Jacob Shellstein was a soft-spoken New York Dermatologist who enjoyed collecting stamps, studying birds, reading Revolutionary War books and treating his patients.
When his wife had just about enough of their normal existence without the luxurious perks her other Upper East Side friends seemed to enjoy and flaunt in her face daily, she served Jacob with papers charging him with being “withdrawn, cruel and unusual,” and she took custody of their teenage daughter Annabelle, and moved in with that hedge fund manager Juan Carlo Esposito-Caron whom she had been having an affair with for years now.
Dr. Jacob, not one to get overly emotional, became even more withdrawn. As his practice started to dwindle and his finances suddenly dissipated after a contentious settlement (not that the good Dr. Jacob ever had any intentions to contest a thing), he looked through the mail on the kitchen counter of his new “bachelor” pad and saw a missive from an organization he knew well, “Doctors without Borders.” The telegram was from an old colleague he also knew quite well, Dr. Felicia Winstrom, she was in Guatemala handling a leprosy outbreak and she desperately needed her old mentor’s help.
Dr. Jacob was on a plane to Guatemala the next morning.
Felicia and Jacob had been more than just colleagues. He had wanted to marry her at one time but the timing had never worked out. Their love affair and shared passion for helping others made them perfect potential life partners. Dr. Jacob read about George Washington’s theory of enlightened procrastination on the small prop-plane as it circled over the Green Mountain Range and Jungles of Guatemala.
Felicia was just coming out of a tent when she spotted Jacob–she went to him, put her arms around him, pulled down her surgical mask and kissed him passionately with tears running down her eyes.
“You came, you came…my dearest love…I knew you would …I knew you would”
Felicia collapsed in Jacob’s arms, clearly sleep-deprived and overwrought. Jacob carried her to her small hut, laid her on her bed and let her sleep.
After speaking in Spanish with a couple local doctors and nurses Jacob got a better grasp of the nature of the outbreak –and knew from the description of the symptoms, exactly which type of leprosy it was, the warning signs to look for, and the utmost importance of keeping certain acutely infected patients away from the general population. Upon receiving those instructions, the nurses rounded up the patients with those particular symptoms.
Dr. Jacob explained to Felicia when she awoke that time was not on their side and that it was absolutely essential to try out a new, relatively untested, infectious disease treatment on at least one of the patients to see if it might reverse the awful symptoms.
The local doctors found a willing volunteer, a 10 year old boy whose face was starting to bubble like a gourd. Upon administering a large and painful hypodermic with a strong steroid and drug that had recently been FDA approved, the young patient’s symptoms started to go into remittance within 48 hours. The look of joy and relief on the boy’s face and the local doctors was matched only by the love in Felicia’s eyes for Dr. Jacob.
The rest of the acutely infected patients were quickly administered shots and all seemed to be under control except for one minor incident where an old villager, who did not appreciate the size and pain of the needle, and perhaps the nonchalance of Dr. Jacob, jumped up screaming from the table and bit his arm. Dr. Jacob calmed the old woman down, finished administering the shot, checked his arm and quickly wiped the area on his arm with a alcohol swab, bandaged it and continued on with the hundred or so remaining villagers.
The next morning, Felicia kissed Jacob on the cheek and was quickly off in a helicopter to another village area in the Ticataxa Region after having received a telegram regarding another outbreak. She couldn’t say no. The letter to Jacob included a photograph, a poem and a promise– that when the time was right they would find each other once more–and never be parted again.
Jacob felt relieved and was happy for the first time in what seemed like years.
When Dr. Jacob got back to New York he immediately started to feel funny.
He went into his office and gave himself a full physical. What he saw caused grave concern. He administered the hypodermic with the anti-infectious disease serum and waited 48 hours.
No improvement.
The symptoms were getting worse.
Of course, it must have occurred when that old woman bit me–but why did her leprosy symptoms go away–could I somehow be resistant to the cure?
He looked in the mirror and was shocked by his appearance.
His face looked almost reptilian.
Dr. Jacob was horrified, panicked and confused but knew exactly what he must do.
He needed to quarantine himself immediately. He packed a couple bags full of supplies, put on latex medical gloves sanitized the area, placed a hand-written quarantine sign on his outer door and waited for dark.
He drove upstate at night to his small, broken-down cottage in Millbrook where he kept a small laboratory and research center and often studied birds and nature. The area was beautiful for nature lovers with the nearby Innesfree Gardens and various farms, but of no interest whatsoever to his ex-wife. “Let him have his little nature shack she told her attorney, it’s not worth anything.”
Jacob called a trusted colleague and told him what had occurred and that he couldn’t risk starting a leprosy outbreak by infecting an ill-equipped hospital staff and that the best solution was either to find a cure in his laboratory–quickly– or kill himself by tying himself to a chair and lighting the shack on fire. There was no other way as he saw it.
His good friend could not believe the situation was so dire. Dr. Jacob assured him it was so.
“Paul, remember my old Medical School nickname?
“The Turtle?”
“That’s exactly what I look like now.”
“Jacob, …no…”
“I’ve got to go…no time.”
Jacob Shellstein was awarded the affectionate moniker of “The Turtle” early on by his adoring Columbia Medical School classmates because of his last name, his tortoise shell glasses, his methodical nature in the lab, his withdrawn personality outside the lab and because of his preternatural intelligence– if ever a man was the embodiment of a wise old turtle it was indeed Jacob. He graduated the top of his class and became a leading global specialist on infectious diseases. His charitable, pro bono medical work around the globe over the years had positively impacted thousands of lives.
Jacob carried the two large red plastic containers of gasoline up from the basement and plopped them down on the carpet next to the rocking chair in the study. He took a favorite old book on George Washington and placed it on the chair and then he went back into the lab.
He biopsied his leprous flesh and tested it for hours under the microscope. He poured through old books and scanned the internet looking for any similar cases of patients with similar reptilian-looking skin.
He thought he found one possibility about 20 hours in but it was a false lead–so he kept plugging away.
He listened to Gershin’s Rhapsody in Blue as tears ran down is turtle-like face, He loved the song and it made him think of his beloved daughter Annabelle Blue–who he might never see again.
His good friend Paul called and asked if Jacob wanted or needed anything.
Jacob joked– “a cure would be nice.”
“Absolutely, said Paul, awkwardly–let’s pray for that–what about a Blonde Russian Hooker? he joked in a thick Russian accent –a call-back to an old medical school joke about what would be a good solution to any problem? Jacob laughed and replied, “No Paul, she would probably just say, “I von’t fuck turtles!”
“Hang in there buddy–if anyone can figure this out, you can.”
