Some glances.

You drive for ten hours. You drive for twenty. Driving for days makes you not want to stop driving. To drive to the end and drive right back. Never fleeing. Moving. Looking. Driving for days makes you want to stop. To walk. To touch. To put a branch into your hands. Feel its snow. Hear your feet under it. Driving for days makes you lock your eyes to your feet. It makes you push. It makes you write yourself in the second person only.

Each day dresses itself in a week. A month ago the sun broke its sunrise over your trunk and you passed through the Appalachians. Then Kentucky. Hills mined beyond recognition. Chewed by tractors. Nibbled through to their ribs. If there are trees they are infants. Mechanical claws, wheels drills rotors land themselves like insects over the slopes.

The trans-Siberian railway continues. You keep going. You drive through the smells of diesel and cost-effectiveness. Your eyes red themselves with exhaust. You try to look. To tell what you see. The perverted anonymity of motel rooms. Gas stations where chewing tobacco receives a separate isle. I-Hop diners where miners row themselves in front of Football telecasts with the attentive concern of UN delegates. Where Evangelical crosses stick lit and gleaming out of the night forest. Where the earth tilts and the hills slide off.

Where you see with your own eyes what silence looks like. Where “nothing” turns into a qualitative object. Where the earth is flat. Where next weeks’ weather hangs at the far end of the chessboard. Where people use words like “ours” and “here.”

You keep on going. You go past “just over there.” You go where ghost cities of highrises form themselves like playing blocks over the snow carpet. Where you move like a fly towards them. Where even these glass sentries seem to lean on each other under the winds that keep on and on on on on on from nowhere on to nowhere.

But sooner or later everybody sleeps. For the first time in years you slide into the backseat. You are little again. Everything is simple. You close your eyes.

And resting your nose on the metallic cold of the glass you again open them. You are on a local road, the sun is heavy over the side of your neck. In the front seats parents are hoping for gas. A forgotten stable passes you on the other side of the window. Then a bit of snow. Then your eyes snap open. You slide up in the seat look back over the trunk reach for balance, reach over the seats and suddenly and unexpectedly –

“Stop!”

The trouble with being in a car with a critic and a drag queen is that they never agree on anything. The radio becomes a fumble of half-songs. Decades come back in a very big way. Joni Mitchell. Michael Jackson. Smiths. Stripes. Deborah Harry. David Byrne. Bowie. A lot of Bowie. Each trend is defined. Argued. Defended. Cigarettes stay lit for miles. Simona becomes a caravan of a smoking section.

Cassie turns out to be quite a character. One hour out of the city and we can suddenly no longer go west. A phone call from her father changes everything. She begins to claw at her mouth, her teeth grip every nail, she hugs the seatbelt, she pounces at the window.

“We can’t,” she says, “we can’t cant can’t can’t can’t.”

“Can’t what?” I ask. For some reason I’m driving. Earl never made it.

“We’re gonna be right in the storm, we can’t,” she says. Rainman-like she begins to sway in her seat. “Can’t do it,” she repeats.

I try to keep my eyes on the road. I had never seen anything like it. With the intensity of a woman in labor, Georgette gives out a moan from the backseat. This is the city talking, I realize. The withdrawal kicking in, the cockpit shaking itself open at takeoff.

“What do you want to do?” I ask in my most therapeutic, grandparent-sedating voice.

“We have to go South,” she states.

“South?” I ask and find myself instantly wishing for my table and my space and nothing else.

“South,” she states. She holds her cell phone to her mouth. She holds it between her palms, they are drawn together.

“How can we go South?” I ask.

“We have to,” Cassie says with the determination of a hijacker. “We will go down just a bit then go West. We’ll pass the storm.”

I look at her. She nods to herself.

“Darling, let us just do it,” Georgette chimes in.

I look in the rearview, I look all around. There’s no help. We take an exit. We go south. Just a bit turns into three states.

We go way South.


Somewhere in the Appalachians we stop. The clouds float algae-like near the hills, the sun sinks in them slowly. It’s one hell of a sun. Cassie is ecstatic. We’re on a two-lane country road looking for the waffle house.

“Waffle house! Waffle house!” Cassie yells over a Save Ferris track. Yes, dear readers, I have gotten a doctorate in the 80’s. Just in case you’ve missed it the first time.

“It’s right by here,” Cassie keeps on, “I know it.”

The Men in Black anthem comes over a vintage radio station. This tips everything over. In her knitted hat, Cassie dances in her seat, she bangs on the glove compartment.

“Waffle house!”

She can’t contain herself. I can feel Georgette exhale slightly in the backseat. I snap my head back just for a moment. He has his fingers under the tip of his ear, his knees draw together towards the door. His eyes pass over a barn, a field.

We never find waffles. We find a rest stop and park. Cassie is a different person. She floats out of the car ethereal, with the passivity of a spirit. She is heartbroken, I know that. Georgette knows it too. Despite his seeming annoyance with her, he walks along, he slips his arm under hers. Together they walk under the oversized Chilli’s sign. I lock the car and walk to the edge of the parking lot. I could never like rest stops, these roadhouses of deja-vu, of ray ban stands and unused payphones and stationary eighteen-wheelers, of groundhog days and mornings and minutes just waiting for you to step into them and buy something.

I stand by where the concrete ends and the grass starts, ahead of me is a field big enough to land a plane on, if only it wasn’t part swamp. A flock of about thirty birds grows miniature over the green and yellow crust of the algae. Across the field I spot a small house. It looks real, it looks warm. I exhale.

I find the bathroom without trouble and do what I have to do. I take an extra long time to do it. I wash my hands in the sink, I make the water as hot as it can get, I wash my face, my hair, the back of my neck. A few stalls into the bathroom a father commands his son on how to urinate. I dip my fingers into the already wet center of the paper-towel roll, I spin myself what I need and a little bit more. I bring the dry and patternless paper to my face, I sink my lids into it. I try to tell myself who I am. Who I’m not. Or at least, I try to make sure I can remember.

There are so many things you remember when looking out the window. He asks me if I'm all right and I say that I am. We shake hands. He gives me a four-piece pseudonym. Because he's not wearing his makeup I dub him a he. He slips something pink with his glass of red. Thinking of Shelby I dub him Georgette.

Above the corner of the living room the BQE maternally rubs the ceiling to sleep with its rumble. A florescent cow hangs from the ceiling. The walls are turquoise. Or pink. I was never too good with colors. The cow has tits that expand and contract. They change colors too.

Georgette fumbles through a youtube selection. A break in the music and depeche mode fills the room.

