This is where I grew up.

The artless fools who took the photos and wrote the ad of course know nothing about the beauty of this place. It is an untouched corner of our country, the same place the indians knew. Every moment of my childhood which I remember was spent in these trees, bridging the streams and building cathedrals from logs and stones; sitting on the great boulder, big around as I was tall, which rests resplendent in the pine-filtered light, left there by the Wisconsin glaciation. That other stone, the great sheared surface hidden in the tall grass. The one where my sister and I would sit and play when it was warm with sunlight in the summer months, and the tiny little jumping crickets, the color of grass seed, filled the first few feet of air like dust motes. Fishing, with my father, when after several hours our dog would swim to the middle of the lake to join us for awhile, before swimming off again to the far shore to stalk birds or rabbits or do whatever it is that dogs do when left to their own devices. Maybe he just sat at the top of the ridge and listened to the wind in the quaking aspen, like me. I passed hours walking the well-learned trails through those trees, most of which were forged by the deer and the foxes, probably the same trails they walked since the lay of the land last changed; probably the same trails they've walked since that great stone was laid. I walked those trails, hunting for mushrooms, and for burial mounds, and I understood what it would be to die there. Sometimes, a holler would call me back. Sometimes it wouldn't.

And now it's on the market for a cool million, someone who doesn't know the half of it struggling for words and giving into defeat with "YA JUST GOTTA BE THERE." You do, I suppose, but I hope you won't — I hope it languishes in these Difficult Economic Times, and is overgrown to the extent further possible, and forgotten by time once again. Then I will return, and it will be mine and mine only, once again, like it was back then when I was naive enough to not know all the ways in which it wasn't. My cynicism drives me, it is true, but I cannot escape this conviction that something awful will happen to this place, like happens to all the other places; some keen businessman will write that cool million in his ledger and in three summers there will be groves of vinyl siding sprouting from the soil, forty feet apart exactly, and they will sit there for a few more summers, losing fifty percent of the little value they had to start with. Then some desperate souls will file in, as this sad modern affair with which we debase the term urbanism encroaches a little further, and these people who had been living something they understood need to move a little further away. The place they knew will be paved over with a new version, which comes with all the usual promises but is so deficient in all the ways not easily marketed, and so as the dependence of these souls on this new promise is cemented, their hearts will fill, more rapidly every day, with the desire for escape.

So they move out to my eden, but they bring all those awful things they are running from with them, because they don't know better. And thus their fumbling hands crush the beautiful as they try to embrace it. I don't expect these refugees to damage beyond repair, because I know their intent is not malice, though they depend on so many who rejected their responsibility for good or bad long ago. I expect them to despoil, in their naive way, in a way not unlike the naivety with which I soaked this landscape into my bones. And then it will be finished, it's fate sealed when those new addresses are amended to the books, the ever-advancing Frontier advanced a few Standard City Blocks further, and regardless of what value is impregnated in it, if any, a wild place will never be wild again. I want to scream and throw fire, at these innocent hoards advancing down the line, advancing twenty or fifty years hence, advancing with greater speed and the same inevitability as the glaciations. I want to write letters to them, I want to listen to their stories and explain all the holes they contain, and explain how trespassing on my lost birthright will not fill them. And yet also I want them to inherit that splendor, which I tended to once and so long ago, and to know it like I knew. I want them to know, in that innocent way which you are certain is right, because you felt it even before you learned the rules of right and wrong. But they are human, they are old, they are defeated and resigned in countless ways. They are ignorant and beautiful, and this place is good enough for them, but they are not convinced, and never will be. They will be happy with the shreds which remain; not happy, exactly, but close enough. A forgotten memory will tell them, sometimes, when alone or troubled, driving in the car, that the feeling of wholeness sometimes accompanying the act of love used to be, could be, all around.They will feel that lack of completion, the missing something, undefinable. But that definition will elude them, because so few are bothering to define it, and so they will try to be good; they will try to respect what meant so much to me. But they will be incapable.

