

EXIT NOTHING

Pat King

Copyright © 2012 by Pat King

(KUBOA)/SmashWords Edition

www.kuboapress.wordpress.com

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for Katie

Bad Mojo

What kinds of screeds were written in blood on my walls before I was born? None, I hope. Otherwise it means that the gods really are laughing at me. That's too much, even for me.

This world. This world is madness. This world is madness and only the mad are in love.

My name is Nothing. I don't do anything. I drink too much. I don't eat enough. I'm only twenty eight but my body is already failing me. My hands shake a little. My cock doesn't work right. Pain down my back. Given up, man. Given up. Nightmares every night. Sweat soaking my hair. I'm twenty eight. I sometimes wake up mouthing those words. Turning twenty eight was a system shock for me.

I accept. I just accept. No more dreams. But all I want to do is dream.

I am haunted by the women and the cities in my life. I fall in love with both flesh and concrete. Kaye and Anne. Philadelphia, Baltimore. I will never leave any of them.

Kaye. I married Kaye when she was eighteen. I was twenty one. Kaye was smarter than I was. She was partially Catholic. At any moment, I was either fully passionate for her or totally repelled by her. Both intensities came in waves. For a time, her devotion to me, even in my most mad moments was unshakable. But then I left her in the middle of the night and drove from Birmingham, Alabama to Philadelphia. Left her with an apartment, bills, two cats. Things didn't work out so well after that.

And now, Philadelphia's over. Instead, there's Baltimore and there's Anne. Anne is my sanity and I am her madness. She is my Mad Love. When I'm inside her I'm sane and she begins to travel through my madness. I'm not sure but I think she might want to devour me. She might want to become me. But she's often next to me, even when I become a vapor and wander bodiless through the labyrinth of my marriage, Philadelphia, my nightmares, my childhood, my death.

It all comes back to me. The women that I've loved and the cities that I've loved. It's all the same thing to me. A strange and mysterious kind of love. A devouring, rejuvenating love. A working class love. The middle-class social compromise is dead to me.

I vapor away, wandering certain posts continuously, haphazardly. My mind is a bleeding submarine. My laughter is disembodied. I don't worship time. In fact, I don't believe in it. I believe in dreams.

But thankfully, finally, there are no more dreams.

String Theory

When I'm inside Anne, I feel like I've defeated Time. I feel giddy with discovering the secrets of timelessness. I think I'm getting there. I know my mind is reaching toward something. But what? Insanity? Metaphysics? Horrors?

Probably a little of all three. And that's just fine by me. I am beginning to open up to strange things. I close my eyes and sensations come back to me. Riots, violence, the scent of Anne's shoulder after she's gotten out of the shower. I think forward. I think back.

I'm at work right now, at the deli counter in a supermarket about a thirty minute drive from Baltimore. Suburbia so clean that it squeaks. Howard County, Maryland, a very rich county. There is a very large woman in a yellow dress in front of me, watching me as I slice her lunchmeat. I know this woman. She's here every other day or so. She likes her lunchmeat cut just right. You can't make a mistake when you are dealing with her. She'll make you throw the meat out and start over again.

Suburban housewife want you achieve unachievable perfection. Demand perfection. Suburban housewife scowl as she smile. Ruined person? Best not think too deeply. Have brain meltdown.

Her husband is here now. He's holding a couple of big steaks in his hands. He argues with his wife about the price. They feign politeness toward each other. Too expensive, she says. It says in the circular that they will be on sale this Friday. Why not wait until then? But the husband insists that he wants the steaks now. He wants to eat them tonight. The husband's hair is cut short, almost a crew cut. He has a neatly trimmed military-style mustache. He has the rancid smell of a cop about him. I can't be sure, though. He must be in some position of authority. He fits the type too perfectly. Indeed, he definitely has dominion over his wife because he tells her that yes they are getting the steaks today and there will be no further discussion about it. Still feigning polite. His wife drops the matter. She has no power in their relationship. But she has a small amount of power over me. And I know that she enjoys it.

***

The grocery store is like an asylum. Well, at least I get paid a little bit to be here. Others are trapped in their morbid shopping routines. Still, it's hard to listen to such inane conversations from people with such a sense of class superiority. They treat the workers like dogs. Some will point to what they want on the menu board, as if we need a visual with their words. Others will take care to enunciate for us, drawing each syllable out one by one. And if you ask them to repeat something because they are talking too softly or because the noise of the chicken rotisserie or the fryer behind you is too loud, they will shout their order back to you. We're all dogs to them. We take orders and then fetch. Fetch, fetch, fetch. That's my job.

I finish slicing the smoked ham for the cop and his wife. I lay it on the scale. I smile at them but my attitude is stoic. All the while, I'm locked into my imagination. There's a four pound loaf of ham still sitting on the slicer and I imagine picking it up and throwing it at the cop. In my mind, it hits with such force that it removes his head from his body. Other customers in line scream. A child faints. I pull off my shirt and throw it on the ground. Then my pants. Now, completely naked, I run around the deli counter and kick the cop's head into the cereal isle. I follow it, making gorilla noises, yanking my cock and pulling boxes of cereal off the shelf. I bounce up and down and then stumble and then do a pirouette.

All of this might happen one day. Except of course the cop's head coming off. In reality, I would probably just throw the piece of meat somewhere near his head and walk out of the place. I've walked out of jobs before. Ain't no big thing. I sometimes just reach the point where I'm ready to move on to the next humiliation.

So I don't do it right now. Instead, I put the lunchmeat in a plastic bag, put a price sticker on it and smile. Then I blink. I blink and the memories come back to me. I'm remembering a night with Kaye. We are lying in bed, naked, having just fucked. I have something to ask her.

"When I die," I say, "will you eat my ashes?"

"No," she says. "Of course not."

"You could put them in a pudding or something."

"No."

"Why not?"

"I'm just not doing that."

"You don't have to eat me all at once. You can do it over time."

"Stop it. You're being gross."

"So you won't do it?"

"No. And I wish you'd quit talking about it."

And yet Anne says she will do it and I believe her. Already, my information is coded into her mind. Even if my writing doesn't survive, my patterns will, as long as she stays alive. And she will be alive much longer than me. And she will eat of me when I die, completing the ritual. Time will have finally beaten me when she dies. It will have the last laugh. But Time always wins. Or does it? There is, of course, the infinite to consider.

I blink again. I'm back at the deli counter.

"What else for you?" I say.

"Nothing else today, hon," the wife says.

"OK, thanks. Have a great day."

"You too, hon."

The pair waddles away.

I see a long line of customers. But there are three of us here behind the deli counter and I decide to wash my hands. I don't really need to, but I'd like to take a few seconds for myself. I take my gloves off and walk over to the sink. I turn the water on. It is extremely hot. I run the water over my hands and fall into the warmth. I think to myself that I seem to have become Billy Pilgrim. No, I am definitely Billy Pilgrim. I've started to discover the key to Time. I might know how to defeat it. I'm starting to grow psychic. I am going beyond simple memory. I am actually traveling to my past. I feel, see, hear exactly as I did in the moments when the memories first happened. In bed with Kaye or Anne. In Philadelphia or Baltimore. I am right there and in the present too. I know you probably won't believe me. Or maybe you will. Maybe you are mad too. There are so few of us left these days. And if you're not mad, you should try it, if only temporarily. Become mad for me. I want to eat of you.

I wonder what the Mad Poet would have to say about all of this.

Sungod

Why did I give my nudity to you? You could see through my mirror though my head was reflective. I don't know how to be naked anymore. The weight of your stare is too much. I can't see myself getting older. Only more clothed.

Kaye and I lived in a small one bedroom apartment in Montevallo, Alabama. The college town was about forty minutes or so from downtown Birmingham. It had one main road, one bar, a grocery store, a drug store, a used bookstore and a video store. We didn't know anyone in the town but we knew the cockroaches. They lived in our apartment, outside in the parking lot, everywhere around us. They crawled over our faces and onto our naked bodies as we slept. They crawled over our food, our couch, made a home in our sink. They were a constant reminder to Kaye that we were not yet living the safe middle-class life that she so desperately wanted. For her, poverty was a means to an end. It was a nuisance at best. I feared leaving our poverty. For me, middle-class life meant leaving all of my dreams and fantasies and madness behind. But security! Almighty security! She believed in security much more than she believed in art. She was an inspired photographer, one of the best I had ever seen. But she was studying business at the University of Montevallo. She wanted her photography to be a hobby. A hobby. I never understood what that word meant except consciously deciding to be a mediocrity. And why? For what? A couple pieces of silver and a warm bedroom to sleep in I suppose. It all seemed so trivial to me.

But we both slept naked and that was a start. Kaye started to sleep naked because I slept naked. It was exciting at first but then it became routine. We started very early on sleeping on opposite sides of our bed, our backs to each other. I slept nude because my dreams were always more intense that way. And so Kaye, in an effort to make me happy or perhaps to understand me a bit more, slept naked too.

It wasn't about sex. Good lord, I wish it was. We weren't home at the same time very often. Different work and school schedules. She was a night sleeper and I generally preferred to sleep during the day. Besides, my cock didn't work right back then. Kaye and I weren't sexually compatible. It was always awkward and I eventually started to dread the thought of trying to make love to my wife. No, our nudity, together, lying next to each other during the few hours when our sleep schedules overlapped, mundane. But I still had my intense dreams, which I treasured, even when I twitched and sweated during my nightmares.

But bed nudity was as far as Kaye would go. Anything else verged on madness. There were rules to be observed. Let not the idea of liberation cross your pretty mind. Don't be troubled by it.

Kaye would never have understood the idea of Mad Love. Too much, just too much. Too intense. Too violent.

I liked to get up in the morning, scratch myself and let out a hearty fart. Then, I would eat breakfast naked. Once I was sitting naked at the table, cross-legged, eating a bowl of instant oatmeal. The morning sun shone through the half-open blinds. Kaye was in the kitchen getting a bowl of cereal together for herself. She was in scrubs and a t-shirt.

"Goddamn it," she said. "You're going to get your butt-smear all over the chair."

I didn't know what to say. She was only being half-serious, right? I just laughed a little and continued to eat.

Kaye, I just wanted to feel beautiful around you.

At the time, Kaye was working part time at a bakery. She brought home muffins and cakes and various other treats. It was often the only food in our apartment. I was getting fat. Expanding at an incredible rate. A lot of my old shirts didn't fit anymore and the ones that did showed my distinctly pregnant-looking belly protruding through, as if it were trying to escape. I hated my body. I was disgusted with myself.

So was it any real surprise that I wanted a little sanctuary within the confines of our apartment? I used to leave the blinds open and walk freely about the place, unconcerned with the possibility of a passerby seeing me. But Kaye would shut the blinds and admonish me, as a mother does a child.

"At least put some pants on," she said.

To Kaye, my nudity was only acceptable within narrow limits. When we were having sex or taking a shower together or sleeping. My nakedness was an abomination. I was a lunatic.

Kaye was chubby. She was thick and beautiful. I told her that her body was exactly the type that Renaissance painters would look for in a model. The way she looked used to be considered the perfect ideal of beauty.

Kaye always laughed when I told her this. She thought I was making fun of her.

Once, we were in the bathroom. We had just taken a shower together and we were still naked. I stood behind her, my arms around her stomach and my head on her shoulder. I reached up and cupped her breasts in my hands. I looked at the reflection of the two of us in the medicine cabinet mirror. She smiled shyly. I imagined in these slow, intensely moving moments that we might actually be all right. That the two of us might stay together. That we might find our Mad Love.

But it never came. Instead, the cockroaches scurried around in the bathtub, waiting for us to leave, so that they might have the apartment to themselves.

Artist/Muse

Anne is an artist but most importantly she's my muse. Perhaps I've stepped into sensitive territory. Let me explain.

The muse is the very engine of the artist, the human embodiment of the work. This is not sexist. Any gender can be a muse.

Anne is my muse but she's also an artist. She is brilliant when she paints or draws. But she is distracted. I am too much to handle sometimes. She spends much of her energy nurturing me.

Perhaps it isn't fair that I don't encourage her more. I am certainly a psychic vampire. I am an obsessed writer. I suck all of Anne's creative energy. I feed off it. I am devoted to art and art in life. Listen to me. This is important.

Perhaps.

I am a maniac but Anne is a part of my work. She is a spiritual collaborator in my work. This is Anne's book as much as it is mine.

Being a writer is a frightening and lonely way to live. But the rewards are immense. Most people aren't built for this kind of abuse. Staring all day into the abyss. Perhaps Anne is strong enough to be an artist. But she has me to contend with. My whirligig of madness flows in every direction.

Anne has kept me from committing suicide, from jumping out of a moving car, from getting into a fistfight.

Once, I called her at four in the morning, an hour before she had to get up for work. I had been drinking heavily, close to a blackout.

"Hello?" she was barely awake.

"Listen," I said. "I just wanted to tell you something, all right?"

"OK."

"I'm going to get into my car and drive down to Alabama."

"No," Anne said. "You can't do that. I'd miss you."

"Oh. Yeah, well, I'm not leaving for good. I just want to go steal a goat."

"No baby," Anne said. "I don't think you should do that. You should probably sleep."

I thought about it for a while. "Yeah, I am kinda tired."

"That's right baby, you just get some sleep."

"OK," I said. "But listen, I have something I need to ask you."

"OK."

"Will you marry me?"

She laughed. "Yeah, I'll marry you. Get some sleep now, all right?"

"OK."

I first realized that Anne was my muse when we took a short beach trip. We had been dating for three months or so and decided to spend the night in Ocean City, Maryland. We stayed in a little hotel near the boardwalk called the Plim Plaza. I started to call it the "Pimp Plaza."

The room was small and plain. The TV was only a foot or so away from the bed, leaving just enough room to squeeze through on your way to the balcony, which was only a couple of feet away.

But we were two kids in our twenties with nothing on our minds but drinking and fucking and listening to each other talk. The hotel was a place to crash.

We dropped off our clothes and bathroom supplies and then walked around the boardwalk for a while. There were street musicians playing guitar and huckster magicians trying to woo an audience. There was a scrawny man in cutoff jeans and a tanktop who told passersby that, for only a dollar, they could look at the "strangest thing they've ever seen," which was in a little black box on top of a podium in front of him. I was about to give him a dollar but Anne let me in on the trick. There was a mirror inside. All you saw was yourself looking at yourself. Strange, indeed, to be surprised at seeing your own reflection. I wished that Anne hadn't told me. I would have liked to have found out the trick for myself.

After walking around for a while, going on a few carnival rides, holding hands and talking, we decided to find a bar. There were only a couple actual bars on the boardwalk. Most of the hotels had bars but we decided that if we were going to drink in a hotel bar, it should be ours, since we could drink as much as we wanted and then crash at our hotel room, not far away. (I have this fear about public intoxication. I had a friend who was tricked by a cop into walking away from his apartment while he was drunk so that the cop could arrest him. I don't trust cops.) The bar we ended up at was big, a club for rednecks and yuppies. It was poorly lit and everything had a neon glow about it. There were a couple of disco balls hanging from the ceiling. It wasn't the kind of place that I usually dug but you could feel the salty sea breeze through the open front doors and see the ocean from the bar. We sat on two uncomfortable bar stools and the bartender asked us what we wanted to drink.

"She'll have a Jack and Coke," I said. "And I'd like—uh—some sort of beach drink."

"Beach drink?" the bartender said.

"Yeah, I mean we're at the beach. I'm in the mood for something tropical. I don't know. How about a Sangria or something?"

"Don't know how to make that."

"No? Well shit. I guess I'll just have a Bloody Mary then."

Fuck. But what was the point of arguing? I only had one night on the beach and I was with my beautiful fat Polish girl, Anne Wysokis, relaxing and listening to the waves outside. I was enjoying myself despite the tacky ambiance of the bar.

"This is great," I said. "I'm having a great time. Thanks for doing this with me."

"This was a good idea," Anne said.

"I'm glad I know you," I said.

