Samigina.

Unpublished

The road to Baltimore at midnight in January is so cold your tires will complain. In a mid-size two-door sedan with a heater working part-time, it’s hard to talk or think about anything but the weather, which doesn’t help. No matter the volume of the radio, or the quantity of salt and processed cheese on the bags of chips, the discomfort of the bladder and the skin permeate anything under the moon.

The foam 1-Up mushroom from Super Mario Bros. atop Stuart’s radio antenna was so cold it practically broke in half as we made our way east, then north, from Leesburg, VA to cross the state line and towards Baltimore. Our conversation changed from what our balls had turned into to what our relationships had turned into.

“Sarah and I have a deal,” Stuart said. “If she runs a tangent on a subject she knows holds no interest to either of us for more than three minutes, she has to bake me a pie.”

“Oh man, that’s a deal,” I said.

“What about you?”

“We just tolerate each other’s tirades, I guess.”

“How does that work out for you?”

“Fine, overall. I mean sometimes she…well, I’ll…”

“Yeah?”

“Man, it’s fuckin’ cold.”

We made our way downtown and struggled with our printed directions for a few minutes before locating a crowd of pilgrims and onlookers lining a 10-foot stone wall around Westminster Hall and Burying Ground.

“Is that them?”

“That has to be them; look at the make-up on that chick.”

Stuart parked the car less than 10 feet from where we camped the rest of the night with the other members of the crowd. There were 50 or 60 men and women of all ages bundled in jackets, scarves, snow hats, gloves, thick skate shoes, boots, long johns, blue jeans, snow pants, ski masks, beanies, mittens and, oddly enough, a couple miniskirts in our accompaniment. Among the crowd, our teeth chattered, our noses turned red and ran, we shivered and cuddled and drank and talked. Unlike the blizzard of the following winter, which brought our neighborhood together into a community of sharing and symbiotic friends, nobody along the wall seemed to have hot cocoa or coffee to share. A few people broke out heating pads and acted as misers over them as though they were the last food on a desert island. Everyone tried to become friends with the guy who had the heater powered by a crank generator.

We met a short, stout English teacher with black hair and her husband. She’d driven in from the Midwest and her students were texting her incessantly to inquire about the night. Stuart piped up first.

“So, you’re an English teacher?”

“Oh, honey, look; Jennifer from my third period just sent a picture of her and her friends’ sleepover since they couldn’t come. Can you believe it? What great kids. Yeah, I teach freshman English Lit just outside Chicago.”

“I’ve been thinking of teaching myself; is it worth it, all in all?”

She was responding, and her keypad went click, click, click.

“I love English; it’s a great subject.”

“….All right then.”

None of us knew we were, in all likelihood, there to witness the end of an era. It was just another January 19 downtown to most of the troupe and Stuart and I did our best to blend in. There were a few tiny goth girls enamored and late-teen sports boys attending for extra credit, but primarily there were middle-aged men and women and a few real eccentrics in the crowd to cheer on the Poe Toaster.

Edgar Allan Poe never escaped controversy, nor mystery. For every student who loves and understands the loss and harrowed loneliness piercing through the majority of his body of work, there are ten who will ask “Didn’t he marry his cousin and die of rabies?” Stuart was even in a production of a play at college called “Nevermore,” which offered a romantic look at the final days of Poe’s life, during which he went missing and was later found dead.

Then in 1949, Boston’s own Evening Sun reported that a mysterious figure dressed all in black, save for a white scarf, had been seen stopping at Poe’s grave on the anniversary of Poe’s birthday, leaving at his headstone three roses and a near-full bottle of Cognac, only missing enough for him to have drunk to Poe and made his peace.

The next year, it happened again.

Over the next 60 or so years, people began to wait outside Westminster all night, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Poe Toaster and share in the commemoration of the life and work of the renowned poet. At first oddities fanatics and thrill-seekers, then more somber English scholars and lifelong fans would crowd around peering through the shut cast-iron gates on January 19 every year. Surely the Poe Toaster caught on, as his tribute metamorphosed from a plain stroll to a near magic act to avoid crowds, lest he be unriddled and unmasked by the curious onlookers.

As far as the public could tell that night, there were only two entrances to the cemetery where Poe had been laid to rest: the main entrance, which the majority of us surrounded, and a smaller gate around another side which offered a far more limited view of the area. Between both entrances was the high stone wall, and beyond the other entrance was a city block, ending the cemetery with a tall office building. The church itself bordered another wall and the fourth, we were told, was also blocked in by office buildings.

As the night drew on, every person walking the streets was suspect. “Did you see how quickly that guy walked past us?” a woman said. “I bet that was him. He was just scouting the location, seeing where his best entrance would be.”

“Well I was sure I saw someone in that office building behind the cemetery a few minutes ago,” someone else said. “I bet he’s got the lights off and a window open and he’ll scale down and pay his respects.”

Stuart and I were fascinated by the event and happy to honor the writer, but we couldn’t help slipping in a few comments. “Nah, man, you see that headstone next to the mausoleum? That high one, that looks a little too new? I swear I just saw it wobble. He’s probably in it and he’s making his way over an inch at a time to visit Poe.”

Then ten minutes later someone came over and said “I heard he might be in one of the gravestones; my buddy and I saw one move a few minutes ago.”

“What do you think, Stu?”

“…It is really, really cold out here.”

He was right. We had stopped moving around as every step was agony on our frozen toes. A woman reading “The Raven” with as much gusto as she could muster had stopped long enough to tuck her face into a winter jacket and continue her recitation through its collar.

“Mmph a ruvmph, ‘Nevermore.’”