"The colonization of Como girls was not a project for the weak-hearted, and didn't really ever pay off, but the soreness from walking late and slow and the trepidation of waiting seems to be very golden, as if I were snowblind, in those early days before I understood how to act and cared enough, as every year passes.

Here I learned Condé, Beckett, Vandermeer; the Velvets, sweatband pedal heroes, Stax; Punto, Crain, Thome; Apatow, Carpenter, Brakhage; bourbon, Grain Belt, Franzia. But the best lesson there was to always allow every idea to gasp a little and die a quiet cradle death, under that big dry moon. "

-pg. 58, "The Navel Stone Handbook Vol. One" Martin Snapple, 2028 (Gumshoe Press)

A person built a city, tenderly, a daydream city, a block and ten minutes between classes at a time. First they materialized a field, and stood-while-not-standing-actually on the field, made an inferno and leveled it. A firestorm of white sulked and the person watched until their phone rang and then a person left the whiteness for their actual location, which was a room, which wasn’t near the field. Then they forgot about the bonflower until they caught the bus, which purred or waited.

The bus was full of strangers. A person looked out of the window, was borne back to the charred and buttery space by the thrum and hob of the bus, the animal and bent mustard diabetic smell of perfume and bodies. Charred from the fire, buttery from the butterflies a person popped into existence while imagining what the strangers they saw from the bus liked about themselves. The butterflies collapsed from the smoke. A person reached their destination,

And a person left the bus and a person dreamt roads on the field, in squares first, which wasn’t right, and then in circles, which also wasn’t right, so a person made his streets tessellated and rose half of the field to a hill, for contrast. A person likes contrasts. Sometimes contrasts are nice.

A person dreamt museums and libraries and people, bars, bicycles, willow trees. The people became planets, pregnant barren planets with their own gravity & some offered more comfort to life than others. Some planets vacuumed others in with their compulsive gravity and filled their lungs and arteries with poisonous gases. The alphabet died. A person could do that, walking home in the sunshine. Eliminate comma fevers, clause sicknesses, language. They didn’t have to be there. They could be corrected. A person, drinking coffee in their yard, could imagine a system of broadcasts where no language was necessary. In this play epoch of daydream everyone understood through morphic resonance.

A person dreamt this place inside their carriage of terror every once in a while. Sometimes it was a field of vegetables, or a BMX track, or ribbons of beauty. A person had to sleep, eventually. A person wondered if that this field was renewed in sleep; if the planets and fantasies and resentments became a garden of skulls and time to compost for the next day, every one an epoch, all forgotten but the soil rich for new flight.

The Damnation of Party-Faust

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Party-Mephisto: A young white man, slim, sort of a fish-belly pale Italian club-rat, with narrow features and an irritating little beard, like carefully-groomed rumpled stubble (utterly contrived), and perfect oily hair, and thin lips and beady black eyes that he swings around like a laze-beam. Perfect white slacks around pipecleaner legs, white leather shoes w/ upturned toes, impossibly black T-shirt, white leather jacket. He is always smiling.

Party-Faust: A young white man in faded black chords, beat red sneakers, yellow T-shirt w/ a big black star on the chest, shiny golden blazer thrown over his shoulder, held the way MJ holds his jacket in Billy Jean. Cleanshaven oval face drawn tight like he recently lost a lot of weight, large green eyes and perfectly orthodonted teeth (except for one little snaggle on the lower left that he worries compulsively with a fingernail). He looks dehydrated & dreamy & is extremely full of himself.

Party Guests: A large group of typical human beings, men and women, young and happy

ACT I

(A wild party in a vague space—drink, music etc. PARTY-FAUST doesn’t live here but he’s still the host. He and PARTY-MEPHISTO stand slightly apart from the crowd. PF looks tense and depressed and PM looks pretty pleased about that)