"No more eighties," Cassie yelps from the couch, her chin a paperweight over the tops of her blouse. Cassie is a literary critic, the true and clear mind of this apartment, the master of rubricked creativity. "Earl!" she yells.

Earl is in the bedroom. In Georgette's room, to be precise. There is a bed and a moat of socks and scraps about six inches wide around it. There isn't much else. Earl is on the bed in an evening gown putting on lipstick.

He snaps something back with a voice of a mechanic. A few fucking minutes. OK?

OK.

We wait.

Georgette snugs next to me on the couch. I readjust myself slightly. Valium is really best for shopping, he tells me. But you have to know what you want. Every time I go, I feel like a conductor, he tells me. He swings his arms masterfully.

"And then cheese, then bread, then that awful dip," he explains. Somewhere in the background Psycho Killer comes on. Heads talk. He bobs his head. He has a ring of keys around his neck. They swing left. They swing right.

"But if you don't make a list, you will just swipe everything," he tells me. "And then you'll just be like - god, what are these things doing here?"

He continues talking. His British accent is beautiful. He tells me of the local bands in Brighton. I don't listen.

Outside of the window the grey popped like popcorn. Since sundown it held together. Then it snapped. Flakes fall. Suddenly there is no end to them. They put me in a reflective mood. My mind thinks of everything.

Earl paces out. He has thin legs and the heels work. The dress doesn't. Everybody stays quiet. Slowly, bodies begin to lift themselves up. We shuffle down the stairs soldier-like. No words are wasted. Earl opens the door. We step back into the factory of cold. Steel beams. Warehouses. Not a tree in sight. Earl balances himself down the stoop stairs.

Simona waits for us at the curb. Simona is a Ford Focus whose doors look like they've been kissed by a rhino. Earl opens the driver door, slides in and reaches around the cabin to unlock the other ones. Cassie and Georgette stand near their respective places.

"Well?" Cassie looks at me.

"You really should come," Georgette adds politely. He is standing by the passenger door, leaning his torso out, hugging the sides of his face with his red curls. He really does pull it off better than the other two, even without the makeup.

I stand and I look at them. It's cold, unbearably cold. Flakes have turned hard and they slap the back of my neck. In an hour we will pick up Cassie's girlfriend. Her voice will be deeper than mine, I remember that. We will go to a warm nook in Brooklyn where we will watch boys dance the dance of not being boys. Then back to Simona. Then to the Pacific. Twenty minutes ago they figured it all out.

I stand and I look at them. What does one do? Conscious attempts to not_run from yourself only seem to make your feet move faster. What does one pack? What does one pack when making a miniature mess of life? A toothbrush? Dreams that you can always see when you close your eyes? Things that you stubbornly continue to believe in?

My feet don't move. Behind Simona the BQE sloshes passively. Three men appear from around the corner. Their eyes focus on us with the intensity of forest animals. They quickly disappear into a cellar.

"Well?!" Cassie nods and shakes her head. She twitches at her nose ring.

I stand. For once, despite anything, perhaps because of everything, this is suddenly one city I do not want to flee from.

I close my eyes. I feel the flakes ring over my lids. Swaying, I keep them closed.

If only for a little bit.

It has been difficult to write lately. December has been thick, so abundantly thick with its air, it often seems like a Herculean task merely to lift the pen out of the pocket, to prop the eyelids open with it, to look, to scribble, to look. Everybody seems to be just trying_to_make_it. The weekend, the vacation, the pillow. Some place where you can exhale, feel yourself, breathe. Heads move quietly and obediently in and out of the train. Ties gargle cigarette smoke by the canisters. Electricity replaces sunlight. And one can’t help but ask – where’s the story in that? Where is the story?

So you begin to look. Not at just how the womans’ cheekbones tell you “I’ve seen some shit in my time,” not just at how the street musician wraps the saxophone around his neck like a dance partner, but more. More. Where’s the story? What is it? How is it? Where does it all come from?

Walking home I see always an old man with the flattest stare god has ever slapped across a human face. It’s simply a disk, an empty plate, asking for nothing, saying nothing. He is in a wheelchair by the entrance. The twilight thins over the retirement home, no one pulls him in, no one pulls him out. He sits. His face sits. The chair stands. I wonder time and time again - what is he thinking about?

Here, of course, he is mine, and I can stuff him with anything. The fact is, (I can say) his face is paralyzed. He had fallen asleep with the window open several years ago and had woken up immobile. A freak accident. It happens. He sits now and wonders about the new pool they are installing in the retirement home. He cannot, for the life of him, understand why someone would install a swimming pool in a residence where nobody can even walk. His mind crawls over itself. It is all he thinks about. When his daughter phones him he walks her through each possible conspiracy.

(Here, he is able to talk. We dutifully suspend our disbelief).

The conspiracies drive his daughter mad. She becomes haunted with dreams of management buyouts, retirement homes turned luxury apartment complexes, nurse bribes, retiree diasporas, her fathers’ possible schizophrenia (she had never seen the swimming pool), and so on. She becomes irritable, paranoid, and upset. She begins to frequent the gym with the passion of an antichrist. She begins to squirm from her husband who is a former top-line project manager but now teaches typing classes in Albany. His self-esteem sinks even lower. He begins to call Svetlana, his former lover in Tashkent. Svetlana, a mid-aged sales clerk with a warm face and subtle, charming wrinkles begins to dream of an exit visa. She begins to reminisce more and more of the old theater where they had met. He was in charge of the stage, the lights, it was Leningrad in the 80’s and anything, for that brief and inescapable moment, was possible. These thoughts chain her into a state of constant anxiety. Svetlana begins to neglect customers and more and more frequent the local theater. She begins to re-read her copies of Shakespeare and Pasternak. She begins to fumble with plates, hum in the shower. Three times a month she goes to the store to buy eggs and two times a month coming back she drops them. In the autumn of 2007 the streets of Tashkent become glazed with the clear and yellow jelly of broken white shells. People slip.

And so on.

But - these stories, even if I can muse on them, are not mine. I have come to realize that. My stories are much closer, they are right. here. Still, as so often it happens, I cannot reach them. It’s the things that are closest to us, after all, that are hardest to grasp, the hardest to understand. Can it be, after all this scribbling, that our own stories are the hardest of them to tell? Haven’t we been taught that it is all the other way around?