A large metalhead had been carrying around a foot-long coffin all night. God knows what’s in it, I thought. Then I saw him talking to an elderly gentleman on the other side of the gates, who we believed was the curator of the grounds. I trotted over to them on my heels so as not to snap any thawed toes and listened to their conversation.

“…so they’re just like little tributes; I brought one for the Toaster and one for you, if you think your connections at the museum might be interested in carrying them.”

“Oh, yeah,” the other man said with a clear air of dubious caution. “I’ll definitely take this inside and show it around the next time I see the rest of the staff.” It was the same tone I used when a threateningly aggressive man approached me in a bookstore the previous Christmas season and ordered me to buy a spy novel by his favorite author.

Near the metalhead with the coffins, the teenage Goths with the zombie Poe t-shirts and fishnets stared in mock indifference at the graveyard. In reality I could see a thrill dancing behind their eyes so fiery they could barely sit still. Between us and them was a tedious dork who kept asking us what our favorite story “of Edgar’s” was, taking for granted that we were all on a first-name basis with Poe.

“I have to find a bathroom,” I told Stuart.

“There’s a hospital a block that way and down the side street,” replied a man with snow caught in his beard.

I fled and sought the hospital. Everyone’s personalities were starting to grate my nerves like the beating of the hideous heart. I began to wonder if even Stuart and I were starting to get sick of the sight of each other; we’d been rolling our eyes at some of the more fanatical members of the crowd for hours and it was only a matter of time before that intolerance extended to each other. That’s what below-freezing temperatures do to friends, I imagined.

I was allowed into the lobby of the hospital by security but not into its bathroom.

“Oh come on man, it’s 15 degrees out and we’re all waiting by Poe’s gravesite and I really have to piss.”

“Sir, this bathroom is for patients and visitors only.”

I left and tried to find another bathroom or street corner to relieve myself. Before I could, I managed to catch the attention of a suspicious-looking man who started walking towards me from 50 feet off.

I tried to nonchalantly turn and walk the other way, and he continued to follow me. I rounded the corner of the hospital, out of his sight, and ran until just before he would be able to spot me again. When he came around the corner, he broke into a jog to catch up with me.

Fuck, I thought, walking briskly back towards Westminster. How stupid am I to walk around downtown Baltimore in the middle of the night alone? This is how idiots die, jonny you…idiot. They camp outside famous people’s graves like stupid tourists and get mugged.

Just before he got to me I rounded the last corner and started loudly talking to the crowd of onlookers again. My pursuer stopped and turned around, retreating to his street in front of the hospital. I doubled back and pissed behind a dumpster near the crowd.

As I passed the small gate towards the main entrance, a couple of the younger kids tried scaling the wall, getting boosts from their friends and snooping over the masonry in hopes of seeing the Poe Toaster. A few minutes earlier, one had hopped over and tried hiding in the shadows on the corner of the property from the caretakers and curator, but they found him and ushered him back out onto the sidewalk.

“How’d it go?” Stuart asked. “You find a bathroom?”

“More or less.”

“I’m not sure I can take much more of this cold.”

“If you don’t mind risking a mugging there’s a hospital where you can argue with a security guy until…”

“Until what?”

“Stuart, look at that.”

A van turned onto our street and turned its lights off and kept driving.

“Why’s that guy got his lights off?”

“Looks pretty suspicious.”

“I think he’s stopping.”

One by one, everyone turned and stared at the van.

“Stuart, I think that’s him.”

“jonny?”

“Yeah?”

“Why are you whispering?”

“…I don’t know.”

There was no movement inside the van. There was no movement in the crowd. The frostbite, the tedium of company and the wait all melted into the background. Minutes passed and enough of the crowd turned back to what they were doing that it almost seemed to have never happened. We kept our eyes peeled.

An eternity later, the curator appeared again and told us the Poe Toaster had already come and gone and we should all go home and get out of this weather. Nobody believed him. Nobody moved. Denial turned to anger, and people started cursing and leaving. Our group diminished from 50 to 20 over the course of five or ten long minutes.

Then one indignant woman, standing next to our English teacher from Chicago, declared she was going to go find out who was in the van. No sooner had the sentence escaped her lips than it started up, its brights blinding us all, and peeled out of its parking spot at an alarming speed. It was like someone had punched the gas and was escaping a bank robbery.

It was only then we saw the manhole over which the van had been parked.

“Oh, son of a bitch.”

“He walked right under our feet! He opened that manhole and went and paid his respects while we all stared at his god-damn van!”

“I am not coming back for this next year.”

“What a genius!”

A few of us started laughing. The little we’d seen, the winter we’d braved, the pomp and circumstance of the night all ended with such an anti-climax it was befitting of some of Poe’s most underrated work. The night felt like it needed a redo, another viewing.

Confused, half-frozen and hungry, we all moped back to our cars and drove home. Stuart told me a few days later there was a blurb about it in a Baltimore newspaper he’d found online, after returning home. At the time we’d felt cheated, but had we known it was the last visit of the real Poe Toaster to Edgar Allan’s final remains, we surely would’ve raised a solemn glass with him and saluted his life and work, imitating his same admiration of one of America’s great writers before disappearing into the biting cold fog of New England for the last time.

Ka'ahumanu

from 'The Xenophobe'

It occurred to me in 1996 at some point. I was at the front of my middle school’s campus and the buses had just dropped us off. It was bright, hot and early that morning. My backpack had about 30 lbs. of books in it and I was looking at the field, the portable classrooms, the big peach-colored buildings, the countless bugs swarming and the construction work going on near the other corner of campus.

“Man, fuck this.”

And I turned around and left.

I got to the edge of the school property and took my first step into a larger world, of optional class attendance and absenteeism-for-mental-health. I remember feeling like a total badass. I walked to the end of the block, then over to a tourist-trap strip mall. I bought a Coke with my lunch money and sat at a table for about an hour trying to come up with something to do or someone to see.

