Mab was driving recklessly away from it all, from all the stupidity, all the games, all the exasperation of life. He was planning to make this his last day on earth. He would put up with it no more. He felt a curious relief at arriving at this decision. It was so obvious, like spending years looking for something & there it is right on your kitchen table.
Mab had his foot all the way down on the pedal of his burned-out 300 grand miles old Volvo; it was amazing it still kept running. Even with that much gas, it only went a total of 45 m.p.h. "Hurry up, you old bomb!" he yelled at the Volvo, while puffing on a joint & taking another hit of hot pepper Russian Vodka, "I've got an important appointment with Old Man Death today!" He laughed hysterically, as the car nearly ran off the road, barely missing the guard rail over a narrow gorge.
Uh, uh, he was going to have to get himself under control. That wouldn't do. A car wreck just wouldn't be elegant enough. No, Mab had another plan.
He'd given it some careful consideration. Sleeping pills & oven gas was a little too conventional. He had to do this in style.
He popped another cassette tape in the deck from among his varied & dusty collection, having no idea what it was. He needed some kind of background music for this oncoming tragedy.
Appropriately enough, it happened to be the album "Homeless" by the Blue Angels. The lyrics were about a lost soul who was predestined for a better world, but somehow got born on the wrong planet by a mistake of the Cosmic Bureaucrats. The music was in an upbeat minor key. Mab could relate to that. He loudly sang along with the words:
"What the hell has become of me...
I was destined for Infinity.
How did I wind up with this shit...
So I may as well take another hit."
What brought this all on, among a pile of other things, is he had a rather violent argument with the woman he was living with. She didn't think he was good enough. She thought he was a jerk & told him so. Mab didn't like to hear this kind of thing, so he stole the keys to his own car & took off.
Yes, that's right, he stole his own car. You see, he was arrested a couple of days ago for uncareful driving around 3:00 A.M. He'd been discovered driving upon someone's front yard, soused/stoned out of his mind on a combination of booze, reefer, amphetamines, & amyl nitrates. He was running over a bunch of neatly trimmed bushes, backing up, hitting garbage cans, knocking over a prize bird feeder, putting a good dent in a Mercedes Benz in the house's parking lot, having a jolly good old time. The address of the house was of his ex-boss, which he'd looked up in the phone book in a honky-tonk bar earlier that evening.
He was dragged out of the car, thrown in the drunk tank, & his license was suspended for ten years. So Amy got possession of the car & kept his keys.
The previous week, on paycheck day, he got a rather abrupt notice with his paycheck that he was to leave immediately. On Wednesday afternoon, he was a bit rude to an important client in the accounting office. It just came out naturally, like a long repressed fart. He got tired of being so servile to the condescending bugger. All he did was call him an asshole. So what was so wrong with telling the truth for a change?
He'd never originally wanted to become a fucking accountant anyway. Once upon a time, Mab wanted to be a surrealist painter. He thought he would be rich & famous, achieving the recognition of Salvador Dali. He went to school & studied painting. His professors & collegues thought he was quite good at it, but the real world didn't. He spent five years painting after school, while working at idiot labor jobs, but never got a damn cent for his creative labors nor a hint of recognition beyond that he got in school. Apparently, his stuff was a little weird for the "market" & somehow he couldn't stomach producing more normal art just to make money. There was no way he was going to do fucking commercials, the ultimate sell-out.
After five years of going nowhere with this, Mab buckled under societal pressures, & went back to school. This time he studied accounting, a rather extreme about-face from his previous aspirations, perhaps as a way of exorcising the Muse. Upon graduation, he cut his hair, donned the obligatory suit & tie, & got employed at the Jones, Bishop, & Pope accounting firm. During the week, he played it straight. On weekends, he got as shitfaced as he could, & went to punk/disco bars. On one of these excursions, he met Amy, who took up with him because she liked his attitude, & besides, he had some money.
He'd been with Jones, Bishop, & Pope for five years up to the past week, a straight accountant by the week, a punk on the weekends. Looking back on it, he wondered how he stood it for so long. How could he have put up with something so opposite to the way he really was?
O, the idiocy of it all. Mab drove meditatively along, trying his best to align his car with the white lines of the highway, humming frantically along with the "Homeless" album.
