On Not Noticing what is to be Noticed

The current climate in Minnesota is not so much characterized by radical change but by the fact that there seems to be simply more weather than there was before.  This means that if it is cold, the cold will last longer and seems more relentless than before.   Similarly, a windy day will be windier and the gale will last longer than in previous years.  When it’s hot, the heat lingers and lingers and lingers.

Since the Super Bowl, it’s been cold – frigid with day-time temperatures reaching 3 to 5 above zero and, then, plunging to ten below at night.  My heating bills have been calamitous.  About every forty hours, light snow falls – only about an inch at a time – but it keeps everything dusted with fresh snow and hides some of the insults to the landscape made by tires and salt and dogs and cats – the ubiquitous filthy slush huddled in gutters.  After midnight, when I get up to go to the toilet, I look out my bedroom window and across my neighbor’s driveway and lawn to an intersection lit by a street lamp.  The street lamp’s rays are marigold-colored and so the intersection shows desert-yellow, with windrows of snow drifting over icy tracks – it’s like looking out over a desert in Arizona, a featureless plain drifted with sand and dust.  No one has plowed the residential streets for some time and they look abandoned to the cruel piles of snow and the rugged knobs of ice that hurt my dog’s feet when I take her for a walk. 

The other day, at an intersection, I noticed that the Tahoe ahead of me had a vanity license plate that read FIRE.  This seemed odd to me.  It wasn’t a government license plate, but a vanity State plate.  Who would want a license like that.  I know that Dr. Bob Schroeder, a forensic fire cause and origin investigator in Anoka, has a license that says FIREDOG – this is also the name of this business enterprise, the corporation under which he provides his consulting and cause and origin work.  But simply “FIRE”?  I wondered if this were Dan Wilson’s license – the fire chief for the Austin firefighting force, now retired.  (I represented him for years and he was very proud to be a fire chief and, I think, wouldn’t have hesitated to buy a plate for his own vehicle like this had it been made available to him.  Periodically, Chief Dan would call on me to discipline or fire one of his employees, a difficult task because the fire fighters were all governed by a Union contract and are public employees with a constitutionally protected right to continued employment as well.  He was tough but fair and, generally, I thought the firings that he proposed were well-warranted – a guy pocketing money that was supposed to be used for continuing education and, of course, trouble in the bunk-house, someone orchestrating an orgy up there.  I last saw him with his in-laws at Casa Zamorra in Albert Lea chowing down on enchiladas and no longer as fit as I remembered him, growing a little paunch on the beer that he had been consuming with a bit too much exuberance.)  FIRE led me on through the windy dark and, in fact, I followed the white vehicle for a few blocks beyond the turn-off to my house – down by the Catholic cemetery after the bridge on the river, FIRE was willing to speed where I was not, and, so, he eluded me.  I thought of the poem by William Carlos Williams “The Great Figure” in which the poet sees a number 5 on a fire truck proceeding through the dark city.  FIRE was in a hurry to get where he was going – the white SUV hustling ahead of me on the icy streets.

Usually I’m pretty observant of the world around me.  But I often mistake the relationship that the world poses to me for something other that what it is.  Then, perhaps, a year later, or, in some instances, decades later, the meaning of an encounter or series of encounters will suddenly come into focus and I will retroactively realize that experiences that merely bemused me, that I thought irregular and strange, in fact, had a very specific meaning that eluded me at the time.

