Donny and the Three Bears
Donny Jackson was twenty, thin but solid-looking with a strong jaw line that only recently had been rid of acne. It was late August and in the span of this one summer he had gotten the first decent hair cut of his life, discovered his spiritual inner life, found, and then lost, love. Kara Longshoe, of Eskimo heritage, was two years younger than Donny and had been responsible for all of it. She found him the hair dresser that worked around Donny's cowlick, introduced him to Totemism and Animism, cleared up his acne with regular sex, and then dropped him like a greasy chunk of rancid blubber in July. But he still loved her.
One day, less than a week after losing Kara, Donny was driving to work on Fulton Avenue with his friend Gary, and jerked the car across oncoming traffic and off of the road. They bounced over the curb and stopped on the lawn before the woods as traffic continued to stream past them.
"What gives?" Gary asked.
"I just remembered something," Donny said. "These woods; this is the top of the hill overlooking the zoo, isn't it?"
"I guess," Gary said. "Is this where you and Kara used to hug trees, or whatever the hell you did?"
"No," Donny said. "My father used to take me here." He climbed out of the car and started into the woods when a cop pulled up at the curb and beeped his horn. Traffic slowed to a crawl as the lights on the police cruiser lit up.
"You can't take a leak here," the cop said through his loudspeaker. Donny stared at him for a moment as if confused.
"C'mon man!" Gary called out the window. "Don't make him get of the car. Get your ass back in here."
They crept down the curb and led a procession down Fulton with the cop tight on their ass. "Tell me when that fucking cop is gone," Gary said. "I got a ton of reefer."
Donny turned right on Memphis and the cop continued along Fulton. "Damn it!" Donny cried and punched the dashboard hard.
"Is he pulling us over?" Gary asked.
"I wanted to go see the polar bears. I forgot. I can't believe I forgot to go see the polar bears."
"We can't man," Gary said with great relief. "We're late for work. You'll have to go tomorrow."
They worked at Zorba's Family restaurant on Memphis Avenue. It was a family restaurant in name only. At seven-thirty the supper crush, which meant twenty people, was over, and Donny took a break in the alley beside the restaurant. As he smoked a cigarette amongst the trash cans he thought he saw Kara walk by with her new boyfriend and realized that nothing, absolutely nothing, made sense anymore. He wasn't particularly jealous of the new boyfriend; if Kara chose him then so be it. Yet Donny's inner blueprint of how the world worked had been shredded by the pure capriciousness of Kara's motives in dumping him. She simply didn't want to date him anymore. He hadn't done anything wrong, or left her unsatisfied in any manner, and the new guy wasn't smarter, cuter, or even richer. She just woke up one day and didn't give a shit about Donny.
Gary came into the alley from the back of the restaurant and stopped short at the sight of Donny. "You alright man?" Gary approached him cautiously. "What was with the polar bears? Is that something about Kara?"
Donny looked at him without recognition. The cigarette dangled precariously from his lower lip. He blinked.
"Never mind," Gary said. "Hey, some big, fat-assed jerk wants pancakes, for Christ's sake. I tried to make them, but I burned the piss out of them and the smoke's pretty thick in there."
Donny nodded.
"The Greek is pissed at me and I have to go work on tables again."
In the smoky chaos of the kitchen Donny was able to attain a semblance of normalcy. With his muscles occupied in the familiar activities of cooking, he tried, carefully, to piece together some of his thoughts. He was a fourth year student of Electrical Engineering at Cleveland State with a minor in anthropology. He had previously assembled in his mind a fusion of theories that led him to believe that the one hundred thousand years of selective breeding by humans would make a handsome, intelligent young woman like Kara embrace forever an intelligent young man like himself. He had even reinforced their natural attraction for each other by enthusiastically embracing her Eskimo culture and beliefs in Totemism. But it had all turned to crap.
"The fat guy really wants those pancakes," Gary announced.
"I should have gone to see the polar bears?" Donny said.
"Pancakes," Gary said. "Pancakes."