"I'm glad I know you too."

We drank for a few hours. I was happy and boozy. But it started to get dark outside and the wind was blowing hard. It looked like it was going to rain soon. So we left the bar and went back to our hotel room.

Drunk and happy, I opened the door and flopped onto the bed. Anne closed the door behind her and lay down beside me. It was raining hard outside. Anne kissed me and I kissed her, biting her lower lip.

It rained hard and thundered as we took our clothes off. I kissed her breasts, drunk and fumbling and laughing. We naked fucks, fucking wildly underneath the sheets. We lonely fucks, come together for a while. Exhausted with sweat and more sweat. We strange lonely creatures come together.

And then there was a silence between us.

We relaxed. My arm was around her shoulder. I kissed her on her forehead. The rain had stopped. I rolled over and stood up.

"Where you going?" Anne said.

"Gonna go smoke," I said.

I walked out onto the balcony. I sat in a plastic chair and lit up a cigarette. I inhaled the calm. The boardwalk was empty except for a group of three teenage girls. As they walked by, I stood up and waved at them.

"Hullo!" I said.

"Hello—Oh my God!"

I wondered what her problem was. Then I realized that I was still completely naked. I flicked my cigarette over the balcony as I went inside.

Anne was laughing. "You crazy asshole," she said. She couldn't stop giggling. I jumped on the bed and began to tickle her.

Change

By my first night in Philadelphia I was already aware of the ghosts. They wanted to tell me their stories. But they needed a vessel. I wanted to hear their stories because I wanted to become a ghost myself.

The Mad Poet had been living in Philadelphia since the late seventies. I first met him in the summer of 2003, in Chicago, at a literary happening sponsored by the Radical Writers Association, of which I had just become a member. The RWA had, since late 2000, been holding protests, creating communal zines and agitating for the cause of underground writers. The leader of the group, Charles Jachowski, had been living in Philadelphia for about two years when he met the Mad Poet. They instantly took a liking to each other and the Mad Poet joined the RWA almost immediately. Myself, I read about the group in early 2001, while I was browsing through the literary section of The Village Voice in my college library. Before I had read the article, which chronicled the first few months of the group's protests and press conferences, I had been a fairly typical English major. But after I read about the group of street writers, living and creating art with dirt underneath their fingernails. I decided that that was exactly the type of writer I wanted to be. I wanted to be a visionary. I wanted to agitate and shock. I didn't want to get an MFA or become a college professor or get published in respectable journals. An hour before reading the article I wanted all of those things. But now I had seen another possible life, Mad Life, and I wanted it.

Birmingham, Alabama is a long way away from Philadelphia, so I didn't contact Charles immediately. Over the next year and a half or so, I published a couple of short stories in a few lo-fi print and web zines and I started my own zine. In late 2002, I finally wrote to Charles.

I was accepted into the group around March 2003. But I lived in Alabama and had yet to meet Charles or anyone else in the RWA.

That would change by mid-summer of the same year. A zinester had been hit by a car while riding his bicycle to work. He was going to live, but he was in bad condition. Charles rushed to set up a benefit reading for the guy, more for moral support than anything else. Some money would be raised but not nearly enough to make a dent in the uninsured writer's medical expenses, which totaled over a million dollars.

The benefit reading was to be held in Chicago in June. I was going to be there to watch the reading, to support the hurt writer and to possibly show Kaye, my new wife, a good time with some of my fellow madness-makers.

Kaye and I met the Mad Poet at breakfast in a Chicago diner the morning of the show. He smiled wide when Charles introduced us, despite missing many teeth. The rest of his teeth were nearly rotten, barely hanging on to his gums.

The Mad Poet was polite, even shy. I had no idea the kind of personality that was underneath. It turned out that he was always a bit shy around new people, though never too shy to be completely honest and blunt when he spoke to you.

I was also shy around new people. So I didn't talk to the Mad Poet much that morning. I'm not sure if I even talked to him at all.

After breakfast, Kaye and I went back to our hotel room to take a nap.

We arrived at the Barrelhouse Tavern around seven, an hour before the show was to start. The Mad Poet was onstage, practicing the poetry he was going to read that night. He waved when he saw us walk in. Kaye, the official photographer for the event, snapped a few photos of him. Then I went to the bar and ordered a whiskey and Coke.

The reading was fairly uneven. There were decent, mediocre and one or two excellent performances. For me, though, the highlight was the Mad Poet, reading his poem, "Regan's Brain" in a black executioner's mask and aviator sunglasses. The bar was dimly lit. I imagine he must have been half blind in that getup. The poem, surreal as it was, had a sort of plot to it, concerning the dead President's brain and its madcap post-body adventures. I was quite drunk by that time, and laughed loudly, perhaps even inappropriately. I once even fell out of my chair and began slapping my knees, unable to control the intense nutjob happiness in my belly.

After the show was over, Kaye and I met the Mad Poet at the buffet table, as he piled his plate with free goodies.

"Man, I really liked your poetry. It was hilarious."

"Hey, man, thanks," the Mad Poet said. "Where youse guys live?"

"Birmingham," I said.

"Shit. And you drove all this way for the show?"

"Yeah," I said. "I really wanted to meet some RWA people."

"Hey, man, if you're ever in Philadelphia, look me up, OK? You ever been to Philadelphia?"

"No," I said.

"You should come up sometime. You'd like it. Philly's a haunted city, you know?"

I next saw the Mad Poet early in 2004, at an RWA meeting in Philadelphia. I stayed in a Holiday Inn in the Center City area, close to the bar where the meeting was to be held. We all got insanely drunk and plotted the future of the organization. At one point, Charles asked the Mad Poet to sell the city to those of us who came from out of town (Charles dreamed of Philadelphia as the center of the new literary movement).

The Mad Poet stood up and spoke, flailing his arms in the air. "Philadelphia is full of ghosts of writers past. It's the penultimate writer's city. It's got, uh, great parks with plenty of trees and great readings. It's a city of pirates. Hell, I'm a pirate. If anyone wants to move here, I can get them a pirate job."

What he meant was that he did light construction and home repairs and got paid in cash. He didn't report any of the money to the government.

"I refuse to pay taxes in a time of war," the Mad Poet once said. "And there's always a war on."

So it goes, I suppose.

I saw the Mad Poet for a third time in the summer of 2005. Charles had scheduled a big reading at a bar called the Medusa Lounge. And so I went.

This time I stayed at the Mad Poet's townhouse in West Philadelphia. As far as I could tell, the Mad Poet was the only white person on the block. The street smelled of Chinese food and sewage. There was an abandoned, boarded-up ice cream shop on the corner. It was a total slum. It was my kind of place.

Early afternoon before the show, we met with a few RWA out of towners and locals at a fairly upscale restaurant. It wasn't the kind of place you would expect a bunch of greasy, street-hardened writers to feel comfortable in. And we didn't, really. But several members of the local press had promised Charles that they would show up and interview us. I wore jeans and a t-shirt but others attempted to dress nicely. The Mad Poet even wore a bright red vest. It had a Party City logo on it. I don't think that he had ever worked at Party City.

As it turned out, it was all for nothing, since none of the promised press showed up. All we had left at the end of the two hours we spent there was a bit of a buzz and an expensive bar tab.

And it only got worse. When the Mad Poet and I went outside, we found an empty space next to the sidewalk where his car should have been. I looked at the empty space and then up and noticed the sign that neither of us had seen when we pulled up: "No Parking." Shit. His goddamn car had been towed.

"What the fuck?" the Mad Poet said. "This fucking city. They put the sign where you can't even see it. Those fuckers. How is someone supposed to find a parking spot in this goddamn city?" The sign was in plain view. We had just failed to see it when we went in. But I didn't say anything. Suddenly, the Mad Poet raised his arms toward the sky and said, "Fuck you, Philadelphia!" Even in this jaded city, where freaky behavior is more the norm than the exception, several people turned and looked at him as they passed on the sidewalk.

It wasn't until the following year, when I was living with him, that I was able to fully contextualize the event.

There had been some construction going on behind his townhouse. They were building a new apartment complex or something. The workers would start their machines at six or seven in the morning, waking both of us up. The Mad Poet hated the construction with a passion, especially considering that the space used to be a sort of unofficial park. One morning, as we were eating omelets, the Mad Poet, in a rage over the construction, shouted, "They killed my favorite fucking tree, man. I used to sit underneath it in the shade and read. We were friends, man. Then one day it was just a fucking stump. They killed my tree, man. I walked up to one of them guys and said, 'You killed my friend. You motherfuckers killed my friend.' Now the only place in the city you can see trees is on the murals they've painted on the buildings."

It was only in this context that the outburst outside the restaurant nearly a year before made sense. The Mad Poet saw ghosts and souls everywhere. Cities had souls. Trees had souls. Everything had a soul and everything was alive. He was convinced that he was an old soul. He meditated every day and once had a vision in his intense concentration that he had begun his cycle of lives as a demon.

"I ain't no fucking aristocrat and never have been. In feudal England, they executed me for stealing a landlord's sheep."

The vessel, man. The Mad Poet was an old ghost and he was a vessel for ghosts. He was open to something that I didn't understand. I didn't understand because I never believed. Not literally at least. But I was able to accept that he felt things I couldn't imagine. The wealth of his emotional bank was nearly limitless.

My first night living in Philadelphia, after unpacking my stuff into my new bedroom, the Mad Poet took me out to a clean, well-lit Irish pub. It wasn't the kind of place I generally liked, and I was pretty sure that the Mad Poet didn't like it either. But we were there, sitting at the bar and sipping beers when the Mad Poet began telling me about Kathy Change.

Kathy Change! What an impossible story! What a fucking narrative! She was something else, man. Someone entirely different.

In 1996, before I was even sixteen, Kathy Change set herself on fire. Did you hear that? On fucking fire, man. She did it for art, for Transformation. She set herself on fire near the Peace Statue on the Penn campus. A nearby police officer tried to save her but she died.

Kathy Change believed in Transformation. She believed in an organic human evolution. Such a crisis creature is man that only a great spectacle can get his attention. She was going to ignite, ignite, ignite and then the world would be at peace.

Yes, the great Transformation would happen after she killed herself. The snake would stop eating its tail. There would be singing in the street. And there would be dancing. Above all, dancing! Celebrations for days afterward, weeks perhaps.

The governments of the world would dissolve because there would be no need for them. The people of the world would cooperate. There would be happiness everywhere. There would be no wars, no starvation and no more money to become greedy over. Humanity would finally become human.

Such naiveté to marvel at.

But she had faith. She believed in people. I want to believe in people. I want to be wrapped in a blanket of faith. So few people have such intense faith. I don't. How unimaginable is the pain she suffered? I try to imagine it and I can't even come close.

Candles burn. Buildings burn. Love burns. And Kathy Change is still on fire, in the hearts of a few West Philadelphia artists. Too few people understood what she was trying to do.

But the Mad Poet did. Her ghost was using him as a vessel as he told me her story. It was as if Kathy Change was actually speaking to me. She speaks through ghost believers and dream followers.

To some, it must have seemed as if she had always been a ghost. But she was a real flesh creature for a while. She was an enigma. There were always rumors about her.

Some of the stories were true, though they were sometimes hard to believe. Change spent a decade and a half roaming around Philadelphia, performing her dances and her anti-war chants. She was often on the Penn campus or at the bottom of the steps of the art museum, chanting and improvising poetry, all while dancing and waving colorful banners. She sang songs of love, of peace and of human evolution. Onlookers rarely took her seriously. Instead, they were attracted to the spectacle of the thing. Her frustration with them was understandable.

Though the Mad Poet had never met her while she was alive, he was aware of her, had heard the stories about her. He was especially aware of the way she died.

The Mad Poet was after the spirit and Kathy Change had the spirit. It was the synthesis of life and art. Kathy Change was synthesis.

Later I will go to work at the grocery store and I'll have to see all the icy people. The robotics of it all. So for now, I turn on Bob Dylan's song, "I Want You," and my spirit is temporarily revived.

But, those icy people! A frightening loneliness flows through my bones. I think of Anne, working in an office somewhere. I want to hold her right now. I can only love people like Anne. I can't bring myself to love the icy people. I resist it.

This is why I'll never be like Kathy Change, who had love and hope for all humans, icy or not. She felt a powerful universal love and an art-life synthesis. And she lives on as a ghost, inside people like the Mad Poet.

There will always be a distance between my art and my life.

But I will push onward, toward Change's light.

It's the best I can do.

Home

Philadelphia is like Kafka. Philadelphia is like Burroughs. I was in love with her once but I couldn't figure her out. I was inside her but I couldn't make her come. Philadelphia is a frigid city.

You're walking down the sidewalk, hand in pocket, passing another hoagie shop or pizza joint. Someone passes you. No eye contact. You look up at the sky, down at your shoes; you look at your fingers and chew your fingernails. And the car horns honk in stereo. Someone sticks his head out of his car window so that he can better shout at the car in front of him. Walk, man, just walk. Ignore the strange sounds. It's cold outside but the sidewalk seems to radiate heat. Don't talk to anyone. Don't get too close. You're getting too close.

Philadelphia. A city for the alienated, a city gone insane. She was my city, my lover.

I was only able to live inside her for six months. After I left Kaye, I had planned on staying there permanently. But things changed. I spent my first month there doing nothing, not really looking hard for work. I arrived in the city with about five hundred dollars and ended up spending it all, plus maxing out my credit cards, in the first month. Then it was time to look seriously for a job.

When I did find work, it was in a little newsstand in South Philly, next to Tony Luke's cheesesteak diner. It was a kind of dream job. For most of the day, I didn't do any work at all, just read novels and wrote in my notebooks. Only occasionally would I have to punch some lottery numbers or sell some cigarettes or a porno magazine.

I worked for an Indian guy named Rass. He was almost thirty, just a few years older than me. Besides owning the newsstand, Rass sold cheap electronics through eBay. He needed someone to look after the newsstand while he worked on his internet business. I was happy to help.

Ol' boss man Rass was paranoid. It was amusing to work with him. Nearly every day, after I arrived at about noon or so, Rass would accuse me of stealing something during my last shift.

"You don't have to steal porno videos. You borrow them if you want."

"I didn't steal anything, Rass."

I was pretty sloppy when I counted inventory at the end of the day. The next morning, Rass would always recount the stuff anyway, so I was never sure why I had to do inventory at all. When I arrived for my shift, I would often see Rass bent over the computer desk, erasing numbers wildly and penciling new ones in. He was obsessive about his inventory, but he could never get it right.

"You took five packs of cigarettes yesterday! Five packs. What you do with five packs of cigarettes? Re-sell them? I tell you all the time man you can have cigarettes at wholesale cost. And still you steal from me!"

"No I didn't."

"Then where did they go? Eh? Five packs of cigarettes missing. I count three time! You count yourself if you think I'm lying. I'd better take this out your pay. You're no good, man. You're lazy and you steal from me. I should fire you. It's not worth it, all this stuff I lose with you."

"Do I need to start looking for another job?"

"No, no. Don't do that. You're the best help I've had ever. But you steal from me and the customers complain you're unfriendly. Did you open an hour late on Wednesday?"

"Yeah," I said. "The subway was closed and I had to take the bus. I got on the wrong one and got lost. Sorry, man."

"Oh. OK, fine. You come in an hour early tomorrow. I want to work on eBay."

Despite having to deal with Rass's moods, the job was great. I was only paid seven dollars an hour but Rass paid me in cash, so the government never got their cut. Which suited me just fine. Plus the newsstand was closed on weekends, so I had plenty of time to go to music shows or plays or poetry readings. Or to just walk around the city, which I liked very much.

One hot afternoon in late July, an old man and woman approached the newsstand. I put my copy of Tropic of Cancer down and got up from the computer desk. I opened up the little sliding-glass window, prepared to punch some lottery numbers. But they weren't there for the lottery.

"Hi," I said. "What can I get for you?"

"Is Rass here?" the woman asked. She was smiling.