So, I stop. I look at my ashtray. I look to the side of the table where the wall is an endless white. This has been my space, my endless space between the table and the wall into which I look, into which I scribble. Sometimes. Most of the time I plainly smoke, bend my head down into my open hand, the lit cigarette like a dandelion sticking its way into my hair, I try to close my eyes, to think what I want to say, all the bla’s and none of the bleh’s but then suddenly open my eyes, remembering that they must be open, that I must simply point them into that space and that everything will be all right. But, as they say, it ain’t easy. The space has not always been there. It is not always there now. Hell, I had no idea what it was until I read about it.

Still, it is that space that I come back to and it is in that space that I sometimes begin to see. Small things. A branch, perhaps. My branch. The way it bends like a racing track over the fog. A memory of a basketball game played suddenly comes out of nowhere. Small details here also. A backboard over my head, the pointed shoes of the coach, the feeling of a marionette. Different lifetimes and everything so clear. I stop by one and peak in. I lean my eye closer to the door. And I think, always cannot help but think – what makes it mine? What makes it truly, indescribably mine?


So, here is an old thought: if I am taking a visitor to a place I have been, to a feeling I have felt, should they not see what I see? Feel what I feel? Shouldn’t my consciousness sit on their shoulders like a child leading the way, should it not be the helmet that guides them? But then, what exactly is my consciousness? What is this nasty residue clinging to the sides of my brain, this stained glass mucus of the heart? Where does it come from, and more importantly, what drives it?

I know I am a sucker for images, sounds. A single track in my earphones can dump me straight into my Kharkov apartment and the next sling me out into the narrow Seville streets. Over the years I have grown into a walking switchboard of triggers and somehow I get the feeling I am not the only one with this disease. So, has something changed? Have words, once the precious cargo of horse messengers and heralds, lost their touch? Is the continual abolition of physical distance, the evolution of printing presses from the first moving type to the one I am banging away at this very minute – has this all made words dull, secondhand? Is this changing what we read? How we read? Is the oral tradition coming back in a very big way? Have written words, once the exalted mercenaries of expression, become a form of media? Have they always been? And if so, can they not be combined with other forms, in a one, whole, cohesive dance?

What I have in mind is not quite the picture book, not quite the raw and segregated labels of Warhol and not quite the slaps of chaos of Pollock, but perhaps something inbetween. Something fluid, something that grows, in a sense - a moving type that truly does move. After all, we have a printing press here that is very much recent and very much unused. Isn’t it about time?

Of course, this is all nothing new. Nothing really is. The earth is a grandmother of inspiration. We wrap ourselves warm in its quilt and keep our eyes open. Looking. Saying everything, telling nothing. Coming to the microphone without pride, without ideas, tapping it only so slightly, and, having given our eyes a pass around the room, asking in a soft and leading voice:

Where is the story?

A Bit of Non-Fiction

Sunday. December. The day in a constant evening.

December asks you to clean the apartment. To keep all the lights on. To keep cleaning and cleaning.

December makes you not like the things you say. To dislike even more the things you write.

Understand even less the things you feel.

And then start over.

December makes you snap at the people closest to your heart. And then snap the heart itself.

To keep cleaning and cleaning.

To stop blaming December.

Sitting in bed, the sheets only half way up. For a change not smoking.

Listening to music never heard. Re-reading things never read.

For a change from cover to cover.


Worth a peak:

A very good essay:
What is an author?

Some valid but sad points about identity:
The Saturated Self

What wind moved these flurries? Everything was silent behind the window. They meshed under the streetlight, they clanked against the pole, melted together under the bulb, got ripped apart over the darkness. The whole week the city cracked over its own edge. It had snowed once on Sunday, an unexpected and sweeping whiteness that had debranded the cars, deleafed the trees, leveled the autumn and disappeared. It had melted as soon as it came and now the city was nervous. The holidays stood like a doorman over the streets. Barrel-chested. Heavy. The air thinned. Heads fugued at the store windows, postal workers hackled in the side alleys, everything rattled like a cockpit.

And then it came again. A slow, ethereal march of the flakes, a Tchaikovsky dance of the lilliput swans over the twilight. Like a dream, the snow came only at night. It came at night and changed everything. This was not the post-thanksgiving cold that had prematurely gripped the air, gripping until a thin frost climaxed over the pavements. This was a graceful and pale hand of the unseen, the good and beautiful unseen that was beginning to stick to the windowsills and antennas. Where had it come from?

So often then it seemed as if the world was under occupation. The unseens were everywhere. Car engines scratched satan-like beneath the window one moment and clothes danced lightheartedly over a string the next. The room crashed into your stomach during the night only for the air to be suddenly plentiful in the morning. The world somehow had taken to passing itself in freight trains through the ribs and nobody seemed to know why.

It was only an hour past sunrise and I stood at the street, keeping my eyes on the coats and scarfs and backpacks carefully making their way to the train. There was a thoughtfulness that a newly fallen snow gave to a morning. Feet moved slowly, words slid around the collars without a sound. I stood in a driveway, my head bent, feeling the warm and irreplaceable silence of sunlight over my neck and my nose. There was really nothing like it. Everything was at a sudden yet worried peace. I stayed where I was, feeling the street wake up around me. Doors began to open, exhaust pipes rattled to a start, shoes stepped out over the stoops, they lay their faces slowly to the newly fallen snow. They rubbed their cheeks into it like a pillow. With each step they crunched the powder, they chewed it without a hurry.

Hryuuush.

Hryuuush.

I opened my eyes slightly to the sounds and instantly began taking small notes in my head. I wanted to write something about this, to capture it all somehow. Yet, nothing came. I thought about Hopper, Wyeth, Seurat. The previous night I had went again to the museum, never going up but instead lingering outside by the lobby. Back to back cigarettes and indecision ultimately led me to the store and there I had spent most of the night. Looking around, reading. In truth, there was a Hopper anthology I had always went there to see, and finding an odd copy of it stranded near a guide to Lisa Minelli, I had fled with it to an abandoned corner. For an hour I must have stood there, beats and cellos within my ears, my fingers tracing their way across each print, focusing at a point within the painting where it all seemed to merge. There was something there, there was something undeniably there. But what was it? Was it silence he painted? Was it the frozen movement of the moment? After songs upon songs of tracing, it hit me - the bastard! He was painting the unseen. The unseen stuck between the spaces, locked in bars and bedrooms and gas stations, everyday eating us and massaging us… I lifted my eyes over the book and glanced around. Were the students, the clerks, the shelves, vases books lights – were these all the result of the unseen? Was the unseen all that there really was? Was it the charged ether that seemed to flood the cities? Did the atmosphere merely blanket over its round body, keeping it all from spilling?