But everyone was in class. Shopkeepers started giving me dirty looks. “Don’t you have school today?”

Sheepishly, I wandered back to campus halfway through the day, warm Coke in hand.

“Dude, where were you all morning?”

“Ditching.”

“Whooooooa.”

The entire fruits of my labor were three missed lectures and a warming bottle of soda. Even still, I was hooked. It was shortly thereafter that I reached high school and the stakes were raised.

Maui High faced east. This meant from the front of its campus, staring at the whole of its collection of buildings, you were pointed west and the Iao Valley was a lovely, foggy backdrop against it.

Maui High had a six-foot fence around its entire perimeter, with the exception of two spots. The bus lanes that dropped the kids off at the front of the campus had locking gates. Even if they hadn’t, they were right in front of over half the staff’s and faculty’s offices, and the remainder of the front of campus was empty, save for that chain-link fence, so any escapees were visible to anyone peering across the front half of the campus.

The other spot was at the northwest corner of campus. There was a soccer field adjacent to the locker rooms and a banyan tree at the corner of campus with a trunk you could park a Mini Cooper inside. There was also no chain-link fence, and the buildings were mostly windowless classrooms. When you combine those with its seldom visits from campus security, it was like The Underground Railroad of slackers, stoners and misfits.

The real problem was security. They patrolled on golf carts at approximately 60-second intervals around campus. They were almost always somewhere along the front of campus, but only intermittently in view of the northwest corner. The trick was to hang out until they passed, and once out of their field of view, run. From the locker rooms it was a 20-second run to the far side of the banyan tree, then another 10-second dash across the street and behind the nearest house to campus. The neighborhood next to school hid the ditchers from that point on, and the mall was nearby.

Freshmen and sophomores who had struck up paid deals to hide in the trunks of seniors with early leave were suckers, I thought. What kind of self-respecting punk handed over cash for the privilege of being locked in a trunk face-down in jumper cables and red dirt until the driver felt like letting him out in front of God knows who? Those of us with dignity just dropped our books in our lockers and hauled ass. By the time the trunk-ditchers were released from their tombs after their drivers had run an errand or two, most of the rest had hoofed it to the mall and gotten the best tables at the coffee shop and drunk whatever was in their bags.

We knew half the staff at the coffee shop – one of them managed my first band – and so they’d get us free drinks on occasion. Also, the post-high school mallrats were always in abundance: Omar, who had gauged his tongue bar out so far he could lock a Master Lock through it; Charles, who worked nights and had nothing to do all day but hang out with us; Portia, the first transgendered person I ever met and nice as could be; Jade, who home-schooled, etc.

The third option was more of an emergency escape hatch than anything else. Near the southeast corner of campus, almost directly opposite the soccer field, the portable classes lined up in a row and one in particular stood across the street from the closest house to our high school. Coincidentally, my third period American Government class was held in this very shack and I had triple the absences in it than my closest second.

As it went, the street bordering the campus on the south, running east to west, was angled ever-so-slightly north as it ran east. At that nearest point, just at the corner of my Government class, was one tiny three-foot wide gate the school had been made to install for emergency evacuation purposes. To get to it, nobody could waltz around the front of the building – the teacher knew the gate was there and promised security she’d keep an eye out for ditchers – and if you went around the back, there was an additional appendage to the chain-link fence that blocked the route to the open gate. This fence appendage was about two feet shorter than the rest of the fence and 18 inches shorter than the bottom of the windows in the classroom, so to get out was an acrobatic feat of vaulting over the fence while keeping low – and quiet, of course – but not until after hearing the teacher sit in her chair and start to call attendance. Once over, it was easy to walk straight south out the open gate and into the residential neighborhood. Of course, to get to the only point of interest, the mall, it added an extra 15 minutes of circumnavigating campus to escape from the southeast corner, so most of us just used the soccer field.

School, in that sense, was like its own little battle map. Every student in attendance at that institution could point out the best spots to ditch, to smoke, to egg classrooms, to disappear with a fling and of course which bathrooms to avoid. Some of the locals had developed nasty crack habits and took to smoking it in one set of bathrooms in a big building on the southern end of campus, which made them even more prone to violence against littler kids than usual. Often on the way to class I’d smell that smoke coming out a bathroom window and it would make me shudder – it was like the smell of death in amphetamines and sky blue tile.

The strangest story we ever had while ditching was that one of the faculty members had decided to ditch school too, so when we saw him it was incredibly awkward. It was strange enough for us being semi-caught a mile from campus, and it was stranger for him to be negotiating with 15-year-olds and saying “If you don’t tell on me, I won’t tell on you.”

It wasn’t until the end of my tenure on Maui that security discovered our route near the soccer field and covered it en masse, after our last great adventure out. A school assembly had been called and none of us had any intention of sitting through 90 minutes of cheerleader pep and being slapped in the back of the head by locals. We had to leave in several groups, as nothing draws suspicion on or off campus like 10 kids hanging out in a pack, constantly peering over their shoulders.

I went on the first party, of underclassmen. It was three younger friends and me. The second party was leaving the opposite end, via the narrow gate, around the same time. We were the guinea pigs; if we got caught, the older kids knew security was onto us. I was actually older than two of the kids in the third party but they were decidedly cooler so I got stuck babysitting the freshmen and geekier sophomores.

Security passed by and we picked our moment and ran. I was paranoid about being seen with my backpack at the mall so I ditched it under our car, which was parked at the corner behind the banyan tree. We sprinted for the next block and embraced freedom after making our way northwest; I planned on picking up my bag after school as we got back to the car.