PM: Jesus Christ Party-Faust you sure do get down.
PF: Alas that I cannot party with the gods. I am naught but a lowly worm who can barely turn a mother out. No matter what party-heights my party-art can raise me to, ne’er shall I taste the wine of the party-sublime, nor glimpse the visiage of party-providence.
PM: Alright Party-Faust I can tell you’re just bursting with despair over there and this bash is gonna flounder without its motor (that’s you, big guy), so I’ma lay it on the line for you: (produces a little golden bottle from nowhere) do four shots of this demon-tequila with me and you will party like no man before or since.
PF: Nay, damned party-spirit, assail not mine ears with such sweet lies, for what hope can I, a lowly mortal party-beast, have of reaching the plane of such eternal party-starters as Party-Aristotle, or that holy Party-Plato with the light in his baby blues and all the best drugs.
PM: Those chuckleheads got nothin’ on me, Herr Fest-Faustus. Put that pout on ice and dig this for a minute.

(PM puts two fingers to his lips and whistles a whistle that rings out over the thump of the techno and shakes the ice in all the glasses and the bricks on the mantle, the fireplace erupts in red flame and a dozen baying black party-poodles bound out of the inferno, they pull down a fat guy and rip him to pieces while the crowd circles round and cheers and claps)

PF: (a little shaken but excited) Stay this madness, party-demon! That guy owned me 8 bucks.

(PM lights a Pell Mell, takes a drag and exhales an impossibly dense nimbus that engulfs the entire party besides PF and himself, the clapping and the techno die out, replaced by at-first quiet but sustained & ever-crescendoed chords on an unseen pipe organ. PM holds out the pack and PF takes one and lights it w/ an entire book of matches, holds it in his mouth and eyes the cloud hungrily as he pulls on his jacket and picks his snaggletooth and rubs his belly under his T-shirt. As the smoke cloud clears—the blood and dogs are gone, the guests seem gaunter and much more made-up—PF hops nimbly atop a nearby minifridge and turns to address the crowd, Pell Mell in hand so he can gesture w/ the cherry and take a drag when he holds for applause. PM melts against the wall in shadow to smoke, jacket at his feet, eyes on flicker between PF and the crowd)

PF: Friends! Rats! Drunken scum! Stay your tongues, grab a handful of ass if it’ll shut you up, and listen for a minute to your humble haggard host, me, your Party-Faust.

(deep bow w/ cig held high to a general whoop of shit-faced approval)

PF: Cram it, Janet!

(the crowd crams it)

PF: (heartfelt, brooding) The body before you is bruised and broken, the soul ratty and careworn, the belly full of iron, the liver curdled, the lungs like blackened porterhouses. A pack and a half could not stay these shakes. Yet here I stand before you monsters, here I smoke and chatter needlessly. How can this be? What force of man or god could sustain so wretched a creature? The answer is easy:

(he kicks open the door of his minifridge soapbox with a flourish, revealing more handles of liquor than it can possibly hold, great cheers, a bucket line forms and soon the booze has spread among the crowd)

The best of friends! Whisky, rum! Those who never let you down! Vodka, scotch! Oil of conversation, liquid courage, the unbroken cure for all that ails! Tequila, moonshine, beer
& wine! There is a balm in Gilead, and he can help us to forget, for a single endless instant, the shit and mud and deep dark holes inside us all…light the fires, with blood and puke and pelvic hammering! Join me in an incantation, a witching-ritual to seal this night away from the closing dark! Ready your drink and heed my words!

(shots are poured with a collective gentle gurgle, PM oozes up and pours a pair of healthy slugs from a golden bottle pulled from nowhere, then joins the crowd front and center)

(the bottle wears a tiny gold sombrero)

(all eyes are on Party-Faust as he raises his shimmering shot and lowers his cig hand until the palm grips his skull, ashes tumble in his hair)

This head…this black head throbs with the thumping bassline of the underworld, the Olympian subwoofer of Vulcan’s forge. My sputum swims with cerebral cortex! I close my eyes to nightmares of astronomy and nesting spheres! The music sears my synapses! Let us forget the head!

(cheers, shot, pour another)

(PF spreads his fingers wide before him, barely holding his glass and cig)

These hands have lifted ten thousand skirts and gripped twice as many creamy hamstrings, knocked teeth from big mouths and holes in shoddy plaster, pressed together in mad prayer to Bacchus for bail money and miracle beer. My knuckles ache! Fingers scrabble on white-hot prison walls! Let us forget the hands!