Jacob smiled and then suddenly a light bulb went off. Joking about hookers suddenly made him think of a whole new group of unapproved FDA rejected HIV drugs (Interferon6QP & Glaxiclaplonase) that had shown great promise in tests on mice in combating certain infectious diseases when used in combination–but the potential side effects were still totally unknown if used on humans. Jacob probably still had the recently mailed samples in his medical kit –never used– he glanced into his study at the two containers of gasoline–and then quickly rifled through the kit. After preparing the hypodermic he said a short prayer. He quickly wrote a last will and testament with instructions to leave everything he owned to Annabelle Blue along with a brief note to her and he emailed it to Paul. Then he phoned Paul and left a message on his voicemail and told him that one bullet, or a torch thrown through the study window from a safe distance of at least 10 feet –would ignite the gas containers and set the house on fire and protect everyone from this new strain of untreatable leprosy and that NYPD/ Hazmat– if they have not already– should simply light his old apartment on fire as well-to be safe.
Jacob Solomon Shellstein, or the grotesque creature he had suddenly become, then took the large hypodermic needle and jammed it in his arm. the image of George Washington flitted quickly through his mind as he gasped in excruciating pain, closed his eyes, and then everything …just…went….black.
Two years later at a solemn dedication ceremony at City Hall, the Mayor of the City was heard saying, “…Today we remember the heroic spirit of a New York doctor whose courageous actions and selfless decisions protected the lives of thousands of our fellow New Yorkers…”
Later that day a family walking by Belvedere Castle in Central Park stopped at a little area before the Delacorte theatre.
“Now, what’s this big surprise?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Annie and I thought you might like this little part here Darling–it’s called…”
“I know exactly what it’s called Felicia, you minx…it’s Turtle Pond–home to red-eared turtles, loons, frogs, ducks and soon one very beautiful, retired and very pregnant wife of mine.
“Oh, Jacob… I’m so indescribably happy.”
The three of them hugged and soon there would be four.
Brickhead wasn’t stupid he was just a little bit slower than the other guys.
I guess it was my job to bring him up to speed on how things at the office ran. Over drinks was the best way to get that shit taken care of.
Anyway, Brickhead wasn’t a bad guy. He was just young and from the Midwest or the country or some place somewhere where they had chickens and roosters and cows and hens and I really didn’t give a fuck about any of that.
It wasn’t my job to care.
It was my job to train the new recruits so they knew how things were supposed to go and to get things taken care of without making any mistakes.
That was the most important thing of all. No mistakes ever.
This bar I took them all to was called Mr. O’s—a favorite little shit hole because it was always empty, the bartender minded his own fucking business and he never charged me for drinks- why? I don’t know– but that was just fine with me.
The juke had a pretty good selection too —The Doors, The Stones, U2, The Who, The Police,Fucking ACDC, Good shit.
They even threw me free chicken wings –a big ol’ greasy bucket.
Yeah, man– Mr. O’s is the shit.
Ok so get this– Brickhead– who is nothing more than a little fucking shit-eating cowboy– he says to me –with this serious look on his face—-“So when do I get to handle some real action, already.”
Can you believe this fuckin guy–the balls on this fuckin retard.
I look at him and I’m about to slap this mutt silly but just then, Charlie the bartender, trots up with a couple free beers and a buckets of wings…and I just laugh to myself–I eat a couple wings and down my beer.
Then I grab this mother-fucking prick by his fucking neck with my right hand and I start to squeeze– and he looks at me–all surprised–but now I got his attention real good–I start squeezing harder and harder –and his face starts to turn redder and redder–like a real brick-head– now I got his full attention, his eyes start tearing up, he looks all confused and then I whisper–“when I say we talk about business–that’s when we talk about business…do you got me?…nod if you understand…” I helped the kid nod.
Then I slowly eased up on the vise.
Same routine for over a dozen new recruits.
What can I say? They gotta learn from the get go ’bout protocols.
Anyways for some reason schoolin’ this young prick made me think about all the other important stuff I had learned over the years about all sorts of shit.
Like, it’s always better to over-tip than under-tip. Just is. Red-heads are all crazy. They just are. Always mute commercials–that’s why there’s a mute button. Never answer a phone call from a phone number if you don’t recognize the number on caller ID. Police lie like a rug–just as much as criminals. Potato chips go great with ketchup. Always double down when you can. Don’t order take out sushi. Never write down shit or text or email important stuff only use payphones. Women never look fat…not if you wanna get laid.
“You know something is happening here/ But you don’t know what it is /
Do you, Mr. Jones?” – Bob Dylan
Last week, one of my adoring fans wrote a story about me, then sent it to me. He informed me, directly, that this story was not just inspired by me, it was (and is) about me. In other words, I am one of two main characters in the tale. My last name, in real life, is Barrigar, and my credentials are MFA, PhD, which I sometimes use, since I earned them.
This author changed my name, in his tale about me, to Bannister, MFA, PhD.
In the opening scene of this story, I am presented as a drug addict who bursts into a woman’s room, beats her into submission, and steals all her money so he can buy drugs. While I admit to having been forced into borrowing money from a few lovely, generous, and wealthy ladies in the deep past (mostly for food), the scene of physical violence that was (and is) portrayed in this story about me is so far from anything I would ever do in life (or have ever done in life) that its effect upon me, the reader of the tale that is directly about me, was (and remains) disturbing.
(I have never struck anyone in my entire life, even when struck first, although I have had to take a few people out in other ways, like tripping them or throwing them down onto the ground before swooping away like a ghost and disappearing around the corner. The message is, and has always been, Don’t tread on me.)
Next, in this story about me of which I speak, I am portrayed as if I were some sort of Ivy League, bicoastal elite because I spent over twenty years teaching (in various forms) in academia.
But I was a college dropout until I was twenty-five years old. I’ve lived in the Midwest (Michigan, Illinois, and Kansas) for 97% of my life. I attended humble state universities (the University of Illinois, Wichita State University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago). I took out an enormous (and even ungodly) amount of loans to finance my own education. I worked as a pizza delivery driver for a large portion of my twenty-somethings, and was mugged more than once while doing so. At one point I was teaching at three different colleges in the city of Chicago and spent four or more hours, four or five days a week, commuting, by car, train, and feet. And I only stayed in academia so long because I couldn’t find a job that would pay me for writing (even though I also do come from a family of teachers, so a lot of the work felt fairly natural in that sense; and on the other hand, I was often teaching so much to keep my head above water that I had no time for my own writing, postponing my development as a writer without any doubt whatsoever at all).
Finally, in the story about me, I am simplified, distorted, turned into an unrecognizable cartoon villain, and presented entirely as someone I am not, even though it’s obvious that the writer of this tale about me (which, again, he himself directly said is about me in no uncertain terms) has read a lot of my autobiographical writings to write something about me that almost, in just a few places, weirdly resembles who I almost am (but only almost, and only in a very few places).