"No, not right now," I said. "You want me to leave a message for him?"

"No, that's all right," she said. "We'll stop by tomorrow. Will he be in tomorrow?"

"Yeah," I said. "Around eight or so."

"What's your name?" she asked.

I told her. Then she told me her name. "We're buying the newsstand."

Rass had never told me anything about this. Probably to keep me from looking for another job. Fucking bastard, I thought. I was so pissed I could barely talk to the woman any longer. And the old man, bald with a little red sunburn on top of his head, just stood there, smiling like a retard.

When the couple left, I sat back down in the computer chair. I didn't pick up my book. I was in no mood to read. I felt like I was being sold. Fuck. If I was going to stay in Philadelphia, I needed to find new work fast. I hardly had any money and the Mad Poet's rent was coming due. I need four hundred dollars for my half. I didn't have anywhere near that.

The day afterward was a Saturday and I was off work. But I couldn't wait until Monday to talk to Rass. So I called him on my cell phone.

"Listen," I said, "some people came by yesterday. They said they were selling the newsstand. Is that true?"

"No," Rass said. "It's not final yet. I don't even know they're serious."

"Well, when will you know for sure?" I said.

"We're signing papers in two week."

"Shit," I said. "So you are selling the newsstand."

"Yes."

"Damn, man. What about me? What am I supposed to do for work?"

"Just hold on a while, OK? I have some friends own a 7-11. I can get you a job there no problem."

I didn't really believe him, but I didn't have much of a choice. I was sure that the job would involve weekends and night work, but it was better than nothing. So on Monday I was back at the newsstand, waiting on word from Rass about when I could start work at his friend's 7-11. At week's end, Rass claimed that he hadn't heard from his friend yet. But not to worry, they would get back to him soon.

But I did worry. I searched frantically for work. But all of the shit jobs that I was qualified for were already taken by college students. The sandwich shop in the subway station didn't even have an opening.

Philadelphia. I was losing time. I didn't want to be anywhere else but I was being pushed out.

Philadelphia. Did you realize I was once in love with you? That I still am?

Philadelphia. West Philadelphia. Baltimore Street. The artists' houses. The Ethiopian restaurant with a bluegrass bar upstairs.

Everything Philadelphia.

Once, the Mad Poet took me to an anarchist coffeeshop on Baltimore Street for an open poetry reading. It was a small space, about the size of a studio apartment and fifteen or so people stuffed themselves inside. The Mad Poet read a poem about hurricane Katrina. Others read political rants. One guy, either incredibly nervous or drug-shaky, stood up and gave us a dry, boring lecture on the evils of Wal-Mart. Said they made people work off the clock, said they locked Mexican cleaning crews in the building overnight. After he was finished, the Mad Poet said, "I gotta shop there sometimes. Sometimes it's the only place I can afford. I buy my workboots and workshirts there. Anyone else ever shopped at Wal-Mart?"

I was the only person who raised my hand. But I didn't quite believe those people who didn't raise theirs. Nobody? Ever?

After all the poetry and political rants were over, the organizer of the event, a hefty woman, stood up and made some announcements.

"There will be an excellent featured poet here next month. He's just been released from prison and—"

"This guy," the Mad Poet said, "did he actually, you know, do anything to get put in jail?"

She was somewhat taken aback and it took her a second to respond. "Well," she said, "I'm not going to pretend that everyone in prison is innocent of any crimes. Still, our criminal justice system is completely racist, classist and sexist. There are better alternatives than sending people to prison."

"Yeah but...."

And so the Mad Poet started to debate with her, proper protocol be damned. I stood up and went outside for a cigarette. I'm a little skittish about this kind of conflict. A girl who was maybe in her early twenties followed me out. She had short red hair and her breath smelled like she had been chewing on an asshole.

"Can I have a cigarette?" she asked.

I gave her one.

"Your friend was a good poet. Well, I couldn't really understand everything he was saying. I guess it was about Hurricane Katrina? Anyway, he was very enthusiastic."

"He's the last of the great Surrealists," I said.

I was halfway through my cigarette when the Mad Poet came out. The girl split as soon as she saw him. I waved at her as she half-walked, half-ran away.

"Well," he said, "I've been kicked out of there again. Those people take themselves too goddamn seriously, man. Fucking neo-liberal fascists. Ain't no tricksters allowed in their group. Fuck it, man, let's get a drink."

And so that's what we did.

And that was what it was like for that entire summer. There was fun to be had everywhere. Serious fun.

But the hammer was coming down. I started to feel desperate. I couldn't live on the Mad Poet's generosity, though he wouldn't have minded helping me out for a while. He had helped me out since I had arrived in early March, giving me a room to stay in, food to eat and going easy on me when he asked for rent. No, I was definitely going to have to leave Philadelphia, at least for a while.

The plan was to go down to Maryland for a while. My dad lived in a small town between D.C. and Baltimore. I would live there and I would get a job and save enough money to get back up to Philadelphia, better prepared to establish myself there. I would be able to look for a decent job. I would have time for it. Because it's always about Time.

I dated a sideshow performer named Lenore for a few weeks in late July. One night, we were walking home from a movie and I told her my plan.

She pushed my arm off her shoulder.

"Fuck you, man. Why are you giving up?"

"I'm not giving up. I just can't find a job. The rent's coming due. It's just for a few more months. I'm planning on coming back. I can take the train up here whenever I get the chance. And we can talk on the phone."

"No," she said. "Fuck that. I can't do it. I've tried the long distance thing before. It doesn't work."

"Maryland isn't that far," I said.

"It's far enough. Look, it's not that hard. You find a job. Any job. Any shitty job. That's what you do. You don't just give up."

We walked to the subway station in silence.

She was right, though. She had been living the Henry Miller life for years, getting by on freelance hair cutting gigs and performing in sideshows every now and then. She lived in a tiny room that was barely big enough for her bed, a bookcase and a small dresser. She knew how she wanted to live and she didn't worry about Time. There was no future. Fuck the future. For Lenore, life was a series of infinite presents. Her Philadelphia was like Henry Miller's Paris in Tropic of Cancer. A city of dreamless dreamers. Hadn't I left Kaye for that exact reason? Wasn't a life without a future my dream? Of course it was. And yet, it seemed as though I didn't have the raw mettle for it. I pined for the kind of life Lenore lived. But in the end I was too weak.

Henry Miller, where art thou?

But it's best not to think like that. There is always the abyss to consider.

I loved Philadelphia, that loud, frigid city. I walked her streets with a backpack full of novels and notebooks. I passed through the bookstores, coffeehouses, the rows of three- or four-story houses where artists, musicians and writers lived communally. I hung out with filmmakers and poets and sideshow folk.

I loved Philadelphia, West Philadelphia especially.

I loved Clark Park, about a mile from the Mad Poet's apartment. Not nearly as crammed with people as Rittenhouse Square in Center City, it was much more cozy. Nobody bothered the homeless people who crashed on benches. There were drum circles underneath the statue of Dickens reading to Little Nell. Always something new for curious eyes to fix themselves onto. I used to sit alone on a bench underneath the shade of a tree, writing in my notebooks or reading Borges or Burroughs. Lovers lay on blankets on the grass, jugglers juggled, someone else played their guitar. On Sunday nights, as soon as it got dark, the fire dancers would come out and give everyone a free show, throwing their flaming batons in the air and dancing in tribal gyrations.

I miss you, Philadelphia. I miss your whiskey tears. I carried your around with me in my backpack, with my notebooks and pens. You were always a city waiting to be written.

Philadelphia. Visiting your bars and your arthouse theaters. Listening to bluegrass in that tiny bar above the Ethiopian restaurant.

I met Walt Whitman in Philadelphia, outside a Kmart shopping center. His bronze head sat atop a pedestal. There was a plaque on the pedestal. Had his birth and death date on it. Did anyone even read the plaque anymore? Did anyone even notice Walt Whitman as he sat there, staring out into traffic? It seemed unlikely to me.

I was no Walt Whitman. I was no Henry Miller. I was abandoning my dream. I was a failure. I told myself that I would go back. But at the same time I knew I wouldn't. Philadelphia would always be something I pined for. Perhaps it's best that she's pined for.

I didn't figure on staying in Maryland. I didn't figure on meeting Anne. But I did. And Philadelphia slowly disappeared from my view.

And now, after two years of living in my father's basement, Anne and I live in a small apartment in the Mount Vernon neighborhood in Baltimore.

Baltimore is a fun city. Plenty of bookstores and bars. Plenty of stuff for a visionary to get himself into. Baltimore is a playful city. I feel at home here. I feel comfortable. Living in Baltimore isn't a crisis, as Philadelphia was. But maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm winding down my adventuring for now. I am enjoying breathing normally and slowly taking in all the visions and nightmares. Yes, but I do fall in love with cities. And I am in love with Baltimore. But it's more subtle than my love for Philadelphia.

She wasn't my first love.

Alien at Home

Even before I left, Kaye and I had talked about her coming up from Alabama to visit me. But she was paying for our two-bedroom apartment and her car on her own. She had too many expenses and I was too broke. It didn't seem likely that I was going to see her anytime soon.

We also talked about her maybe coming up to live with me. She said she would but never sounded very certain. She still had school to finish and she was on a scholarship. But I wanted her to come up and at least see the city before she made her choice.

My dad ended up solving everything. He bought her some plane tickets. She would arrive in Philadelphia on Saturday morning and leave Sunday night. It was late June. I hadn't seen Kaye in over three months.

It was a bright and hot morning when I picked her up from the airport. As I drove back to the Mad Poet's place, we were mostly silent. She seemed to be smiling. But was she? No, just squinting the sunlight out of her eyes as it came through the car window.

I parked next to the sidewalk in front of the Mad Poet's townhouse. Kaye got out of the car and looked around. She had heard me talk about the place plenty of times but she obviously wasn't quite prepared for the reality of it. She was in the thick of a real East Coast slum, the smell of piss and booze all around her. She tried to take it all in, looking at the boarded-up ice cream shop across the street, then at the brown water running down the sidewalk and the broken forty-ounce beer bottles in front of the next door neighbor's front steps. Kaye scrunched her nose and her glasses slid down a little. She tipped them back in place.

"You like it here?" she said.

"It's not bad." I said.

I must have seemed insane. I wouldn't have been surprised if Kaye had asked who the fuck I was and what I had done with her husband. There's nothing I could have said to soothe her.

We went inside and the Mad Poet met us in the hallway. He shook my hand and then hugged Kaye.

"Ah!" he said. "So this is who he's been talking about all this time! You're even prettier than he described." I had barely told him anything about Kaye, but I was glad he had my back.

Kaye smiled and said hello. The Mad Poet gave her a great bearhug, picking her up and twirling her around a little.

"Well," he said, "youse guys should be alone for a while." He winked at me.

We went upstairs to my room. Besides my desk, my computer and the jumble of blankets that I used as a bed, there was nothing in the room except a few piles of books that I had bought while I was in Philly. And everything was layered in dust. Kaye bit her lip as she took it all in. She sat down on my computer chair. I sat down on my pile of blankets. Neither of us said anything for a while.

"Nice place," she said, finally. "Looks like you're doing well for yourself."

"It's all right," I said.

"You really like it here?"

I nodded.

"Look," Kaye said, "I'm not moving up here."

"I'm not moving back to Alabama," I said.

"I know. You don't have to. But I have a year or so left of college and I don't want to start over. Not now. Not with my scholarship. If I came up here, I'd never finish school."

"Fuck college," I said. "Just come live with me."

"I'm gonna be the first person in my family to graduate," she said. "I'm gonna finish."

I shrugged. "I just don't see what the big deal is. Wouldn't you rather be with your husband?"

"I didn't know I'd be forced to make a choice."

"I'm sorry."

"It's all right."

"A year's a long time for married people to be apart," I said.

"We'll be all right."

"Is it over?" I said.

"Not unless you want it to be," Kaye said.

"I love you," I said. And I did.

I crawled over to the chair and started to kiss her on the knee. Then I kissed her thigh. I stood up and kissed her lips. I took her by the hand and led her to my pile of blankets.

We got naked and fucked. The whole thing only lasted a few minutes. I quickly came inside her. Then it was over.

Afterward, I sat up against the wall and lit a cigarette.

"You've started smoking again?" she said.

"Old habits," I said. "You know how it is."

"Not really," she said. "You seem like a child. It's like you're regressing or something."

"It happens," I said.

"I guess."

"So what we just did, what did it mean?"

She paused for a second. "Neither of us has had sex in a while." I was instantly deflated.

I finished my cigarette and put it out in an ashtray near the makeshift bed. Then I lay down with my head on her breasts. Eventually we both fell asleep and napped for a few hours.

When we woke up the Mad Poet was standing in the doorway.

"Youse guys wanna go get something to eat?" he said.

He took us to Gino's, a pizza place on 40th Street that we both liked. We sat in a booth toward the back of the place, near a large window. There was a group of five hipsters outside, at a table on the patio, smoking and drinking cheap beer.

The Mad Poet doused his vegetarian pizza in parmesan and hot red peppers and smiled at Kaye. "So, how you like Philly so far?" he said.

"I haven't seen much of it," Kaye said.

"Yeah," the Mad Poet said, "it ain't a bad place. It's a place for pirates. And artists."

"I think you can be an artist anywhere," Kaye said.

"Kaye's a great photographer," I said. "Remember those pictures she took at the Chicago reading?"

"I remember that," he said. "Freakin' great work, Kaye. I mean, just really inspired shit. There's a lot of photographers here, of course. I'm tellin' ya, this is an artist town."

"Yeah," Kaye said. "I guess."

"Hey," the Mad Poet said, "Youse guys wanna go to the Hydrojoinian Jungle house later? They're having a cookout, I think. And practice, of course."

"Sure," Kaye said. "Sounds fun."

Shit. I had told Kaye over the phone about the Hydrojonian Jungle but always made sure to downplay their insanity. Now she was going to see the whole scene in person. I knew Kaye wouldn't be down with it.

The Hydrojonian Jungle was a band and a group of sideshow performers. They had fire breathers, sword swallowers and even a woman who ate crickets. They practiced Saturday nights in a spacious three-story house off Baltimore Street where most of them lived. The practices almost always turned into insane all-night parties. Jimmy Woosterfield, the lead singer and a sort of general director-in-chief of the group, was known for his outrageous Surrealist happenings, like the infamous "clown crawl" where a couple dozen people in makeup and clown clothes went from bar to bar on South Street, shocking certain patrons, amusing others. The clowns got rowdier as they got drunk. They capped the night with seven bare clown asses pressed against the window of a posh bourgeois restaurant, horrifying the patrons, especially the women, who were dining.

And the scene could turn violent. Just before I arrived in Philadelphia, Jimmy Woosterfield had punched the Mad Poet for no apparent reason. He just walked up to him, hit him in the face and then walked away. And Jimmy had once dressed as a female clown at band practice, complete with a dress and shaved legs. The wife of a popular West Philly poet was offended.

"You fucking sexist pig," she said. "If you really want to know what it's like to be a woman, then you'll have to get raped." And then she put her hands around his throat and tried to choke the life out of him. The other band members pulled her off of him but he had marks on his throat for days.

There was no way to prepare a good Catholic girl for a scene like that. So I didn't say anything. I figured that what will be will be. Or will be worse.

We got to the house around four in the afternoon and walked around to the backyard. The cookout was already in full swing. There were already about fifteen people in the backyard, lounging on the porch with a cheap can of beer or sitting in the grass talking. Mary Thumb was cooking veggie burgers on the grill. Then we saw a skinny gutter-punk kid stapling dollar bills into Axel Abel's muscular chest. Axel was a performer renowned for his feats of pain endurance, like lying on a bed of nails or lifting stuff with his nipples. He loved the sight of blood, especially his own. Kaye cupped her hands over her eyes.

"Why is that man being abused?" she asked. "Doesn't that hurt?"

"I imagine," I said. "But after a while you get used to it. You can get used to just about anything."

"I guess so," she said.