Donny grasped the large spatula firmly and began scraping the griddle meticulously. The secret to a perfect pancake was a perfectly clean griddle. He shoved the hamburgers to one side and covered them with pan lids to keep the grease away, and then poured the batter.
The Greek leaned into the kitchen. "Where the hell are the steaks? I got an entire table been waiting thirty God damn minutes for steaks."
Donny looked at the Greek blankly. "I didn't know," he said. "I'm making pancakes."
"This ain't the God damned house of pancakes. What's the matter with you? Five years of college so that you could get stupid all of a sudden?"
Donny shrugged. He shut off the griddle, dropped his apron where he stood, and lit a cigarette on the way out the back door.
"Wait up!" Gary called as he handed his slop bucket to the Greek.
# # # #
They went to the Fulton Tavern where Donny resisted all of Gary's attempts at cheerful distraction. But he did accept all the drinks offered to him, which, because of Gary's influence with friends and bartenders, were prolific. Donny raised his glass to all of his benefactors and said: "To the polar bears!"
"He's wasted," Gary said by way of explaining. Then, quietly, he said to Donny: "Dude, quit mentioning the bears. It's okay to be drunk, but stop saying stupid shit."
"I'm not drunk."
"Six gin and tonics, four jagermeisters, and a shot of Jack say that you're drunk. Not to mention five or six beers."
"I am not drunk." And he wasn't. It was as if his mind was working so very, very hard on his troubled life that his body metabolized the alcohol for brain energy.
What if there is nothing more to life than this physical presence, Donny thought. What if the self-awareness that supposedly separates mankind from animals is all just a cruel joke, an impossible long shot of circumstance and chance that such consciousness should exist on this planet. What if a human's consciousness were nothing more than a survival trait, like a giraffe's long neck or a bat's sonar, an evolutionary mutation that gave Homo Sapiens a slight advantage over Homo Erectus.
And to make matters worse, because of the evolutionary limitations of this particular conscious life, mankind deludes itself with the belief that there is a higher form of life-God in her heaven-and with the further belief that heaven follows this life just as surely as a healthy crap follows a hearty meal. Even as one God is debunked and disproved, another fills its place so that paganism begets multitheism, which begets monotheism, which begets God and Judaism, which begets Jesus and Christianity as well as Mohammed and Islam. In addition to all this you have to consider Hinduism, Buddhism, and probably Confuscism. Nature abhors a vacuum, and man abhors Nature, therefore man invents God. But Nature destroys man and thus it follows that Nature destroys God.
Donny had abandoned his own Catholic upbringing after his mother died, when his father no longer insisted on going to church. By the time Donny entered college, he had created for himself a belief that all things in the natural universe comprise God, what he later learned was known as Pantheism. This he abandoned for Kara's Totemism, the belief in life spirits embodied by animals, and Animism, the belief that God can only be exprienced through nature. Donny hugged a tree so that he could screw Kara. But he found comfort and peace in these belief systems, and that's what bothered him. That's what he had to resolve for himself, even if he couldn't screw Kara anymore.
Billy Longshoe, Kara's father, came into the bar. Gary wasn't sure that this was a good thing, but Donny seized upon the opportunity and sat beside him. Billy Longshoe was huge: two-hundred eighty pounds, and had the flat, mongoloid face of an Eskimo. He was exceptionally good-natured and liked Donny even more than he liked his own daughter.
"She's not pure Inuit," Billy said when Donny asked about Kara. "Forget about her." Billy had acquired a nasal, Midwestern accent. "Her mother is Polish, all right? I don't know what Kara will do with her life-spirit, though it is strong."
Gary leaned over Donny's shoulder and revealed his stash of weed to Billy Longshoe. "You guys want to step out into the parking lot for a minute?"
Gary tugged at Donny's shoulder and the three of them went outside.
"This is the stuff you got me," Gary said. "This is killer shit."
Billy scowled at Gary as he rolled a joint. "What are you doing to that poor thing?"
"Just wait a second."