I stood at the street thinking of this, watching a car pass here and a parent scold a child there, gathering the seens in an effort to describe the unseen. The sunlight. The people. Small exhales of vapor. Two-legged locomotives choo-choo-ing their way onward. I had always preferred to write in the mornings. The world becomes clear. Simple. Even the unseens slumber calmly and lethargically. Yet nothing would come. I watched the flakes, the few of them still left in the air, slightly pick up, carry over a car and a porch, nestle under a canopy. I thought of ways to describe them. I took in the details. A light wind came again and a nearby rooftop popped soundlessly like a blender, the flakes dancing eagerly upward then downward, dropping into the driveway and coming back up. There was really no way to describe them. No metaphors to build, no mediums to combine. They were flurries, only small little flurries, warm flurries, cold flurries, hard edged and soft flurries dancing in a horrific, beautiful slavery to the wind. I stood in the driveway and watched them, closing my eyes and opening them again, letting my feet grow slightly cold and my nose grow warm.

Careful, we’re in a memory now.

If you feel the need to walk - don’t. Think first of where you want to go.
Places are like taxicabs around here. You just get into one.

So, lets take a look.
Remember, stand still. Distances are nothing.

On our right is a piano. It’s old and the story goes that it was smuggled from Germany during the war. It’s an interesting story, but I will tell it later.

The piano is filled with glass jars filled with water. When you play, if you can play well, the sound floods, it spills and crashes over the apartment. It’s beautiful. Every time I come back I hear its nocturnes. There is never anybody here. You can stay for days.

Listen.

It’s the one in G-Minor. The page that someone ripped at the top. But I put the book back. The piano doesn’t need it.

I have been walking around these walls. Coming back to them. For how long? It’s not always the same. Scholars of travel and of space will argue: time is motion. Motion is time. If you return to the center of your space, to the center of your time, you will find neither.

But I will have to disagree. Kindly.

At this moment the sky is grey outside. Turn a bit more to the right. That door with the glass in it that is hard to see through. That is my room. Peak in.

The windows are closed. Daylight leans over the bookshelf, slightly falls over the new years tree. The tree is in the corner. It’s dry. It must be March then. This year we had left it in for too long. We forgot all about it.

There is a pipe near the window. It sucks up the echoes from the yard. Water drops down like pebbles. It’s March and everything above is melting.

Let us go somewhere else.

Quick.
Through the corridor. The door, the living room (our feet still by the piano).
OK.
We’re here.

It’s warm. Even in the evenings it seems as if the sun never leaves. The grey television screen in the corner holds on to its dust. The vase on a small table near the armchair cradles its mint drops. There’s about four of them there.

And the table! The table where the sun rests in a fixed parallelogram of yellow. The red and white checkered tablecloth.
Everything is good now.

I sit down.

Below me, a bowl. Beans and lettuce and sour cream in a soup that is green and white with everything. To the left, a white little plate, a piece of bread, black, the butter - light yellow. Cut into small little pieces. Small little soldiers. To my right, my mother.

I do not see her. I see an old sweatshirt. Flannel.

My mother tells me then of the lost gnome. There were a thousand stories about him. The gnome once found a machine. Wandering through where the forest became thin he found it by accident. The gnome was tiny and the machine was tiny also.

I see it. Small and rectangular like a digital silver watch. Big as a red-checkered square. I pick it up and put it under the shadow of my plate.

My mother continues. He didn’t know what it was, the gnome. But he couldn’t help but tinker with it. He had to figure it all out.

It took him ages.

That was the hardest part, after all. Years passed. Each day the gnome would run from the village into the forest. He would inspect every lever, every switch.

Then it came to life. Suddenly.

The gnome did not know much. What it was about, where it came from in the first place.
He pulled down the cover.
He pressed a button.

He went.

The watch, this streamlined spec of silver, it could take him anywhere. Any place. Any time. Any person. The gnome met kings. He danced with princesses. Ate grapes with Scheherazade. He listened to her stories.

Porters. Mules. Ali Baba. I listen to them and suddenly time begins to coil. Stories within a story, memories within a memory. The room is funny that way. But it is only from this room, from this apartment that I can travel. This is the terminal, it seems. But why?

I become nervous. For a second I step back.

And there is nobody. Everything clicks downward. The rooms are empty.

Still, the sun is where it was. There are small breadcrumbs over the tablecloth. Muted through the door come the rings of the piano.

Suddenly I see everything better.

Everything begins to fill. There are shoes now by the door, near the shelf in the corridor. I am still in the room, but can see them from here. On top of the shelf there are glass bottles. We use them to fill up with water for the piano. I fill them up in the kitchen. I see everything. The cottage cheese drips bored from a sack near the window. A small wooden table, the wood painted white, brown and soaked in the parts chipped away. My feet are still by the piano, do you see? This is simple.

Watch.

The balcony. We’re on it. We’ve gone through the room where the piano stands, where our feet still are. The piano is playing a mazurka now. A song or two had passed.

I look around. Below the balcony is the yard. Ahead, garages. On the left a new building is being pieced together. They have been building it as long as I can remember, and thus, here, now, they are building it always. A piece goes up. The crane lifts it. It will be somebody’s window. Somebody’s kitchen. At ground level, black tiles paste themselves over the fresh cement. The rest of the floors paint themselves beige. Beige upon beige.

And now suddenly we see it from below. The sun breaks over the straight edge of the roof under the sky. We’ve dropped straight into the yard. It wasn’t hard. Memory is soft, after all. It is the soft pillow of possibility. Anything could happen here. We land without a sound.

The new building stretches up and up to our left. We are by a tree. There is a rock, an enormous, primeval rock that stands under it. There are a few tree stumps near it. In the autumn we all use the stumps to climb up onto the rock. We make a mountain of leaves below it. We jump. Then we climb back up again.

I am showing you this because you need to know me. If we’re going to walk here, to go around this yard, to see the alleys that flow out of it, we need to know each other. This place is treacherous. It has a peace like no other but it is worse than any summit tightrope. I have seen people ski off rooftops. Fly off swings. Plainly disappear into the garages.

Look, a small road to the garbage pile and we are near them. Stay close. Some of them are open. Mouths of uncertainty. Black, there is a constant smell of cement dust and oil. There was a man in one of them who lived under a car. I only saw his feet until he was no longer there. Everybody said he was sick and that he ended his life with a screwdriver.

I do not go near them. I walk to the garbage pile quickly, I carry a plastic bucket by my side, there are cucumber peels, apricot seeds, a glass bottle, I woosh the bucket up and everything comes out.