Mary Thumb saw the two of us and waved. Then she came over and gave me a hug. She was a tall girl, over six feet, with greasy black hair. She was chunky in all the right places and I had wanted to get with her since I first met her. Unfortunately, she was hung up on someone else.

"Hey," she said. "What's been going on, you?"

"Hey, Mary," I said. "This is my wife, Kaye."

Mary shook Kaye's hand. "Great to finally meetcha! Hey, I've got some chicken grilling for you carnivores. Come over and fix yourself a plate."

I told her we would.

She walked away and then Jimmy Woosterfield came over. He was wearing his clown pants, green with black polka-dots. And a wifebeater. His thick black chest hair sprouted out from underneath the shirt. He handed me a beer and then started to hand one to Kaye.

"No thanks," she said.

"This is my wife," I said.

"Oh, wow, man! That's cool. I didn't even know you were married."

"I guess I'm not important enough to mention," Kaye said. A chill ran up my back.

I was sure I had mentioned my wife to Jimmy before. But not that often, and Jimmy was prone to forget things anyway since he was always either high or drunk. But saying what he said didn't help my situation. How could it? I was right fucked.

The night went on. Kaye and I ate a little and talked. I drank my beers a little too quickly. Then we went inside to the living room and sat down on a sunken leather couch so that we could hear the band practice in a room across the hallway. The musicians started to tune their instruments.

"I want to leave," Kaye said. "I don't feel comfortable."

"Don't worry," I said. "You're safe. It's cool."

"I don't believe you," she said.

"Nothing's going to happen. Don't worry, OK?"

An hour passed, Kaye and I mostly silent and listening to the music and watching the people around us get high. I had finished a six pack. Kaye was still complaining, saying she wasn't having a good time, she was uncomfortable, she wanted to leave. But by then there was nothing doing. The Mad Poet's apartment was a mile and a half away and I was afraid that I was drunk enough to get us lost if I tried to walk her home. And now the Mad Poet was so fucking high that he had become the Otter King.

"I am the Otter King!" he said, pointing at Kaye. Then he charged toward her and started to poke her on her sides and belly.

"Stop," she said. "Just stop."

The Mad Poet looked puzzled. But he backed off and went to the other side of the room and sat down on another couch next to a pretty blonde.

"What's your sign?" he said.

We were going to have to wait for the Mad Poet to sober up before we could go home. And who the fuck knew when that would be?

So we sat in silence and listened to the Hydrojonian Jungle practice their jazz-rock. I kept drinking. But I wasn't in the mood to party anymore. I was drinking so that I might forget that Kaye was sitting next to me.

It was nearly one in the morning before we climbed into the back seat of the Mad Poet's old red Dodge Neon and started heading back to the townhouse.

Even when he was sober, the Mad Poet's driving was frightening. He would sometimes get only an inch or so from a car's bumper if he thought they were going too slow. He would make illegal turns. He would cut other cars off without hesitation if he thought he needed to be in another lane. In essence, he was a typical Philly driver. Now, as we made our way home, he was going nearly seventy miles an hour down a narrow two lane street. He was blatantly running red lights. He was making turns so sharp that they lifted the wheels off the ground. Kaye dug her fingernails into my jeans during the entire horrifying ride. But we made it home fine. The Mad Poet was an artist when it came to reckless driving.

We went upstairs to my bedroom and Kaye got under the covers without even taking off her shoes. She pulled the blankets up to her neck and held them there tightly, even though it was hot outside. I took my clothes off and lay next to her. I tried to put my arm around her but she turned away. So I rolled over the other way and tried to get some sleep. But sleep wouldn't come for another few hours. I just lay there, depressed.

The next day was one of the strangest of my life. Even now I don't totally know how to explain it. But I'll try.

I woke up after what seemed like just a few hours of sleep. I was parched and severely hungover. My head ached like hell. I felt like puking. I didn't want to get up. But the sun shone through the dusty window and I knew it was beautiful outside. I woke Kaye up.

"Hey," I said, "You feel like going to the art museum today? Just me and you?"

"Just us?" she said.

"No one else. Just us."

I knew Kaye would like it. She would like it because she was an artist. Sometimes. When she wanted to be. She had a passion for photography. And she was good at it. Once, when we were on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama, she snapped a picture of me as I stood near the ocean. It turned out to be a photo of my bare feet and my ankles and the wet sand underneath. It was such a simple picture and yet it said so much about the peacefulness, the harmony of the moment. It wasn't brilliant but it came close. A lot of her photographs were like that. Almost inspired but not quite. She was good but she would never be great unless she totally gave herself to her art, like I was trying to do in Philadelphia. She needed some madness. But in order to do that, she had to push herself to a place that she wasn't willing to go. She wanted safety, she wanted comfort, she wanted routine. She wanted these things before anything else, even her art. And it showed. She would never be a great artist. But she would be good. And that was fine with her.

Still, she loved looking at great art. And that's why she was happy to walk a couple of miles in the stale summer heat to spend a little while at the museum. She also wanted to be alone with me. At least that's what I wanted to think.

We spent three hours at the museum. Kaye was interested in everything, so we went from room to room, quietly checking everything out. Neither of us talked much, about the artwork or anything else. We held hands as we walked around the place and everything seemed right. There was no tension between us. Kaye smelled good and looked pretty and nerdy and vulnerable and tough. I ran my fingers through her hair. I kissed her on the cheek.

By the time we left the museum I felt so close to Kaye that I had decided that I never wanted to leave her again.

Once we were outside again, I bought her some ice cream from a vendor on the sidewalk. We sat on the steps, on a far side, out of the way of tourists and students and families with small children. Cars moved bumper to bumper on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, honking their horns and yelling out their windows. I pointed out City Hall in the distance, with its enormous bronze statue of William Penn on top. I put my arm around her shoulders. I knew that somewhere inside my dehydrated body was a terrible hangover. But I was so overwhelmed with desire that I could barely feel it. I knew I was supposed to be sick. But I was feeling good.

"Listen," I said, "let's forget about your plane. Let me take you home."

"You want to come home?" Kaye said. "To stay?"

"Yes."

"But you love it here."

"I want to make things better. I want to be with you."

"OK," she said. "Then let's go home."

And so we started on our way back to the Mad Poet's townhouse, crossing the bridge over the Schuylkill and then making our way down Spring Garden Street, and into a poor residential area. The neglected apartment buildings with barred windows and broken tenants who sat on the front porches drinking forty-ounce beers had always seemed beautiful to me, but now they held a certain radiance about them, a glow. Trees seemed to dance for me. It was a private show, something that only I could see. It seemed vaguely erotic. The vision felt like an acid trip. Now I was a shaman, now I was a visionary, now I was a poet. Everything was good. I was losing my mind with love.

We got to the Mad Poet's place around three in the afternoon. He was sitting on his couch in the living room, watching a ballet program on PBS.

"Hey, man," I said. "I'm leaving. I'm going to take Kaye back to Alabama."

The Mad Poet stood up. "Are ya sure?"

"Yeah."

"But what about Cleveland?" the Mad Poet said. Cleveland. Shit. I had completely forgotten. The Mad Poet and I had been invited to read at a small literary festival in a few weeks.

"I'll make it up to Cleveland," I said. But I wasn't sure I was telling the truth.

"OK," he said. "I'll see youse in Cleveland, then."

And that was it. Kaye and I spent about an hour loading my books and computer in the car and then cleaning my room.

With Kaye sitting in the passenger side of my car, I stood on the sidewalk and said goodbye to the Mad Poet.

"Cleveland," he said. "Don't forget."

"I won't," I said.

"So youse got everything?"

"I think so," I said. "But if I left anything, it's no big deal." The truth was that I had searched all over my room but had been unable to find my wedding ring.

"It was great having you here," he said. "Really great. I'm gonna miss ya, man."

"I'm gonna miss you too," I said.

There wasn't much else to say. We shook hands and then hugged. Was the Mad Poet about to cry? It looked as if he was trying to fight back some tears. But I couldn't be sure. He did look sad, though, and for the first time, looked his age. He was in his mid-fifties, old enough to be my father. But he always looked younger in his wizard goatee and dreadlocked ponytail. He had a youthful innocence about him.

Kaye and I were soon on the road and I started to feel the familiar half-mad anticipation that comes to me just before an all-night drive. It was the exact feeling I had when I left Kaye in the middle of the night nearly three months before.

But the feeling didn't last very long. I missed the onramp once, then circled around and missed it again. I got frustrated and pounded on my steering wheel.

"Fuck!" I said.

"It's all right," Kaye said. "Just calm down."

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe this is a fucking sign or something."

"You can go back," Kaye said. "My plane doesn't leave for a couple hours yet."

"No," I said. "I want to do this. I just hate fucking driving in this city. Fucking makes me nervous. Fuck it. I'm not gonna miss the exit next time."

And I didn't. We were heading south. In fourteen hours, we would be back in Alabama.

I drove most of the way. After we stopped for gas in Maryland, Kaye took over. But she only burned half a tank before she got tired and I had to take over again. Once in the passenger seat, she quickly fell asleep. She slept through the night and I ended up driving the rest of the way. It was a lonely drive, over half of it through Virginia, where the cops are always looking to give out a speeding ticket. I drove the speed limit or below through the state, over five hundred miles. And all the while, thinking. Thinking. Thinking. What the fuck was I doing? Why had I left Alabama in the first place if only to come back three months later? Was this giving up? Was it quitting? Am I meant to fail at everything I try? What would I do for a job? Would I go back to college? Would I keep in touch with my friends in Philadelphia? Would Kaye really move up to Philly after she graduated?

The more I thought about the last question, the more I became convinced that she wouldn't. Most of her family lived in Alabama. She didn't hate the place like I did. In fact, she liked it. Fuck knows why. It would be even harder to get her to leave after she graduated. There would be talk of starting a family, of settling down, of finances. I could see her lecturing me about how the living was cheap down there, how we could get more house for our dollar down there.

It suddenly occurred to me how hopeless the situation was. And I started to remember clearly why I had left in the first place.

I loved Kaye to death. But it seemed as if the Fates hadn't planned on us staying together. There were things that neither of us wanted to give up.

I was exhausted. Between the thinking and the long hours on the road, I began to succumb to road-lunacy. The coffee and sodas only did so much to keep me awake. I moved my eyes in rapid motions, bouncing from spot to spot on the highway, so that I wouldn't focus too much on one thing for too long and begin to fall asleep. I slapped my face, I turned the radio up. I turned the air-conditioning up to freezing.

When we finally did make it to our apartment in Montevallo, I left my stuff in the car and went straight to bed. I just flopped down and fell almost instantly to sleep, with all my clothes on. Kaye took my shoes off and covered me up. Then she left to run some errands and see her parents.

I'm not sure how long I slept, but it wasn't long. Five hours at the most. But my phone was ringing loud and I tried to ignore it but whoever was trying to get in touch with me kept calling back. By the sixth or seventh time, I figured it might be important and forced myself to open my eyes and see who it was.

It turned out to be Rass.

"Where the hell are you?" he said.

Shit. I had totally forgotten about work.

"Hey, man," I said. "I'm really sorry but my wife missed her plane. I had to drive her back to Alabama."

"You should have call," he said. "I have things to do. I can't be at the newsstand all day. I should fire you. You know this. You are totally unreliable. So when you be back anyway?"

"Wednesday," I said. "I'll be back on Wednesday."

"OK. This not good, man. I'll not forget this. But you come in on Wednesday. Noon."

"OK," I said. "I'll be there."

And so it went. I was going to be back at work on Wednesday. I had thought about going back to Philly a lot on the drive down, but hadn't made a decision. Not until Rass called. And that settled it. Of course, I had no idea what I was doing, and only a vague idea that I had made a mistake in coming back to Alabama. Leaving once was one thing. Leaving again, just hours after getting back was another, totally insane, thing. What was I doing? Where was I headed? I had no idea. All I knew was that I was going back to Philadelphia. I was going back and it was going to be the last time I would see Kaye. There was no way our relationship could survive my leaving a second time. But it was happening. I had made my decision. I didn't know left from right. But I didn't care anymore. I had submitted to the insanity. I was off my rocker, a total lunatic. But I didn't care anymore.

Later that night Kaye came home. She was smiling, happier than I had seen her in a long time. I was sitting on the couch, reading a book. She put some groceries on the kitchen counter and sat down next to me. She put her arm around my shoulders.

"Bad news," I said. She took her arm off my shoulder and laid her hands in her lap.

"You're leaving again," she said. She sighed and swore underneath her breath.

"This place doesn't feel right. I don't think I should have come back. I think I made a mistake."

"You made a mistake?" she said.

"I think so."

"OK. You do what you have to do. I don't care anymore."

"Come with me," I said. "Please."

"And what? Stay with that friend of yours?"

"Why not?" I said. "Just for a little while. Until we can find our own place."

"No," Kaye said. "I can't. I told you, I'm finishing school. Here. If you want to go, that's fine. But I can't come with you. I told you that."

"I shouldn't have come back here in the first place. It's not right."

"What's not right about it? I've been through a lot because of you. And I'm still willing to be with you. That should say a lot."

"It does," I said.

"You can't take the car," Kaye said.

I laughed. I thought she was joking at first. Then I realized she was serious.

"I pay for that car. It's mine."

"It's in my dad's name. He didn't want you to take it the first time. He was thinking of getting a lawyer to get it back. But I convinced him not to. I'm not going to let you take it again."

I stood up and began pacing about the living room. "Fuck!" I said. "You're being totally unfair. How am I supposed to get back? I'm stuck here without that car. You're trying to get me to stay. Why? Why do you want me to stay when you know I'd be miserable?"

"Miserable? Look, Just calm down, OK? Yeah, you can use the car if you stay. But my dad is going to be pissed if you take it again. And I'm not going to defend you this time."

"Un-fucking-believable," I said. "You're just going to use whatever you can to keep me here. I'm trapped here without that car. I'm completely at your mercy."

"You're not taking the car."

You're not taking the car.

You're not taking me.

You can't have me.

Not anymore.

You're lost.

Lost.

There's no sense in going any further with this. The conversation went on for over an hour. We yelled at each other. We let everything out. I can't go any further. The details are lost anyway. And I don't want to remember them. Not even two years later. Not even at twenty eight years old. It's too much. I am a creature of crisis.

I did end up leaving Alabama, early the next morning. My dad bailed me out again, buying me a one-way plane ticket back to Philadelphia. I never saw Kaye after that.

Transition (or Treason)

I'm a mad submarine—I'm a liar, an idiot, a ghost.

So there's this river house on the Chesapeake. My stepmother owns it. It's the perfect place to take a new girlfriend if you want to impress her, especially if you've been working at a grocery store and living in your dad's basement for the past eight months. And so that's where I brought Anne. It was a weekend in early April 2007.

We sat together on the screened-in porch that overlooked the yard and the water. Anne drank whiskey and I drank beer. We were goofy, laughing and telling each other stupid jokes. It was fun. Then after a while, everything turned serious.

"I love you," she said.

I hadn't expected that. Things had seemed so casual up until then. But I was drunk and everything seemed all right. So I said, "I love you too."

Later, around midnight or so, I asked her to go out to the dock with me.

"OK," Anne said. She started toward the back door.

"No," I said. "Let's take our clothes off."

"You want to just run out there completely naked?"

"It's dark out," I said. "No one'll see us."

Soon we were running naked and barefoot through the grass. Anne passed me and I slapped her on the ass. Finally, we were on the dock and looking out at miles of oil-black water. Anne glanced nervously at a neighbor's house. Most of their house lights were on. I beat my chest and howled at the moon. I laughed and reached out and tickled Anne.

"Enough of this shit," I said.

And then we ran back to the house.

It was a wonderful night. Almost perfect. It only took me a week to fuck everything up.

"I don't love you," I said.

We were in my room. Anne was over by my desk, putting a shirt on. I was still in bed, still naked. Still probably with a morning erection. I had to be at work in an hour or so and Anne was getting ready to leave.