He arrived at his destination, Mt. Watatic. He parked his Volvo in a designated lot at the head of the trail. He grabbed his pack. He left the tape deck on, the doors unlocked, & the keys in the car. Let someone take the damned piece of shit. Besides, he wouldn't need it anymore where he was going. It was his last day on Earth, remember?
He hiked up the trail past the frog pond. The frogs were all asleep now; it was the outset of the long New England winter. When it was warm, he used to sit here, get stoned, swat at mosquitoes, & croak along with the frogs at nightfall. Well, this was the last time he'd be here. He gave his regards to the sleeping frogs, wishing them sweet amphibious dreams.
The ground swirled somewhat around his feet. He'd had a bit too much of that peppered Vodka; what the hell had possessed him to get something like that? A couple of miles back, he'd hurled the half- empty bottle out the window, letting it smatter into pieces on the side of the desolate highway.
He stopped by a stream & had his last drink of water from there. He had hefty handfuls of it to dilute the Vodka in his system. It was good, clear water; it would purify him for the long journey he was about to embark upon.
Up the mountain, he had to stop & rest several times. It was steep, rocky, & got icier the further up he went. He stared into the dense forests of fir trees, wondering what kinds of wild animals not yet extinct dwelled there. He wondered if there was a bear in there.
Actually, that wouldn't be a bad way to do it, he thought, to be mauled by the fierce claws of an enraged, starving bear, to have the jaws tear out his neck & guts. It would be a natural way to die. And he would be re-cycled into the eco-system that way.
Mab huffed & puffed up the trail, climbing rock stairways built by the forestry service. His heart was pounding violently; he wondered if it would give out. That would solve the problem; then he'd be food for the scavengers of the wild.
There was a lean-to hut near the top, made for overnight hikers. The rear part of it was burned; someone must have been careless with a fire. Or some pyromaniac did it just for the fun of it.
Mab took a break, having a seat on the porch of the lean-to, & a toke off his pipe. He noticed some graffiti on the walls. One said: "We were here the night of August 27, 1977. Boy, did it rain! But we didn't care. We just drank beer & got drunk." There was a picture of a woman with unusually large breasts, drawn with charcoal from a fire. There was one interesting injunction: "Artists of the world. This place is for you. Treat it with respect. Make the best use of it." Mab said he'd do his best. He pulled out a knife & carved underneath it: "This is my last day on Earth. Mab." He carved a stylistic impressionistic self-portrait, half-man, half-wolf.
He climbed the last few feet. The top of Mt. Watatic was a windswept granite crag, where a few stunted trees & moss grew. It had an incredible view all around. It was a clear day & he could see the towers of Boston in the east, Manchester towards the northeast, the White Mountains in the north, Mt. Monadnock in the northwest, the Green Mountains of Vermont west northwest, the Berkshires in the west, Mt. Wachusett in the south.
It was a cold windy day. There were a lot of clouds hovering over head. Every now & then, a few flakes of snow would fall. The freezing snow-bound winter was rapidly approaching this day.
Mab sat down & contemplated the view, facing southwest. The reason he'd picked this mountain to be his last day on earth was because his formative late adolescent years were spent in this area. He'd gone to a small boarding school near here. He used to hike up to here a lot back then. It was a favorite spot of his.
Suddenly, near where he was sitting, a bunch of crows rose out of some bushes, going "Caw, caw!" Or was it "Haw, haw!"? Mab imitated their language back at them. He wondered what all those crows were doing there. Crows were funny creatures; they were somehow more independent & intelligent than other birds. Mab would have liked to be a crow. Then he could fly places, live off the land.
He remembered the first year he went to school around here. He remembered seeing this mountain for the first time. It was so high up above the other hills. It was love at first sight. Mab was from the great northeast metropolitan region & had never seen so much wooded land in his life. He remembered how blown away he was the first time he saw this view. He still was.
He looked out over these hills which were once the only real home he'd had. Mab started to cry. Why did everything have to be so fucked up? Why did life have to be so stupid? How had he gone so far astray?
Memories rushed back at him about the times he came up here when he was younger & had no idea what life had in store for him. Back then his life was much simpler; he felt no need to become known, no need for material success. His whole life plan back then was to simply become a happy wanderer, with no cares or worries. He knew then how to be happy for its own sake, rather than needing something or someone to be happy.
He also came here to escape from the school, by signing out for walks, then coming here. Although his art teachers & few fellow artists liked what he did, he was cruelly treated by the other classmates. They derisively called him "Mad Mab". Why? Probably because he was so different.