In the winter though, this turns into my favorite place in the yard. No one knows about it and yet it is the most beautiful. The owners close their garages and there is no one here. The yard is empty anyway, always, yet it is then that it truly seems at ease. The poplars crunch their twigs softly under the crisp winter air. Snow spreads like sour cream over the burnt back of the yard.

I come to the garbage pile. In the winter it is covered with flakes and has no smell. There is a small mattress near the garages. I am not afraid to go near them because the owners closed them up until the spring. You put the mattress against the garage, you put the tip of your shoe into the wooden frame, and you ascend. You climb.

On the garage roofs, there is snow. Snow up to your knees. No one touches it. You can plop. Make human toilet seats. Human shadows. Arms out, legs out. Human touches. Visualized.

But it is not winter yet. I stand now (feet still by the piano) within the empty yard. Everything is so big. Sounds come like air balloons at me through the summer warmth. It is summer here, now, it is March back in my room and perhaps September around the checkered table in the living room. That is the kind of time we have here. If a stranger would pass through the yard (as often they do on the way to the university or the park), and would ask me: dear boy, what time is it right now, I would tell him:

It is a different sort of time here, sir. It is not the time that circles around the yard in clouds and stars and airplanes. It is only the kind of time that me and you bring into this yard ourselves, dear sir. It is the sort of time that sits in our bone marrow. It is the beautiful disease that we carry. By stepping back here we infect the air with it.

But it’s all right. Do not worry, sir, do not stir for your briefcase or umbrella. We are inside the spindle now. It spins faster than anything. If someone was to try and find us, the spindle would appear to them as standing still, (as spindles do when they are spun). But we know better.

Sir, the time is: a crumpled time, a fragmented time - time of quarks and pigments and memories. Its outside flow breaks here.

I can tell you that it is morning because near us I see two or three apples in the dirt that no one has yet picked up. I can tell you it is midday because the poplars lull as I remember them when coming back home with a chessboard. We piece together the time around us like a quilt. A quilt of understandings, dreams, who knows what else. We stretch it farther and farther until we can make a tent out of it. Our own little planetarium. Fine sir, sit on the ground with me. Do not worry about your appointments.

Look up.

The time is: poplar trees stretching, the crane crowing over, the swings moving only slightly… who touches them? Who rocks them so softly yet precisely?

We are small now, so small sitting on the ground. I see details, small details of the quilt – the way the playground sand sticks to the wooden planks that guard it, the way a stone edges its way out of the ground like a loose tooth, the small apple forgotten, the poplars so high over everything, the road bending beneath them and their leaves hanging out near the curb. I see the sky, the day, time sweeping the clouds along like a brush – the external time, the outside time, the outer edges of the spindle spinning and spinning…

and you fine sir..

What do you see?

Santa Maria gave life to three turtles while sitting next to me. Strange things. I thought them dead, the way she had them in that plastic box - they had no heads, small and hard shells as big as two thumbs put together, rolling around and around the bare plastic bottom. And that smell. It wasn't strong, but if you listened to the air vents it hit you. Or rather, slapped at you. Like a soft and stale banana.

Yet, in true marketing fashion, she gave them life. A poland spring. Half a bottle into the box and their heads were out. Their hands and feet followed. They moved over each other, they were flapping around like puppies, they couldn't contain themselves. Slowly.

I was grinning. I knew I was but felt no need to stop it. Why stop? I kept my eyes on the turtles, I left my smile where it was.

Still, Santa Maria got up. She got up and moved towards the door. A stop came up but she didn't exit. She simply stood there. No one took her place.

I looked around. Strange things. She was the second person to sit down next to me and instantly rise. Was it because I was writing? People do not like to see a person with a notebook open, I have observed. It makes them nervous. A camera with its lens open, OK. A notebook? Ah-ah. A notebook could be anything, a humble atom one minute, but any second, any second, a mere pin could split it wide open and then - who knows?

Strange things. I smiled at Santa Maria's Reeboks. The train stopped. Lights blended in the outside fog and it felt like we were swimming. Everybody listened to a fire truck drag its sirens below the tracks. Over Santa Maria's soft arm, I saw the turtles gather by the back side of their tank. They were on top of each other and were looking. It seemed they were trying to take down as much as they could.

Michelle

“And who’re you?” Michelle said.

How long had I not seen her? Had I seen her ever? She was on my couch in a distant memory, just a few months old then, a newborn. She sat with her legs crossed and pulled and pulled at my hair. I remember I let her. The more she pulled the more she laughed. She kept laughing and laughing.

How old was I then? Eleven? Just a boy. And how old was I now? How old did that make her? She stood at the piano and looked at me and around the room, she had a pointed, narrow glance. No more the clumsy baby, she stood without swaying in her small heels, her face lipsticked and eye-shadowed - she seemed at the same time older and seemingly a toddler still, merely dressed for a play.

Somehow it all made me nervous.

“You don’t remember me?” I said playfully, knowing of course, that it was a scientific impossibility. I suddenly felt stale, like a big-breasted aunt who knows everything about you yet whom you have never seen.
I too was becoming older.
It didn’t feel good at all.

Michelle shook her head. “You’re silly,” she said.

An answer of some sort began to form in my mind, I half-way smiled, scratched the side of my stomach, a crowd of perfume circled us and before I could say a word, we were back at the table.

Ah, the table. Again. Two months ago a new year, in two months another, then a birthday, a holiday then a birthday again. Then the year anew - shoulders in, ass out - sit.

I sat.

Michelle was across from me between her parents. Her father stretched over the table continuously, a plate, a joke, cognac, more cognac, you are not nearly drinking enough… he was young, hair black and thick, an engineer from Moldova he lapsed between taxi’s driven in Brighton, windows installed in Boropark, airport terminals planned and instructed, the women kept their eyes on him, husbands forked grape tomatoes around their plates absentmindedly.

“I also make windows,” Michelle said, nodding. No one seemed to hear her, she smiled strangely and said something else, seemingly to herself.

“What kind of windows do you make?” I asked her quietly across the table.

“All kind of windows!” her father said suddenly. “You wouldn’t believe.”

I laughed into my plate and looked across. Michelle said something to herself again and smiled. She had one of the strangest smiles I had ever seen.

“We were at this Hassid’s house one time,” her father went on, “I give him the breakdown: fifty for the windows, twenty for the bars and screens, and we give you the frames for free. So do you know what he says?” His eyes took a lap around the table. “He says – well, can I just get the frames?”