Her eyes went almost instantly wet with tears. Her pale Polish face grew red with anger.

"Why the hell'd you lie to me last week?"

"I don't know," I said. "I guess I just felt like I needed to say it."

"I was just being honest with you. I didn't expect to hear anything back. That wasn't why I said it. I've got to go."

She finished putting her shirt on and left the room. She went upstairs and out the front door.

I lay in bed, feeling a wave of guilty relief. I felt free, somehow.

But when I was at work, I had a drastic change of perspective. I kept slicing turkey and corned beef and bologna and all the other stringy meats that fell like paper into my hand. I got lost in the rhythm of my hand catching the meat and slapping it down onto deli paper. I looked at my hand inside my plastic glove and I thought about how foreign it looked to me. Nothing seemed right. Why was I here in Maryland in the early spring, in a supermarket in the middle of nowhere, twenty six years old and college dropout and wearing an apron and the bourgeois horror-faces watching me cut their food? I had a woman who didn't seem to care even slightly about these things. She loved me. Christ knew why, but she loved me.

I still wasn't sure if the things I had said at the lake house or the things I had said in my bedroom were true. I was still as confused as hell. But I knew that I needed to err on the side of love.

On my break I went outside and sat on a bench, lit a cigarette, and called Anne.

"Can you come over tonight?" I asked.

"Why?" she said.

"I want to talk to you. I just—I need you to come over. Can you do that?"

"Fine. Whatever."

It was around seven when she got to the house. My dad and stepmom were out, we had the place to ourselves. I was sitting on the couch in the living room, watching TV. She sat down next to me and I turned the TV off. Her jaw was clenched. She wasn't looking at me. I turned toward her and moved some of her hair from her eyes, placing it behind her ear. I touched her cheek.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't know what I was thinking. Maybe I just panicked. But I do love you."

"You can't just say that and expect everything to be all right again," she said.

"I know," I said.

"No more lies."

"OK," I said. "No more lies."

I hugged her and held her. She smelled so good and everything felt fine again.

Sometimes the person I'm most alienated from is myself.

I am a mad submarine.

A Reluctant Threesome

In October 2007, Anne and I drove to Lowell, Massachusetts, where the annual Jack Kerouac Literary Festival was taking place. We were staying in a hotel we couldn't really afford but I had known about the festival for a while so we had enough money for gas and food and a pretty decent amount of scratch left over for booze and meals. It was going to be an incredible weekend.

Tara was going to meet us there.

She was seven or eight years older than me, in her mid-thirties. She was a poet. A good poet, to be sure, but always a bit too sentimental for my tastes. I liked the surreal images and her flights of imagination, but, on the whole, her writing was much too sugary, much too romantic, for my tastes.

We had found out about each other through our involvement as editors at a literary website, one of the many that caters to the freaks and misfits of the world. We both liked mad people and insane writing. We became friends quickly and started instant messaging each other virtually every night, sometimes for several hours at a time.

We got close during those chat sessions and soon I was telling her about the nightmares that I'd been having almost every night since I'd started living in Maryland. On the surface at least, they had little to do with my moves from Alabama to Philadelphia to Maryland. They had taken place in Upstate New York where I had lived when I was an elementary school kid. The dreams revolved around the snow and the piercing winds and the little country neighborhood where my family lived. I was always returning to the town as an adult. I was in a car or on a bicycle and trying to find the small two-story brick house that I grew up in. I knew that I was in this particular place, but everything that was supposed to be there was gone. Instead of swamps and cornfields, there were malls and apartment complexes. There was a busy city where once there had only been a small village. I always dreamed myself panicking to the point of near paralysis at the unfamiliarity of the place. It was total alienation every time.

Well, Tara had grown up in Upstate New York and, despite living in cities on both coasts, she was living there again, with her husband and five year old daughter. In addition to writing poetry and raising her daughter nearly on her own because of her husband's sloth, she worked full-time as a nurse. As it turned out, she was able to heal both body and mind.

Apparently.

Maybe a couple of weeks after I had written to Tara about the nightmares, they suddenly stopped. We were having our usual midnight instant messaging session when the subject came up. She told me that when she meditated she had concentrated on my nightmares and moved the dark spirits from my mind to hers. Looking at your computer screen as your friend admits she used some Buddhist Voodoo on you to capture your nightmares can be quite unnerving, especially when you don't really believe in that kind of spirit world. But you don't fuck with results and it had been weeks since I had tossed and turned and sweated throughout the night.

Besides, it didn't matter if Tara's story was literally true or not. Tara had thought of me during her spiritual practice. She wanted to make me better. There was definitely some sort of strong connection between us. I started to feel superstitious about the whole thing.

It didn't make any sense to invite her to share drinks and a hotel with me and a girl that I had just started a relationship with. It made less sense to ask Anne if she could share a bed with her. It made absolutely no sense when Anne agreed to the proposition.

We had just dropped a friend off at his parents' place. I was sitting in the passenger seat and she was driving.

"Tara's husband treats her like shit," I said, turning the radio down. "She cooks and cleans and does all the housework while taking care of their kid, holding down a full time job, and trying to write. I just—I think we could maybe cheer her up or something."

Anne laughed. "What do you mean?"

I grinned.

"It's cool by me," Anne said.

"What?" I said. "No shit?"

"Yeah, sure. We can all fool around. But I swear to God, you put your dick in her and we're through."

It was a reasonable demand. Very reasonable, actually. I quickly agreed. I felt like a lucky bastard.

So first week in October we drove from Maryland to Massachusetts in Anne's small but fast Toyota Yaris. We drove with the windows down and the radio up. A little CCR providing the backbeat to an unseasonably sunny seventy-degree trip.

We arrived at the Marriot at about six in the afternoon on Friday. We checked in and went up to our room. It was fairly comfortable, with a queen-size bed for me and Anne and a couch with a pullout bed for Tara. The air-conditioning was on. It was a little chilly. I laid a family-sized bottle of Jack Daniel's on the dresser next to the TV. I filled up two plastic hotel cups with whiskey and Coke and then brought one of the drinks over to Anne, who was relaxing on the bed. I got in next to her and laid the drink on the nightstand and took off my shoes. Anne sipped her drink and I gulped and guzzled mine.

Only an hour passed before Tara got to the hotel room. But by that time I had already put down five drinks. I was getting hammered.

I opened the door and let Tara into the room. I hugged her, perhaps a little too tightly, perhaps a little too long. I took her suitcase and put it next to the couch. Tara sat on the couch and waved at Anne.

"I've heard a lot about you," Anne said, smiling. "He talks about you all the time."

"All good things, I hope," Tara said.

"Oh yeah, definitely."

"You want a drink?" I asked.

"Oh no. Not right now. I've got to get something in my stomach first."

"You wanna check out the restaurant downstairs?" I asked.

"Sounds great," Tara said.

And so we took the elevator downstairs and sat in a booth in the restaurant. Tara and Anne ordered something to eat and I ordered another whiskey.

"You know, I didn't picture you sounding like you do," I said.

"Oh yeah?" Tara said. "What do I sound like?"

"I don't know," I said. "Kind of Midwestern, I guess."

"My accent changes all the time."

"Weird," I said.

The food and drinks came. Tara and Anne talked for a while, exchanging pleasantries and basic information about themselves. They seemed to enjoy talking to each other.

"We're becoming fast friends," Tara said.

"I hope so," I said.

The drinks kept coming and soon everything was blurry and sounds seemed distant. Anne left to go upstairs to the room so that she could use the bathroom. Tara and I stayed behind to pay the bill.

Once everything was settled we got up and went to the elevator. I put my arm around Tara's shoulder and led the way, but I took us down the wrong hallway and we ended up having to turn around. I moved my arm from around her shoulder and put it around her hip. I leaned close to her and smelled her neck. She had the scent of peaches about her.

"Stop that," she said, as she removed my arm. She shook her head, embarrassed. But she was also grinning. "You're crazy," she said. "You know that right?"

"I wouldn't be me if I wasn't," I said. We finally found the elevator. We got in.

"You men," she said. "You'll drive us women insane if we give you a chance."

I wanted the chance.

When we got to the room, we unfolded the couch and set it up as a bed. I fixed myself another drink and sat on the bed next to Anne while Tara finished putting the blankets on the couch.

"This is cozy," I said.

Finished with the blankets, Tara joined us on the bed. We sat cross-legged in a triangle, drinking and laughing. We were having a great time. I was good and drunk by this point and it took me a while before I even realized that I had Tara's hand in mine and was rubbing it with my thumb. But Tara didn't say anything about my advances this time. Neither did Anne. So I kept doing it. Eventually, Anne got up to go to the bathroom again. I leaned over and started to nibble on Tara's ear.

"Oh God, what're you doing?" she said.

"Kissin' you," I said.

"Well stop," she said.

"Why?"

"Why? Why what? Because I'm married and you've got a girlfriend, that's why."

"Anne's cool with it," I said.

She grinned and shook her head. She didn't believe me.

"Just put some ice on it, big boy," she said.

"You want another drink?"

"I think we should just go to bed," Tara said. And she got off the bed and got onto the couch bed. She had her eyes closed and the covers up to her shoulders by the time Anne came out and sat down next to me. She put her head on my shoulder and kissed me on the cheek.

"Aw," she said. "Party's over?"

I took my shoes off and got underneath the covers. "Looks like it," I said. I was irritated and embarrassed and just wanted the night to be over. I took my shoes and my stinky socks off. I put my socks inside my shoes so that I could find them in the morning. I lay the shoes side by side. Then I got underneath the covers and turned off the light. Anne clicked the light off on her side of the bed. As we lay side by side in the darkness, Anne started to kiss me. I kissed her back. We kissed passionately and I put my hand underneath her shirt. I rubbed her nipples.

"Fuck me," Anne said, whispering into my ear.

"We can't," I said.

She kissed me again. My dick was stone hard. "We can't because Tara will hear us."

"It's OK," Anne said. "Let her listen."

I thought about it for a second. It seemed to me that if Anne and I started to fuck, Tara might join us. But it would most likely just freak her out. And I didn't want that. I wanted her to stay.

"I want to," I said. "But I don't think we should. It might be rude."

"You're no fun," Anne said. She kissed me once more on the cheek and then rolled over.

"Goodnight, babe," I said.

I rolled away from her and almost immediately started having the whiskey sweats. It took me a while before I was able to fall asleep. When I did, it was a painful, restless sleep.

Tara woke us up at around seven in the morning, all peppy and bright and ready to greet the day. My bones ached and I was parched. And I was incredibly embarrassed about the way I had acted the night before. But Tara was in a good mood. If she was upset about what had happened the night before, she didn't let on.

"Hey kids," she said, "let's go eat some breakfast."

So we went downstairs to the restaurant and got something to eat. Afterward, Anne needed a nap, so she went back to the hotel room. Tara wanted to see the original On the Road manuscript. It was on display in an old textile mill that had been turned into a museum.

The air outside the hotel was crisp and warm. It wasn't at all what I had expected October in Massachusetts to be. We walked the sidewalk side by side, not really saying much. I occasionally yawned to try and break the tension and to give me an excuse for not talking. Tara insisted on taking a picture of me on a bridge over the Merrimack River. And so there I was, leaning against the railing, trying to smile while my stomach bubbled and my muscles felt like paper cuts. It did turn out to be a pretty good picture, though.

Tara took a lot of pictures along the way. I just hung back, out of the way, for the most part. I was sick and exhausted.

The exhibit itself was a little disappointing. The manuscript, a long scroll made from individual sheets of typing paper that Kerouac had taped together, was in a glass case in the middle of the room. I looked at it and wasn't inspired, though I thought I would be. It was a first draft, an unfinished thing. To look at it felt almost like an invasion of privacy.

Lining the walls were old photos of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. All the people you'd expect to see. Underneath the pictures were cards with little factoids that I already knew. And naturally there was jazz music piping throughout the room on multiple speakers. The whole thing stank of death and I hated it.

I was glad to leave.

When we got back to the hotel room, Anne was still asleep. I slunk on the bed next to her and put a pillow over my head.

"I'm gonna go to sleep for a while," I said.

I closed my eyes. I was tired as hell but all of my bones ached. I fought to relax, lying very still. Finally I drifted off to sleep. I started to sweat again. My legs and arms twitched and I felt like I was falling. Falling.

I slept for maybe two or three hours. I woke up slowly. My shirt was stained with sweat. I felt sticky all over. I must have been having nightmares.

Anne and Tara were sitting on the couch-bed, talking. I stared at them for a second, trying to adjust to reality. Anne noticed I was up.

"You're soaked!" she said, laughing.

I smiled. "Yeah. Hey Tara, I'm sorry about the way I acted last night. I wasn't being me."

"Who were you then?" Tara said.

"A whiskey monster," I said.

"OK whiskey monster. Don't worry about it. How about we go to a poetry reading?"

Sounded good to me. We all got cleaned up a little and left.

The poetry reading was in a real bourgeois restaurant where people wore slacks and shiny black shoes. With my long hair and fluffy beard, I definitely stood out. Which was extremely weird considering that we were at a conference honoring a bohemian poet. But what can you do? Make the best of it and get goosed up. Which is what we did.

I ordered a draft beer and it came in a glass goblet sort of thing. Tara had the same and Anne ordered a whiskey and Coke. I sat between Anne and Tara, both of their knees pressing against mine. I wondered if Tara's touch had been intentional or if I was dreaming. But we ordered another round and then another and Tara started leaning closer to my face as she talked to me.

"Beer goes right to my head," Tara said, smiling. She patted me on the knee.

I tried to drink slowly, to keep my nerves. I didn't want to embarrass myself again. Could have been that Tara was just flirting. I didn't know how far she would want to go or if Anne would be into it.

After we finished our fourth round, Tara said, "I think we should just go back to the hotel room."

Anne rubbed my shoulder. "Sounds good to me."

Back at the hotel room, the girls were in a goofy mood. They fixed themselves another drink. Tara had a stereo dock for her mp3 player that she put on the windowsill and turned on. Out came some indie rock that I didn't particularly care for. But Tara and Anne liked it. They started to dance with each other while I watched them from the bed. It went on for a couple of minutes, a few songs. Then Anne walked over to the bed and sat next to me. Tara sat down on the opposite side.

"You—ah—your hair's all tangled. You need to let us brush it," Anne said.

"Nah," I said. "That's all right."

"Come on," Tara said. "Let us brush your hair."

There was no point in protesting any further. They each got a brush from their purse and began fighting with my tangles.

"You really need to take better care of your hair," Tara said.

"I know," Anne said. "I tell him that all the time. He's always got these tangles and split ends."

I knew what was coming next but for some reason I didn't want it to happen anymore. I admit, I was a little aroused, but not nearly as much as I should have been, considering my anticipation for the thing. And now, as I lay there on the bed, Anne was leaning over my chest and kissing Tara on the neck. I slipped out from underneath them and sat near the foot of the bed, watching them. Anne had her hand up Tara's shirt and was massaging her breasts. Tara smiled and moaned and then patted the bed, looking at me, wanting me next to her. I laid myself next to Tara, my hand on my head, my shoulder on the bed. I watched with a sort of detached interest. It was too surreal. I couldn't believe it was happening.

Soon Tara's shirt was off. She had small, firm breasts. Her nipples were hard. Anne massaged them and kissed them. Then she started to fiddle with Tara's jeans. She was trying to unbutton them. But Tara gently moved Anne's hand away.

"No sweetie," Tara said. "Not that."

But eventually Anne's hand was down Tara's pants, her fingers moving gently inside of her. Tara's eyes grew wide with surprise but they were soon closed while she bit her lip and writhed about the bed. I was finally overcome. I leaned over and kissed Tara's neck. She had on some perfume or soap or something that made her smell like peaches. I massaged her breasts and leaned over and kissed her nipples. I massaged the inside of her thigh. I guided her hand to my pants and onto my erection. Tara squeezed and massaged it. I closed my eyes. This was really happening.

