A man in the street, he’s one of those, you know them, he wears a button-down shirt but his shirt’s too big. He’s blond, and he’s got long eyelashes, standing there reading—this is on the train, where I first saw him. He’s not reading, though, he’s looking over the top of his book. Out the window there’s bricks going by, and the conductor is talking, not actually the conductor but a robot instead, with all the inflections.
          On the street, it’s the kind of day when there’s two people on every bench around the park. Benches hold four, but you can’t sit down. Don’t talk, stick to your business.
          This man with the eyelashes, he’s the kind you wouldn’t think much of. I’m sure of it. He’s holding a girl’s hand, the type that always smiles at everything. Inappropriate, whatever, she’d smile. Her pantlegs are too short, white socks, her butt’s kind of flat. For how long he knew her, who knows. Outside the drugstore, there’s flowers, plastic wrap, and buckets of water. There’s lots of people, it’s a summer day, a man’s on the garbage can rocking back and forth.
          People say I don’t look like my dad, but I don’t take it personally. My dad never took a drink everyday I knew him, all the way to the day he died. He told me, I love you and your sister, but I sometimes wonder how things could have been different. A part where the train comes out of the ground, you see sunlight, then it goes back in—it makes me think of him. Once when I was a kid, he started singing there one time. I don’t ever know songs, so I don’t know what he sang. See, he was happy.
          At night, the songs in the grocery store sound familiar, but I never pay attention to the words. I guess sometimes one of those make me think of him, too.
          A guy in an argyle sweater wanted a cigarette from me, but he didn’t ask the man with the eyelashes. I got nothing to give away. A girl in a yellow suit looked at me like I said something bad. It’s none of her business.
          The man and his girl stopped and asked me if there was trouble. Up close you can see he’s just a boy. I told him he was a lucky guy. Everyone went along.
          No one wants that. You told me I was a lucky guy, I’d have you on the pavement. No one said anything to that.
          The night’s chilly even though the day was hot. Yellow streetlights are the prettiest kind, but they’re only on for a second. Not long ago, I thought I’d memorize all the statues in the park and then I’d know all that. It turns out they’re not interesting even though people think they are.
          There’s a young guy with muscles who hangs out around here. He’s always drunk, and threatens the high school kids a lot. Especially the ones with girls. Gets in their face, points. They act tough, and the girlfriends hold them back. He’s a big guy, eats the warm-up stuff from the corner store. What makes me wonder is who buys his clothes, because they’re nice. Outside of the neighborhood, I saw him by the ferry terminal, leaning on a tree. Big healthy neck. High school boys shouldn’t try to fight him, because he’ll beat them senseless.
          They tore down the playground and now it’s orange netting. The lady who worked there used to tell me about her son, always in trouble. She should have lost weight, but I didn’t tell her. People do what they do. Wonder where she is. She had pointed out the man with the eyelashes, walking to the train, two falls ago. Something about him, she liked him a lot. When I see him walking, I think about it, and I just don’t know.

This morning when I woke up, I was having a dream. I was going to be executed, but before I went for that--because I was just supposed to go, like for the dentist--I was posting one last thing on the internet. I put up a drawing of a gallows covered in snow.

I turned off the computer, but then I thought of something to say. I'll say it later, I thought, but then I was sad, because there wasn't going to be any later.

Then I woke up, looking out the rainy window. A half-hour before my alarm.

John! Thank you for the book, it is lovely, and I like the stamps and postmarking too.

Lately I haven't been able to run since I'm resting my knee. The weather is pleasant, though, and cool, so I miss the track. On the weekends, I've been taking a book there and sitting in the shade in the bleachers, watching the other people run, reading, trying to be relaxed.

A group of kids showed up with cokes and sat on the bleachers with me on Sunday. They were junior high aged--not grown up yet, but also not children. They were all hispanic, had fairly nice clothes, and looked a bit like a classy misfit group. One of the guys had spiky hair, the two girls had dye in their hair--one red, one blue. No one had on a Cure t-shirt, but if they were 20 years younger, maybe they would have.

I watched them for a while, in between pages. Their conversation was boring, so I don't remember it, but I liked them. When I'm around teenagers, I extrapolate and find reasons they could be like me. You know--the shy kid who wrote stories and listened to goth music in the dark, didn't quite understand how to ask a girl out, enjoyed 20 year old sci-fi shows: I want to know he's still out there. We want to preserve ourselves in the gene pool, but also in the cultural landscape. What cultural artifacts can you draw a line from yourself into the present? It would be sad to know the goth kid you were ended up a dead-end in the evolution of mankind.