An example must suffice for many instances.  One summer I drove to New York City.  It was very hot and humid and the subways were like sauna-baths.  I felt intimidated by the hotels in Manhattan and, so, I went back across the George Washington Bridge to Paramus and found a cheerless motel beside the roaring freeway.  I was all alone.  A girlfriend who was supposed to take the trip with me had backed-out at the last moment.  The next morning I found a train station a mile away from the motel and decided that I would use that commuter service to ride downtown each day.   The train line ended at a terminal associated with the Port Authority.  A friend of mine set me up with a woman who lived in the East Village.  In those days, the East Village was pretty raw and, as I waited for her at the appointed street corner, on the pavement in front of the Gem Spa, at least, four dudes approached me to see if I wanted to buy marijuana from them.  The girl showed up very late, but (I give her credit) she did appear.  We went to a concert in a loft in Soho.  She met some friends and I then took the subway back to 42nd Street and the Port Authority Bus Station and terminal where a late train would take me to Paramus.  It was about 1:30 am and I was walking along a lonely stretch of pavement a little to the west of Times Square.  (This was around 1981, I think, long before that part of the city was gentrified.)
A bum came up to me holding a broken bottle. It looked like a vodka bottle and the man was gripping the bottle by its neck – the lower half of the bottle was broken and formed a sharp-edged scoop.  The man waved the bottle at me and said something.  “I didn’t hear you,” I said.  “It’s a dangerous neighborhood,” he said.  “It looks okay to me,” I replied.  He said: “You need a weapon to be safe.”  “I don’t need a weapon,” I said.  “I’m only going up there –“ I pointed a block ahead of me to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, brightly lit with a few beggars sitting on the curb in front of the place where cabs were continuously coming and going.  “I can sell you the knife,” the bum said.  He glared at me with red eyes.  “Why do I need a knife?” I asked him.  “It’s a rough neighborhood,” he repeated, pushing the vodka bottle toward my belly.  “It looks okay to me,” I said.   I pointed up at the street lamp –“It’s well lit,” I said.  I wanted to be polite and did not want to be the typical censorious “out-of-towner” fearful about all aspects of the big city.  “But you need a weapon,” he said.  “I’m already there,” I said, pointing to the big building and the huge parking ramp a block away.  I turned to walk away.  “Come on, man,” the guy said.  “Okay, okay,” I told him.  “I think I have a dollar.”  I looked for a dollar in my wallet.  The guy leaned close and I could smell his alcohol-infused breath.  “You need to buy the knife,” he said.  “Here’s a dollar,” I reached out, careful not to cut myself on the blade that he was pointing at my belly.  The man looked at me in astonishment.  Then, he took the dollar, stooped to set the bottle on the curb, and staggered off. 

I didn’t realize what was going on during that encounter until about four years later when I told the story to a friend. 

It took me ten years to discover some of the meaning of my first great trip to the East Coast.  In High School, I had two friends named David.  I will call them David L– and David P – . 

David L– lived across the street in a house on the highest point of the residential road where we lived.   A great oak tree stood atop a little knoll in front of the big white house.  The little knoll was artificial, shored up by a very neatly constructed retaining wall.  David L– ‘s father was mild-mannered.  He worked tirelessly to keep his yard manicured and I would often see him in the Fall standing under his huge tree, atop the knoll enclosed by the retaining wall, raking leaves.  David L– was very gentle, handsome, and he had freckles.  For some reason, he squinted out at the world from behind slightly tinted sunglasses that he wore day and night.  David L– ‘s twin sister was an accomplished gymnast; she had broad shoulders and was very strong.  To me, she seemed totally opaque, like a beautiful creature from another planet.  His mother was a harridan.  She had a strident voice and seemed to be perpetually offended by something or other.  Mrs. L – gave me the impression of being a wounded Southern debutante, like a character in a play by Tennessee Williams.

David L– was generous to me.  He found me a job working with him at the golf course a half-mile behind his house.  We had to be at work at 7:00 am to mow greens and the two of us walked together through the shadowy meadows and little truncated farm fields, now gone to pasture, to reach the golf course where we worked during the summer and, during Spring and Fall, after school.