We went bowling, first; our bowling alley had the best food on earth and we had lunch and bowled a couple games for about $6 each. We moseyed to the mall and spent our usual day window-shopping, chatting and wasting our idle youths away.

By noon, only one person from the second group showed up and came running, soaking wet. It was one of the local skaters.

“Man, everyone got fucked.”

“What?!”

“I barely made it here; security caught me and the other freshmen a block from campus and I jumped into some dude’s swimming pool to hide. They didn’t see me when they rolled on by to catch everyone else running.”

“What about all the upperclassmen? Where are they?”

“Man, I don’t even know. I heard some yelling when I was crossing by the houses near the soccer field but who the hell knows; I wasn’t stickin’ my head out to see.”

Anxiety got the better of all of us, then. We worried far too much to enjoy our free time and ended up going back to school early.

We came back via the soccer field. If we ever had to come back in the middle of the day, odds were good we could blend in once we got back on school property. Plus my bag was there, under the car, with all my books in it.

Only when we got to the car, there was no bag. There was no 40 lb. stack of $30 textbooks in it. There was just settled dust and dying grass and the car. The bag wasn’t in the car, so I knew my brother hadn’t put it in there for me. My stomach tied itself in knots and I spent the rest of the day coming up with any excuse, any lie, anything to get me out of losing an entire set of textbooks.

By the time I caught up with the upperclassmen – Jeff, Eli, my brother, Alicia, Roach and Jago – I was livid.

“What the fuck happened to you, Jeff?”

“Cool it, buddy; security caught us by your car and we all got shat on. You guys are the only ones who made it out.”

“So I’m supposed to feel bad for you because you can’t run your fat asses fast enough across a soccer field? Where’s my bag? It was under the car this morning.”

“I don’t know.”

“Eli, where’s my bag?”

“Haven’t seen it, dude.”

Eventually someone remembered they saw security take it.

I went to the security office and asked for my bag. I figured they were going to hold it hostage until they could run me through the ringer and make me admit to ditching out. I’d get a detention or two, sure, but it would be better than replacing those books. They claimed not to have it. I had to go home and tell my parents the whole story, front to back. They were furious. They were even angrier when they got off the phone with the school, everyone at which swore not to have seen my bag.

It never turned up. I got out of having to buy a few of the books, but my parents and I had to fork over almost $100 for those I couldn’t escape. In the end, it mostly took the wind out of my absentee sails.

By the time we moved to Atlanta, schools had started cracking down on ditchers. All absences had to be accompanied by at least a parent’s note if not a doctor’s, and we were made to carry around handbooks with personal attendance records in them. All absences and tardiness were marked and initialed off by staff and faculty, in pen, and we had to check in at the end of every few weeks. Too many absences meant detention, and too many more meant expulsion. I went to all six classes five days a week. The last resort would have been to fake sick and spend an hour in the nurse’s office, but come on.

Of course, in college nobody cares about attendance; nobody gave a damn when I took a day off. Most of my classes had mandatory attendance, but those professors gave us two freebies – any more than that, and they bumped our grade down a full letter at the end of the semester. Also, I wasn’t in class from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. straight, and the beatings decreased in Atlanta high schools and became non-existent in college so it was a much easier institution to stomach. Playtime metamorphosed from playing hookie to barhopping and students were so unafraid of teachers they brought beer to class, but the real secret weapon the schoolmasters unleashed was simply of our own aging. Near-perfect attendance records and knowledge gained from our educations became points of confidence, not shame; the loose schedule and price tag accompanying a university matriculation were enough incentive to spark in us a sense of personal responsibility.

But when we were young, we damn sure made those security guards earn their paychecks.

Moonlight Over Ephemera.

from 'The Xenophobe'

The sun had set an hour before we left the house. It was summer and the world went dark around 9. My brother drove my mom’s ’93 Camry and I rode shotgun. We listened to Frank Sinatra and Sex Pistols while we drove around the mountain looking for the parking lot party. Mount Haleakala – or House of the Rising Sun, I was told – rose two miles above sea level and housed several observatories at the top. Before dawn, tourists were driven to the top of the mountain and given bicycles to ride all the way down. It took four hours.

By this time we’d moved from the south tip of the island to a small hippie town halfway up Haleakala. At that altitude the temperature was cooler, if not quite comfortable. On occasion we suffered as the mercury rose to 90, but more often the evenings and nights waned breezy and relaxing. It was a night like this that found us in search of our friends from high school. Mostly it would be my brother’s friends; mine were still a year off from partaking in any alcohol or recreational drug use.

We found it in an hour. There was a small parking lot across the street from several houses on stilts over rock faces. The lot itself was only separated from a 100-foot cliff by a modest guardrail. By the time we arrived, the street 100 feet below us was already littered with broken bottles. There wasn’t much else to do on the island; there were few concerts and fewer road trips. If you didn’t surf, skate or work, it’s likely you drank, smoked or played video games – or all three.

The muggy air thinned by degrees and our friend Jenny saw us first. She yelled to us and we made our way around the cars, talking to everyone sitting on hoods and trunks, music blaring out through windows.

I went to talk to Jenny’s car. My brother’s friends had never thought much of me and I always desperately wanted to change that. Jenny held out a bottle.

“Hey, try this.”

“What is it?”

“Peach Schnapps.”

“What the hell is Schnapps?”

I took it and sniffed the mouth. It smelled like paint.

“You’ll love it; it’s so good,” she said, as I glassed the party through the rippled glass of the bottle. I took a swig and it felt like fire burning down my throat and lungs into my belly.

“Jesus Christ!”

“How amazing is that?”

“Keep it.” I coughed and moved on, alcoholic saliva falling out of my mouth and onto the pavement. Even still, I felt a bit fuzzy and warm and the stars twinkled a bit brighter than they had.