I went back to reading, only half absorbing the words on the page. Suddenly, a miniature soccer ball fell from the sky, brushing tree leaves on its way down. It landed right in the lap of the girl with blue hair.

She was a small girl, the smallest of all of them. None of them said anything, and she looked surprised and then held up the ball.

From around the bleachers ran a sort of nerdy kid with glasses, their age or slightly younger. He was white, with short auburn hair, and was chubby.

Blue-haired girl gently set the ball on the bleacher step below her, and the kid with glasses clumsily picked it up and took off in the other direction. Hot on his heels was a kid who looked just like him but ten years younger, with glasses three times as thick. "WAAAAAAA!!" he was yelling. And off they went.

The kids on the bleachers started mumbling, and then talking a little louder.

"Yeah, you're welcome." "Thanks for saying sorry." "Gee, thanks, I'm sorry your ball hit us."

Then one of them yelled it: "Thanks for saying sorry! Thanks!"

One of them said, "God, I hate white people."

"I hate them. I hate white people."

"White people think they can get away with anything."

And then the girl with blue hair looked up the bleachers at me, and saw me looking at them. "Good going," someone said to her. And then they all laughed. She turned around and hit one of the boys on the shoulder, and they went on, all laughing.

I was done with reading, but I didn't want to stand up and go, so I sat and pretended to read for five more minutes, when they got up and walked onto the track. Then I got up and went home. They probably didn't mean it. They also probably don't know I am trying to find myself in them. If anything, they probably think I am judging them.

In 1999, I was living in New Orleans, in a one-room second floor apartment carved out of a pink Greek Revival, amidst the then lowdown charm of the lower garden district. In February, Mia, who was still in college, showed up for Mardi Gras, with purple hair.

The week after she left, I got a TDK 110-minute cassette in the mail, one side being a mixtape she made for me. On it were the instructions TAPE OVER SEND BACK. For six months, we passed this tape back and forth through the mail. When I got it, I would listen to it repeatedly for a week, knowing all the songs by heart. There were implicit rules, in the spirit of this game--not only did you have to tape over it, but it would be poor form to copy it first, to save. The gift was ephemeral. Each mixtape would be lost to time, something that as the years go by has added to their ghostly charm.



My favorite of the ones I received started with a live bootleg of Chris Isaak's I Believe, full of crowd noise, something easy to imagine a scene for. I loved this song, it was beautiful, but like most worthwhile things, there was a dark side. Why had she put such a fatalistic breakup song on the tape? I couldn't get it out of my head, this dual feeling--why that song, and why was that song so gorgeous?

We had a rule that was explicit, other than TAPE OVER SEND BACK, and that was the songs don't mean anything, they are just songs. But a man in love, or at least this man in love, doesn't think that way.

About three or four years ago, I suddenly thought of that song, and tried to find it. Eventually, I bought it from iTunes, but the album version isn't good--it's subdued, a ditty, without the power this live version had had. There was no cheering, it seemed to have no emotion behind it. The exact same song, but a different spin killed it entirely.

Occasionally, I would search the internet, in moments when I thought of it. Google was no help. I could find a couple live versions, played for TV appearances, but none of them was right. The most common live version you find has prominent saxophone, and I knew that wasn't it.

I should have been ready for a letdown when I finally found it, but I uncharacteristically knew it would still be perfect. When I heard it as I remembered, I was confident it would give me the same feeling as ten years ago, broke, young, in my wonderful and awful apartment, unsure of what to do about life, or about anything. It really is a perfect song.

Mia and I had the car packed and ready to go on the morning of September 11th. We were moving to New York, for good, to stay. After what happened, we didn’t go, but waited a few days and then went to Tennessee to stay at my mom and dad’s place.

We stayed there a few weeks, doing nothing, caught in the halfway state with no place to go since what had happened in New York. On the phone, our friend Sam told us not to come yet. All the street corners had soldiers with rifles, she said.

When things started to get calmer, a man in Florida died of anthrax. At first they thought he had gotten it camping, drinking from a creek. But no, soon it became clear—he had opened a letter full of white powder that arrived at the National Enquirer, where he worked. Other letters with white powder appeared in New York, at NBC, and in Washington, at the processing center where the President’s mail was opened.

I lay on the couch one night, watching the local news in Nashville, filled with local news things. They told us a crop duster had been seen near Franklin, Tennessee, dropping something white on a field.

The newsman told us then, deadly serious, “The TBI would like us to remind people that Al Qaeda has little reason to attack a rural area.”

How many people did that scare?, I wondered. The story following was a camera crew, on the front porch of an elderly couple. A dour young woman with perfect hair asked how they were dealing with events. Together, they showed her a small basket of mail they kept near the door. In detail, they explained each piece of junk mail whose origin they were unsure about.