David L–‘s good friend was David P –.  David P– came from one of the very old farming families in Eden Prairie, the place where I grew up.  His great grandparents had been pioneers in this region of deep ravines and high gravel moraines where chilly, humid glacial potholes held deep lakes crowned with ice sometimes until the middle of May.  David P–‘s family were truck farmers and, also, had a plantation of raspberries growing along the rocky side of one the slopes on their land.   His family farm, a gaunt old house with a high gable and lean-to mud-room built against one side, occupied a curve in a gravel road that ran through a dense woods.  Several sheds with potting benches stood around a open space where trucks and failed cars, partially cannibalized for parts were rusting.  There was a big old wooden barn made from broad painted slats with a high hay mow.  Some fowl occupied a collapsed chicken coop.  David’s father drove a blade-grader for the City of Eden Prairie and, often, the big yellow vehicle with its angular plow was parked next to a pole-shed in which there were some old John Deere tractors.  The place was out of the way, hidden in a forest that was impenetrable because its margins were always flooded – ghost-white tree trunks stood in the reeking swamp surrounding the woods and there were patches of bog-colored open water and the gravel road that looped off the county highway ran through the marsh, a gravel pier only 18 inches above the murky, sullen-looking swamp.  The gravel road ran down to the swamp past the boiler plant for the State Sanitarium, a complex of buildings that comprised a vast campus of red brick towers and huge multi-winged wards built along the ridge of a moraine, a great quadrangle of Elysium fields between the football field long hospitals that were mostly unoccupied at the time that this story takes place.  (The hospitals had been built as a tuberculosis and polio sanitarium and there had once been 10,000 people confined there but that was in the forties.)  The sanitarium’s boiler plant was a vast pile of brick as well, cavernous and built into a hill covered with huge oak trees.  On the road to David P–‘s house, beyond the swamp, the trees crowded the right-of- way very closely and there were no shoulders and the gravel track was a tunnel through the woods, roadside trees clasping hands, branch to branch overhead.  Then, there was a curve, a sharp turn that caught drunk teenagers motoring this lover’s lane by surprise so that the underbrush was scuffed there and bark abraded from the trees and broken windshield glass lay hidden in the brown and decaying leaf litter and, beyond, there were railroad tracks set on a low dike running through the swampy woods and, then, there were more lakes, invisible from the road and entirely surrounded by trees, indeed, the pillars of drowned trees since the lakes seemed to be expanding, always growing so as to press their still waters deeper and deeper into trackless forest as if to join with the muddy lagoons of the marshland under the Sanitarium ramparts.  We knew that a one-lane driveway went through the swamps to where the sky opened up above a very old camp for the retarded, a group of log cabins with fat chimneys standing on one of the tiny parcels of solid ground in the forest.  (This camp was so old that it was later designated a historic site – I don’t know what has happened to it now.  The last time I went into this area, the sanitarium was gone and its power-plant and the woods had been turned into a residential neighborhood and, even, the lakes seemed somehow to have vanished.) 

There were two farms on the gravel road that dropped down into the swamp from the County Highway, the place where David P–‘s family eked out a living and, then, a larger farm, with a modern dairy barn and a bigger tract of staked raspberries, the place David P–‘s cousins lived, but both farms were surrounded by flooded woods and for this reason had been spared the development in the rest of the suburb, a process converting farms into residential neighborhoods – this terrain was simply too difficult to convert to winding cul-de-sacs spiraling around single-family ramblers.  David P–‘s parents were elderly – his father had yellow whiskers and bad teeth and his mother was a tiny bird-like woman, extremely kind, a doll that smelled of spoiled milk, as I recall.  David was their only child, born in their old age, and he was tall with a stork-like body that was oddly articulated at the hips.  He had very pale cream-colored skin and was quite shy and soft-spoken.  Unlike his cousins, down the road, he wasn’t athletic and didn’t go out for any sports.  Chores on the farm occupied his afternoons.  I believe that he played clarinet, badly, I think, in the band.  Like all the farm kids, he had a big junker car that he drove to and from the High School – he had been driving cars since he was 14 and couldn’t recall a time when he hadn’t driven tractor to help his father with hay-baling in the little meadows hidden in the woods.  He was an inveterate gambler – if there was free time at school, he sat in the cafeteria or study hall or, even, in a corner of the library, playing poker with the other farm kids.  (In those days, half the families in Eden Prairie were indigenous, old pioneer families, and lived on farm and tracts of land that had once been farms but that were hedged-in by suburbs – the rest of us were middle-class suburban people, preppy kids all college-bound, whose fathers worked in white-collar jobs in the Cities or west suburbs.  The farms were vanishing, but there were still many big fields cultivated with vegetables for sale in the City grocery stores, corn as well and soybean growing on acreages next to lonely cold lakes embedded in the swamps).  Sometimes, with David L –, we would go to David P–‘s farm and shoot hoops under the moon and the little yellow yard-light affixed to the barn.  The basketball rim and net were screwed into the side of the barn, under the hay mow and the amber light.  When we played basketball on the packed clay next to the barn, we would hear strange exotic cries coming from the ruins of the chicken coop.  Sometimes, a fat, flightless guinea hen would emerge from the half-fallen wooden coop and strut around the improvised basketball court where we were playing, a hideous-looking beast that stood almost waist-high with a turkey’s wattles and malevolent eye. 