"Give it to me," Billy said, and took the papers and marijuana from Gary. He rolled them a smooth, even, thick joint and fired it up, filling his lungs with smoke and then sucking in the errant wisps that plumed from the smoldering end, holding it all in with a smile for what seemed to be minutes. He handed it to Gary, along with the stash.
"I love her," Donny said. It occurred to him that he might have been a little too desperate for love when he met Kara. What did he care about Inuit Totemism anyway? Why did he think they could be soul-mates?
Billy said, "Kara is a royal pain in the ass. That she got from her mother, queen of the bitches." He motioned for the doobie. "You're better off without her."
"But I love her," Donny said, almost weeping. "Love is the most powerful force in the universe."
Billy laughed. "I can't even believe she's that good of a lay, all right? I don't really want to know, but if she's anything like her mother you're better off screwing a warm pail of water, all right?"
Donny's mind was beginning to fog, and what he kept with him was the belief that he loved Kara to the point of ecstasy, as if loving her brought him closer to God. He had once spent an afternoon in the woods with her. They sat in thick brush near each other but out of sight. They were experiencing nature; it was a form of the Animism she espoused. Donny wasn't sure what he had experienced other than a tremendous number of mosquito bites, but Kara had been filled with fire and, at least that day, an insatiable passion. Every time that they visited the polar bears, whom Kara explained were the life spirits that created the world, she was once again filled with that same passion.
Billy exhaled a huge cloud of raw, sweet smoke. "Let's see if we can't get your ass laid decently," he said. "That should put into perspective any lingering feelings you may have for the princess bitch."
Billy handed the doobie to Donny, who reluctantly inhaled. They smoked the rest of it in turns without further talk, and went inside.
Billy led them to the bar and stood next to two women, but it was clear he was only concerned with getting himself laid.
Gary handed Donny a beer, but Donny shoved it aside. "Let's go," he said.
# # # #
"Where the fuck are we going?" Gary asked. They were stumbling through the patch of woods along Fulton, on the southern side of the bridge that spans Old Man Creek and connects Cleveland's south side with Brooklyn Village.
"I'm looking for something," Donny said. Donny couldn't even find the fence, which worried him the most. Perhaps he had pulled off of the road too early. He hadn't been there in ten years and there was no good reason he should remember. "It's in here," he said. "I'm sure of it. I know this woods like it was the house where I grew up."
"Did it occur to you that looking for something is what you do in daylight?" Gary said. "It's dark now. This is when we lose things."
They walked into the chain link fence and fell over on top of each other and back into a thorny bush. "See: I told you," Donny said.
"Christ almighty," Gary said. "I thought we were going to Mama Mia's for a pizza."
"You can have pizza anytime," Donny said. "This is like going to church. This is like midnight mass."
"Midnight was two hours ago," Gary said as he scraped mud off of his pants. "We've been in a bar for almost six hours. What sort of church are we going to that likes its members higher than a kite?"
"Are you familiar with the Inuit people of the Arctic circle?" Donny's speech was slurred, but he spoke as seriously as he could.
"Will you stop with the Indian shit," Gary said. "Just because that Indian squaw broad dumped you, you keep getting all mushy about this stuff."
"The Inuit believe that polar bears possess tremendous life spirits, as if they were Gods."
"I never liked Kara," Gary said. "I don't think she ever loved you and I don't give a damn about polar bears. I can't believe we just quit our jobs, either. Let's go get pizza."
Donny dragged himself along the chain link fence shoving bushes and tree branches aside as he went. They stumbled again. "She taught me about their ways, and about the great life spirit of polar bears."
"The only thing good about Kara is that her father scored some of the meanest reefer I've ever had. We should be grateful for that. Please don't tell me you're screwing up that connection? I mean, you're going to stay friends with Billy, right?"
Donny reached out as he stood up and his hand passed through an opening in the fence. "Here it is," he said and crawled through.
"But where are we?" Gary asked. He could hear Donny tearing through the woods like a deranged squirrel, laughing and giggling down the hill. There was nothing to do but chase after him.