The story about me is very poorly written and obviously tossed off in a fit of rage and pique after I verbally warred with this person online about the nasty things he was saying about my writing, and also about the writing and art of other people, on the independent literary site I am an editor for. And yes, when the vitriol and hard feelings become intense enough, it is a form of psychological warfare; and I will continue to defend my own work and the work of other artists we choose to publish on this blog until my dying day or until the site closes its doors. I consider it very much a part of the wider war against philistinism and closed-mindedness in this nation and world.
It is a weird thing to know that someone out there hates you so much that he or she is willing to sit there for hours writing a story about you that obviously shows some sort of weird obsession with you even though it also makes its disdain for you as clear as it could possibly be, and then sends it straight to you the next day, even after a cool-down period. (This sort of thing also happened to me a few times back in the old days, when I was a member of writing workshops, etc.)
None of us can understand any of the others of us in this world, not even when we think we do (or especially not when we think we do).
But sometimes, when the writer has done her or his work after long hours (and years, or decades) of patient toil and joyful, painful labor, that writer is able to start producing material that transcends the self, at least some of the time.
Almost no writers ever get to this point, and definitely almost all best-selling writers these days never get to this point. Just cast your eyes over all the best-seller lists these days, and see how all the material is: all the same, all the same, all the same (all the same, with only the names changed). Formulaic writing is not transcendent writing; and one could also say that it’s not even “writing” at all, in the sense I mean here.
After decades of toil, often-unrelenting pressure, danger, and more toil, you finally find your voice in prose. And then someone who doesn’t understand you, or your project, at all, casually happens by and pisses all over it; like a dog trying to mark a territory that was never meant for him at all.
END NOTE: Thank you to Bob Dylan for the song “Ballad of a Thin Man” which gives the epigraph to this (all-too-true) essay. There is nothing new under the sun.
In the title, “thin” means, among other things, of no real substance, insignificant, pointless; Dylan is brilliant at reinventing words (not using them in a sloppy, imprecise way).
END NOTE: The great poet Matthew Arnold first used the term “philistinism” in the nineteenth century, to describe a middle- or upper-class hatred of high culture, which is consequently a hatred of artists and art: due to the love of comfort, possessions, and money, to the exclusion of all else (hello, Mr. El Presidente and billions more).
As I scanned the SD card, a theme emerged. First it was birds in flight, then I sort of got taken by the vivid colors of summer. I thought about Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome.”
I don’t have any Kodachrome, but I do have a Nikon camera… It takes a nice photograph. I always get fascinated by foxtail weeds. They are quite photogenic. Morning glories steal the show when the soybeans dry and summer slips into fall, but we’re not there yet. Let’s not rush into anything.
So while we’re not there yet. I took some pictures of flowers. Flower Power, and why not? I can’t claim that era, but I can enjoy the flowers. Get a little dream going in the hammock.
It wasn’t a big deal or was it? Keifer stared at the baby for a long time. Archie was sleeping, right? He put the slobbery dog toy, next to Archie’s little red ear, SQUEAK-SQUEAK-SQUEAK. Archie didn’t move—not even an eyelash.
Better than his stupid fucking crying, thought Keifer. “Good boy.” Like Archie was the dog. Who always ran, like a chocolate streak, for the bedroom when Keifer trounced down the hall in his shiny paratrooper boots. It was rough being a dad when you’re seventeen.
It was hot, but after he jacked-off—all sweaty. Keifer preheated the oven to 425 degrees for a Tombstone Pizza. He sat on the couch, eating a thick slice with hot cheese and red sauce dripping on his olive green PTSD T-shirt, watching WAR movies.
The explosions, helicopters flattening the elephant grass, M-60 machine gunfire, were so loud, people walking by the dirty white bungalow, with big yellow dandelions sticking up, ducked for a second, thinking an active shooter was on the loose.
If the baby had been crying, Keifer couldn’t hear it, anyway.
CJA
(Ed note–CJA is also a great photographer and we would like to refresh the readerships’ memory with a few of our favorites by him–Leila and Dale)
When he was five years old, his mother got down on his level, as she often did. But this time, she told him something different, something he’d never heard before.
She told him he was going to spend the summer with his Grandmother.
And that she herself, his mother, would come to visit him a lot, with his father; but they also wouldn’t be seeing him for a while.
And she immediately informed him, before he panicked, that this was a good thing – NOT a bad thing, and certainly not a punishment of any kind.
She reassured him about how much both she and his father loved him (and he already knew that very well, since they had showered him with love and attention since day one).
Then she told him that he was going to stay with his grandmother for the summer because his grandmother had things to teach him that only she, his grandmother, could teach him.
He couldn’t wait to get going.
…
He wasn’t scared or nervous at all as his mother drove him north from their very modest Detroit suburb to the thumb area of Michigan, where his grandmother lived in a trailer park on the edge of a small town.
It was a town that was made up mostly of German American and French American people who almost all claimed Indian blood of some kind, usually Chippewa or Iroquois. All the small merchants of the town were former farmers who served all the many farmers who lived spread way out all around the town. It was, and is, some of the most fertile land not just in the USA, but in the world. The town was (and is) fifteen miles away from Lake Huron, one of the Great Lakes.
His grandmother was what can only be called a kind of German mystic, although no one called her that.
But they all came to her when they needed something.
Not when they needed money, because she didn’t have any of that.
But when they needed consolation, needed healing, needed advice, needed a friend, needed someone to listen to them without passing judgement, they came to her.
His mother dropped him off in front of his grandmother’s trailer with his little suitcase. She didn’t make sure he was safely inside or anything. She just picked him up, hugged him, kissed him, said goodbye, then gently put him down and shoved him toward the door of the trailer, where his grandmother was waiting inside.
And then she drove away.
…
At first he and his grandmother didn’t do anything special.
And he almost never got bored, because whenever he started getting too bored, he retreated, and entered a world that no one else around him could see. They thought he was in a trance, but he knew he was somewhere special.
It was a world of the imagination, filled with wild characters, wonderful animals, amazing adventures, the ability to literally fly wherever and whenever he wanted, and also to turn invisible and roam around, wherever and whenever he wanted to.
And they watched a lot of TV.
And she sometimes told him stories about the family, in her quiet voice, what it was like on the ship coming over from Germany, accidents or good things that had happened to people on the farm, wild and crazy things the farm animals had done, stories about weather and storms and harvests, stories about sickness and healing.
And sometimes she read to him, especially about Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh, and even more often than that, from the Bible, stories about Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark and the animals and the rainbow, Moses, David and Goliath, Joseph and the coat of many colors, Job and the Whirlwind, Jeremiah and the well, Jonah and the whale, Jesus and his mother, Mary, and the adventures of Paul while he was spreading the Gospel, like Johnny Appleseed in America, who she also told him all about, many times. There was only one picture on the walls of the trailer, and it was a picture of Jesus’ face. He wasn’t being crucified in the picture. In the picture, he was quietly smiling upward with mysterious eyes and a weird kind of halo light falling down behind his head onto his shoulders out of the clear blue sky.
And then one day they started planting things.