After high school, David L– joined the navy.  He was gone for several years.  I wrote him a few letters since I assumed that he would be lonely.  David L– must have been dyslexic, because although he was bright enough, he couldn’t write coherently to save his soul.  When I received letters from him, he said that was at Majorca, a place where European royalty partied in seaside casinos all night long – he had been caught with marijuana and confined to his vessel for a half-dozen weekends when everyone else had leave to go shoreside and explore the night-life in the resort.  He was unhappy with the service and longed to be discharged.

David P– went to the University of Minnesota, attending classes at the Ag Campus.  He was a brilliant student and worked all the time.  By his third year in college, he had earned enough credits to graduate and, in fact, was writing a Master’s Thesis on different types of tomatoes.  His advisors were stunned by his industry and high intelligence and, so, they recommended that he obtain a Ph.D from an ivy-league college – his work was very fine and academically innovative and, so, he was encouraged to apply to schools with prestigious research programs on the East Coast.  I saw David P– periodically.  He lived at home, as I did, and commuted to the University of Minnesota and, sometimes, when I didn’t have a ride to school, I would hitch a ride with him.  He would park his car at a remote lot midway between the Ag Campus and the State Fair Grounds that had the dairy barns and mink ranches and hog confinement buildings on the campus as its backyard and we would hike up to the Student Union where he would play poker for cash for an hour or so before commencing his studies.  A bus shuttled between the main University campus on the Mississippi river six miles away and the Ag Campus and, so, I would ride the bus to my East Bank classes.  (I was studying English literature and German). 

Ultimately, David P– was offered scholarships at Rutgers in New Jersey and Cornell in upstate New York.  The University of Chicago also offered him a teaching position and admission to its ph.d program in tomato science.  David P– planned to travel to each school, interview there, meet professors and survey the facility’s horticulture programs.  He arranged to undertake these interviews during the Spring break – early March in those days at the University of Minnesota.  David asked me to come along with him and said that it would be an fun road-trip.  I was in my third-year of college, doing well enough myself, and, so, I agreed to travel with him to his interviews with the three schools to which he had been invited.   

David P– had a few obligations at school before we left – I think he met with his faculty adviser before we started for Chicago.  It was a dark day and we drove through rain and sleet across Wisconsin and, then, on the toll way to Chicago.  Neither of us had much money and, so, I recall being surprised at how expensive the tolls were on the Illinois expressway.  The city loomed overhead as we followed 94 toward the skyscrapers in the loop – it was probably about 8 p.m. when we exited on North Avenue.  The traffic had been intimidating on 94, particularly near O’Hare where planes were ceaselessly dipping and bobbing overhead and where the train roared on its rails between the lanes of the freeway. We exited at North and went east over viaducts toward the lake, crossing a wasteland of warehouses and crumbling factories, little dispirited islands of old tenement housing with peeling clapboards located among acres of rust and ruin.  Then, there were people and the intersections were overrun with hoodlums.  The plan was that we would stay at the YMCA on Division Street – in fact, as I discovered, David P–‘s plan in general was to stay at YMCA lodgings as we crossed the country.  After some confusion and a few close-calls on the one-way streets, we found the Division Street YMCA, a big brightly lit building across the street from a fortified police station.  Parking was impossible, but we found a place along a sidewalk next to towering bags of garbage about four blocks away.  We hiked up to the YMCA, went into the lobby, and were promptly told that the place was full and that,  without reservations, we were out of luck.

“Now what?” I said.  David P– shrugged.  We hustled back to the car and found that the back seat passenger side window had been smashed to pieces with an old reddish-brown brick.  The brick was still lying on the seat.  All of our luggage was missing.  This was not much a tragedy for me – I had an old cardboard suitcase tied up with bungee cords containing some toiletries a few shirts and some underpants and, of course, a new set of flannel pajamas so that I wouldn’t be embarrassed by my ratty old Pjs since I expected we would be rooming together.  David P– was more aghast.  His one and only three-piece suit in its suit-bag was missing as were his neatly polished black oxford shoes.  His toiletries and socks and underwear in his own YMCA duffel bag was also gone. 