“This one’s going back.”

“We don’t know who these people are, so this one’s going back.”

This was mass insanity. The collective unconscious was infected. One absurdity multiplied into another, forming a mass, obscuring the ground.

I took a drive to a strip mall, wondering how it felt right then not to be stuck in limbo—to have a continuity, a job one went to everyday, people one saw, a routine. Not to have been moving to New York. The overweight, pleasant lady at the bookstore smiled and said hello just like every time. What kind of things did she wonder about? The ground—did she have it firmly underneath her, or were she and her husband collecting their junk mail, afraid they were the victims of chemical warfare, preparing to return it to sender, thwarting the enemy.

I found a Penguin paperback of an Algis Budrys novel, Who? It had a beautiful, fatal cover painting of skulls on a table. For two dollars I got it. It smelled slightly of mildew.

At home, in the back yard, I started to read it. One could find comfort in a Cold War spy story—no matter how terrifying nuclear war with the U.S.S.R. had felt, as recently as twenty years before, that was a story one knew the ending of. No effort, no imaginary games could load the tale with the urgency it had had before the last act had been written and a new book begun. The Soviets—an enemy, yes.

Irrational thoughts populated one’s head. Now they had been an enemy. Here you could be, a nobody, located nowhere, thinking lines suited for Napoleon. Upon your hill, in the wind, you surveyed the battlefield. This elegant, worthy enemy. They weren’t crazy like these people—one could depend on them, they would not destroy the world.

Yes, that had all been a charming game. You could also have counted on yourself not to destroy the world. Why yes of course.

In the sun, I turned a page, each of them pleasantly grey, massive fibers visible, with the printed lines so close together, as a book should be made. Each page had a density. You did not finish them too fast, they did not congratulate you on how fast you read. Only a book for television lovers would behave so obsequiously, placing the text far apart, a sea of blankness to glide across for free, from one word to another.

Another page turned, and across the paper, several circles of white powder were caked. Defying gravity, they hung on, sticking to the fibrous, roughened text. Stark white against the grey page.

I closed the book, and looked at the sky. It was a nice, fall day.

The battered book seemed so small. I waved it back and forth, and fanned through the pages quickly. I held it up to read, and fanned through them again, slower. Throughout, dotted onto many of the pages were spots of the powder.

I put it down and went inside. In the bathroom, I washed my hands and looked closely at my eyes in the mirror. It’s not, I thought. Stop. It is not.

That night on NPR, they played a story about people leaving New York because of the danger. A young woman talked about her daughter’s school, thinking maybe it wasn’t really a good school, and maybe it wasn’t the right place to raise kids. She and her husband—they had decided if there was anthrax they would leave. Then there was, and now they just weren’t sure what to do. While listening, paying attention to my breathing, making sure it was going all right, not like I was sick, I wondered—how was it that people had anticipated anthrax. First talk about it on the news, and then it comes.

I lay and listened to the radio, my mom and dad and Mia all in the house somewhere. Next to me a light cast a dim circle, and I could hear talking in another room. A story came on about a tour guide at a national park somewhere in the West. He had been reprimanded for language he used during his birdwatching tour—“The call of this owl sounds like a woman screaming in distress.”

The man sounded near tears. “I have said that same thing for ten years and no one has cared, and now people—people suddenly can’t handle it. We—everyone, us in this country, we are going to have to grow up.”

I continued to read Who? the next day, and across every second or third page, through the entire book, there was white powder. It was caked onto the pages, and difficult to remove except by brushing it. I have no idea what it was. I think maybe it was baking soda to fight the mildew. If I thought about it at the time, I could feel my breath getting short. No reason to worry, I thought. It’s not anthrax.

I thought about what it was like for the man in Florida who died. Had he drowned in his own lungs? Had he had a fever, and fever dreams?

Every night I went to the Villager Tavern up the street and drank beer by myself, leaving Mia alone with my parents. After a few days, we drove somewhere, and we yelled at each other in the car.

“So are we going?”

“Not yet. I don’t think.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, okay? I don’t fucking know!” We drove in silence. “Shut up!”

I got up a few mornings later, and a passenger on a Greyhound bus in Tennessee had gotten up in the night and slit the throat of the driver. The news from a helicopter showed the bus overturned in the median lane on the highway, police scattered in the green grass around it. They played the audio of a woman on the bus, and asked her who the attacker had been.

“He was a Middle Eastern man,” she said, in an understated, innocent way.