Some of the things were flowers, and other things were other, small, green plants.
And she showed him how to plant, how to dig in the soil, how to treat the plants tenderly, how to place them where they now belonged, how to put the dirt back on top, how to pack it all down snugly, but not too snugly, how to water the earth.
And they planted things all in and around the trailer park on the edge of the town.
Then one day when he was sitting on the couch looking at a Bible picture book with all the grown men with their long hair and beards, and the beautiful women in their flowing robes with their flowing, long, beautiful hair, he smelled something wonderful. It was a loaf of bread she was baking.
A little later she showed him the loaf of bread under a kitchen towel. His mouth watered and it looked wonderful.
She told him they needed to go take the bread to a man she wanted him to meet.
…
She drove slowly, cautiously, patiently, calmly, and fearlessly.
She had strong, gnarled hands, a simple bracelet on one wrist, and her long, graying, pretty hair was pulled back with a simple blue ribbon around it.
They drove for a long time.
They didn’t talk, and they were completely comfortable around one another not talking.
They both enjoyed just going, the wheels flying over the road, the farm fields all around them always with trees in the distance.
The man they were going to meet was called Old Joe.
That wasn’t his name, but it was what they called him.
Old Joe was a local legend.
He was such a local legend that stories about him had appeared in the local newspaper a few times, and even on the local TV news station one time.
He lived way out in the middle of nowhere, alone, in a shack, in the middle of a huge, vast field with trees and a river in the distance, and a few huge trees that loomed over and sheltered his shack with their leaf-filled arms.
Except he didn’t live alone.
As the boy’s grandmother pulled the car over to the side of the road by the field where the shack was way over there, she pointed, and he saw that there was a whole, huge pack of gigantic dogs lounging around on the ground around the shack.
She told him that there were at least twelve dogs.
And then he saw the goats.
The little goats were all leaping and jumping and playing and shivering with joy in the tall grass of the field. They were bumping into each other and munching and chomping on grass and little scrub trees in the field. A goat shot away from the rest of them and one of the dogs leapt up and shot after the goat and circled around it, bringing it back, and they looked like they were playing a game on the way back.
His grandmother and himself got out of the car, and started walking across the field toward the shack and the dogs and the goats on a little trail. They held hands as they went and his grandmother held the loaf of bread under her other arm, wrapped in the towel.
The dogs all came over in a pack wagging their huge tails and greeting them. The goats kept to themselves but seemed to start jumping around even more, almost like they were excited by the visitors.
But Old Joe was nowhere around.
They sat down in a couple of old, broken-down chairs that were sitting outside the shack and they waited for him in the warm sunlight as they petted the shaggy dogs and talked to the shaggy, friendly, wagging-tail dogs, and laughed and waved at the goats, some of whom started approaching them and looking at them with curious eyes before bounding away again.
And before very long they saw a man approaching them across the field from the direction of the river.
He walked slowly and steadily and when he was about half way toward where they were he raised his hand and waved at them one simple time.
When the man got to where they were, the boy was shocked, and almost terrified for a few seconds, but then just fascinated.
Old Joe wore a beat-up old black hat that came down very low almost covering his eyes. His eyes beneath the brim of the hat were the darkest, most intense eyes the boy had ever seen. The man’s nose was large and he had a gigantic mustache covering his mouth and a huge, dark, graying, tangled beard that came down to the middle of his chest. He wore a suit of old, black, tattered clothes that was dusty and filled with patches. He had old, battered boots on his feet.
And he never said a word, not even hello.
He just came over to the boy’s grandmother who handed him the loaf of bread. As Old Joe went over to take the bread into the shack, a bird swooped down out of one of the trees over the shack and landed on his shoulder. It rode his shoulder into the shack, and when Old Joe came back out of the shack, the bird flew back up into the tree again and landed in the leafy green branches.
Old Joe pulled over another old, broken-down chair from over behind the shack, and then he sat down right next to the boy. Old Joe leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and just sat there, very close to the boy, while his grandmother continued to pet the dogs and talk to them. Old Joe never said a word. Not one word.
Pretty soon the boy’s grandmother and Old Joe just looked at each other. They both had tiny, small smiles in and around their eyes. No one ever said a word.
Then the boy’s grandmother said it was time to get going. Old Joe just sat there, elbows on knees. The dogs surrounded him, like they were protecting him.
The boy and his grandmother held hands again as they walked back to the car on the little trail through the beautiful, glowing green field that was now popping with harmless grasshoppers hopping all around them.
As they drove away, she told him that Old Joe was her brother; his great-uncle.
…
There was one more thing from that summer that the boy would never forget.
He didn’t remember his grandfather, who’d died right before (right before) he was born.
She told him that his grandfather visited her almost every night (but not every night), just for a few moments.
She would know when he was about to appear because she could suddenly feel it; and then he would sit gently on the other side of her bed, the bed they had shared together, only for a few, dreamlike moments that only seemed half-real.
And he came to tell her that, though it was hard to believe, everything was (even when it wasn’t) okay: now, yesterday, tomorrow, forever, and always.
“Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing…” – Jack London, The Call of the Wild
I realized recently how much I love going outside when I couldn’t go outside.
I couldn’t go outside because I live in Chicagoland, and the other day we had, by far, the worst air quality in the world. The AQI was at nine hundred million billion zillion or some such number.
The air was truly toxic and as soon as you stepped outside, as soon as you stepped outside, you knew it.
It was like a yellow and grayish toxic fog of smudge filling the air everywhere that made your lungs burn. The dogs, too, started coughing. You literally could not stay outside unless wearing a mask, and last time I checked, dogs can’t wear masks, thus, you had to take them out quickly to do their business (if you have dog/s) and then right back inside.
It was wildfires from Canada, hundreds of miles away, that were causing this dystopian, toxic situation.
The smoke blew down from there to here, mixed with the city air and the 105-degree F “real feel” temperature, and created the toxic air.
Even the professional baseball games were canceled. All the Lake Michigan beaches (28 straight miles of free public beaches in the city of Chicago alone) were closed.
I am not a person who needs a mountaintop, a seashore, or a desert on a daily basis, although I have been known to travel to those kinds of places frequently in the past, and I go down to visit Lake Michigan pretty frequently. (Lake Michigan is 307 miles long and 118 miles wide at its widest, with a maximum depth of over 900 feet: i.e., an inland sea, connected to four other inland seas and forming the Earth’s largest fresh water system, or 20% of the world’s surface fresh water. There will be a lot of people trying to move to this area by the end of the century.)
But all I need on a daily basis is some trees (or even one tree), some flowers, some grass (or snow in winter), a few parks, or the local, humble forest preserves, which look modest and are actually filled to overflowing with such creatures as: frogs, toads, snakes, turtles, bees, beetles, butterflies, dragonflies, praying mantises, other insects, hawks, herons, ducks, geese, song birds, other birds, deer, coyotes, raccoons, opossums, squirrels, skunks, rabbits, river otters, muskrats, and even some beavers. And even the fish in the river must’ve been coughing during the latest Toxic-Sludge-Air Event. (Hemingway roamed this area as a teenager and John Wayne Gacy dumped bodies into this river 25 miles upstream which, to me, shows the best and the worst of humanity all coming together at the river.)