Lono was there. For all intents and purposes, Lono was the luckiest guy we knew. He had epilepsy and got something like $1,500 a month from the government for disability, which was enough to pay his rent and buy his groceries. Luckily for him, he lived with his girlfriend and she paid their rent so he had $1,500 a month for bills and whatever else he wanted. He was also the most reliable person we knew; I never saw a day where I couldn’t go over to his house and play video games with him.

Thomas was there too. Thomas stood six-and-a-half feet tall and had shoulder-length fire engine red hair. As far as I knew, he was full-blooded Hawaiian or close to it and I always thought he looked like Perry Farrell from Jane’s Addiction. A couple weeks prior to the parking lot party he’d had an embarrassing incident in History class. The teacher was waxing endlessly about George Washington Carver and mentioned his work with the peanut. Thomas had a mouthful of potato chips and said “I like peanuts!” but the “t” was muffled and everyone thought he said “penis.” I walked over to his car at the party while he was looking away.

“Peanuts anybody?”

“Shut up jonny.”

Everyone loved Thomas; he was nice to everybody no matter what. He was friends with the other seniors his age but he always made time to hang out with the freshmen and sophomores like me and my friends when we started at Maui High. He also lived closest to school so whenever we’d ditch, we’d go to his house and eat and watch TV before we went anywhere else.

So the parking lot was packed. Only a couple of my friends were scattered about and had been invited by the older kids. The night trod on likewise; the moonlight and one flickering streetlamp lit our adolescent debauchery as we walked around making and breaking conversations with friends from around the island. An hour in, Dome spoke up.

“Hey jonny; Jnana’s over there.” He pointed off to the side and I saw her silhouetted against the sky; she was reclined sitting on the grass beneath a large oak tree. It was then I remembered where we were; the parking lot was less than a block from her house. I hadn’t noticed her the entire time. She’d been sitting there since we arrived.

Jnana was great. She wore chest-length flowing Irish red hair. Her sister used to run around with Dome; nobody would ever talk about how it ended. I met Jnana in 8^th grade, over a year prior. She just showed up at school one day, from God knows where. That year she had a pixie cut and started taking all this shit from the locals about it.

“Ho, braddah, is that one boy or one girl?”

I thought she was unimaginably cute; she had this Pearl Jam shirt from their 2^nd album, Vs., and I could never take my eyes off her. My biggest regret on Maui was probably not becoming better friends with her faster. Underneath all my delusions of fair thinking and open-mindedness I was still too chickenshit to really open up to her. I knew the locals didn’t like her, and they didn’t like me. More than almost anything, I’d just wanted to be left alone and I was enough of a prick to pay for that shyness with friends.

But the parking lot party was all smiles. I’d slowly earned Jnana’s friendship, whether I deserved it or not, and her long hair blew in an increasingly violent wind. Dome’s voice broke my heady daydream.

“jonny?”

“What’s up?”

“I said it’s time to go talk to her, man.”

She was staring off into the distant horizon, where the valley met the Pacific and where the starlight crashed into the sea. “I don’t know, man.” I went anyway. Jenny would later say the Schnapps was helping me muster up what little bravery I could.

I tried to look impressive but apathetic walking over to Jnana.

“Hey Jnana; what’s up?”

“Hey jonny. How’s it going?”

“Good. You?”

“Good.”

I sat next to her for a minute. Away from the cheap jokes and anecdotes of the bottle-and-joint party to our left, we could hear the trees rustling in the wind. I looked down at the grass. Jnana had taken her shoes off and her bare feet were nestled into the ground. Her dark dress was a shadow on her and for the only time that year, it suddenly started to pour rain.

It started as a heavy mist and by the time everyone could organize carpools and run to them it was a monsoon. My brother and I jumped into the Camry and rode off back down south towards our house.

The rain fell so hard we maxed out the speed of the windshield wipers and visibility was still less than 30 feet. “Man, we are so fucked.”

“Shut up; shut up!”

As we adjusted to the mayhem, we realized we were lost. We were headed in the right direction, but the street names and buildings were alien. “Where are we?”

“I don’t know; be quiet.”

We turned the music down and traversed narrow streets while clouds pissed on us triumphantly. Things got quiet; we only heard the spatter of the rain and the windshield wipers. Neither of us talked. I thought about Jnana, her dress and bare feet amplified by the moonlight. Then I was screaming.

“Jesus, look out!”

A large white owl was beating his wings in a slow flight across the street. My brother tried to yell “Owl!” but his mouth had been closed and it caught him by surprise, so it came out “Ndyowl!” and I ducked my head down by the passenger glove compartment.

I heard a high-pitched thud. The owl’s feet caught the upper driver’s side corner of the windshield. I kept my head down for a moment, buried under my arms, and finally released and looked around. My brother had done the same and wasn’t watching the road.

“Drive, dumbass!”

And he did. We got home and I crashed, dressed, into bed, and the cheap liquor and various smokes wafted into my nose as I fell asleep, and I dreamed of owls and grass blowing in a violent wind.

Eidolon.

Unpublished

I knelt at the bank of the Hudson River and plunged my hand in. The icy water refreshed my sweaty palm at first and splashed my hand cold. In the reflection was the grey Poughkeepsie sky in October, the changing autumn leaves and some kind of man with his headphones on and his hand stuck in the water. Systematically the daemons crept up my back and over my shoulders.

“jonny - if you ever come back to New York I’ll be waiting here to kick your fucking ass.”

The cold water began to sting my hand. It started at the fingertips and crawled up to bite my knuckles. Why am I here?