The chorus of women giggled.

I felt it again in me then, the holidays scooping me out, that special brand of knifing that comes when sitting shoulder to shoulder under a warm light in front of a warm pile of food. I reached for the bottle of Canadian whiskey near my plate, let my fingers linger on the small ridges within its neck, and refilled my glass.

What was she thinking? The whole dinner I couldn’t help but watch her. She had a small gameboy by her side but somehow I knew that was not where her attention lay. I couldn’t help but sense as if she felt just as estranged at this table as I did. Who were these people, anyway? I looked around. A few relatives from the Volga. They didn’t look different at all. Same jeans, same shirts. Their Russian was harder, it hacked away at the air in front of their mouths, it came out with a ring from somewhere behind their throats, but that was about it. They passed photos around of a new addition to the dacha, of tombstones, small pieces of rock with sparsely filled glass jars of flowers next to them - forecasts of a merry and shoulder-to-shouldered fate.

What was the point?

I excused myself, pushed my chair back against the wall, climbed over it, balanced myself over a handbag, and made my way to the bathroom.

Of all the ways to escape from myself, (and what are the holidays if not a serving of your assigned self back to you?), the bathroom has long been a favorite.

Click, snap – and you’re invincible.
At least for a moment.

I slid my pants down eagerly and settled on the soft and pink seat. This was my grandmothers’ house. One of the local newspapers was lying by the toilet and I picked it up. For some time I leafed through it. A community college was closing its doors but its community would live on. I flipped again. Pasternak’s love life looked up at me in two columns. Flip. What Kasparov really believes in. Flip. A supermodel’s journey to the Western Wall. Flip. The Odessa holocaust revealed – a column and a photo of two men in striped pants by a skeleton half way in an oven. Their eyes had the half-glazed look of commuters. Flip. I closed the newspaper and tossed it back where it was. I let myself urinate. I let myself sit like that for a while.

Urinating clears my mind and once done, I began to think. Isn’t enough enough? How many more evenings was I to spend hiding in bathrooms and kitchens? Wasn’t it time to grow up? Be a man? Have an argument about a Dovlatov translation or deliver a keen and risqué opinion about Hillary? Wasn’t it about time?

I exhaled. I rubbed my palms against my forehead, shook off the urine, pulled up my pants and got up. I bent over the sink. I washed my hands and soaked my face in the water. I picked up a towel and stuck my nose deep into it. I exhaled again.

Yes. Time indeed.

Yet opening the door only revealed an intermission. Feet moved swiftly between the table and the stove, plates and trays trotted their ways, a dry and warm smell of cigarette smoke yawned from the balcony, the thumb was up - the gladiator lives!

I smiled. Years of introspective escapes had made my timing perfect. I congratulated myself. I made my way to the kitchen where Michelle’s mother suddenly grabbed my arm.

“Can you talk to her?” she said. She was a well-framed woman who worked in a lens shop. Her glasses were nicely picked as always.

“About what?” I said.

“Devil knows,” her mother said. “She saw one of the tombstones and now won’t come out of the bedroom.”

I looked down the corridor. I felt a shove from the side. “Go,” she said.

I went.

From the corridor, I looked into my grandmothers’ room. I saw her there, Michelle, lying on my grandmothers’ bed. They had just won a new bedroom set, a true Cadillac of the faux-Italian line and the bed sat like an obese whore under the bookshelves. It all seemed somehow unfair.

I looked again at Michelle. She was tiny. The bed was enormous to begin with but around her it stretched like a field. She was looking away, her head pointed somewhere into the window. A part of me began to feel like an intruder, but I came up to the bed nonetheless.

“Hey,” I said and sat down.

The small gameboy was in front of her but it was off. She looked up at me. Her eyes were strained.

“Hello,” she said with a bit of a smile.

“What’re you thinking?” I said with an attempted lightness. It was a question I had only recently learned and it seemed like the time to ask it.

She looked down, she moved the gameboy around the mattress slightly with her left hand.

“I don’t know,” she said shyly, leaning her head away.

“Well, you surely must know,” I said in a voice that wasn’t mine and instantly hated myself for it.

She looked up at me with a fixed smile, her lips locked, she shook her head.

I laughed. If only she knew how many spoonfuls I had dodged by that same method. She clearly did not know what she was up against. Then suddenly, her eyes settled on me.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

“Who’s who?” I said.

She nodded behind me. I turned my head. My grandmother had re-arranged her bedroom, I looked and was caught off guard.

“The old photo?” I asked.

Michelle nodded.

“That’s my great-grandmother,” I said.

“What’s her name?” she asked.

I paused. “Well, she had many. She always changed them.”

“Why?” Michelle asked. I looked at her. This girl really seemed to be big on the questions. I thought about it.

“Well,” I said, simplifying my tone again, “it was a different time back then.”

“So?” Michelle said. She was lying on her elbows, and played with her earrings slightly.

“So?” I said, “so, people had to change their names a lot, sometimes just to live.”

Michelle’s face didn’t move.

“I understand,” she said. “Kind of like trees, right?”

“Like trees?” I said. I thought about the park close to my house, my endless laps around the same small cluster of a forest.

“Like trees,” she said. “Papa took me to the park and he said that trees change the leaves because it helps them live.”

I thought about this for a moment. It sounded like nonsense to me.

“Yes,” I said, “perhaps a bit like trees.”

“Where does she live now?” Michelle asked.

“My great-grandmother?” I said.

Michelle nodded.

“She died,” I said after a hesitation.

“I see,” she said. “That’s OK,” she added after a moment. “Grandpa died last month.”

I nodded. The conversation was gaining the air of post-exam chatter. I thought of ways to switch the subject.

“I liked it,” she said before I could come up with anything. My eyes turned to her.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Well, I wasn’t in school,” she said, “and Papa wasn’t at work.”

“Right,” I paused. “I understand,” I said and understood nothing.

“We even went to the park,” she said.

“The park?”

She nodded.

“That’s when I got sad over the leaves,” she said.

“Why did you get sad?” I asked rhetorically. With each question I felt myself getting closer and closer to the great-aunt status. I couldn’t help it. What else was there to say?

Michelle stayed quiet. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. I couldn’t tell if it was the makeup or if something was turning within her.

“I think,” she said after a while and her eyes moved down to the floor, seemingly following an extension chord there, “if trees die or not?”

I looked at her. It sounded instantly like a question I myself would ask. But at such an age?

“Not at all,” I said. In truth, I had nothing to say. I tried to follow her fathers’ argument.