A theft of this sort is baffling.  It leaves you confused, perplexed, and, for a moment, immobilized.  There were glass shards all over the back seat of the car and the suitcases were gone, but something that is missing is, of course, just missing – it’s an absence not a presence and, so, at first, the loss doesn’t exactly register.  We just stood there gaping.  An icy rain began to fall and the streets now looked palpably darker and more brutal and the stink of the garbage was almost dizzying.  Buses roared by fountaining water on us.  David P– saw a bum wandering down an alleyway about 100 yards away.  He charged off in the direction of the bum, an old black man leaning heavily on a silver aluminum cane.  David shrieked at the man and, then, hurled him against a wall.  The man sputtered and moaned and protested his ignorance.  David knocked him down so that the old man rolled heavily into a puddle.  We heard a hoot in another alley and David set off in that direction and we found another bum, a skeletal junkie sitting on the back stoop of a burned building.  David howled at him and demanded that he tell us where our stuff had gone.  The junkie smirked and David punched him in the face.  Then, we chased down another couple of drifters – David held the brick that had been used to bust open the car and threatened to smash people with it.  There were some more scuffles.  I didn’t think it was prudent for a couple of scrawny white guys to be hunting down African-American drunks in alleyways and pitching them up against walls.  Furthermore, the chases down the wet alleys had confused us.  Panting, we looked up in the sky.  A block away, the blinking light atop the Playboy Tower winked at us.  I found the Hancock building’s silhouette against the blackness and we retraced our steps to the car.  The rain was now puddling in the backseat. 

Indignant, and now soaking wet, we went into the concrete bunker of the police station.  It was just four short blocks down the street.  The thieves had been so aggressive as to break and enter our car only 500 feet from the entrance to the cop shop.  A couple of exhausted looking Black cops took down our names, the license plate, and wrote something on a sheet of paper.  “Your stuff is gone,” the older grey-haired cop said.  “It’s looted, the bags opened up, and traded for something already.  There ain’t no chance of finding the contents of the bags, that’s for sure.  But if you look in the dumpsters you might find your stuff.  No junkie wants second-hand clothes – the suitcase, the bag’s what they’re after.”  We asked the cops if they wanted to photograph David’s car.  “No point to that,” the younger man said, showing us with white teeth and red gums.  “You had the luggage in the back seat?” the older grey-haired man said incredulously.  “That ain’t a good idea,” he said.  “You keep your luggage in the trunk of the car, down where the shit-heads can’t see what you’re carrying.”  The younger cop smacked his lips together. 

We went outside into the sleet.  A few blocks away the sleek stone and metal fin of the Playboy Club hung in the sky.  The light atop the club, by the big shadow image of a bunny, kept winking at us mercilessly. 

We spent another hour ranging the gutters and alleys, sticking our head in noisome dumpsters.  But we didn’t find anything – just rotting garbage, broken bottles, deadly looking construction debris reeking of asbestos fibers, boards of wood all porcupined-up with sharp nails, mounds of rags and decomposing newspapers, dead cats, rats the size of terriers scuttling away in the cold darkness.  It was hopeless.