Mad Mab looked out at a line of mountains that stetched towards the northeast. There was a trail that led along the ridges of these mountains. When Mab was in school, whenever he came up here, he would fantasize about going along that trail. He would backpack from here to wherever the trail went to. He planned to do that when he got out of school. But somehow he became interested in other things.
He became interested in women & how to lure them. He became interested in drugs & alcohol & how to pay for them. He became interested in art & how to sell it & how to become famous in order to sell it. Finally, he became interested in how to play a game he really didn't originally want to play just to make a fucking living at the American middle class standard.
How did he get that way? How did he manage to get sucked into something he swore he'd never get sucked into? It was all so perverse.
Well, it was time to take care of business. He reached into his pack & took out the six-shooter he would do himself in with. He bought it from someone in a bathroom in a rather disreputable bar on the wrong side of the tracks of the town where he worked. He gazed at it & checked to make sure there were some bullets in it. It wouldn't do to try to kill himself without bullets; it just wouldn't be dignified. We have to do this with dignity. Mab hysterically started snickering to himself.
He remembered how his first art teacher somewhere in junior high school told him he had a real talent, that he should grow up to be an artist. What a disservice that teacher had done him; he would have been better off wanting to grow up to be an accountant. But that wasn't what he wanted to be. He wanted to be a creative artist.
He started crying again. Why did life have to be so unfair? Why did everything he set out to be have to blow up in his face?
Mab put down the gun & went to the top of the peak. He started chanting to himself a stoned-out ad-libbed version of an Indian death song. It only seemed proper to pay homage to the place of one's death. He raised his arms, moving his body in a slow circle, & declared his acceptance of his death, of all that is.
He looked around him. He wondered what it was like here before the White Man came. He looked at the view, trying to imagine it without the fields, the houses, the highway below, the megalopolis of Boston & Manchester to the east. It must have been very peaceful without the sound of jets & trucks on the highway.
Mab wished he had been here then. He never basically liked civilization & all the societal bullshit that goes with it. It must have been so free then. One could be free to be wild. No jobs, no games.
Mab went back to the gun & picked it up. He took a final toke from his pipe. He looked all around him for his last glimpse of life, sensing everything intensively. As he held his gun in hand, he thought of reciting "To Be or Not To Be", just to give it the right dramatic flourish. Nah, that would be too conventional.
Well, let's get this over with. Mab put the gun to his head, counting a one, a two, a three, all the while looking along the ridge of mountains he always wanted to wander along, once upon a time in that distant innocence of youth. His finger tightened on the trigger.
All of a sudden, the words "Fuck this shit!" popped into his head, & Mab started shrieking & whooping, firing off the bullets into the high sky, like a drunken Indian. He violently hurled the pistol outwards off the cliff.
For the first time in his adult life, Mab felt happy. He was free. He didn't need to put up with it anymore. Perhaps he had just become crazy, but it was a good kind of craziness, not the gloomy, morose kind. It was like he finally got the punchline of a joke, thinking all along it was a tragedy. It was only a tragedy because he'd made it that way.
Mab put on his pack & took a last look at the view. The sun was starting to go down between the clouds & the horizon. He would spend the night in the lean-to tonight. Tomorrow, he would start hiking along that trail that went to the northeast.
He would live by his wits. He didn't know what he would eat, but he'd find something in the woods. He didn't know how he would sleep, but he'd make it up as he went along. He would see how far he could go. If he died in the process, starving or freezing, well, that was okay, too. His remains would be picked by the crows & maybe his consciousness would somehow get reborn in that form.
That night, sleeping in the lean-to hut, Mab had a dream. He was walking along the trail. It was warm summertime. There were no highways or planes to break the peace. There was no civilization at all. Everything was so beautiful, just as it should be. Everywhere he wandered was idyllic & wild. There was plenty of fruit & berries on the trees & bushes, so he didn't need to worry about food. There was plenty of fresh water. It was always warm enough to sleep outside.
A week later, some last hiker found a skeleton in the lean-to. It had been picked clean by the crows and wild beasts.
Somewhere in those distant New England hills, through the eternal changing of the seasons, wanders the spirit of a man once known as "Mad Mab". It drifts freely, without the cares & burdens of us poor mortals. At last, Mad Mab has become what he truly wanted to be.