The shower was running. Tara and I both suddenly stopped what we were doing. Anne was gone. We could hear Anne crying hard and loud from the bathroom. It was frightening. She was wailing. I felt like the guiltiest man on the planet.

Tara stood up and began fumbling with her bra and shirt, hurrying to put them on.

"I should go," Tara said.

I shook my head. "Don't go. She's drunk. She just needs some sleep."

"You sure?"

"Yeah. I'm sure."

But I wasn't sure.

Puzzles

I fall in love with the concept of a city. I fall in love with parts of a city. I claim a street or a few blocks as my own. I let my imagination move freely around the place.

I live in the Mount Vernon area of Baltimore, a few blocks north of the original Washington Monument. Six or seven blocks from the Station North neighborhood, with its bars and theaters and hipsters. Mount Vernon was once home to the richest people in the city. Now the four- or five-story Victorian houses that line its streets have been gutted to make room for apartments. Anne and I live in one of those buildings. We stay a couple of blocks from the house where Gertrude Stein once lived. There's no other area like it in the city.

I've grown attached to this place. I've staked my claim. I've dug my trench.

I've never felt any serious need to know everything about a city. It's an impossible task, anyway. Better to know a small area well. Get to know it thoroughly, from the guts out.

It's impossible to get a real grasp on the totality of a city. Spend your entire life in a city and you're still just one person, limited in your experiences. It's all so immense.

And so I'm content in my small part of a city, to know it as best I can. I let the thing embrace me for a while. But soon, the idea of home collapses onto itself, and I'm left with nothing again.

A Haunting

Months go by and I don't think about her. But then the nightmares come and I wake up in my bed, sweatsoaked and ashamed.

I did love Kaye.

I want you to believe this, even if everything else seems like a lie.

If she ever looks back on our short five years together, she probably only sees me as a youthful mistake. A distraction. Nearly a tragedy. Maybe she's convinced herself that she never actually loved me. Come to think of it, I'm sure of it.

But she did love me. I know she loved me.

Kaye romanticized my rebelliousness. She was so young, only sixteen when we met. I was almost twenty. I had already had my fill of drugs and insanity and hopelessness. I thought my wildest times were behind me.

She probably thought so too.

She probably thinks of me as someone too cruel to experience love, someone who couldn't have possibly loved her. There's a good chance that she thinks of me as a sociopath. And she would be right, at least in part.

And Kaye haunts me, defenseless as I dream, in the paralysis of sleep.

I once dreamed that she had a baby. I was the father but she was so ashamed of me that she never told me about the child. She wanted me to stay away. She wanted to pretend it never happened. But I found out somehow.

I was a shit. A total bastard. I admit this.

All I want is a little total absolution.

I'll kneel and kiss her feet if I have to.

I'm asleep. Strange wires fizzle and pop underneath my bed as I toss about. I try to moan away the pain. There's a connection being broken, meat being pulled apart, vibrations floating away.

I haven't spoken to Kaye since I signed the divorce papers.

It was maybe a year after the divorce was official when my mother told me that Kaye had a new job working for a gardening magazine in Birmingham. I still had her e-mail address and I sent her a quick note of congratulations. A couple of days later, I got her reply:

"Please take me off your contact list."

No, Kaye. Not yet.

A Casual Marriage

While it's true that I first proposed to Anne while I was shitfaced drunk, it's also true that I meant what I was saying, even if the thought had only just occurred to me. It did take a few sober conversations before she was convinced of my sincerity. When we got an apartment together in November, 2008, we had yet to set a date. But moving in together seemed like a logical first step.

At the time, I worked in the late afternoons and early evenings. Anne had a job working for a company that monitored clinical trials, a nine to five, Monday through Friday kind of gig. We didn't see each other much. I only got one night off a week, but since I worked at a supermarket, it was always a weekday. We also saw each other for a few hours on Saturdays and Sundays, before I went to work. But since I worked late and stayed up until two or three in the morning, I always wanted to sleep in.

The short of it is that Anne was alone most of the time during those first few months, in an unfamiliar city, in a tiny apartment, at least an hour away from family and friends.

My fucking God, she was dedicated to me. Much more than I deserved then, or now, for that matter.

Looking back, I'm amazed that we didn't give up. But Anne is a strong woman and we were both in love and, in our own way, having an adventure. We both generally have relaxed dispositions and that helped. But we knew we couldn't go on indefinitely living like we were. Something had to change. And it did.

It was late January 2009, seven at night or so. I was sitting on a bench outside the supermarket where I worked, smoking and talking to two teenage girls who worked with me. My cell phone rang and I picked it up. It was Anne.

"Hey, babe," I said.

"Hey," she said. "I just wanted to—look, I've been thinking—we're never going to get married, are we?"

"Sure, we can get married."

"Look, it's fine. I've resigned myself to my fate."

"Ah, don't talk like that," I said. "We'll get married. I promise."

"When?"

That was a good question. I thought about it for a second. "I dunno. How about in a month?"

"Hmmm...yeah, I think that'll work. We can do it on a Thursday. That way you won't have to take off of work."

"Great!" I said. "Let's do it. Let's get married next month."

"OK," Anne said. "You're serious, right? You're not gonna back out of this, are you?"

"Nah," I said. "I'm not gonna back out."

"Are you excited?" Anne said.

Yeah, I was excited. Definitely. This was going to be fun.

And that was it. We were going to get married. It was a casual conversation, sure, but I don't think that it was crass. Some might even call it cute. I don't know. Maybe.

And so on February 26th we went ahead and did it. Anne put on a nice dress and some heels and I wore a black button-down shirt and some jeans. Then we drove to the courthouse, about ten blocks down the road.

A few of our family members met us there. Along with my dad and stepmother, Anne's mother and stepfather came. Anne's older brother and younger sister were there too, along with her grandmother. There was a small room set aside for the ceremony. We filed in and grabbed a seat on one of the folding chairs that faced the arch underneath of which the justice of the peace was to marry us. The actual ceremony only took a couple of minutes. Wasn't much except a few words about the nature of commitment and that it was serious and I guess I wasn't really listening because I was distracted by Anne and just how happy she seemed and how natural this whole thing was turning out. It felt good to be with her. It felt right. Surprisingly short, that ceremony. A little shocking, actually. There wasn't a lot of time for transition. Kaye and I had a long and extravagant wedding in a Catholic church where we lit candles and maybe gave some flowers to the Virgin Mary. There was time between the before and after. Here, though, there wasn't much time.

When it was all over, Anne's folks took us out to Philip's Seafood, a restaurant at a mall in the Inner Harbor. We ate big portions and toasted and there were well wishes all around. It was a little embarrassing and bourgeois. But I liked it and Anne was radiant with happiness.

After dinner, we all said our goodbyes. I hugged Anne's grandmother and she cried a little and told me that her late husband, who had only been dead for a few months, would have loved to have been there. I hugged her again, genuinely moved.

Anne's family went home after that but my dad decided to take us out to our favorite pub, the Cat's Eye, a Blues bar in the Fell's Point neighborhood.

Anne and I went back to our apartment, to change into more casual clothes. After we had finished changing, Anne hugged me tightly. "You'll never get tired of me, will you?"

I hugged her back. Tighter. "I'll never leave you," I said. I fucked it up again. What I should have said then and the time before was, "You'll never leave me." That's where the truth is. Though I might flee the scene, I can never get rid of the people in my life. They're all in my head, man.

I'm sure Anne knew what I meant, though. She knows that we might not always be together, that we might fall out of love. And I realize it too. As wide-eyed as I am, I can be realistic sometimes. We might not always love but we will never leave. Our thoughts are imprinted on each other. We are vivid and bright and much synthesis.

We went to the bar and had a few drinks. More than a few. We left at ten or so, hugging my dad and stepmother and then walking down the cobblestone streets, my arm around Anne's waist, swaying a little, bumping each other with our hips until, finally, we had walked a few blocks and were at the parking garage. I was drunk, and so was Anne, probably. But we had taken her car, and anyway someone had to drive. As usual, she drove fast, weaving from lane to lane. On President Street, we stopped for a red light. I had my window down and was smoking a cigarette and I looked up and noticed a fat white girl in a green truck and then ashed my cigarette and something flew back and hit me in the eye. I grew excited. I wanted to dance. I shook my hands wildly at the woman. She shook her head, embarrassed.

"Hey!" I yelled, in my best Southern accent. "I done got ashes in mah eye!" The woman shook her head again and smiled and then laughed. The red light turned green.

Soon we were on Calvert Street, heading toward our apartment. We passed a bunch of cars. I tried to yell at every one of them.

"I got ashes in mah eye!"

We passed a skinny hippie guy on a bicycle.

"I got ashes in mah eye!"

"Stop already!" Anne said, giggling.

I flicked my cigarette out onto the road and rolled my window up. Still laughing, still overwhelmed with internal movement, I put my arm around Anne's shoulder and then rested my head on it. Anne smiled and patted my thigh. Good God, I loved this woman. I love this woman.

Carnival Lenore

Even before I came to Philly, I had heard about the Hydrojonian Jungle band and their sideshow act, the Urban Carnival. The Mad Poet had talked them up in e-mails and I was supposed to meet them at a show once when I was visiting, but it was canceled at the last minute. They were hippies, clowns, fire breathers, musicians, filmmakers, sword swallowers and rebel vagabonds. I wanted to meet them as soon as possible. But the week I had arrived was a bad time for introductions.

Just a few days before I arrived, Jimmy Woosterfield, the bandleader, had punched the Mad Poet in the face at a party. Jimmy just casually walked up and knuckle-slapped the guy and then walked away just as casually, no explanation given. That's how things worked in that scene apparently. Shit just happened. The Mad Poet was understandably pissed, and didn't have any desire to see them any time soon.

And so I spent my first week or so wandering around the West Philly neighborhood, my new home, checking out bookstores, hanging out with the Mad Poet and casually looking at want ads on his computer. I enjoyed hanging out with the Mad Poet, but the fucker could talk. All the time. He rambled as he made breakfast. More rambling after he came home from work. Still more rambling as we relaxed in front of the TV. I tried my best to follow his liquid thoughts on the off chance that I might be able to contribute to the conversation. Yes, yes, poetry. Yup, yup, the Buddha, past lives, magic, neo-liberals, fascists, neo-liberal fascists, cops, the bourgeois, bourgeois cops. Yep. I'd always nod and try to smile or get angry when I thought it was appropriate. I never could figure out if I was too stupid to grasp what he was saying or if he was just fucking insane. Yeah. Probably.

I loved the Mad Poet. It wasn't just his free room I was interested in. The guy struck me as something genuine. But being around him all the time was getting tiring. I needed to meet new people.

Finally, after a week or so, the Mad Poet decided it was time to visit the Hydrojonian Jungle house. Maybe he needed some variety too. Maybe he just wanted to have a good time. And, apparently, the Hydrojonian Jungle house was a lively place, always full of people and booze and drugs and conversation.

The house was a few miles away. We drove over in the Mad Poet's clunky Dodge Neon, parking on the sidewalk in front of the place.

The grass in the front yard was an unhealthy looking brownish-green and it needed mowing. The house was four stories high, impressive to look at on a block of otherwise moderately sized homes. It looked as though it had been painted blue at one time, but it was graying and the paint was peeling. It had a long porch that led to the front door and on it were piles of beer cans, a couple of recycling bins and an old rusty refrigerator.

We walked up the porch and the Mad Poet rang the doorbell. He waited three seconds or so and when nobody answered, he started pressing the button wildly, almost musically. Someone finally answered the door. He was average height and had long, straight black hair. He looked stoned out of his mind.

He let us in and we gathered in the hallway. The Mad Poet made introductions. The stoned kid's name was Bobby Woosterfield. He was Jimmy's younger brother by a couple of years. I put my hand out and he shook it passively, trying his best at a friendly smile. He was staring at the cigarette in my hand.

"Oh fuck," I said. "I'm sorry. Is this not cool?"

"Yeah, I guess," Bobby said. "We usually don't smoke cigarettes in the house. It's cool, though."

"Nah, man," I said. "I'm really sorry. I'll go outside."

And so I went back onto the porch and leaned into an old, fairly wobbly wooden railing. Someone had chained their bike to it, so it must have been stable enough. I looked out into the yard and saw a little dirt path that led to the backyard. It didn't look like it had been put there intentionally. Rather, it looked as if it took a few thousand trips back and forth by people with shoes, and no shoes, to make the thing. Who were these people? What tribe did they belong to?

I finished my cigarette and flicked it out into nowhere and then went back inside. I looked around for the Mad Poet and finally found him in the kitchen, sitting at a table and talking to a skinny hippie with long, wavy hair and a gray and brown beard. The Mad Poet introduced us. His name was Charlie Modd and he was the flute player in the band.

"Plenty of beer in the fridge," the Mad Poet said waving his own high in the air. And so I went and got one. I brought it to the kitchen table and sat down next to the Mad Poet. That's when I noticed the strange sounds coming from upstairs. Violent gagging. Sounded like someone was sick but had nothing to throw up.

"Someone must have partied too hard last night," I said.

"Nah," the Mad Poet said. "That's just Jimmy. He's trying to teach himself to swallow a sword. He's almost got the entire thing down his gullet. It's actually pretty simple. You just push it down as far as it will go and then go a little further each time. Once you get rid of the goddamn gag reflex, you're good. Just takes a lot of time and patience."

Impressive. "How does he keep from slicing his throat up?" I said.

The Mad Poet shook his head and laughed. "The blades dull, man."

I felt like an idiot. And then I laughed. "Shit. Yeah, I guess that makes sense," I said.

It was maybe five minutes or so and Jimmy was in the kitchen. His eyes were half closed. My God, I thought. Am I the only sober person in this house?

Jimmy was short and skinny and had a goatee that was thick on his chin but got skinnier as it went down. It made him look like a wizard. The Mad Poet made introductions once again.

"How ya doing, man?" Jimmy said. He had a soft, mellow tone.

We didn't talk for long. He was in a rush to get to the practice room and tune his guitar.

The house began filling steadily with people. The place was getting cloudy with weed. I went into the living room, which was just across from the practice room, while the band tuned their instruments. There were several couches arranged in a U shape around a coffee table. I found a free spot and sat down, the cushion sinking under the weight of my ass. There were people all around me and I wanted to talk to them but I decided to just sip my beer and pretend that I wasn't interested in them.

More people filled the room. Hippies and punks with thriftstore clothes and musky scents. Mostly. There were a couple of people who looked as if they might have been homeless and had just strolled in after a little gutter nap.

The band wasn't too bad. Their sound ranged from standard jam-band jazzy stuff to psychedelic rock to straight up 70's rock-n-roll. But after a while the sound sort of blended together and all I could really hear was dah-dum-dah-dum. Five minute songs about a clown and robot apocalypse. That sort of thing.

Dah-dum-dah-dum.

I got to know them all a little better, and the Mad Poet and I even read at their first gig of the summer, an acoustic show, since several members of the band were out of town. It was held at a place called the "Maslow Museum," which wasn't really a museum per se but an outdoor square of four or five backyards that was closed off from the road. You went through a fence to get there. There was a small, makeshift bar with a bamboo roof where some goon sold overpriced beer and wine and there was a tree fort and old benches and plenty of stuff to play on while you watched the show or got drunk and stoned. There was a stage, and behind it this guy Maslow had painted a mural dedicated to Philly's black musicians and artists. It was an interesting hell of a gaudy place.

The next month there was a full show, with the entire band and a sideshow. I'd never seen anything like it. There were close to a hundred people in that old courtyard. It was a chaotic scene. Lots of dancing and boozing and the inevitable smell of weed. The Hydrojonian Jungle played their first set around nine. It was maybe forty five minutes long. They kept the pace upbeat, no slow songs. It started things off right, setting an ecstatic mood. Dancing all around me. I didn't dance. I can't dance. Well, maybe I could if I tried. But I just can't lose myself. I can't shake the feeling of being me. And these people, these kids in gypsy getups, they were losing themselves, sending their souls into the ether. I watched their gyrations as I moved close to the stage and crossed my arms and tapped my foot, every once in a while moving my head.