(cheers, shot, pour another)

(PF drops his arms to his side and looks at the floor)

And this demonic health, my indestructible constitution, that granite troll no drink can drown, no vapor choke, no endless bender blot out for good—damn the motor that turns this party! Damn the platelets and the macrophages! Let us forget our health!

(cheers, shot, pour another)

(PF holds his hands to his chest, and looks out, imploring)

Finally this heart…this heart is broken in a thousand places. The fractures run from my beat brown soles to the tip-top of the party-firmament, where the moon gives black light and the stars go strobe when God claps twice. I am torn in two, betwixt the instant and eternity, the Asian and the Blonde, betwixt parties past and parties yet to come, betwixt myself and all of you. If I…

(a beat of silence)

(suddenly profound, thousand-mile stare) If I could taste the One True Party, if I could be there when the lights come up and the vesicles empty and the world ends, if I could throw the bash that justified the whole and worthless human race, why…

(a beat of silence)

I’d sell my soul.

(two beats)

(remembers himself, turns back to the crowd, with deepest contempt) And all of you with it! Here’s to Hell and a black sun rising!

(huge cheers, shot, resounding cheers, resumption of dancing with yet wilder abandon, thin glass bottle bottoms rising from time to time above the crowd, towards the ceiling. PF hops down and shakes himself out, motions offstage with a nod to PM, who has already donned his jacket and lit two more Pell Mells, one of which he wordlessly hands over)

PF: Come, black imp, and summon my party-familiar. We’ve got a bar or two to barnstorm. If I just sold what I think I did then this ought to be one hell of a night.

exeunt Party-Faust and Party-Mephisto, lock the doors and burn down the theatre

When Kid saw the ziggurats, his first thought wasn’t of how long they’d been there or who built them but a clot of words, which he prayed: palace, corona, aura, aureola. “I Did Not Understand,” he said, even though he’d been hearing the rayguns for days now. We all had and nothing made sense. Nobody mentioned the flashes of afternoon or the coyote bark, chasing us just around the corners. Slamming doors so they couldn’t get inside. Kid was a stuttering DSM-V by this point & even he refused to talk about the murmur of alien tongues we heard sometimes when alone, which attacked the lymphatic system rather than the ears. Like his brain came and then rolled over on him asleep, is how he explained the absence inside after the Four Words materialized. They were his skeleton key, his sun & stars, his ugliness, combat, treasure. His epitaph even. Convinced, we headed to where he saw the ziggurats. On the way thru Dinkytown Kid suggested we get some snacks to boost morale in the ranks. His brain had digressed somewhere beyond the Kuiper Belt from all the stuff he did. I looked at girls who walked by, when Kid was in the convenience store: wing rib dyejob pumpkin hieroglyphs cryptology lying hard sciences toothbrush spearmint Camels lighter gloves Durex soda cowboy Doritos. Kid bought Cooler Ranch but I wasn’t hungry. One walked by that hurt my gums. Continuing on, suspicions rose that Kid had availed himself of more Navel Store, shit you not kiddo, heavy stuff huh, down on our way to the river. He tapped my Not Totally Coca-Cola. We talked:

KID: When I meet Old Scratch, leaning toward sooner, I’m going to do a good thing for you. A real fine eyefucking extraordinary new-sheriff-in-jail thing.

ME: ?

KID: I’m gonna get a card for that library they have, the one the cocksucker started to keep all the books to himself, the books Little Horn gets when he successfully steals them from brains with instruments of his own persuasion and invention. Your Not One Hundred Percent Coca-Cola, for example. OR the Navel Stone.

ME: Is there also an art gallery in that vein? Or an entire city?