We went back to the car, drove to a service-station/garage a couple blacks away and, then, used cardboard with duct-tape to seal up the broken window in the back seat.  Near the service station, there was a pile of crumbling masonry with boarded windows called the Viceroy Hotel – a neon sign in the window said Transients Welcome.  We went inside.  The place smelled of gin and burnt coffee with a strong stench of body-odor.  A man was squatting in a cage behind barred glass – rooms were 12 dollars but there was a 20 buck key deposit.  A half-dozen old men were sitting around a single foggy TV in the lobby, a room that was like a cellar in a bombed-out basement.  The old men were all missing appurtenances to their faces or bodies – about half of them had only one eye surviving in the ruin of faces that were also lacking noses and, in one case, lips.  Most of the men were seated in ancient wheelchairs with vinyl seats, sloshing slowly through puddles of urine on the floor.  They had some popcorn but only one set of dentures – and, in fact, only a couple of incisors and a molar hinged together – and so they had to pass the teeth around before they could eat anything.  The elevator smelled of excrement and its moaned and howled like a damned soul as a cable pulled it slowly upward in the ruin of the building.  We were on the 8th floor.  A couple of empty rooms that seemed to have been charred by fire opened away from the corridor, the door fallen flat into the chamber where I could see a bed soaked by water draining through blistered plaster on the ceiling.  Outside a neon light cast a jaundiced yellow glare into the hallway.  Our room was next to a door that someone had repeatedly kicked and pummeled so that the wood was all splintered inward.  Taped to the knob on the door was a little sheet of paper that said: STAY OUT  – KILL ROOM!  We staggered down the hallway, crossing little streamlets of cold water running over the floor boards.  The key didn’t work at first and I accidentally nudged up against the door to the KILL ROOM and, to my horror, the door creaked and opened inward.  The darkness in the KILL ROOM was blacker than the blackest night – pitch-black, stinking darkness.  But something moaned in the KILL ROOM and, then, as we fumbled in panic, a huge wooly head, a head like a bison, bobbed there in the darkness, a shapeless face made up of manifold wounds and two dismal eyes glaring at us like the eyes of a deep sea creature.

We got into our room and tried to lock the door behind us but the door wouldn’t even fully close, let alone lock.  There was a single cot, about three feet wide, a bucket with a Gideon Bible in it, a chair with a broken back and, then, a big window without curtains overlooking the vast and cheerless city.  David P– called his parents and I recall that he began to cry.  I began to cry too, looking down over the black alleyways and miserable intersections where homeless people were squatting in the fume rising from steam tunnels.  We were both soaking wet.  David P– took off his clothes and sat naked except for his underpants on the bed.  The wetness in his fruit-of-loom underpants had made them transparent and so I gazed with dismay at his penis and testicles.  Outside, sirens howled.  We shoved the broken chair against the door.  The neon outside flooded the room with a savage radiance.  Neither of us could sleep.

At dawn, we got up, limped down to the car, and drove back to the freeway.  Somewhere near Gary, Indiana, we found a discount place open and I sat in the car, guarding it from bedraggled African-American zombies who were staggering around the parking plot, while David used a credit card to buy a new suit, some shoes and black socks, and a few toiletries.  I said that I’d wear the same clothes for another couple days.   

We drove and drove.  The wind whistled in the duct-taped back window.  Pennsylvania stretched on forever, an endless series of wooded ridges between long, narrow valleys.  We stopped for gas and to use the toilets and ate chips and candy bars in the car.  There was a toll bridge at the end of the Pennsylvania highway with high bluffs overlooking a big, half-frozen river.  The sun was setting orange and red among the bare trees and the character of the terrain changed – little mountains with transmission towers lining their scuffed tops stood amid suburbs, sluggish rivers, boulevards without medians so that to turn left you had to go right, nasty fast u-turns every couple miles along commercial thoroughfares that stretched out forever: the same procession of bar, diner, commercial storefronts for insurance agencies and financial services, fast food places inaccessible behind frontage drives that we couldn’t figure out how to reach, small motels advertising TV and air conditioning although periodically the sky filled with snowflakes, vast tracts of humble residential housing concealed in the forests sloping up away from the gutter-like valley where we were driving.  Every stop light was congested.  You made left turns on red because of the pressure of traffic:  Cars and trucks everywhere, squirting through interchanges where little dwarf pines were encrusted in freeway sludge, marshes with low, half-flooded islands covered with rusting derricks and big round tanks.  At last, after it was dark, we checked into a little motel with individual cabins scattered across a wooded lot.  Beyond the road, a chemical plant like a skunk lifted its tail and squirted poison into the air and my eyes were burning.  David P– went into the front desk and made the deal while I lounged in the car looking at a map.  He came back and said that the place was almost full, that we got the last cabin, but that there would only be one bed in it for the two of us.  “Whatever,” I said.  The place was tiny and smelled bad and there were dead flies on the window-sill.  It didn’t appear to me that anyone had been in the room for months and, as I watched through the screen window, the parking lot didn’t fill and most of the little steeply gabled cabins remained locked and dark.  I fiddled with the TV but it had rabbit-ears and you had to grip them between your fingers for the fog on the screen to coalesce into images.  In the shower, the water smelled like sulphur. 