And when you can’t go outside, you start to get cabin fever. (Or: when I can’t go outside, I start to get cabin fever.)
Cabin fever usually denotes not being able to go outside because it’s too cold and there’s too much wind and snow; but now it also means not being able to go outside because when you do, it makes your eyes and your lungs burn, your hair and clothes smell like smoke, your healthy adult dogs cough, and the fact that it’s hard to breathe out there starts giving you the fantods (and the heebie-jeebies) because there’s an onslaught of toxic particles infesting your lungs and eyes – literally, seriously; like something out of an H.P. Lovecraft horror story (not exaggerating here) and that self-admitted weird guy could really make up some creepy stuff. Weird Tales, indeed.
If you start feeling like you’re in the middle of an H.P. Lovecraft short story and it’s real life, do something!
I suggest putting your mind above it all, like Jesus on the cross (even though there’s also a time to shout out, “Why have you forsaken me!?”).
Sitting Bull used to sit down in the middle of bullets whizzing all around his head, pack his pipe calmly, and sit there smoking his pipe, calmly, while all the bullets continued whizzing around his head.
No one knows why, but all the bullets missed, all of the times, except once when he was younger, and at the end.
And I realized that when I can’t go outside, I start to go insane.
Then we had a Noah’s Ark and the Rainbow moment here.
I woke up today and the sky was blue and clear, and the air was okay again, just like that: and the temperature was perfect enough at a “real feel” of just 90 degrees F.
When I was a little kid, about fifty years ago (I’m 59 now), 90 degrees F was VERY HOT and very rare.
Now it’s normal for a midsummer day here in the middle of the American Midwest in the middle of North America. Just like tornadoes and floods are much more common here in Illinois now, and in the wintertime we sometimes get a thing called “thundersnow” (thunder storms and snow simultaneously) which is a thing that did not even exist around here at all when I was a kid. The first time I saw it I was so flabbergasted and amazed that I felt like Moses on a mountaintop being shown the Burning Bush almost.
And I still love, as do my dogs, going outside.
Crucial Dog Notes: I have the dogs for a literal multitude of reasons, one of them being that I don’t get along with the vast majority of herd humanity very well on a face-to-face basis most of the time because they give me the fantods and the heebie-jeebies (the people I do get along with I get along with fine, and very well, usually) which is why I always appear to be running away from people or hiding and lurking behind doors, like Emily Dickinson; or faithfully wearing my sunglasses, like Lightnin’ Hopkins or Jeffrey Lebowski; and another of those huge, crucial reasons is that we all love going outside together so much.
END NOTE: The wildfire smoke is back today (but not as bad).
“The Dream Songs have given me more pleasure than any other poems I have ever read.” – Nick Cave
The American poet John Berryman (1914 – 1972), author of The Dream Songs, once famously said that he wished to be given cancer because it would test him.
In the context of the full quotation, one can tell that he was probably being metaphorical and even ironic.
But he was also not kidding. Because that’s the kind of guy he was.
Berryman, who was a severe, chain-smoking alcoholic with a bad case of Bipolar Disorder (known as Manic Depression while he lived), was a badass.
Too many people in our global society today, as in far, far, far too many millions or even billions of people, are far too soft. They are far too soft, too enormously large, too enormously corpulent, gigantic, obese, overflowing, slow, flaccid, slow-moving, slow-thinking, spreading, steady, useless, entitled people.
If they were all attacked by a single samurai warrior they would be toast.
Not all heavy, or even enormously fat, people are lazy, despite all the stereotyping that goes on. John Belushi, John Candy, Chris Farley, Harold Bloom, Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, Orson Welles, Madame Blavatsky, Shakespeare’s Falstaff, all were or became enormously fat folks.
And they had energy; they had life; they had spark; they had liveliness; they had chutzpa; they had attitude; they possessed what one needs to be and become (a process that never stops) who one is.
But too many enormously overweight people have let themselves go, are addicted to poison food and sugary beverages, and they don’t move enough, and what’s more, they don’t want to move – ever. Or barely.
John Berryman leapt to his death from a bridge over the Mississippi River in Minnesota at the age of 57 years. He was massively, manically depressed, totally intoxicated, utterly drunk, woefully strung out, completely burned out, and totally done when he did so.
Hart Crane, the American poet (born on the SAME DAY as Hemingway, July 21, 1899, exactly one-hundred-and-twenty-seven years and two days ago from today) leapt from a ship into the Gulf of Mexico at the age of thirty-two and was never heard from again.
Right before he did so, he happily shouted out to a bunch of travelers, “Goodbye everybody!” They all knew who he was and some of them weren’t even surprised.
He too, at the time of his death, was manically depressed, intoxicated, drunk, strung out, burned out, and done. He went out with a bang, not a whimper – like Berryman, Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Hunter S. Thompson, Vincent Van Gogh, Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell, Anthony Bourdain, and many other artists, near-artists, and sensitive souls in the world’s history. Having been suicidal myself in the past, I know it’s almost always what should really be called a kind of accident. (And I believe that God catches these people when they fall for the final time, NOT sends them to hell.)
Berryman’s famous magnum opus The Dream Songs helped establish and create what was and is called “confessional poetry,” which is both a good and a bad name for what it tries to describe.
Berryman’s book is oftentimes awfully overwritten. Frequently, one can tell that Berryman was, without doubt, blasted out of his mind when he wrote this stuff, like William Faulkner when William Faulkner wrote much of his (later) stuff. Gabriel Garcia Marquez once pointed out (from personal experience) that it was really good to write while you were drinking because it freed the mind and inspired the writer – but only up to a certain point. Once a person is too blasted on anything (whether it be benzos, weed, booze, cocaine, all of the above, or whatever), the writing is sure to suffer, and sometimes it will take a dive straight into the toilet, depending on how blasted the writer is.
Sometimes, when Berryman wrote, he was far too blasted, on booze and pills; and it’s obvious.
But the highly flawed Dream Songs is still a landmark in twentieth century American poetry. It’s one of those often-unreadable books that everyone should have on a shelf. See Dream Song #107 for a wonderful poem about a drunk writer’s encounter with the wonderful animal called the raccoon, which deeply characterizes not just the raccoons but the writer.
And Berryman (though he could very, very often be seen just lying around, at least half the time) was not a lazy, soft, snarky, sarcastic, useless, entitled person.
He was a badass!
Crucial End NOTE: The term “badass,” like the word “cool,” both originated in their current form/s within the African American jazz culture of the 1940s. Those folks were badass/es; and they were totally cool.