KID: How should I know? But in this brief instant of lunar clarity, cause the N.S. is starting to make my skull glow, let me tell you, I’m gonna steal your books and flip the ol’ Jackson to the Spooky Man. O SHIT THE RAYGUNS----

KID: I’ll mail them to you. Do you think Hell’s spread past Earth? Your books, I can bribe a minor demon, Ronwe or Astarix or Steven, to load them onto a rocket on its way back to Earth. I doubt they’re written in blood or anything that space travel could fuck up. If the planet’s too far away, and you die by the time the hellship arrives, I’ll just parachute them down right over here.

ME: Do the rayguns shoot faster than light?

Kid continued etc until we reached the ziggurats. I could barely see them in the dark. Maybe Kid saw them in the deadlights of his own, private moon. I Just Don’t Know. I finished my Actually Not In Any Way A Coca-Cola while he tried every possible permutation of the Four Words. Kid yelled poems, speeches, stories, invectives, jokes clean and dirty, finally the Words were profanaties as he convulsed in the dirt. I left him there, soundtracked by the moaning of the rayguns. A lot of time went by, at various speeds, sez the Voice. Listen: Time passes. Much later in life I found a box, far after Kid had finished his talks with the Navel Lady and died. I forgot what his Four Words are, exactly. The ones I said were invocations. I heard my own Four that night. I looked through the pages in the box, from before I’d even met Kid. Stuffed them back in. Closed the box up real tight. On the box there was the distinct purple thumbprint of a serious Letheylphenemine addict. The return address was:

The worst thing about being
here is that you have to
remember everything

The Apples & The Bees

I just ate an outstanding apple, standing in the sun in the funny little garden on the south side of Crowe Hall. It was a Honeycrisp--developed by the University of Minnesota and released in 1991, this cultivar (whose sweet, tart and flavorfully crisp flesh makes it ideal for eating raw) is now proud bearer of the heavy mantle of 'Minnesota State Fruit'--that I purchased from a sassy old lady farmer whom I banter with at the farmer's market every Saturday. I wonder if she'll let me haggle if I hit on her hard enough. New Student Week has begun and everywhere you turn your head, nametagged freshmen scuttle around corners. They move in large groups, or in trilateral family units, or sometimes even all on their own, with a purposeful stride and terrified twitchy features. The apple was so crisp and juicy that each bite sounded off like a gunshot and produced a mist of apple-scented vapor for the streaming sun to filter through.

(I wanted to describe the off-juicing as an 'arterial spray' but could not in good conscious do so.)

There were shady benches in this garden but bands of marauding yellowjackets, numerous and cocksure off of late-summer excess (and I suppose a healthy dose of pre-winter desperation), scared me off. I hate the hell out of bees. Standing on the sidewalk in the shade was not so bad, and it let me feel more like a strange and menacing prominence, which I enjoy because I am an egoist. 'Who is that forlorn and malevolent stranger with the harrowing beard and the nervous tapping foot? What magnificent pain, what tragic genius could drive him to flaunt social norms and so boldly eat that apple, with its crude crunchings and dribbling of juices (some into his very beard itself!), here in the sun before our very eyes? He pauses only to cooly appraise our daughter and girlishly twirl in place to shoo a bee, then turns his rage back to the helpless apple clenched in his hairy grip, back to the beastly heaving, ripping and tearing of the supple flesh, licking and smacking his lips, swallowing it down with demonic and overwhelming gusto. We are terrified, and strangely drawn.' This (really) is the narrative that ran through my head while I stood there and ate this apple.

I put all of my energies towards not eating a bee. People are coming back and I need to shave my hermit beard, which I suppose I grew to keep my company. In Peter the Great's Russia, men who wished to keep their beards had to pay a special tax and carry around a little medallion with a picture of a beard on it, and there was still a good chance that the Tsar himself would see you on the street, grab you by the beard and cut it off with the razor that he always kept on him for this purpose.* This apple, once the size of both fists held together (or brain-sized, if the old grade-school heuristic holds any water), has dwindled down to about one fist in volume. It is 75 degrees American and this tiny Asian girl is wearing jeans and three layers of sweatshirts; I suppose that come winter she will require a parka the size of a minivan. For her parents' benefit she has pointed out a dead bush of special significance but her mother would rather glare at me over sunglasses. (I suppose the 'Pax as Romantic Byronic hero whose all-consuming apple-passion destroys both himself and those around him' storyline above is pretty much from this woman's POV. Women fascinate me more and more these days.) I look back at her through my own sunglasses and take an especially big, sloppy bite of the Honeycrisp. I instantly regret not first sliding down my sunglasses and making true eye contact. I seem to have switched to the present tense.