“I overheard these two girls at dinner the other night talking about this poor shmuck they knew who was clearly getting screwed over by his girlfriend. I mean, I didn’t think they were talking about you at first, but they said he moved here from Atlanta and had to leave the state suddenly over Christmas break…”

By the time the freeze coiled around my wrist, it had dulled to a throbbing pain. I could see my fingers were purple through the refraction of the water. What possessed me to fly back to New York?

I’d received an open-ended plane ticket in 2007 after having to break an earlier commitment and I’d just moved to Virginia three months before. I didn’t know anybody anywhere except my brother, who lived and worked in New York City.

I got to the airport in Richmond and parked my car in long-term parking. It took so long to park my car I almost missed my flight and ended up sprinting with my luggage to the terminal. From Richmond you go straight up the East Coast at 35,000 feet and if you’re afraid of flying, you need cash for the drink cart. You fly into either JFK or LaGuardia and they unleash you into the city from there to do to it what you wish.

My phone rang and I jerked my hand out of the water to answer it. The ripples distorted my face, six years older than its last gaze into the Hudson, and my ride said she was waiting for me out front.

When I got off the plane in New York City it took two subway transfers to get to my brother’s office in Soho. On my way I realized I was in New York, the one place on Earth where you can say essentially what you want in public and nobody will pay attention. I turned to a businessman next to me with a big grin on my face and said “I’m riding on the bus.” One more story for the kids back home.

I got off at Canal St. and we set my bag in his office and got lunch at a nearby bar. After we got caught up he went back to his office and I exited his building to trudge around Manhattan.

I found a cigarette in my bag before I left and when I hit the street I saw two girls smoking. “Got a light?” They wouldn’t let them on the plane.

“Just use this,” one girl said to me and held up her cigarette. I grabbed the butt and lit my cigarette and she started screaming. “And you touched the fucking butt?! My God, just keep it for Christ’s sake. Un-fucking-believable.”

“Really,” her friend chimed in with a disappointed shake of her head. “Tourists. Let’s go back inside, Johnna.”

Embarrassed and ousted as a tourist, I bowed my head low and stalked north up the Avenue of the Americas to Prince St. and east to the KidRobot store that followed. I searched the store for small vinyl art toys and do-it-yourself action figures to take home to my wife. I settled on two neon zipper pulls in the shape of straight razors. Fall was upon us, after all.

I zigzagged northeast another few blocks to the Virgin Megastore in Union Square, whose doors would close for good less than two years later. I bought my brother a copy of Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails and left, heading for Union Square Park. Dozens of high school and college students littered the park and I sat and listened to my headphones. Radiohead’s In Rainbows had just released and I played it almost incessantly all month.

“Hey man, you got just a minute?” A boy had approached me while I stared off in the distance at the rain-slicked streets of Manhattan. I paused my music and he started a sales pitch while fiddling with the strings on his red hooded sweatshirt. “So I’m a poet and a beat-boxer and I’d like to play for you my newest creation – the Super Mario Bros. theme song. Maybe it would be worth a dollar to hear?”

“Sure thing.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out some money. “Here, take two.”

“Oh, thank you my brother. Here we go.” The boy started breakdancing and did an impeccable beatbox rendition of the music from the popular video game franchise. He started to draw a crowd and offer other performances for small change. I left him to his audience and made my way back to my brother.

We took the A C subway from Canal St. to Jay and transferred to the F, which we rode to 4^th Avenue in Brooklyn, and walked from there. My bag was heavy in my hands by the time we climbed up the stairs to his apartment. I set my bag down and changed clothes and we walked to dinner.

The neighborhood surrounding 5^th and 5^th in Park Slope, Brooklyn was one of my brother’s main haunts back then and we ate at a South American restaurant called Cocoroco. After we ordered we talked about my move to Virginia from Georgia and he got on me a bit about what I was going to do with the rest of my life. A sax and conga duo played light samba and we applauded them at every opportunity.

“You’re a college grad, bud; you don’t just want to stay in retail forever, do you?”

“Well of course not.” Our ceviche arrived in a hollowed half-coconut with a fried plantain chip sticking out of it like a sail. I broke it in half and gave one piece to my brother. “My writing is coming along alright. I’ve got almost half a book on my computer.”

“What is it?”

I unraveled my silverware from the cloth napkin, placed the napkin in my lap and scooped up a forkful of ceviche. “It’s all creative non-fiction, like that NPR, slice of American life type of shit.”

I took my first bite of ceviche. The tuna and salmon, which had marinated in a blend of citrus and pepper juices for a half day, played symphonies on my tongue.

“Well, good; is that something you want to pursue?”

“Jesus Christ; this is amazing.”

“Yeah; I told you. So are you going to try to write this stuff?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s a lot of fun and I seem to be alright at it. What’s in this sauce?”

“I think it’s lime, orange and maybe a bit of jalapeno or habanero. Finish your book, then what’s the next step? Hey, dinner’s coming.”

My steak was served to me and I wasn’t surprised that it was cooked and seasoned perfectly. I made my case about publishers and blogging and felt more relieved by the minute that we were getting along as well as we were. We made our way back to his apartment after dinner and went to sleep.

The next morning we rode the subway back to Soho together, utilizing the same routes and transfer as we had the way down. I’d made arrangements with an old college buddy to meet upstate on the Hudson and go to A Taste of New York. My brother and I took the F to Jay and transferred to the A C, and while we waited for the doors to close, a man in tattered clothing standing near us started yelling at someone in a seat nearby.

“Yeah, I knew it was you, you no-good raggedy-ass motherfucker,” he said. A cardinal rule of city life is minding your own business, and nobody besides us would even look at him.

“I can’t believe what you done gone and did to me you god-damn Cabbage Patch son of a bitch.” As he went on, my gaze shifted from him to the person he was yelling at and back. We noticed that he wasn’t actually screaming at anyone who was there, but rather an empty space between two people he’d never seen. “I ain’t never gonna forget yo shit, asshole. You think I’m gonna let you live this down? You got another thing comin’, bitch. You fuckin’ ass bitch.”