John Berryman, like Hart Crane before him, was hugely influenced by jazz and blues. Berryman’s book The Dream Songs could not, and would not, have been written without his love of jazz and blues, which inspired the form/s, the spirit/s, and the meaning/s of his poems, as he himself so often admitted and said, and preached and talked about.
My psychiatrist (who is employed at a very well-known and well-respected hospital and medical establishment in the city of Chicago) calls the time we are living in right now The Psychedelic Renaissance.
He calls this time that name because of all the research that is currently being done on what are known as “Magic Mushrooms” on the street. Magic Mushies, or psilocybin, are being researched right now as an effective treatment for a wide array of modern issues, including, but not limited to: treatment-resistant depression; Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder; adult ADHD; and Substance Use Disorder.
To those not in the know, it may sound ironic, and even ridiculous, to give someone who has been addicted to alcohol or opioids Magic Mushrooms instead; but, trust me, the difference between these substances is profound, and one important name for this kind of treatment is: “HARM REDUCTION.” I.e., taking a few Magic Mushes now and then might be beneficial, and is not deadly in the way a full-blown addiction to alcohol and/or opioids is deadly.
HOWEVER: lest anyone think that Magic Mushrooms are perfectly harmless and you can take as much as you want whenever you want, I offer a few examples (taken straight from life, and experience) to make you think again.
If you take too many Magic Mushes all at once, accidentally or on purpose, you can really, really get yourself into some big trouble. Number one, it raises your heart rate and can trigger strokes or heart attacks.
Number two: it can make you paranoid. It can make you very, very, very, very paranoid. It can make you so paranoid, if the dose is large enough, that you become, temporarily, psychotic, which means, totally out of touch with reality.
Taken every day in large doses over, say, a two- or three- or four-week period, a person can slowly, steadily start to become separated from “reality” in a very, very serious way, as in believing you are being watched by the police when you are not being watched by the police, or thinking that your neighbor is out to get ya.
(I am not saying I know these things from personal experience; but I know these things from personal experience.)
Magic Mushrooms have their street terminology, like all drugs. One term is: “hero dose.” It means taking a massive dose and going on a long, strange journey, or trip. Another term is: “micro dose.” It means taking a small, controlled dose, kind of like having a single cup of coffee instead of nine or ten cups of coffee, or a few puffs on a cigarette instead of the whole pack. A third term is really beautiful: “afterglow.” This is what happens when the hero dose or the micro dose starts wearing off, but is still “there.” This phase of the experience is, very often, the very best phase of all. And sometimes it lasts for days (on and off). Literally.
I have seen a grown man sitting on a couch weeping like a little baby and asking the people around him to call his mother because he “wanted his mommy,” even though mommy had been dead for twenty years. This man was not me (I only witnessed this) but damn and wow, did it make an impression.
I have also seen a teenager hiding her head in a bucket for over six hours while believing that “THEY” were at the front door and about to “get her,” because she took a massive “hero dose” accidentally and then freaked out so bad she literally went insane for a while.
Again, it wasn’t me that happened to but I witnessed it, up close and personal, and damn and wow, did it make an impression.
Magic Mushrooms are A DRUG. They are a much safer drug than ALCOHOL, the most dangerous drug of all, along with crystal meth, fentanyl, cocaine, etc. etc. They are a much safer drug than “the hard stuff.”
But if you think you can take as much as you want without losing your shit, you are wrong.
END NOTE/s: They also affect your balance and coordination and can make you fall down.
Never drive on these things unless you are Paul Newman!
In the good old days, this street had been rowdy, ragged, loud, edgy, marginal. For at least two miles in length, one bar and liquor store and cheap restaurant after another on both sides of the street had sat beside each other inviting in any intrepid soul with a few bucks in their pocket and the desire to get partially drunk or completely drunk. The music here had been raw, Chicago blues bands or punk duos or some combination of blues and punk or imitation-grunge or garage rock moved on over from the garage into the bar. It wasn’t always the greatest music (by far), but it was usually heartfelt and it had soul.
“The good old days” in this context meant the late 1980s, the 1990s, and shading into the very early 2000s. After that a shift started to occur that happened gradually, then suddenly.
Now this street was too clean. The restaurants were too expensive. The dive bars had been replaced by workout centers, hair salons, specialty shops, and boutique stores. The music was utterly perfect and utterly soulless. The people here now were the kind of people who walk at the same pace always, never speeding up and never slowing down. Lots of them were nice enough on the surface but as a group, as a race of humans, they were miserable to be around. And “race of humans” here meant people with enough money to hang around and enjoy this atmosphere. It didn’t matter what color you were any more. All that mattered was whether you had the money.
He didn’t hang out on this street any more, and he even avoided driving down it for the most part, except when he wanted to relive old memories by taking a journey back into the past where he could imagine it the way it used to be and remember. A few of the bars still had the same names, even though they weren’t the same kind of places any more, at all.
It was the Fourth of July weekend in the Year of Our Lord 2018. He was here to visit some old friends, and he’d come over here because he’d been becoming so isolated from “the world” lately that it was starting to scare him a little bit, sometimes, perhaps (or deeply). He hadn’t seen most of these people he was about to see in fifteen or twenty years.
And he couldn’t believe, which literally meant that he could not believe, just what it was he saw.
They all looked so old! Even though they were, most of them, no older than he was!
He quickly realized it wasn’t so much in the gray (or graying) hair, the wrinkles, the extra pounds. After all, he himself had all of those things as well. No, not at all, it wasn’t in the surface details where their age sat. It was more in their eyes, in their postures, in their attitudes. People who’d once seemed like lively carefree souls to him now seemed like closed-off, uptight, unimaginative bores.
And as he sat in the bar with them (there were about seven or eight of them) trying to be social at some level, he quickly realized that these folks, who now had become truly strangers to him, were all dominated and dwarfed by a quadruple threat, which was made up of: the large screen, the small screen, the dollar bill, and the beer mug.
There were five or so men and two or three women, and they were all doing the same things in sequences and orders, almost like metronomes: staring at the baseball game on the large screens that dominated all walls of the squeaky-clean establishment, scrolling on their phones, discussing the low stakes gambling they were all involved in, women too, and slowly, steadily consuming their alcohol.
He wasn’t drinking because he was an alcoholic who couldn’t drink. After a single sip of alcohol in any form, all bets would literally have been off. He would’ve followed that up with two or three more beers in quick succession, then gone straight to the hard liquor. He would’ve drank for days and days until he passed out and later woke up not knowing where he was and with the most frightening hangover that it literally would’ve made him consider putting a bullet in his brain just to end the pain, not because he really wanted to leave here. He’d quit drinking because of the suicidal tendencies it had started to create in him; and other reasons. His brain chemistry had been so warped by the constant alcohol at that point that he couldn’t even write any more. He hadn’t had a drink in seventeen years.