*And here's the really great part: if you said a damn word about it, ol' Pete would probably take all your land and belongings and give 'em to his pals, exile your family to Siberia, and then cut your fucking head off, and everyone would say, "Well that was right and proper." Autocracy, everybody.

Curious about the mechanism by which creeping ivy clings to walls, I walked between those symmetrical dorm-things to examine their ivy-carpeted exteriors. One esp. verdant sun-drenched** corner was in unspectacular brown-gree blossom, said tiny boring flowers being however a subject of great interest for a veritable cloud of fucking bees. I stood mesmerized and transfixed and wished I had the power to strike bees dead, perhaps by breathing on them. By this point the apple was what most people would call a 'core,' but I continued to gnaw on it, as I enjoy eating like a refugee. Passersby reached for comment on the uneasy spook staring at a wall in his black cords and blue T used words like 'baleful' and 'maleficent.' My apple is gone, work starts in 5, and there are no bees indoors (if they know what's good for them). Excuse me.

**I find it interesting how often light, especially sunlight, is described in terms of water. Sunlight can drench, bathe, stream, flow, trickle or flood, and sometimes it will deluge or drown. I suppose sunlight and water both have a sort of primal patience and inevitibility about them; no matter how tight you seal it up, light and water will find a way in.

two failures

Corduroy and Sam arrived. Arriving not being very important, they’d been arriving for years now, not knowing anybody or at least hoping so. The house was charming, if I can say that, with a terrace in the back like a secret garden and so well-lit and inviting Corduroy thought he’d rather come over for a sandwich in the afternoon than to a house party after eight or ten hours of drinking. But they weren’t really drunk, really. Maybe body-drunk but sharp brained enough. Starting the ritual. Hide coats, find the bathrooms, look for friends and old enemies, babes, escape routes, fire hazards. The envy thick enough to breathe. He was tired of doing things like this. Lizard was there, an ancestor from the shadowland, still brown and loud but with her voice a lot lower than he remembered. Corduroy dated her friend and roommate for a year, after her. He hadn’t really considered the consequences of this until now beyond a basic ethical inventory considering revenge and pettiness and that stuff, until she was there as much as she could be in the yard. Corduroy and Sam slinking like two black cats looking for somewhere to hide from everybody, Lizard with her friends and the poor bastard she’d chosen to dance attendance on her for the night in a circle, with a look of dumb ecstasy on his face. Corduroy was reminded of himself having a similar look, and even after drinking a fair amount of the Comrade he still had a uniquely bad case of The Screamer. The Screamer being seasickness followed by a pure sharp wave of terror that one feels upon encountering an old girlfriend. Months and years and girls had passed but Corduroy still got The Screamer even through the amniotic protection of the Comrade. He relied on the Comrade a lot, these days.