The doors still hadn’t closed – there was some kind of delay with the subway – and my brother gestured towards the doors with his eyes. Come on; let’s go, they said. “Excuse me, pardon us,” we said, and we slipped past the other passengers and out of the car, back to the platform, to fresher air, and got on the next car.

“Did you hear that guy?” A smirk crept across his face. “What was he saying? ‘You got-damn Cabbage Patch motherfucker!’”

“I think he just said ‘raggedy-ass bitch.’”

“Yeah, but when you or I tell this story later it’ll be ‘Cabbage Patch motherfucker.’”

“Yeah.”

We rode in silence for a minute and burst out laughing.

“You Toucan Sam wannabe punk.”

“You Charles Grodin lyin’ piece of shit.”

“It was funny, the more he talked, the more I looked at him and realized he had plenty of knife wounds on him, and some of them were fresh,” my brother said. “Probably not a guy we should be messing with.”

“Right.”

“Hey, did you hear about the Mad Stabber?”

“No,” I said.

“Well we’re starting to think that like, where the newspapers used to advertise all this great stuff to try to bring tourists, now they just broadcast these crazy stories to keep them away,” he said. “The Mad Stabber is this guy who was locked up in a psych ward in the city, and they eventually let him out.”

“Okay.”

“So he gets off the subway in Soho, walks into a restaurant, grabs a set of silverware and walks out. As soon as he grabs the knife from it, he walks down the street and starts stabbing women in the face with it!

“In the face, jonny.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, and the next day in the papers the headline was like ‘Mad Stabber at It Again!’ like he’s just this wacky local figure.”

“Like the kissing bandit.”

“Exactly! Or did you hear about the guy with the gas-powered hand saws?”

“No.”

“This construction company was doing some work down in the subway tunnel, and they left their tools at the site while they went and got lunch. Among other things, there were these like mini-Jaws of Life circular saws that are handheld and gas-powered.”

“Okay.”

“So some guy, I think he was fresh out of the asylum too, grabs these things, and they’re not plugged into a wall or anything so he takes one in each hand and runs screaming down the subway platform chasing people with them and trying to kill them.”

“You probably shouldn’t tell mom these stories.”

“But it’s not all bad. Did you hear about the Subway Hero?”

“Nope.”

“This guy was with his baby and some other guy had a seizure on the platform and fell onto the tracks with this subway car barreling down on him. So the Subway Hero turns to someone, points at his baby and says ‘Watch the kid’ and just jumps on this guy and pins him down flat. The subway goes over them – doesn’t hit ‘em – and he saves the dude’s life.”

When we got to Canal, my brother handed me a 20. “You need a jacket,” he said.

“Oh come on, it’s not that cold out here.”

“jonny, don’t try to be a hero. C’mon buddy, buy a jacket.”

I walked south and found a street vendor and bought a navy hoodie that said “NEW YORK” in collegiate letters for twenty dollars. I sent a picture of myself in it to my brother, who texted me back and asked what the original price was.

“It was $20; I just paid what was on the ticket.”

“You’re supposed to haggle. Locals negotiate; tourists pay full. You could’ve gotten it for $15.”

I shook my head. I was sick of feeling like a tourist. I took the A C north to Times Square and saw tourists lined up to eat at the Hard Rock Café, the Olive Garden and the McDonald’s. “A hundred cultures’ culinary achievements at your fingertips – maybe for the only time in your life – and you’re going to get a fucking Big Mac?” I asked myself.

I walked to Gray’s Papaya and had two dogs with sauerkraut and Tobasco and a Coke for four dollars. From there it was a short walk to Grand Central and I had a Seven and Seven with a couple from Germany at a bar with mood lighting.

I listened to old Radiohead on the train ride up to Poughkeepsie and watched as the scenery turned from Manhattan to Harlem, eventually thinning out to the suburbs, and beyond that the rural landscapes of lakes, rivers and rocky hills. The train finally rolled into the station at four and I still had an hour until my ride would show up. I walked around the outside and down the hill to Main Street and into Mahoney’s Irish Pub.

Mahoney’s is a 150-year-old house converted to a Pub and Grill. It has a beautiful wooden bar downstairs and I was the first customer of the night. I sat and had two Jamesons with ginger ale and made small talk with the bartender. She was a student at a nearby university and knew the tattoo parlor 20 minutes north at the Rondout in Kingston where I’d gotten my first two tattoos in 2001.

“So why did you have to leave college up here anyway?”

I took a sip of my Jameson. “I got mono about two weeks before the semester started again. My dad and an uncle packed up my dorm for me while I sat wheezing on a chair.”

“Why didn’t you come back?”

“There was a girl up here. She got me into a lot of trouble at school.”

“There’s always a girl.”

I sent a text message to my brother to let him know I was safe upstate and I’d meet him on my way back down. I left the bar around five and walked along the banks of the Hudson. I found a spot and knelt and plunged my hand in.

When my friend called I told her where I was and ran to the nearest street to meet her. She looked terrific; she hadn’t aged a day and I gave her a big hug across the front seat as I climbed into her sedan.

“So where are we going?”

“It’s this food festival thing; they have like 40 or 50 local businesses represented and they give out free food and beer and stuff. We just have to swing by my office first.”

We drove to her office and chatted, and again I was nervous about how we’d get along. We’d had a falling out five years before that was entirely my fault. I shot my mouth off at her about this girl we knew who I’d dated briefly – I was only 19; I didn’t know anything – and we’d only started speaking again a year before I came back to New York.