After the first set ended, there was a short intermission and the band started to clear their equipment off the stage. They started setting up the sideshow, loading swords and a bed of nails and weights and pulleys and other gizmos.

Soon, Bobby Woosterfield began playing his keyboard, the only instrument left on stage. It sounded like an old carnival organ. The song took us all back to another place, where this type of thing took place all over the country, as a matter of course. Or, we wanted to believe that was the way things once were. The music was an invocation, an invitation.

The performers took to the stage. Axel Able pierced his cheeks with clothespins and then invited members of the audience on stage to staple dollar bills to his chest. Bobby Woosterfield lay on a bed of nails as Jimmy stepped over his chest several times and then pounded it with an oversized hammer. And then there was the girl—the woman—who geeked the worms and crickets and lifted iron weights with her earlobes. Who was she? She was fucking with my head, man. So beautiful, so oddly beautiful. She had a sort of flattop, Mohawk deal going on. She was blonde and chubby and wore a tight leather corset. She had enormous circles stuffed into her overstretched earlobes, to which she attached the hooks that lifted the weights. She had a sort of gypsy dress on and wore black leather boots. At the end of the show, both she and Jimmy swallowed swords.

She fascinated me. I wanted to talk to her. I ached for her. But I didn't talk to her. I couldn't. She seemed too wonderful, unreachable. Besides, she looked a little like a lesbian. I tend to fall for lesbians, unfortunately. I hoped that getting silly drunk would loosen my tongue. But it didn't.

She wasn't at the next show. Or the next. I didn't see her at another show for a couple months. I wondered if I would indeed see her again.

Finally, the July show came and she was there. She wasn't in the sideshow, though. I don't know the deal, if there was a break with the Urban Carnival or what. But there she was. I stood behind her and watched her watching the band play. She was close to the stage, moving her head to the music, really enjoying herself. I thought maybe she turned to look at me a time or two. But I wasn't sure.

I got drunk. Very drunk. I almost couldn't see. It was nearing the end of the show, the band was on their last set. I sat in a chair a good way away from the stage, drinking a beer, when she sat down next to me. Was she though? I looked again. There she was. I turned toward her and smiled. Fuck it, I thought, I'm going for it.

"Howya, uh, doin'?"

"Hey," she said. "What's up?"

"What's your name?"

"Lenore," she said.

"Lenore!" I said. "Like the poem."

"Yeah," she said. "That's actually where my parents got it from."

I introduced myself and we made small talk for a while. And then I said something stupid.

"So're you a, uh, lesbian?"

Her response was casual. "No," she said. "There's needs a woman's got that can only come from a man."

Shit. Wow. I was in the clear. I decided to make what was, for me, a bold move. Or another drunk move. If there's really any difference.

"You wanna go to, uh, get some beer and then we can go back to my apartment?"

She smiled. "Sure."

This was great. We were going to have a fun night.

We left Maslow's Museum and went to a bar across the street and got some beer to go. A few minutes later we were at the Mad Poet's place. We went into the living room and Lenore sat in a chair while I sat on the couch, resting my head on the arm and looking up into her eyes as she talked.

We talked for hours.

It turned out that Lenore was even less experienced romantically than I was. She had two previous boyfriends, though she was only a year or so younger than me. Her last boyfriend was also a sideshow performer and they had toured the East Coast together as a part of Gardner's Carnival, playing in little tent shows. The two of them had their own act. But they spent all their time together and the boyfriend had tried to assert himself, push her away. Eventually he started to act out on stage, trying to sabotage her while they performed.

"You don't do that," Lenore said. "You don't endanger someone on stage, no matter how pissed off you are at them. It's against the Code for one thing. For another, you can get fucked up bad, even killed if something goes wrong."

I smiled.

"It's not funny," she said.

"I know," I said. "Yer just such an interesting person."

She shrugged.

She continued.

Lenore was from a small town in Pennsylvania. Her family was comfortably bourgeois, but she rebelled early, running away all the time. She finally left for good, getting work in carnivals when she could, doing odd jobs when she couldn't. And though she always seemed on the verge of homelessness, the thought of running out of money never seemed to bother her. She never seemed to think about money except as an inconvenience. The little income she had in Philly came from cutting hair for friends and performing in the occasional sideshow. She never had a "real" job, the kind of shit I'd had to put up with, and hated, all my life. She had a tiny room in a big house in West Philadelphia that only cost her a couple of hundred bucks a month.

Lenore did what she wanted. She had Time by the balls. Her days were slow and her belly was full enough. She might yet starve, but the thought never gave her any trouble. She trusted Fate.

I was sure that this conversation of ours was a beginning. Of what, I wasn't entirely sure. Meeting Lenore was what I needed. I finally felt at home in Philly. With her, everything was possibility. Lenore seemed like the only person in the city who had the courage to strip her soul to the core. She didn't read much, but she didn't need to. Because it all came naturally to her. What I had to learn from books, she seemed to have almost as instinct.

I didn't know at the time that I would only have another month in Philly. I wouldn't have the courage to go on. I would flee the scene again. Had I had enough time, I might have loved this woman. No, I'm positive I would have loved her. Maybe I did love her.

I don't know much of anything. I'm alienated from myself. I read too damn much. I'm not myself, I'm not disembodied. I'm certainly not Lenore.

But I wanted to be her. Or at least get close enough to her to—to what?

To conquest?

No, something more.

Freakout Dance Party

And so in mid-August, broke and broken, I asked my dad to drive up to Philly and pick me up. He said I could crash at his place for as long as I needed, and I knew he meant it. We drove down that old 95, away from the city that had meant so much to me, heading toward a country town between D.C. and Baltimore. I had no money, no woman, no plans and nothing to do. I wasn't quite the happiest man alive, but I was getting there.

My dad and stepmom had a two-story house with a basement. I would crash in the basement.

For the first two weeks I was virtually inert. I only left the basement to get another beer or to eat dinner. I only left the house to smoke. I didn't try to look for a job. I didn't have a way to get to work anyway. I mostly just watched TV and listened to music and drank.

But then my stepmother bought a truck and suggested, not very subtly, that I might be able to use it to look for a job. Well, I did feel guilty about being broke and eating their food and drinking their beer without being asked to do anything more than wash the dishes after meals. They were right. I needed a job.

There was a supermarket about five miles down the road. I figured they probably had a high turnover rate, plus, school would be starting soon and they would be looking to replace the summer help.

I was right. They called me in for an interview just three days after I filled out the application. They put me in the deli. I would have much preferred a stocking position. The idea of so much customer service made me nauseous. It's a drag to act like you enjoy the company of assholes. But the gig paid eight bucks and no benefits. It might not seem like much, but it was the most a job had paid me up to that point. Anyway, the money didn't matter for now since I wasn't being charged for rent and probably wouldn't for a while.

I mostly sleepwalked through the job. Got cut twice on the meat slicers too. Nothing requiring stitches or anything, though I did get to watch my blood squirt all over the blade, which was pretty cool. But getting cut didn't wake me up. I wanted to fizzle out, to pop, to live as if I was in a coma. What was left for me, anyway? Nothing much, it seemed.

And it was time to settle the Kaye matter. I hadn't talked to her since July, when she had called to bitch about my cat. Neither of us had mentioned divorce but it must have been on her mind as much as mine. I didn't know exactly where we stood, but I decided to write her a letter, to sort things out. And so, after six beers or so, I sat at the kitchen table and put pen to paper. I started writing and just a paragraph into the thing, I realized that I was writing my final goodbye. Maybe we could be friends eventually, but we had to finish whatever romantic relationship we had left and move on. Still, I couldn't write the word "divorce." Maybe I wanted to hold something back, to see if she would beg to get back together. Maybe it was a kind of desperation. I don't' know.

I turned twenty six on August 21st. My dad and stepmom took me out to dinner and it was fine. We've always had good conversations. But none of my Alabama or Philly friends called me and I didn't have any friends in Maryland. I felt a connection with the great Nothing that night. I was ready to give up, to submit. I was done. I was over.

When I got home, I went out to the backyard deck to have a cigarette. I sat down in an old chair and took a deep inhale on the cigarette and looked up at the stars. Peaceful misery, they were.

My phone rang. I pulled it out of my pocket and answered. It was Kaye.

"I just wanted to wish you a happy birthday," she said.

"I didn't think you'd call," I said.

"I wasn't sure I would."

I sighed, so weary of everything. "Hearing your voice—I thought I was done with you. But—just hearing you right now—"

"I feel the same way," she said.

"I wrote you a letter," I said. "Maybe you could write me back. Maybe we could get to know each other again like that."

"I think that's a good idea," she said.

I was crying. I couldn't help it. "It was great hearing from you," I said.

"You too."

We hung up. I hung up and then remembered what was in the letter. Was there a chance that she could misread it as an invitation to reunion? It wasn't likely. The letter, sent just days ago, had sealed a fate I didn't want anymore. Was there any reason to hope? No, there wasn't any hope left.

A few days later Kaye called again. It was the last time I would hear her voice.

"We're getting a divorce," she said.

She'd read the letter.

"OK," I said. And there wasn't much else to say anyway. I had my last chance and I fucked it up. It was time to accept.

"I need your address," she said. "I've gotten a lawyer. Don't worry about the money. I'll pay for everything. You just need to sign the papers when you get them. You also need a witness's signature, but they can't be a family member."

She wanted a divorce. We were getting a divorce.

The papers arrived the next week and I got someone at work to witness them for me. Then I sent it all back to her lawyer and got the official divorce decree a few weeks later. And it was over. Things dissolve quickly sometimes.

And so it goes.

I needed to go somewhere. I needed to try and make friends and get out of the suffocation of the open air and the country and get myself to a city. But which city? For some reason, Baltimore seemed like the more interesting place to explore. And so Baltimore became my city.

It was a Saturday night in late October and I was inside Club Orpheus. It was a dance club that played mostly industrial music. Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy, Stabbing Westward, that kind of thing. The music reminded me of high school, when I was an angry young man and an impossible romantic. It all seemed like an anachronism, a fad that should have faded. But at least I felt comfortable here. So I sat at the bar and ordered a beer and then ordered a few more. I didn't talk to any of the patrons as they stumbled from the dance floor to order another drink. I mostly just watched the kids dance or try to dance, waving pink or yellow glowsticks and watching the tracer lights with fascination.

Someone was poking at my jacket.

"Where the fuck did you get that?" I turned around. It was a woman, a skinny blonde with short hair. She was pointing accusingly at my camouflage jacket.

"I picked it up at the thrift store," I said, trying to yell over the music.

She pointed to a patch on the sleeve. "You've still got the rank on there. You need to take that off before you wear it again. I'm in the army and I can tell you, that's really disrespectful."

"Uh, OK..."

I didn't even notice the patch, let alone think it meant anything. It only cost two dollars and I needed a jacket.

Despite or maybe because of my interaction with the army chick, I decided to go to the club the following Saturday. I brought with me a cheap plastic army action figure that I got at the supermarket for a dollar. I thought it might be a nice icebreaker. It seemed kind of desperate, and maybe it was, but I was willing to try anything. I did feel pretty silly sitting at the bar with an action figure in its original packaging sitting on the bar, next to my drink.

A thick girl, heavy-chested with long black hair, sat down on the barstool next to me and ordered a drink. The bartender handed her a beer and as she chugged at it, she looked down and noticed the toy.

"What's that?"

I told her the story behind it.

"That's great!" she said. "Retribution. Revenge. That's what it's all about!"

I was starting to dig this girl.

We talked for a while. Her name was Jennifer Slate and she was a security guard somewhere in the city. Her arms were big against her tight black shirt and they were mostly muscle.

We had a few more drinks. Then she suddenly got up off the stool.

"We'll talk later," she said. "It's time for some dancing."

I watched her walk out onto the dance floor, underneath the disco ball, flanked by strobe lights. She spotted some guy and danced toward him and they danced together. They danced innocently enough at first but then Jennifer's moves became increasingly erotic. She started slithering like some sort of mad snake having a seizure, maybe an inch or so from his body. It looked like a club mating ritual that I didn't know about. And maybe it was. Because it worked, and the two of them left together soon afterward.

The next week was more of the same. Jennifer sat at the bar and talked with me for a while when she took a break from dancing to get a drink refill. Then she repeated the snake dance with a new guy and the two of them left together.

It went on like this for a while. For weeks I would go to Orpheus and talk to Jennifer when I could, always hoping that she'd do the snake dance with me. But she never did.

The last time I went to Orpheus was in January 2007. I had been sitting at the bar for an hour or so when Jennifer ran up and sat down next to me.

"You've gotta be my boyfriend tonight," she said. Then she pointed to a morbidly obese guy in a bondage outfit trying to dance but instead moving around like a spinning top, the fat on his chin jiggling in waves. "See that guy? He's fucking obsessed with me. Stay close to me. I swear to god he's a stalker. I've already told him you're my boyfriend, so you've got to play along."

This left me a great opening. "That's not such a bad idea," I said. "Why don't you let me take you out sometime? It might be fun."

Jennifer just laughed. "I can't go out with you! You're like, a friend. Well, a club friend, but still—anyway, I can't be with just one person."

"See, that doesn't bother me," I said, lying. "I've been wanting to try an open relationship anyway."

"Yeah, sure. You say that now."

And so there wasn't much left to do but kiss her. I kissed her neck and worked my way up to her cheek and her ear. Her hair smelled like burning charcoal. She put her hand on the back of my neck, pulling me away from her. "Look," she said, "I'm gonna go dance some more. Can we talk about this next week?"

"Sure," I said. I stood up and left the club. I felt like an asshole. I never wanted to see Club Orpheus again.

And I sulked. I sulked for another month or so before I decided to switch strategies. It was true that I didn't have friends, not even casual acquaintances. But I'm writer. Not a terribly focused one, perhaps, but a writer nonetheless. It's really the only thing I have going for me. And so, I reasoned that the anonymity of the internet could provide me with a way to woo a woman with my creative wordsmithing. She would fall in love with me and then we could meet in person and by then she would be comfortable enough with my personality to give me a chance. I signed up for three or four dating sites and started e-mailing anyone who seemed even remotely compatible. At the time, that seemed like just about anyone. I ended up writing a lot of messages.

It took a few weeks of bad connections and disinterested replies before someone e-mailed me with genuine interest. And it wasn't someone I had e-mailed first. She decided to get in touch with me on her own. Turned out that she liked my honesty. I suppose she must have figured me for the honest sort because one would have to be pretty close to insane to admit on their profile that they were broke and lived in their dad's basement. And was twenty-six years old to boot.

Her name was Anne. She was five years younger than me and worked for a company that monitored clinical drug trials. Her last name was Polish and hard to pronounce. I had to write to her and ask her to spell it phonetically so that I didn't fuck it up when we met. And we were going to meet in person. She liked me for some reason.

We were going to meet at a mall and go to the movies. I was a little late getting there and worried that Anne would be pissed. Would she think me a slacker? But I was a slacker. Anyway, it looked like Anne was an even greater slacker since she was half an hour late. I hung around outside the movie theater, near a concrete water fountain that wasn't running. I played with the single rose that I had bought her and watched the Friday-night teenagers laughing and giggling all giddy-like, flirting and laughing. I looked at them and wondered which of them would be like me ten years on, out of hope and nearly broken, one lover gone and searching for the next.

When Anne finally arrived, she was smiling and waving. I hopped down from the fountain and handed her the flower. She was beautiful. She wore little wire-framed cat glasses and her hair was dyed red. She squinted as she smiled at me.

"Sorry I'm late," she said. "Traffic sucked balls."

"I'm just glad you made it," I said. And I was.

We got in line and decided on a movie. Anne wanted to see a new horror-comedy that had just come out. I was up for anything. So I bought our tickets and the movie didn't start for another hour, so we had plenty of time to get something to eat. We went to a nearby Mexican restaurant and as I held the door open for her, I looked at her feet as she walked past and noticed that she had argyle socks on. I smiled.

