung on for dear life.
Put another way, I was having an existential moment, living by impulse and experiencing whatever came my way. Which approach to life was completely antithetical to my Catholic upbringing that included an award for memorizing much of the Baltimore Catechism while being head altar boy at Sacred Heart Catholic Church.
In contrast to my Christocentric childhood, in 1970, the image of a incarnate Jesus had moved from front and center to become a barely recognizable shadow in my rearview mirror, trailing behind me–his long gorgeous hair and beard tousled by a California breeze–while I gunned the engine of my girlfriend’s Volkswagen beetle, urging it to move faster, faster. Instead of the customary rosary beads hanging from the rearview mirror, was a small black cylinder of hashish attached to a cheap silver chain.
Looking back, it was a shame I had completely abandoned God and his Son, or anything resembling Him. I could have used some moral grounding at the time. Left to my own devices, my choices were somewhat questionable.
Enter a charismatic alcoholic named Sudsy, who, it was rumored, had at one time, when broke and out of work, drunk a bottle of Jade East Cologne. Try Googling that one if you have the time. Sudsy was another transplanted South Buffalo resident, and because he was about twenty years older than us, he became the most unlikely father-figure one could imagine. He had a pot belly and long unruly curly hair just beginning to grey. He often gave off an acrid odor when he sweated, a smell I had become accustomed to while working next to alcoholics on those blistering hot August evenings at Republic Steel.
He also owned an ancient station wagon called The Woody. Instead of it being tastefully decorated with real wood, Sudsy had glued wood contact paper along its sides and roof.
How could you not like a guy who could come up with that?
And so the Peter Johnson living in California, much different than the Buffalo Peter Johnson who was supposed to be enrolled at Fordham University, preparing himself for law school and looking for professorial role models, decided to hang out with an alcoholic named Sudsy.
As a result, one hot July night, this Peter Johnson found himself at a construction site helping Sudsy to load two-by-fours and plywood into the back of the The Woody. Why that never struck the California Peter Johnson as being illegal I can’t explain today. I have hated thieves my whole life. Probably the only reason I wasn’t arrested was because I was lucky, or maybe because that God I had abandoned decided to spare me and my family from the humiliation of such an arrest.
The same luck protected me one August afternoon when I decided to accompany two strangers I met at a bar on their way to Long Beach. I didn’t ask them why they were going there. I just wanted to see the Queen Mary, which had been permanently docked there since 1967. It wasn’t until we parked in an abandoned weed-infested parking lot behind an old furniture factory that I discovered our mission. Two guys in a new Corvette pulled in shortly after, and one of the guys from the bar opened our trunk where, it appeared, every drug currently available was neatly boxed.
“What the fuck?” I said. “I’m out of here.”
One of the guys in the Vette, a muscled white surfer type with long blond hair, said, “Where do you think you’re going?”
The guy from the bar said, “He doesn’t know shit. He just wanted a ride to see the Queen Mary.”
The blond guy laughed and said, “Not a great time for a school trip.” Then he looked severely at me, deciding what? what? I wondered.
It was one of those moments when you begin to lose a little confidence in your sphincter muscles.
“I’m just going to walk over there by that broken-down backhoe,” I said, and about fifteen minutes later, the drug deal was done and the Vette sped away.
“You still going to see the Queen Mary?” one of the guys from the bar said. “Or do you want a ride back?”
“I’m cool,” I said. “I’ll take the bus….”
It’s still 1970, but September, and I am driving The Woody across the California desert at about 1 a.m. Sudsy, I, and two friends are on our way to the Colorado River because Sudsy heard of a floating bar called Fox’s. To him that was like discovering the tomb where Christ was buried.
Everyone is asleep, and I should be too. I’m not stoned. I’m not drunk. Just tired, so tired that a one point I nod off, awaking to the complaint from the horn of tractor trailer (or was it a warning shout from God) just as it was about to send the damn fool who had crossed over the double line (me) into the afterlife. I’d like to say I swerved at the last minute, but, in fact, I froze. To this day I am convinced that The Woody magically passed through the body of the semi, as if it were a hologram, and ended up stopped by the side of the road.
Again, pure luck, just like the luck that followed us a few hours later, when, with Sudsy at the wheel, we reached the Colorado River, and Sudsy decided to drive the car up a steep hill where we might camp out until the sun came up. Knowing it was steep, he got the car up to about 60, never taking his foot off the accelerated until he felt the ground level off. The headlights were shining but I couldn’t see anything in front of us with all the dust swirling around. Finally, when the dust settled, and when we exited the car, with the aid of a glorious full-moon and star-filled sky, we discovered we were only about twenty feet from the edge of a cliff that went straight down to somewhere we didn’t want to go.
So why did I escape incarceration or death during that short period? Certainly, we all know people more exemplary than us who just because of one mishap unfairly perished. And how many of us have watched old Twilight Zone episodes on New Year’s Eve while nervously waiting up for our teenagers, hoping they wouldn’t make a fatal decision or be a victim of some capricious force out of their control.
The Romans believed that bad luck and fortune ignored the virtuous, but that wasn’t true in my case. Medievalists also went to great lengths to distinguish between fate, providence, and fortuna, trying to explain the fickleness of an uncertain universe, but, like all attempts to explain the unexplainable with reason, they failed.
Still, looking back at my many flirtations with death and/or prison time, it seems appropriate today to celebrate being kind and virtuous and respectful of nature, in the hope that Lady Luck may smile upon us all.
But, just in case I’m being naïve, it may be an equally prudent to response to suggest to you, “Watch your back….”
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is Old Man Howling at the Moon
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories
Or as Sudsy woulda put it, "Watch your ass . . ."