“Think about it now – the leaves are all falling, right?” I said.

She nodded.

“But then in a few months – bang, they come back out new,” I said. “That is just how trees breathe,” I added and felt very accomplished.

She didn’t buy it. Her eyes began to narrow on something.

“But have you ever seen a tree die?” she asked and looked up at me. Her eyes suddenly gripped mine, they pulled them by the collar – her eyes had an incredible and surprising strength.

“How does a tree die?” she asked. Her eyes did not let me go. A paramount fear flushed through me: her eyes had the same urgency as my great-grandmothers’ during her last days. I froze. I couldn’t say anything.

“How does a tree die?” she repeated.

I looked back at her and said nothing. Her lips tightened with disappointment. She slid past me, slid off the bed, and quickly went out.

I sat up. I tried to get up and follow her but couldn’t. I sat upright and tried to listen. She was moving through the kitchen now, asking everyone there over and over – how does a tree die? Yet no one seemed to hear her. Still, I listened and listened. It was something I wanted to know as well.

There is something about the way sounds sink during autumn. The air huddles around the branches, under the streetlights it clings to them like a determined halo. The world slows down. A half-closed eyelid it drags on, horizontally. Often it seems as if the whole planet, this spherical mass of yellow-leafed asphalt that we step over, as if it is simply talking to itself. Whispering under its’ own breath. As if each building, each turned-off headlight, each curtain lit from within, is simply trying to understand itself, whispering.. whispering…

There is a way sounds sink during autumn. In the park, someone’s dog broke loose, it took off suddenly chasing an unknown and an unseen through the fields, the owner does not see it, the owner launches a scream and then another. But we’re underwater now. The sounds fly one-fourth of the distance and head vertically into silence.

In the park is where silence begins to exercise. This is its training season, after all. It begins without fanfare, modestly. It begins stretching in the daytime shadows, it pulls itself up between the leaves, in the evenings slides between the plates, curls up in the space between the bulb and the lamp, between the mouth and the throat, it rests, it braids its hair, it unbraids it. There is never any rush.

Along the avenue, people fight back. It is an interesting hobby to observe. Suppliers of warmth extend their hours. Couches are set up in circles. Laptops are opened, earphones plugged. Tea lounges become airport terminals. Below them, the basement cellars become filled with the sound of a bass, the jingle of a guitar, the unmistakable scent of pilsner and dishwashing detergent.

Within the city, the worker ants group squadron-like by the subway entrances. Umbrellas are checked, unwound, readied. Hoods are unflapped. Nothing is left to chance.

They charge. Objectives are the new key. Noise is God. Silence is a class enemy. Their sounds razor through the morning lull.

Above them, modestly, Seurat draws his portrait next to an infinite staircase. He was always a master of silence. Wyeth as well. How genius, I think suddenly, it is to paint silence. How rare.

Above me a second-story window is unexpectedly jerked open, a head is produced. It gives the air a quick haaah and an oooooph, watches it turn grey and disappears.

Everything stays pretty quiet after that.

How rare it is to see something new! We are surrounded, flanked on all sides by its abundance. Yet we look it straight in the face, hold our drinks, throw our eyes down, throw our eyes up, and define it as rare.

Such insults.

For most with this problem, let me advise – a simple creak of your head around its tired axis will do. Allow me to illustrate:

Walking to my door along the street routined with my own footsteps, I must simply (and genuinely) bend my head to the left. I will see there an old woman sitting by her porch. She will remind me instantly of my great-grandmother (naturally). I will note that this is because of her legs. I will note that they are swollen, quite horribly swollen, two beehives softened by the rain, tucking themselves into her shoes. It will be hard for me to move my eyes then. Moving my eyes and walking – you can forget about it. I will then secretly decide to make her my great-grandmother. At least until I reach my doorstep. Just a driveway or two. It will feel right. I will walk slow.

And now a few steps back.

Where we are now: Midtown. Fifth Ave. Hotels spray their yellow-lit tops into the sky. The Palace, the Ritz, the Peninsula. Too much, too much.

On the street: Fresh-faced midwesterners look, chew. Paroled bankers smile the unshaved smile of money. Laughter is thrown like car keys to whomever is willing to park. I hear it even through my earphones. I'm too close. I skedaddle.

Fifth Avenue. More and more. Taxi cyclists launch their eyes and words into the crowd, see if anything catches. Limo drivers stand in traffic with their windows down. Respectfully dressed older gentlemen speak of unrespectable things. I have music in my ears and I keep looking. Seeing is easier, sometimes, without sound.

In the subway everything is warm. Up there, the air slaps you around - too many currents, too many faces, too many directions. Here it stands. It hugs your neck. The train pulls in. Doors open.

I’m in. I look around. Who is Brooklyn bound already? Czech and Greek grandmothers finding fluency in confusion. Black-jeaned toddlers of the Queens Institute for the Arts in a soon-to-be-regretted sleep. Oh home. I sit.

Here comes Rockerfeller Center. Top of the Rock. Who lingers at the top of the rock in this weather? Surely, analysts, accountants. Now, these are not dirty words. They are people too. Let us observe:

Enter Birgit. A burly woman of efficient Austrian blood, she inspects the car thoroughly. The doors close. A ziplock bag is produced from her pocket and she bites down on something crunchy. Her cheeks inflate and deflate. Her eyes keep moving. Birgit loves mistakes. Loves them. The harder to find, the better. If you can't find a good mistake, why show up? Her eyes chase everything. But the distribution is perfect. Everything is precise. Dissatisfied, she takes out a folder. Her eyes pounce into it.

On our left is John. John doesn’t wear a tie, John wears whatever he wants. John breaks the filters off his Marlboro reds’, he keeps his sideburns from the seventies when the East Village used to be his. But I am being unfair. I know these people. I see them every day.

Thirty-fourth Street. Backups. Reserves. The car fills up. They blackberry in figures, possibilities, probabilities. Twenty-third Street is empty. Several Russian programmers look on poetically at the car situation. A few dive in. West 4th brings turmoil. Accountants flee, poets charge. Black pushes back blue. Notebooks are unfolded. The poets write standing up. They jot down figures, faces, possibilities. The train keeps going.

I look around more. Who else is there? The hassidic diamond-sellers and the brothers cancel each other out. Russians are left standing. I turn to a grandfather-turned-programmer. I ask him about his story. The OJ Simpson by the door keeps cracking his music too loud, he tells me. That's his story. I laugh. He's not laughing. He returns to his Le Carre translation.