At the bottom of the hill was a paved road. Gary stopped in fear-there was an unnatural stillness-but also noticed that Donny was in a state of reverence, though at first it simply looked as if he were urinating.
"This is spooky," Gary said. "I don't know where we are but we shouldn't be here in this condition. We should be sleeping on someone's floor, under a pool table, where we can't get into trouble."
"This is the zoo," Donny said. He spoke with a hushed, respectful tone. "There's nothing to be afraid of. The animals are in their cages."
"Christ I'm hungry," Gary said. "Mama Mias is closed now, do you realize that?"
"My father used to bring me here," Donny said. "This is how we came to the zoo, through that hole in the fence and down this hill. We'd come down quietly and wait in the brush until the crowd on the road thinned out for a moment, and then we'd step out and join the flow of people walking like nothing at all was wrong with the world."
"That was fifteen years ago," Gary said. "Admission was only fifty cents. Your old man was the cheapest son of a bitch in the world."
"He had his principles," Donny said and set off down the dark and deserted road.
Donny staggered as he walked. He was exhausted and exhilarated and drunk and high all at once, and it was like being in a great spiritual state. To him it was like euphoria after fasting forty days in the desert, though his stomach was still bloated with beer.
"How do we get out of here," Gary said coming up after him. "Tell me we're going to break into the concession stand and make a pizza. Or at least a hot dog, right? I'll settle for a hot dog."
"I want to see the polar bears," Donny said. He was convinced that his life sucked and that he was in need of spiritual healing.
"I want to sleep," Gary said. "I want to eat and sleep. Tomorrow we can see the stupid polar bears."
Donny forged ahead, staggering but doing so with a regular rhythm that brought him ever closer to the polar bears. He had visited the zoo dozens of times that summer, always with Kara. It had been their special place, the place where they had met, though they had always entered through the gate and paid admission like everyone else. Using the hole in the fence conjured a happy memory of his father.
Gary collapsed on a bench along the paved road. "I know your life sucks," he called after Donny. "But I don't see how a polar bear is going to change that." Gary sat back and noticed that there was a horned goat looking at him from the summit of his artificial mountain. The exhibit next to that was Monkey Island, a massive blob of cement peppered with caves and surrounded by a moat; the hundred or so monkeys could only be vaguely discerned.
Gary was also an engineering student at Cleveland State University. Gary, however, was on the verge of flunking out. Gary was thick waisted from beer, pizza, and fried foods, but none of that bothered him. He had puffy cheeks, a slight double-chin, and limp, lifeless hair that he cut himself when it got in his eyes or tickled his ears.
As Gary considered chasing Donny and dragging him bodily from the zoo, he was frozen by a monkey's grunt. It was so close that he was sure one of the little bastards had crossed the chasm and was intent on biting him, or raping him, however it was that monkeys infected you with HIV in the jungle. The monkey grunted again and then another answered the first. Then yet another grunted and some other one screeched loudly, frightening Gary even worse. Suddenly the entire colony began to screech and grunt. Their dark shapes bobbed ominously in the shadows and raised a noise Gary had only ever heard before in the bleachers at a Browns game. And just as suddenly as it had started they all fell silent. Gary found himself retreating back up the path. He searched for the spot where they had descended from the wooded hill but gave up any hope of finding his way out of the zoo in the dark.
The night was warm and so Gary found another bench and this time he sprawled out, frightened and exhausted and also very pissed off at Donny. Feeling sick, he closed his eyes expecting to vomit, but instead fell into a stupor.
# # # #
Donny reached the polar bear exhibit. He leaned against the railing at the edge of the paved area. Beyond that was a small cement wall with a tall chain link fence atop it. Beyond the fence was a sheer drop of twelve feet into the moat that looked now like a bottomless pit but which Donny knew was ice blue water. In the dark he saw nothing of the exhibit but shadows; it was likely that the polar bears were inside their den, a glassed cage area inside the building that also housed the lions, tigers, and six chimpanzees.