Looped inside this passive world, I sat, for some time. It was easy to stare. Watch, listen. One could turn inside out, and touch every soft, red part of one’s insides to the surfaces of the global world. The words of the Taliban ambassador connect directly to the glands in your soft neck. The circuit was short. With all the massive, catastrophic current that implies, terrifying information could flow instantly. Tender things become destroyed. Al Qaeda put anthrax in my hair, at night as they stood over my sleeping body. Watched. Licked my ear. Whispered I love you.

Although it vanished, in time, this was a beautiful way to see the world. This was the modern. Depending on the person, this is simply every day. This is how the human animal lives.

I was walking up Powers Boulevard, on the left side of the road, like you’re supposed to do when you’re walking. Every few minutes a car would go by, and if it was on my side, it made me uncomfortable, zooming past a few feet from me. This was 1989—any later and I would have driven instead of walking.

It was a sunny day. Walking home meant going uphill most of the way, crunching along in the limestone gravel beside the road, looking down at all the garbage people had thrown out of car windows. Coke bottles, plastic wrappers, belts from a car engine, broken glass, single shoes, broken pipes, foam rubber, cigarette cartons, all generously spaced in the gravel, with the weeds.

I stopped for a cassette tape, lying by itself without a case. The Wall by Pink Floyd, my favorite band. I was shocked. The tape was pulled out and stretched, but I suddenly had an idea—I could use the cassette housing for something.


Wot's...Uh The Deal? by Pink Floyd, from Obscured By Clouds

Since falling completely in love with Pink Floyd a year before, I had gone every week to the comic book store where I bought used tapes and records. If I found something, I would get a tape or a record album—the tapes were 1.99, the records really depended on the condition. From looking at the Pink Floyd shelf in Tower Records, I knew they had 13 albums. You could find out those kinds of things from asking the comic book store guys, or the Tower guys, or, if you were shy, just looking around and keeping stock.

I meant to get every album on both record and tape. I already had The Wall on record, but I had only seen the shop have a cassette copy one time, and it had been expensive, because it was popular, and a double-cassette.

When I first realized how great Pink Floyd were, I had liked the popular songs, like the ones off Dark Side of the Moon. Some of the more obscure albums were hard to listen to—my mind would wander while they played and I couldn’t pay attention to them. But then pieces of them became less fuzzy. A piece in the middle of a 20-minute song called Echoes one day caught my ear, a perfect, pleasing, fun pop riff. “Wait, that part is good,” and I rewound. These small parts would come into focus, you could grab them, and then you would come to love them. Entire songs, hard to pay attention to before, would resolve, beautiful and glittering, and the sense it made would astound you.

Since then, all of my favorite books, and all my favorite songs, have had the same quality. They would flirt, and require work, and then, if they had beauty to give, they would give it, full and wondrous. Perhaps years after you first encountered them.


Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict, by Pink Floyd, from disc 2 of Ummagumma

My favorite Pink Floyd albums had become the odd ones—Obscured By Clouds, which was a largely acoustic movie soundtrack from 1972; the second disc from Ummagumma, which you didn’t get on the cassette, all tape effect and odd noises. Obscured By Clouds especially frustrated my collecting efforts, because I could never find it on record album.

I took The Wall cassette home and pulled it in half at the glued seam, taking out the rolls of ruined tape. I made a copy of my record on a JVC Type IV cassette, unscrewed it, and placed the tape rolls in the housing of the one I’d found on the road. Gluing it back together, I thought, “That one will do until I can find a real one.”

Standing in a bookstore and reading a fancy book of Pink Floyd posters, I learned they had done songs for the soundtrack of a movie called Zabriskie Point that was out of print and hard to find. This was a challenge. One of the songs was enticingly titled Heart Beat, Pig Meat.

“I have to find that,” I thought. And try I did, for the next several months. I found a huge place, somewhere in the West, that sold used tapes and would send you a newsprint catalog if you requested it by mail. I ended up ordering Zabriskie Point from there, although it was more money than I wanted to spend. The comic book shop would never have that though. It was justified.

A real copy of The Wall would have to wait. In fact, I never ended up getting it.


Heart Beat, Pig Meat playing over the credits in Zabriskie Point

Skeleton band water concentrated green, sapling easy glorious movement. Glass destruction edge failure point sparkles. Sound forest sunlight layers. Metal spades sheet glossy reflection kinetic splash rising lines flaws bubble surface. Soft layer glowing white icon glance smooth tiny white pitted silk instruction rain. Squat wires wall. Mirrors, dollars. Laugh woman palm sleeve mouth eyes. Turn gorgeous hair nose purse arm. Man smile teeth glass. Candle wax yellow. Woman behind skirt wrinkle turn. Wall floor feet door foot naught night.