Sam was trying to figure out how to talk to a girl he liked, who had open round melting eyes, a princess of the blood maybe, swilling Four Loko and chatting up the gays. Another part of the ritual, Corduroy thought, was remembering that nobody actually talked to who they wanted to talk to at things like this, you had to sneak looks and figure out who was eyeballing who. Going out and getting drunk had ceased to be fun a long time ago. It was field research or a puzzle or a simple distraction. They were in the courtyard, if I can use that word, when Lizard walked by. Corduroy got The Screamer real bad, and then he loved her, a lot more than he actually had when they were dating, and he loved her more because he knew it would only last for an hour or two and then he’d stop. Mouth shut, mouth dry, staring and dropping his cigarettes. Unable to talk to her beyond hello. Going into the bathroom, which was another thing he often did, to be by himself and try to aggregate the psychic data. There’s always a lot of it in Southeast, which was principally why he loved it and needed to leave so much. Above the toilet somebody had written “SWAMP FOOT STRIKES AGAIN”. Corduroy looked at himself in the mirror for three or four minutes without blinking. There was an empty tub of Long Islands. He went to the smallest room of the house, because that’s where the oldest person at the party always is, feeling uncomfortable, he went to the smallest room because he always liked to talk to the oldest person at the party for a long time because he knew that Lizard knew this habit about him and eventually she’d wander into it and talk to someone else, ignoring him completely. All girls do this. It happened immediately. Her presence in the room was warm, narcotic almost, another part of the inebriate love-feeling he was having for somebody who egged his house and left him twice. Not that he was anywhere near innocent about the whole thing. “The whole thing” just kept on getting more fucked up. Corduroy, having a facile conversation with the oldest person, who was way too fucking old to be there, thought he should probably be depressed by knowing and acting in this dumb sketch but was fairly porlocked by the Comrade, and also had a new shirt on, and also liked going out regardless of the heavy emotional cost. He was also very afraid.

One habit of Lizard’s was when she dressed to go out she’d never let him be in the room, or within two rooms of her. She flew into rages while she was dressing, so by the time she was finally ready all of her clothes scattered her room and her bathroom, dressed now and calmly sipping a vodka and Sprite. Corduroy, a quarter in the bag, asked her if her tantrum was over. She stuck out her tongue and they’d leave. Not talk all night. Lizard was a big one for cruelty. Corduroy admired the honest and open quality of it. Having not learned it until he dated her, the honest and open kind of cruelty. Vindictively, with her purse-holder there and the older man with the goatee talking about chemistry, two meaningless conversations happening. The various subtexts were so weighty and adolescent that Corduroy decided to check on Sam, but Sam had made no progress, so Corduroy went into the front yard with the Comrade and wondered if it was worth the effort to chat up one of the birds of paradise on the veranda, if I can use that word. I imagined girls and boys in radiation suits, doing their goddamnest not to bump into each other, faces covered while Ratatat and Notorious BIG played, getting decontaminated before they left so as not to spread the disease beyond the neighborhood.

Lizard left before Corduroy could talk to her. Sam didn’t talk to the sloe-eyed brunette. Two corpses walked home and listened to Kicking Television much quieter than they preferred to, respecting as much as they could the other people around them.

I ran into this kid from my neighborhood on the way back from class last week. I didn’t want to walk with him but we were headed in basically the same direction, so that’s what happened. My brain only works in transit to and from class, mysteriously, so I was annoyed that I had to waste that special fifteen blocks chatting with him about his chemistry test or whatever. And this was almost all fifteen of them, or maybe fourteen. He said a word I didn’t know the meaning of and while I was thinking about that he asked me if I wanted to come to his house and have a couple of beers. I remembered that he had a roommate I was fond of, and they always offered snacks. Then he mentioned offhandedly he was working on some songs and would I take a burned CD with me and check them out, they were just at his house. I just can’t tell anymore if people are holding the carrot or the stick.

He kept glancing around everywhere, and behind his back, and up and even sometimes down. After I’d accepted his offer I felt immediately guilty, like we were going to have sex but then I was going to go on a date with someone I actually like afterward, drinking his beers no less, promising I’d call, so I decided to ask him what the deal was with the looking around, and while I debated if this would be like a socially acceptable thing to do with a drinking buddy and wondering if instead I should just ask him what the goddamned word meant because it was really bothering me, on a fine Thursday afternoon when I had no reason to be bothered. But two blocks had passed, and I let it go until he turned down this side street that was five or six blocks out of the way and made no sense to walk down. This with all the looking around and the chemistry and the talk of the “underwater tone” he was getting from his new guitar pedals was too much, Rollins goes way around the train tracks and it was about the loneliest possible place to be walking with all the sun and the coffee and the general disinterest in everything. So I asked him what’s with the production because this nice Thursday was getting into some film noir shit and if the guy wasn’t such a geek I’d swear he was taking me to a drug deal or a bicycle theft or a general non-fine afternoon thing.