Donny turned to wait for Gary. Across the pavement one of the giraffes stomped its hoof, but that was the only sound. The night was warm and smelled of hay and manure. A slight wind rustled the leaves along the paved walkway. Donny thought he should be frightened by the absolute loneliness but instead he was comforted by the knowledge that the polar bears were nearby.
Donny had not had a lot of religion in his life, but he did recall that the priest described hell not as a burning agony but merely the knowledge that one was absent from God's presence, like knowing that the ultimate party was going on down the street and that you weren't invited.
The last time Donny had been to church was for his father's funeral three years ago. That itself was something of a joke because his Papaphobic father had complained about Catholocism every day for as long as Donny could remember, and yet Donny could think of nothing else to do with his father other than to have him buried through the church.
Donny's mother had divorced his father eight years before that, and she had little to do with either of them since. Donny had begun to believe that life was full of loneliness and separation until he met Kara.
They were soul-mates, or so Donny had thought. Donny was ready to spend the rest of his life with her. Then one last week she stood him up when they were supposed to have met at the Fulton Tavern, and stopped returning his calls. Donny's love persisted even though Gary had seen her out with another man two days ago.
Now Donny climbed the fence surrounding the polar bear exhibit. He paused at the top and noticed a dank, animal smell. His head began to spin and, when he thought he was climbing back down, instead he flipped over the fence and sat down hard on the edge of cement above the moat.
There was pain and fear but mostly surprise at what had happened. The first time he and Kara saw the polar bears both adults put on a display of urinating like two fire hoses filling the ocean. Why that particular image came to him he couldn't explain.
"Gary!" he called out with hushed urgency. He giggled involuntarily as he pictured what Gary's reaction to this would be. "C'mon, Gary!"
Before this summer, Donny's only knowledge of polar bears was from watching an animated commercial of a mother polar bear and her cub screwing around in some snow. Kara, preaching to Donny like one possessed, explained that a polar bear and a wolf had mated by accident in a blizzard, and that man was born of them.
Donny stood up with his back against the fence and with the toes of his shoes reaching past the edge of the cement, and realized how lucky he was not to have fallen into the moat. Falling into the moat, which was refrigerated to less than sixty degrees, would not be good. He reached his right arm across his body and gripped the fence so that he could begin to turn and climb out, but instead he slipped and fell into the water.
For a moment he thought about inhaling the water and ending his life but instead he panicked and kicked and reached for the surface, desperate to breathe while fighting the pain of the cold. He managed to get his face above the water and inhale, and immediately tried to claw his way up the wall. The cold sapped his strength and the weight of his wet clothes dragged him down. He could manage only a feeble, "Gary," before dipping below the surface again.
Donny remembered his training from beginner's swimming class. He held his breath, stretched out his arms into the dead man's cross, and floated face down. His body shook from the cold. Even though this wouldn't get him out of the water and back up the wall, at least he had a moment to think. "You don't drown because of the water," the swimming instructor had said. "You drown because of panic."
Donny heard a splash nearby and then he recalled that the swimming instructor had no clever aphorisms regarding polar bears. In the next instant the polar bear had him by the shoulder and Donny's mind filled with pain. He understood vaguely that he was being dragged from the water and pushed and kicked and pulled as best he could but he was thrown onto the cement against the second of the three polar bears who growled and pinned Donny by the throat with its massive paw. There was a terrible shooting pain in his right leg but Donny couldn't scream. The bear had cut off his wind. Before blacking out he realized he should have drowned himself, even though he was still afraid of dying.
Donny didn't die so easily, however. Two of the bears were born in captivity and the third hadn't killed a seal in many years. On top of that it was summer so their instinct to eat everything and anything wasn't sharp, and they weren't hungry anyway because they'd each just eaten several pounds of raw meat.