So he wasn’t drinking. And he realized now how drugged they all were. It wasn’t even difficult to be in their presence and not socialize with them, since they were all so obsessed with the double screens, the baseball betting, and the slow, steady consumption of their soul-killing alcohol that you could sit there in their midst and quite easily not even be noticed (almost).
He was just about to bail out, call it good, shake off the depression this had all caused, say, “See you in another twenty years!” (once he’d gotten away from them, that is) and go do something else when he saw HER.
He didn’t know who she was and he knew he’d never met her before because he would’ve remembered for sure.
She didn’t look old like the rest of them.
She had the same wrinkles and the same extra pounds (except quite a bit less so of both perhaps).
She was a blonde, what used to be called a bleach blonde. She looked, almost, like Marilyn M. if Marilyn M. had grown up to be fifty or so years old. She smiled like M.M.
She had a lively walk like M.M.
Her eyes were ALIVE like M.M.’s.
They sparkled with HUMOR like M.M.’s.
She looked around her like she knew what was going on but also didn’t care – like M.M. She had a rebel soul like M.M. (or so he imagined).
And she was lost and vulnerable like M.M., too (again, or so he was imagining).
And she walked right up to him, asked him what his name was, and sat down right next to him! And when he found out that her name was Marilee, his belief that there are no coincidences was reinforced again for the trillionth time (he was a trillionaire in his belief that there are no coincidences).
It turned out that she was the cousin of one of the beer-guzzling sports drones.
And he discovered rather quickly that it was difficult to strike up an interesting conversation with a stranger in this stultifying atmosphere: this clean, safe, comforting (to them), conforming atmosphere. (He realized that these were the kind of peeps who would’ve been hanging out in the Roman Colosseum back in the day.)
But she kept glancing at him from the corners of her long, lovely, long-lashed, sleepy-wide-awake, dark green eyes with blue eye shadow on.
She smelled like a beautiful dream and looked like a beauty queen.
He hadn’t “been with anyone” in years, both on purpose and not on purpose.
Just sitting next to her basically lifted him up into the clouds – in a very good way.
It made him not care at all about the lives of all these soulless bores. Let them rot in their own open coffins for all he cared. What did he care? He didn’t care!
There was still someone like this, like her, in the world!
He looked at her again.
She was already looking straight back at him.
…
But there were some things he needed to go take care of. He was, after all, the kind of person who frequently had “things he needed to go take care of.” Even the few people who knew him best didn’t know what those things were most of the time. They laughed at him a lot, and thought he was an enigma even more so. He frequently said to them, “I have some things I need to go take care of.”
“What things do you need to go take care of!?” they would shout at him.
But he didn’t like explaining himself.
He understood why Leonardo da Vinci wrote backwards so no one could read his writings; and why Vincent Van Gogh ended up spending most of his time alone in the fields, sometimes even sleeping there. (VVG was a much happier man than they portray him as in all the movies; although he definitely had his down days as well.)
And today, alas, he really did have some things he needed to go take care of.
The first thing was his sixteen-year-old twin daughters, who’d suddenly phoned him out of the blue with a minor emergency while he was sitting there next to his new Marilyn Monroe friend wondering how to strike up a conversation with her in this stultifying environment.
His kids’ friends’ baby was sick (both of the parents were eighteen) and nobody had any money and they needed him to give them a ride to Urgent Care.
He’d also decided that he couldn’t go through this totally “sober.” It turned out that she was drinking quite a bit faster and quite a bit more than the rest of the party, not to mention stepping outside to have a quick ciggie pretty frequently. She wasn’t drinking like a full-blown alkie (like him), at least so far, but definitely like an expert boozer. He would need some “medications” if he were going to pull this off right.
That fact meant that he needed to make a little trip to go see a friend he had.
He’d already heard them all saying that they would be here for a while, that they would maybe move to another bar, but they were definitely planning on staying on this street tonight for the duration, because it was a holiday weekend, because it was summer, and because some of them hadn’t seen each other in a while, etc.
He even asked her if she was planning on hanging out for a while.
He told her that he had a couple of things he needed to go take care of.
She stared at him with her bright, lively, intelligent, knowing, a-little-buzzed, green eyes and he could tell she was almost about to ask him what things he needed to go take care of. Next, he could also tell that she wouldn’t ask him, since they’d just met. A good sign!
He figured he could go take care of both the things he needed to take care of within ninety minutes or so and get right back here.
And he told her so.
She looked straight at him and said, “Never fear. I’ll be here when you get back, sir.”
…
He was not a person who always walked at the exact same pace, never slowing down, and never speeding up. Instead, he was a person who changed his pace all the time, sometimes walking super-slowly and stopping to smell every single figurative rose he happened upon, other times walking so fast he looked like he was in a joyful hurry to get somewhere even though he wasn’t going anywhere special, he was just going.
He walked super-fast to his small car, unlocked her, hopped in, called his friend with the “medications” to make sure he’d be there in about an hour, and took off to pick up his kids, their friends, and the baby.
Just as he was rounding his first corner off the street that he had hated before and was now planning on returning to soon (as soon as he finished the two crucial missions he was on) because maybe after all it wasn’t so bad if she was here, a woman who was doing something on her phone pulled her car out in front of a woman who was driving her car down the street like a maniac. The maniac driver slammed on the brakes, and leapt out of her car with her purse, as the woman who’d pulled out in front of her stuck her hand out the window and gave her antagonist the middle finger. The woman flipping the bird was unable to move her car forward because of the traffic, and the woman with the purse now pulled a pistol out of the purse, ran up to the other woman’s car window, and stuck the pistol in her face. The terrified driver turned her face away then ducked down into the car, and the woman with the pistol screamed, “Stay out of my way you stupid fucking Mexican bitch!” Then she hit the top of the car with her pistol butt and got back into her own vehicle, traffic started moving again and everybody drove away.
The incident would come back on him later in a nightmare, but right now he was in too much of a hurry to sit for long with the witnessing of this minor trauma. His two kids and their two friends and their baby were waiting for him. The parents of the baby were also sick and within three or four days both himself and his two kids would all come down with the same brutal, wicked, nasty, ten-or-eleven-day-long summertime cold, but for now he drove the kids to Urgent Care, made sure everything was OK as they signed in at the clinic, made sure a nurse looked at the baby before he left to make sure nothing was an emergency, handed the kids half the money he had in his pocket, and darted out the door back into his car.
As he was driving across town to go meet the man he planned on getting the “medications” from, he played the song “Soul” by Van Morrison over and over again, from Van’s great album Keep It Simple (Van’s thirty-third album released in 2008), and he (the main character of this story), quite literally, calmly wept behind his sunglasses as he was driving. He wept because the song was so beautiful and for no other reason. He played the song LOUD over and over before he switched to the title track and calmly wept along with that too, behind his dark glasses. It was a happy weeping, a cathartic weeping, a joyful weeping, a crying for beauty, and a tear-stained face because beauty still existed, very much so, in the world, in this world.