We both ordered root beer to drink and I was overwhelmed by the idea that we like the same kind of soda. For some reason, it seemed like a major connection.

The movie itself was terrible. It was about a retarded stepfather who kills and eats his wife and kids throughout the course of the film. I didn't know that Anne was nearly deaf in one ear and at one point during the movie, she turned to me and said, "This is fucking horrible!" It was a quiet part and I was sure everyone in the theater could hear what she had just said. I nearly got up and left but I remembered that she was beautiful and wore argyle socks and liked root beer and she was willing to take a chance on me. I didn't get up. I wasn't leaving.

When the movie was over, I walked Anne to her car. She leaned against the driver's side door and I leaned in and put my hands on the back of her neck and kissed her. She accepted. I never wanted to stop kissing her.

"You want to go out next week?" I said.

"Sure," she said. "I'd love to."

She got into her car. I waved to her as she pulled out of the parking lot. I headed toward my stepmom's truck, the cold wind or my ecstasy blowing me from side to side. I breathed in so hard that my chest hurt, and then exhaled slowly. I could feel the Nothing leaving me.

That Dreadful Noise

Kaye elbowed me in the ribs and I woke up.

"What?" I said.

"It's noisy," she said.

And it was. The bump thump of bad dance music blasted somewhere behind our bedroom wall.

"I've got to get up at five," Kaye reminded me.

I reached over to my nightstand and turned the light on. I got out of bed and stretched my naked body and then scratched my balls. I bent over and put my jeans on. "I'll tell them to turn it down," I said. I didn't want to go out and confront a bunch of drunks. But Kaye was working at a bakery and taking a full course load at school. I owed it to her to at least see what was going on. So I put on my shirt and my shoes and then made my way out of the apartment.

I was surprised to see that the music wasn't coming from the apartment next door. The party was two apartments down. The sound had actually been traveling through another apartment before it got to ours.

The door was open and college frat- and sorority-types were everywhere. They were spilling out into the parking lot. A skinny brunette girl who couldn't have been more than twenty years old stumbled outside and hiccupped. A muscular black-haired kid in a tight black t-shirt approached me, smiling.

"Hey, man," he said, "come join the party. Want a beer?"

I did, sort of. "I need you to turn the music down. My wife has to get up early tomorrow."

He stopped smiling. "We're having a party," he said.

A fat blonde kid wearing a white sweat-stained t-shirt walked up to the black-haired kid and put his hand on the guy's shoulder. The Piggy Boy stared at me, trying his best to intimidate.

"Look," I said, "just turn the fucking music down, OK?"

"We ain't turning nothing down," Piggy Boy said.

"Look," I said, "it's Monday night. My wife has to get up early. I'm calling the cops." I turned around and started back toward my apartment. Piggy Boy followed me, shouting.

"This is college," he said. "I'll kick your ass. This is college."

I walked into my apartment, turned around, and faced Piggy Boy and said, "Then do some studying," before closing the door.

I went back into my bedroom and started taking off my clothes.

"What's the deal?" Kaye said.

"I guess I'm calling the cops," I said. Half undressed, I walked into the kitchen, where we had a magnet on the fridge with emergency numbers on it. I called the police. A dispatcher told me that an officer would be along shortly.

I went back into the bedroom and took off the rest of my clothes. I got into bed and turned off the light on my nightstand. I lay on my back, pulling the covers up to my neck.

"They'll be by shortly," I said.

It was ten, fifteen minutes later and the music was lowered to a reasonable level. We could hardly hear it anymore. But five minutes passed and they turned the music up again, this time louder than before. Kaye elbowed me in the ribs. "Fuck," I said. "OK, let me call them again." I turned the bedside light on and grabbed my cell phone from the nightstand. I called the cops again.

"We just sent an officer out there," the dispatcher said.

"Yeah, I know," I said. "But they just turned the music back up."

She sighed. "I guess we'll send him back."

I hung up.

Kaye folded her pillow over her head to muffle the noise. She groaned. It was another fifteen minutes or so before the music stopped again. This time it never came back on.

The next morning I left the apartment to go to work and as I made my way to Kaye's little green Toyota Tacoma, I saw that there were seven or eight clear garbage bags piled into the truck's bed. They were close to bursting with beer cans, paper plates and other assorted party shit. I drove the truck across the parking lot, got out of the truck and started tossing the bags into the apartment complex's communal red dumpster. Could have been worse, I thought. Suddenly, I felt guilty and told myself that I probably deserved this punishment for the way I had acted . Cops had been called on me before, not two or three years ago.

I was on the other side of the law now. I didn't like it.

A Drunk's Breakup

I became obsessed with Tara. We communicated all the time, usually by a computer chat program. Eventually I told her I loved her. This was a problem. She was married and I had a woman who was in love with me.

It didn't bother Tara too much that she was married. She was trying to figure out how best to tell her husband she wanted a divorce. But she had also been talking to a poet in England and she was going to visit him in a few weeks. Apparently she had a thing for writers, but only one at a time.

"You should be with me," I wrote.

"I don't know. Maybe."

"We have a psychic connection."

"I know."

A few days later I was at the supermarket. I was on a break, sitting outside on a bench smoking a cigarette. Anne called.

"What's going on?" she said.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"You changed your Facespace status to single."

Oh yeah. So I had.

"Is there something you want to tell me?" she said.

I paused for a second to gather my thoughts. "I just don't know if I feel the same way about you anymore."

It was time for her to pause. "You don't feel the same way? I don't know what's changed."

"You didn't do anything," I said. "I just think we need a break."

I could hear her crying. "A break. Yeah. OK. Look, I've gotta go. Just promise me one thing—tell me we won't stop being friends. I don't want to totally lose you."

"We'll still be friends," I said.

She hung up. I felt like an asshole. Again. I did want to break up with Anne but I did it in the most twenty-first century chickenshit way possible.

But I pressed on with Tara. I didn't doubt that I'd win her over eventually. We kept communicating with our computers nearly every night after I got off of work. Things were going great. I was gonna get this girl.

But then Tara e-mailed me. She wasn't happy. She was permanently breaking off communication. I had fucked up again.

I had also been e-mailing another female writer. We did some flirting, some role-playing, that kind of thing. One night, I had been drinking a little too much and I told this chick everything about my relationship with Tara. How we had cybersex and phone sex. It turned out that that this woman and Tara fucking hated each other. Now, neither of them wanted anything to do with me.

I called Tara a few times but she never picked up. I sent her e-mails. Nothing. I had lost another one.

It was early January 2008. I met up with a writer friend named Paula at the Depot, a little club in Baltimore's Station North arts district. It was 80's night. They played the Cure, Warrant, that kind of stuff. Paula was sitting at a little table with a friend, a chubby blonde in her mid-thirties. Paula's friend had powerful thighs. I went to the bar and got a can of beer and then went over to their table.

"You didn't bring Anne," Paula said.

"We broke up," I said.

"That sucks. I've just started the online dating thing myself. You two were giving me hope!"

"Well," I said, "we're still gonna be friends, so I guess things turned out reasonably well." I wasn't entirely convinced of what I said. It had been weeks since me and Anne broke up and we hadn't even talked on the phone yet.

Paula and her friend and I talked about nothing special. Then Paula's friend got up to get another drink. Paula leaned across the table and said, "I think my friend's into you." I smiled. It felt good to be wanted.

Later in the month, I did finally hang out with Anne. She met me at my dad's house and we drove to a mall about ten miles away. We wanted to see a funny movie. I was glad we were hanging out.

We got our movie tickets and then went over to a nearby sports bar. We had a couple hours before the movie started and getting food and drink seemed like a good way to kill some time.

We walked into the place and a hostess greeted us. "It'll be about thirty minutes before we have a table ready," she said. "You can wait at the bar if you'd like."

"To the bar!" I said.

The bar was lined with sad-faced drunks, some staring into their drinks, others watching a soccer game on the flat screen TV above the bar. As we sat down on our barstools, I had an idea.

"You know," I said, "I think I'd make a good bartender. I'd make better money and get to hang out with my kind of people all night. I dunno, maybe I could go to bartending school during the day and work at night."

Anne nodded. "That's a really good idea." She wasn't being condescending either. She was sincere.

"So what've you been up to?" I said.

"The other day I was outside work on a smoke break and this black guy comes up to me and starts talking about how I'm the kind of girl he likes to date. Well, yeah, of course. I'm a fat white girl!"

"Did you give him your number?" I said.

"No. He was creepy. Besides, I really don't think I'm ready to date right now."

"Why not?" I said. "I'd be dating someone right now if I hadn't fucked up again."

"Don't tell me that. I don't want to hear things like that. Listen—I don't know if I can do this."

"Do what?"

"This, you know, being friends stuff. I thought I could handle it. But now I don't know. Look, you didn't even call me until yesterday."

"I thought we needed some time to cool off," I said.

"Yeah."

Things were getting a little tense. I waved the bartender over. "Hey, man," I said, "what's the weirdest shot you can make?"

He thought about it. "It's called a Bloody Abortion. Actually tastes pretty good."

"Excellent!" I said. "We'll both take one."

It took him a little over a minute to mix the shots. The drinks were dark red and had a glob of white goo at the bottom. The goo did, in fact, resemble a sort of back alley abortion. Anne and I toasted and drank up.

I had another couple drinks at the bar and then we were taken to a table. During our meal, I had another few drinks. I was pretty tipsy when we left the restaurant and went to the movie.

Later, at my dad's house, Anne said that she didn't want to drive the forty minutes back to her place that night. I told her she could sleep in my room. We sat on the bed and I flirted with her and tickled her belly. We laughed goofy and I kissed her and then kissed her again. Then we were naked and our lust took over.

Afterward, I sat on the edge of the bed, putting my clothes back on. "You can sleep here with me," Anne said.

"Don't you think that'd be a little awkward?" I said.

"We just had sex."

"I don't know. It might be a little much. I should probably just sleep on the couch."

"If that's really what you want to do," she said.

I got a few blankets from the closet and then went upstairs to sleep on the couch. She didn't tell me until much later, but, that night, Anne cried herself to sleep.

As the days passed, I started a run of heavy drinking. I was alone and I felt it. I'd finish a bottle of whiskey almost every night. One night I was drinking whiskey and chasing it with beer. Which is to say, I was taking a shot of whiskey and then chugging a can of beer. After getting another can of beer from the fridge upstairs, I started walking back downstairs to my bedroom and tripped on the stairs. I tumbled down to the floor below. I laid there on the fuzzy carpet, whimpering. My nose was bleeding and my neck hurt like hell. I didn't want to move. I didn't move. It was all too absurd. My dad and stepmom were on vacation and so I was all alone in the house, an obese naked man writhing on the floor and whimpering.

I was embarrassed. I felt rotten. I was alone and pathetic. I didn't bother even trying to get up. I fell asleep where I lay.

The next day I called Anne and told her what happened. She was wonderful and loyal and came right over. We sat on the couch in the living room. I talked. She just let me talk. About everything, anything. She just listened.

"I'm an idiot," I finally said. "You're the only girl who's ever loved me unconditionally. I'm a fucking fool for trying to get rid of you."

"Well, at least you admit it," she said. She started to laugh a little.

"I'm so sorry. I need you in my life."

We talked for a while longer and then went downstairs to get to know each other again.

Wheels Spinning Past Prime

I dreamed about endless freedom. I had to get back to the Nothing. I was losing my grasp on it. I had to end my marriage.

Yes, I was a fool. Kind of a dick, actually. An asshole.

This world is madness and only the mad are in love.

It seems like—but, no, best not to go there for now. Let's put it this way: Henry Miller was right when he decided to let the dead feed on the dead.

And the truth is that Kaye seemed to worship a certain kind of death. It's not fair to say that, but that's what I saw. And, worse, I could feel my own muscles starting to decay.

Let me say something. Let me say this. And then I'll unhook the cord and everything will be meaningless again. But let me say this: the prisoners guard the prisoners. If I agree never to be a guard, does that mean that I'm getting closer to my sweet Nothing? I hope so.

When I was a kid and teachers would ask the students what they wanted to be when we grew up, I would tell them I wanted to be a hobo. If not for being cursed with having to write, I would probably do it. I still might have it in me.

I slice dead animal flesh, salted and pressed, and seal it in plastic bags and then hand it over the counter. The prisoners are trying to eat me. They'll never eat of me. That's for Anne alone.

***

Winter 2006, February maybe. I was drinking a lot, going to honky-tonk bars with my brother Chuck. Staying out all night. Having a damn good time. Sometimes we'd also hang out with Dennis, an alcoholic a few years younger than myself whose hands shook all the time. And yet. And yet Dennis could beat almost anyone at pool.

It was in one of these honky-tonk pool halls just outside Birmingham where I met Heather. She looked like a lesbian. And she was, at least partially. But she dug on guys sometimes and I just happened to be at the right place when she was looking for one. She beat me at a few games of pool and just as the sun started to rise outside the barroom windows, I kissed her and she reached into my pocket and grabbed my cock, hard and ready for her hand.

Kaye eventually found out about Heather, but that wasn't the reason I left town. It didn't have anything to do with that. Or maybe just a little. In truth, Heather's kiss freed my imagination. And I imagined freedom. I finally knew that I wanted world-rejection. And rejection! Reject everything, ask questions later. Walk. But where to? Everywhere, and for no reason at all.

And fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

"Man," Chuck said, "Kaye's gonna be pissed."

"Probably," I said, taking another drink from my cider beer.

Hank Williams, where art thou?

Henry Miller, where art thou?

Reject, reject. Maybe find something useful in the rubble. But, above all, reject.

I slice salty death thin and then hold it out for the customers to inspect. Take it. Eat it. Pay for your pudding. Stick your dick in it. Swirl it around. Pay no attention to the ice freezing against your spine.

Chuck laughed. "Sure. Right. What're you gonna do in Philly?"

"I dunno," I said. "Have adventures, maybe. Write."

Chuck and Dennis left the bar in search of something to eat. I called the Mad Poet.

"So you're coming up?" he said.

"You still got that empty room?" I said.

"Yeah. Sure's I do. You can have it too. We could use a few more people like you up here. Real pirates, you know? Can you bring a few bucks with you? I'm running low on bread."

And that was it.

***

"I thought I told you not to come home at five in the morning anymore," Kaye said.

"I was just having some fun," I said.

"You're killing yourself."

"Don't worry. You won't have to deal with me much longer. I'm moving to Philadelphia."

And then she sat up in bed, crying. And it was my fault. Again. How abandoned, how unloved did she feel? I can only imagine my rottenness.

"We can go anywhere you want after I finish school," she said.

But how to explain that it had to be now? The ice was spreading throughout my body. All I know is that I wanted to be a hobo. But I also wanted to be a writer. Living with the Mad Poet seemed the answer to both.

And then, less than a week later, around midnight or one, I shoved a bunch of clothes and a few books into a black trash bag and went outside and threw the shit into my car's backseat. I went back inside and Kaye was standing in the kitchen, crying. She put her arms around me and rested her head on my chest.

"This isn't the end," I said.

"I don't believe you," she said.

I kissed her on the forehead. "It's not over."

It's never really over.

And so I drove into the early morning and then the yellow daylight, driving east and then north. And the ice in my spine began to melt. I was gone, leaving madness for madness.

Exit Nothing

I'm not sure what my name is.

Enter madness, exit nothing. The void, the infinite.

Life is calm now. Perspective. Anne is in our bedroom, sleeping. Perspective. Peace. Perspective.

Maybe it's too heavy for me. I don't really know.

I'm sometimes sick with melt and waiting for new adventures. Maybe, though, I can breathe now.

Somewhere, the Mad Poet. Otherwhere, Kathy Change. Neither ever wrote a bad line.

Maybe the crux of it is that my adventure eyes have been gathering dust.

Madness is the stuff of dreams. And only the mad are in love. Remember this, if nothing else.

All I want to do is dream.