The largest bear, a two-thousand pound male named Willy, was the only one to have lived in the wild; he still remembered something of his training from his mother, and had been the one to go into the water after Donny. He opened up Donny's right hamstring and lapped up some of the blood, but didn't feel like eating. He poked the body and then shoved Chilly, the smaller female, off of Donny's head. Chilly growled and swiped at Willy. Willy shoved her hard, but decided he didn't care particularly about Donny and lumbered back to his rock. In the wild a female bear wouldn't be so bold with a larger male, but this was the Cleveland zoo and she was unfamiliar with protocol.
This brought Cube, their six-month old cub out of the shadows to inspect their prey. He nibbled at Donny's open wound and then pounced as if he were making the kill.
Donny awoke to explosive pain as Cube dragged him by his foot across the cement. The pain cleansed his mind of every thought, and for that moment Donny had no childhood, his parents never existed, Kara was nothing, and there wasn't even God; there was only the pain. Donny felt his bowels move and he vomited. The vomit caught in his throat and sent him into a coughing spasm. He found one of his hands flailing before his own face in a vain attempt to ward off the polar bear cub that growled and snapped at his throat.
With the pain subsided there was room for panic in his mind. Donny understood where he was and remembered some of how he had gotten there. He had been making a spiritual pilgrimage in the hopes of rediscovering God, but instead was at the mercy of these bears. If there was a God she was the hands-off type.
Donny heard himself scream in terror as the polar bear cub gnawed on his good hand, snapping its head back and forth so that Donny was certain that his arm would be pulled from its socket. Donny's screams stopped when the cub's mother took Donny by the throat and snapped his neck with a single shake of her head.
Donny had a vision, a very, very, very near death experience. In the vision he saw his father. Donny knew that his father had died three years ago, but he also knew that time meant nothing in this place. Together he and his father floated above the zoo and soared through the air at tremendous speed. It was cold and calm and quiet. In this place it didn't matter that God was hands-off. Donny felt that God wasn't a single entity, aloof from the universe, but was made up of all the living spirits as well as the physical reality of the universe. The gravitational pull of the planets and the radiation of the stars were all part of God. The wind and the rain were all part of God, as were plants, and animals, and fish. It was all one and Donny's individual consciousness was insignificant in the greater scope. Donny and his father floated somewhere above the earth and rested as they watched, seeing now without eyes all the things that the eye cannot see. In just the first moment of watching Donny realized that a thousand years had passed since he died, and that by now Kara and Gary and even Cube the polar bear cub had joined them on this plane of existence. They were all one.
Then Donny saw a great, blinding white light. He awoke from the vision but it was as if he still existed on that cold, calm, and quiet plane. In the blinding white light a face began to emerge. It was a loving, forgiving face. Perhaps the face of God. Donny felt his own existence focus into being as he finally recognized the face as belonging to the polar bear cub. The cub regarded him, cocking its head to one side. It looked away and Donny followed his gaze and saw the cub's mother a few feet off, chewing on what looked to be Donny's hand and forearm, severed at the elbow.
Donny once again recalled what had happened, but the vision he'd had stayed with him and comforted him even as he realized that the mother polar bear had snapped his neck and paralyzed him so that he didn't even feel that his arm was missing. Moving his eyes, Donny saw that he lay in a large pool of what had to be his own blood, and that surely he would die now. Where just moments before he had been stricken with panic and terror, he was now filled with a deep, comforting calm. Death, Donny thought, was not to be feared anymore than birth. Perhaps this was a foolish way to die, but the result was the same so this was just as good as any way to die. He even managed a smile as the cub scampered away at the approach of the large male bear.
Willy growled at the others as he looked at the mess and regarded the female with what Donny thought of as contempt. Forgive them, Donny thought. They've never killed before. They didn't know how.
Willy's gaze met Donny's and he nodded in agreement. He growled gently, as if to console Donny. Willy lumbered towards him and sniffed his face.
Donny smiled as the two-thousand pound bear placed his forepaws on Donny's back, and felt the rush as the beast put his weight into it. He heard his ribs snapping like a bundle of twigs.
Parma, Ohio, 1990