We got to her office and I was proud of her for doing so well with her newspaper. A ping of jealousy set in and I found myself wishing I’d done something professional with my writing – to date I’d had a short-lived blogger job that she’d gotten me and four semesters on my school paper on my resume. She finished some paperwork while I introduced myself to her co-workers and then we drove south to the event.

Music boomed and lights flashed and we ate free sashimi and barbecue and gourmet chicken for hours. The only free drinks I could find were Mike’s Hard Lemonade and I had two or three while we talked. She photographed local culinary figures and enjoyed a free ten-minute massage and the night became a blur. I leaned in to her ear after a quick photo op and asked if she had a minute.

“Sure thing babe, one second – could you guys move closer together? Perfect!”

Click, flash.

“What’s up?”

“Look…it took me a long time to realize it, but I wanted to apologize for five years ago.”

Click, flash. “Don’t worry about it, jonny; it’s ancient history.”

“Are you sure? I know it was all my fault and I was a real shit; I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, sir, could you hold that tray a little lower? That’s great! Babe, seriously, you’ve got nothing to worry about. I wouldn’t have invited you up here if you weren’t my friend; it’s great to see you again. Did you try the sashimi yet? It’s amazing.”

Before we knew it we were late for the last train back into the city and we had to race to the station. We leapt into the car literally as the doors were closing. We caught our breaths and cooled down. The buzz of the drinks and food, the fear and anxiety of exorcising my New York demons and the serenity of righting some old wrongs were ebbing and flowing through me. I felt terrific.

We brought up the new Radiohead album and I said I had it on my mp3 player. We each took one headphone and listened to it the rest of the way back to Manhattan. “Reckoner” came on and she said “Oh, I love the part where everything drops out but the guitar and the vocals.” We rested our heads near each other’s and listened.

Her boyfriend picked us up from Grand Central and dropped me off in Soho. I took my brother’s A C and F route back to Park Slope and met him at Bar Reis. It was raining – it was always raining – and I ordered another drink. In Bar Reis they play excellent music and there’s an outdoors area in the back. I found my brother there with some friends.

“Hey, jonny; how was your day?”

“Really good; I went to this food tasting party for this newspaper.”

Everyone groaned. “jonny, never tell people who have been working all day that you’ve been hanging out and partying.” I cursed myself again. Stupid tourist, I thought. He introduced me to his friends and we talked for a while. Then we went back to his apartment. I felt sick from the drinks and sheer quantity of raw fish I’d eaten and the night didn’t end well.

The next day I stayed in my brother’s apartment most of the day. I walked around a few blocks and ate a sandwich at a shitty Italian restaurant and went to the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co., which is Dave Eggers’ creative writing center for kids. They have a very Adam West Batman style and sell items like Invisibility Powder and Jet Packs and do writing seminars in a secret room in the back.

I drank two liters of water and bought and administered almost $15 in cold medications. I sat in my brother’s apartment and watched Sanford and Son reruns. His roommate got home and asked if I was ok, then he got home and asked the same. I was starting to feel like a human being again and he took me for “a real New York hot dog” before showing me his rooftop, which has the best view of lower Manhattan from Brooklyn that one could hope for.

It was dark and raining and I stood leaning on the roof access door, smoking a cigarette and listening to Electric Ladyland. I stared at the Brooklyn Bridge and as Jimi’s 2^nd solo waned and the in-studio audience clapped, a revelation swept over me thicker than the fog and the mist rising from the street.

I just didn’t belong here. There were something like 8 million New Yorkers surrounding me and I really wasn’t one of them. This is not my city, and these are not my people, I thought. I’m a suburbanite. A townie. I’m not a city kid or a cool guy. I’d seen enough hipsters in tight clothes and tourists snapping pictures of the MTV building to know what my natural habitat was, and it wasn’t in one of the five boroughs.

My fourth day in New York my brother had off work and we took the subway to Midtown and walked into the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel. I asked to go up through the halls, but if you’re not a staying guest you’re not allowed. I sat and prayed to rouse the ghost of Sid Vicious but had no luck.

Next door was El Quijote Bar and Restaurant, and we went in for brunch. I had something like Eggs Benedict and my brother ate a skillet or an omelet; I don’t remember. We stopped back by Bar Reis one more time that night and on the way home, passed by posters for Legally Blonde: The Musical and Edward Scissorhands: The Musical. We laughed at how bad we imagined them to be.

“Yeah, the funny thing is when you go to lunch afterwards and the actors are there serving you your cheeseburger,” my brother quipped. “Hilarious.”

I packed my bags and got up on my last day. My brother walked me to a popular corner for taxis and on the way we passed a building with Halloween decorations in the lobby. It was obviously low-rent housing, and one could assume it had as high a mortality rate as anywhere, but there was a plastic baby-sized skeleton in a stroller with the words “Help Me” in blood red on its bib.

“Oh, that’s horrible,” we said in unison.

The rain slowed and he flagged down a cab and told him to take me to a subway station that would lead me to my airport. I got on the wrong way in the subway and was halfway back to Manhattan before I realized it. I barely made my plane and flew back to Richmond.

I got back well after dark. It was probably 8 or 9 and the world was dry as a bone. I couldn’t find my car for over an hour and when I went to ask the girl at the ticket booth for help I could clearly see she was crying. She was pretty save for the mascara streaming down her cheeks. I asked if a shuttle were still running and if I could hop onboard for a bit while it made its rounds. She called one to my location and I asked if she was ok. She’d been having some trouble paying her bills, or with her boyfriend, or having her boyfriend help her pay bills, and she acted presentably until the shuttle pulled up and I stepped up into it. As I sat and we pulled away, I saw her erupt into tears again; she wept into closed fists and her shoulders heaved with each sob.