Himself and his brother called the man he was going to meet Alley Man behind his back because the alley was where the man hung out, and they called him the name he called himself to his face, even though they knew his real name was Mohammed.
As the main character of this story approached Alley Man who was standing there in the alley he instantly knew something was wrong because he, Alley Man, had lost about fifty pounds since the last time the main character had seen him, which hadn’t been that long ago.
The two of them stepped into Alley Man’s garage to make the transaction and then the main character of this very true tale asked Alley Man how he was doing.
Alley Man, who was about the same age as the main character, raised his shirt and showed the main character a huge, massive, red, bulging, sore-looking, worm-like-looking bright scar across the middle of his chest in the shape of a cross.
After a heart attack recently, Alley Man had had triple bypass surgery to save his life, and while they were in there, they discovered the malignant tumor on his lung, which they also removed while they were in there (taking half a lung with it), so that the surgery lasted all day and on into the evening.
Alley Man removed the lit cigarette from his mouth and said nothing could kill him, praise God.
They high-fived and fist-bumped each other and the main character told Alley Man to take care of himself.
As he was almost about to get back into his car, the main character ran into Alley Man’s brother-in-law, who was a man who was four and a half feet tall and had one eye.
This man’s wife was always hiding his shoes so he wouldn’t go roaming around the alleys all day and all night, but it never stopped him.
The man with one eye was wearing ragged pants, a ragged shirt, and nothing but ragged socks on his feet because his wife had hidden his shoes again. He came up to the main character, holding a beer can in one hand and an unlit cigarette stub in the other. He had another cig’ behind his ear.
He asked the main character if he had any spare change. The main character handed him a dollar. The man with one eye asked him did he have any more, brother. The main character shook his head no, gently, and told the man whose name he didn’t remember to take care of himself. The one-eyed man looked at him closely, looked at him some more, then wandered away in his ragged socks sipping from his beer can.
Alley Man had said they often found his brother-in-law sleeping in the alley. He was a street person with a place to lay his head if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to (except sometimes). God knows what had made him that way and maybe it was God himself; or herself; or itself.
In the car, the main character took about a third of the “medications” he’d purchased from Alley Man. As he sat there in a traffic jam listening to Van Morrison (the song “Behind the Ritual,” from Keep It Simple, over and over again) he felt the warm, mild, steady, liquid, consoling, BUZZING, humming, reassuring glow from the medicine seeping into his brain, his heart, and his whole system, changing everything for the better, at least for now.
He knew the “medications” would last for at least a few hours and he knew the afterglow from the “medications” would last for at least a few hours more beyond that and he knew he had more when that ran out. It was good enough for now, and now, he reminded himself, is what matters.
But the traffic jam was a bad one and it held him up for a long, long time. By the time he returned to the street that gives its generic name to the title of this story, all the beer-screen-sports-and-dollar drones were still in their usual positions, exactly as if they hadn’t moved one iota in all that time. But SHE (Marilee) was gone.
Instead of ninety minutes his little trip had taken him two and a half hours, probably even closer to three, because of weekend holiday traffic and because he’d pulled over at one point to sit and enjoy the buzz of the “medications” while meditating a little bit.
He asked some folks from the group if they knew where she’d gone and they told him she was still somewhere on this street probably – most likely somewhere in another bar. Then they quickly turned away, back to their screens and beer mugs, offering no more information.
He looked for her all up and down the street, peering into all the establishments, entering some, just glancing into others.
Just as he was about to give up and was thinking about going back to ask someone in the herd whether he could get her phone number perhaps (and he was stressing very much about that because of his intense social anxiety), he looked up and she was standing there on the formerly attractively ragged and now too-clean street corner staring at him.
She ran to him and almost collapsed into his arms.
By now, the sun was going down, and it threw a warm, beautiful, sunset glow over the whole summertime street. She smelled better than anything ever and her warm, soft, collapsing body (along with the “medications” he was on) literally transported him immediately unto another world – a better one.
She asked him if he had a car and they went to his car and she got into the back seat so he got into the back seat beside her, after rolling the windows down so they could feel the wonderful summer eve coming in.
She verbally unloaded on him then, as if they’d known each other since childhood.
She told him all about her accident last year when she’d shattered her ankle in a bicycle-riding accident, how long it had taken to heal, how she hadn’t been able to work during that time, etc. etc. etc.
She told him about her new life in Florida (his heart had sunk more than a little when she’d told him she lived in Orlando, 1,200 miles away from where they were right now in Chicago, but he filed that info away to deal with later and kept on listening) and how hard it had been, how things had not exactly gone as planned down there so far, and that was an understatement, etc. etc. etc.
She told him about her son, who was in his twenties and was addicted to opioids (no comment).
Her son lived in an apartment above a bar on “the street” and that was where she was staying while she was in town.
Then they started making out, out of the blue, there in the back seat of the car with the windows open.
They held hands, and kissed, and hugged (nothing else) in the back seat of the car as if they were teenagers. It was dreamy, beautiful, wonderful, warm, close, intimate, intimidating, great, awesome, amazing, totally unbelievably personal and proof that life was still okay despite the fact that this society itself had landed in the toilet a long time ago and would soon be flushing itself away into who knew what, for sure.
She said she had to go now and asked if he’d walk her over to her son’s apartment and asked if he’d meet for lunch tomorrow at one PM at a restaurant on the street. Yes! to both.
As he was walking alone back to his car after dropping her off, a guy from the sports-drone crowd called his name and hustled over to him on the sidewalk. He asked the main character to hold out his hand and when the main character did so to humor the man, the man placed a wad of cash in his palm. And he told the main character, grinning, that it was three hundred dollars. Someone had placed a bet in his name, and they were all honest after all, so congratulations!
He thanked the fellow heartily (the main character was on a very un-fixed income for a wide variety of reasons that shan’t be gone into now), drove over to where his kids lived with their mother, and gave them the money.
The next day, she didn’t show up at the restaurant for lunch.
He waited at the restaurant, and in the vicinity of the restaurant on the street, for at least three hours (and probably more). While waiting, he texted her exactly three times (they’d exchanged phone numbers the night before).
SILENCIO.
He texted her (very briefly) exactly once a day for the next three days in a row, then quit.
A week or so later, he couldn’t help himself, and he looked her up on the internet, just to make sure she wasn’t dead.
She’d very recently (within the last twenty-four hours) posted a picture of herself sitting on Daytona Beach snuggling arm-in-arm with another guy. They were both in their bathing suits and they both had huge, frozen smiles on their faces (almost like grimaces) and were showing plenty of perfectly whitened teeth for the camera.
He popped a few more pills (cold medications and Alley Man refills) and put on the Van Morrison song “And the Healing Has Begun” from the album Into the Music (1979); and turned it up LOUD:
Saragun Springs 