Balls. I keep looking around more. My body is tired. It’s tired of me and my dirty habits. It wants to sleep, to rest to relax to detune detox, to let go, to gargle some beer, to sleep to sleep but..

Who else is there?

On the next stop the train empties and my eyes land on a K.D. Lang in a pinstripe suit and sneakers. She sits upright, she sternly examines a folded newspaper, she grips it with apparent strength, she holds it close to her face, the fingers of her other hand make small and slow laps around her inner thigh. She becomes bored, folds everything and watches the ceiling.

I keep looking. Soon the train will bust out of the tunnel and everybody will look up. They always do. This is the moment that I wait for.

Across from me K.D. Lang has gotten her blackberry out. It’s an old model. She leans forward in her seat, her eyes fix and focus like a tennis player. I try to float her a smile, I’m a sucker for short hair. She thumbs at the small wheel. On the next stop she gets out.

Balls again. I keep looking. The train is bound to fly out at any minute. I can tell by how the blank scenery behind the window changes. We’re getting closer.

Any moment now, I can feel it, the evening will splash through the car and the heads will lift. Even when it’s dark outside they meet it as a sunrise. In the morning when the train dives in, the heads turn down, they look away but here - here, they move up (slowly), eyes open (slowly), mouths spread, slowly, everything, for an instant, floats. There’s nothing like it. If you haven’t, you must really see it for yourself. At least once. Turn your head. Something's going on over there.

The Brooklyn Bluegrass Kid. Face not ready enough to shave. Eyes small, larger like fish in his glasses. Jumping out. Violin under the chin bow under the nose everything is moving everything is moving. Yee haw.

I have come in search of the Sunday night jazz. I have found something else.


There is an honesty that hits the faces of those performing. Of those truly performing, creating. I had never noticed it before. Their skin becomes loose, their eyes fire wildly, freely bending the light, the people, they smile, they are there, they are there. I look around the bar, the tables, faces making conversation, chewing truths. These faces are hard, static. They do not open, they watch. If we are lucky, they will stretch spandex-like by the end of the evening. Great show man, great show.

In the corner of the bar where the piano is parked, there is none of that. There are more like him. The other three: a minuscule woman, black jeans and a banjo. The banjo covers most of her torso. She has no make up. Her hair is grey. She floats her eyebrows as the melody picks up.. moving, moving.. another woman, a full southern body in a Texan hat. A maternal version of Janice. She sings. The microphone, there is none. She sings. There is a bassist. He has grey hair too. It is long, he waves it around, he sticks out his lips, he sings wolf-like from the gut. Somehow, he reminds me of our president. I laugh. Simplicity.

I watch their faces move. They are naive and clear. GET A MIKE someone yells from the back but nobody notices. My eyes come back to the kid. He's making the show, making the evening. He takes off on a solo and his lips curl, the two of them jump to the corner of his mouth, his eyes sway without effort, he is not trying but he is doing. so. much.

I tell myself to stay just for a song. The drink is already here, bluegrass is not my thing. I stay for the set. They take a break and I stay for the second one. I can't get enough.

In the second set the waitress puts up a microphone. Their voices are clearer now. They wash everything down. I watch their faces, I cannot take my eyes off them. Child-like, they smile, they create. They create, they move air, they vibrate it, they hug it they twirl it. I watch them and find myself smiling. Smiling and wondering: when the music stops, will these faces fade, will the world re-apply its make-up over them? Will they walk out of here returning to their cell phones, appointments, slapping smiles and post-its, shaking hands they do not want to shake? I do not know. I shudder at the thought. I step out for a cigarette.


Outside, I draw my shoulders together to light. The air turned cold lately out of nowhere. In this crazy climate it could snap to snow in a minute. I stand with my back to the glass. I still feel the music here.

Outside, the music and the wine in me, I look at the university buildings, the skyscrapers. They are everywhere. Proportional, rational and rectangular canisters of waiting. Everybody is waiting. For the year to end, for the vacation, the job, the promotion the degree the blowjob the movie to come out, the snow to come, the rain to end. I see this. I know this. I was there. Suddenly I smile. I say it again. I was there. I was there. It feels good to say it. To do a little more and wait a little less. I was there. I muse about the infinity of past tense. A tense within a tense within a tense. I juggle the cold from shoulder to shoulder. After one and a half cigarettes I go back in.

When I return the base-wolf is unwiring his equipment. The show is over. I stand for a moment and then make my way back to my chair. I slide in.  

By the bar, the Bluegrass Kid is making the tables. Shaking a hand, smiling coyly. He still has his violin and plucks away at it. I think of BB King, on a stage, telling that either he speaks or Lucille speaks, they never speak together. The kid utters a word and plucks. Utters a word and plucks. And when he reaches my table, in a self-noted surprise of the century, I speak to him. And I ask him. About his story.

And to my surprise - he tells me.

Trust. Without it words harden, turn into pebbles, suffocate. Trust between the writer and the reader. When the reader feels that the writer is not-trying. Not-trying-to-prove-anything. When the writer feels. When the writer feels that no one is looking. That his words are home, safe, understood.

It is a hard thing to do. Perhaps the hardest.
But I hear it is beautiful.

There is a way people run their eyes from you on the train. Their head tilts back, slightly to the side, their eyes travel up (not too fast now), there is something suddenly very interesting there, how could they have not seen it before, they must look at it now, yes now, where is it where is it, oh there, yes, right there.

There is a way people sit down. You can tell much more about somebody by how they sit down than by how they look away. Some start sitting already when they are standing up. They know where they're headed. They bend their ass out, stick their arms to the sides, and then, after a beautiful stillness, slide in. This is done even if the car is empty. Like hunger artists they perform for no one, they perform without performing. They sit down, push their back against the plastic and begin shaking their leg, anticipating, anticipating.

(Then of course there are the ploppers, the shovers (make-upped women with linebacker wingspans), the leggers, the leaners... these are all very special food groups and merit their own place and their own aside).

On the train there is a way people fall asleep. This is my favorite. Most do not know that sleep is leaning over them, looking over their shoulder, already in what they read and what they write. A simple nod of the head gets most amateurs. They get closer into their lap, their eyes slide, their eyes slide, a pair of ice skaters pushing away, away, away... and they're off.

The conductor jumps into the loudspeaker, the train is going express, express, EXPRESS! but nobody hears him. Earphoned heads lullaby softly their blackberried eyes.

Tudud-tudud. Tudud-tudud.

Literary cirticism No. 243

Some say Bukowski was an alcoholic with a typewriter.

I prefer to think of him as a blogger with a drinking habit.