While he was answering it occurred to me how lonely this person must be.

He said that whenever he was going somewhere alone, which, more and more frequently, was the case (Here I’ll skip a digression re: his girlfriend’s fondness for white wine and pot, and driving to Taco Bell and then having a massive anxiety attack in the parking lot and hiding from him in the Target nearby for hours at a time, like twice a week or something. Or maybe not. Como Avenue stories aren’t exactly famous for their veracity, more like archetypes or fables that illustrate how fucked up everyone is) he pretended that somebody was following him. Not always someone he knew, although sometimes he pretended that it was a friend or relative, and not always somebody menacing and strange. Sometimes (probably a lot of the time) it was some blonde who saw him at the bus stop and followed him hoping he’d go into the deli and she could get his number while he was getting a gyro, and sometimes he’d drop his wallet. At this point, and we’d wandered way past our destination by now, him looking around like he’s a cheating husband on the soaps on the way to his Puerto Rican mistress, who incidentally has a husband that’s like a linebacker or a mafia guy, anyway at this point he stressed that even while he was pretending he’d dropped his wallet he could feel it in his back pocket. The trains nakkering by off Rollins, which had turned into an industrial district. Me smoking as fast as I can, fascinated in the way that it’s fascinating to watch Sam hit on girls.

When the stories about his girlfriend are told people always emphasize that it’s white wine, not red, white. Once some asshole tried to derail a friend’s girlfriend telling this story on a porch somewhere by delving into the minutiae of white wines and I could have just slapped them for interrupting the storyteller, who is generally shy and was telling the story well. Really, these Como fables/half- or full- truth trainwrecks are best heard around the fifth time or so because then you begin to see where the speculation and prejudice of the different tellers set in.

Now we were further from his house than when we started, as I quizzed him on all of the different strategies he pulled to shake off these imaginary followers of his, aside from aforementioned the take-the-empty-frontage-road-on-a-beautiful-day-when-there-are-tons-of-babes-out-walk. He liked to go into stores and pretend to browse, then suddenly run out the back door as fast as he could go. Or he’d order coffee and pretend someone in the shop was not only looking at them but also intently screwing up their courage to talk to him. I admired him for doing this secret thing to make his life more interesting. I thought that about wrapped it up, so I started steering him generally homeward, trying to prod more weirdness out of him all the while. I got into it and we ducked behind a dumpster for a minute, and then walked around a convenience store eyeballing people, which was my idea, because I was out of cigarettes anyway. Then the real true remarkable part of the story occurred, the climax, dénouement, whatever, the end.

He claimed that every time he tried to shake off these ghosts of his, every single time, something lucky happened to him. Different, little stuff: he finds ten bucks, he runs into an old friend just came to town and they pass fifteen happy minutes shooting the shit, his old lovely bicycle, stolen from him two years ago, is found leaning against an underpass when he tries to avoid the (imaginary) UMPD, who are coming to get him for some unbelievably flip and cool prank he has played. Never fails. One time he even actually does get a girl’s number, when he leaves a party early because his girlfriend’s wacked out on a jug of Carlo and a few bong rips. Himself also not being the soberest person around. He asks a girl out that’s following him, right there on the street in front of traffic and God. Of course he can’t call her because of the girlfriend. But he has her number and this has justified his behaviors, which become more and more elaborate as each day passes and he has to get up two hours early just to get to his morning class. He looks up sewer blueprints and takes taxis across town just to go shoot hoops with his roommates, &c. We are almost to his house and I remark that in fact, nothing good has happened to him yet unless he considers the probable psychological consequences of unburdening his strange Situationist drift thing to me, and he says something good will happen and invites me to choose a path at random to take us to the well-earned, by now, beer and demo tape of dubious quality which I am beginning to think might even be cool considering this guy is so goddamned deviant from general patterns of thought.

We look to the left, and there is his girlfriend, leaning against a Mazda, kissing another guy without any of the wine and dope haze she is famous for. I left to look up what exactly cryptomnesia was.