Sleep was difficult in the tight bed.  I kept rolling onto David P– and, a couple times when I woke up, sweating, he had an arm thrown over my shoulders.  The next morning, we drove another hour to Rutgers where he had his first interview.  It was cold and clear and the newer buildings, sheathed in grey metal glinted in the morning sunlight – the place was on break and the quadrangles were empty and the residential halls seemed forlorn.  Big lightless Victorian towers rose from some of buildings all pimpled with encrustations of knobs and finials, ornament like spears and javelins thrust up from the roofs.  I walked around for a while, found a modern-looking library and sat there at a table reading a German book, Thomas Mann, that I found on the shelves – it was something about an artist of uncertain sexual orientation.  The day darkened.  I went outside and walked to the edge of the campus where there was a long road with taverns at each intersection and old Federal brownstones leaning over the dirty sidewalks.  On my way back to the parking lot, I saw an open field edged with eyes of targets for archery.

David P– came to the parking lot mid-afternoon.  His interview had gone well.  We ate at a McDonald’s and, then, found a motel in Newark, a place frequented by big-rig truckers.  A canal walled with concrete ran behind the motel.  There was an airport in the distance and lights rose and fell over the runways.  David came from the motel’s front office and said the place was just about full.  He told me that they only one room left with just a double bed for the two of us.  “Whatever,” I said.

I was getting used to sleeping with David P–.  I drifted off and slept without dreaming.  Our plan was to visit New York City the next day.  I woke to the freeway roaring outside and the buzz of a helicopter scooting between high rises on the other side of the canal.  We drove toward the big city and saw the range of skyscrapers stretched out for miles along the horizon, a serrated edge like the blade of a handsaw.  There was a toll station and we found ourselves squirted out of dark hole into a canyon between skyscrapers.  Everything happened too fast for me to find our location on the map and, then, we were held aloft, on the upper deck of a bridge that seemed to be as high as the skyscrapers, even higher with a grey-green river below where there were sea gulls dive-bombing slow ferry boats churning up against the current.  The bridge dropped down into a neighborhood that was a hive of stone cells, many openings with gates and doors built into the side of a rampart where a train was hurtling along.  We found a place to park, a dead-end road next to a tiny salt-marsh filled with broken glass and tipped-over heaps of construction debris, cut ends of two-by-fours, broken tiles, wraps of fiber-glass insulation, round flattened puck-shaped boulders of poured-off cement.  A porta-potty had been placed on the curb overlooking the swamp but it was knocked over and leaking a star-shaped flood of marigold-colored semi-dissolved excrement.  Above the cul-de-sac, some small highrises rose walling off the street and sidewalk and, then, there was a roaring avenue, grey and black, over which there stood a huge building with set-back terraces rising to box-shaped clock tower capped with a bronze and gold cupola.  The clock-tower hung overhead like the remnant of the moon in the morning sky and it read 10:15.  A subway opened underfoot.  We were in place called Williamsburg. 

I’m sure you’ve seen movies set during the 40's involving servicemen or sailors on-leave in the big city of New York.  In those films, the heroes are shown marveling at the Statue of Liberty, then, riding the subway to the Empire State Building’s top terraces, then, gazing in gauche wonder at a Picasso painting or, perhaps, an Old Master canvas; the sailors and soldiers eat oysters in a vast echoing concourse, look down into the well of the stock market on Wall Street, and, then, are shown nibbling on peanuts or popcorn at the zoo where they taunt gorillas behind cages and shiver at the mighty felines trading roar for roar with them; then, they take a carriage ride around Central Park, walking along those huge, ringing streets on great tobacco-stained sidewalks where the women are the most beautiful and stylish in the world and the gentlemen all wear fedoras and suit coats with dark ties, and, then, they are at Herald Square gazing up at Macy’s, flirting with chubby, happy streetwalkers at Times Square and, at last, wandering up or down Broadway passed the neon marquees of the famous theaters and, reaching, finally, Park Avenue and the tall slender beam of the Rockefeller Center tower rising over the sunken gardens where golden Prometheus, an immense giant, hovers on his gilt pillows over a skating rink where couples are always ice-dancing.  The sailors and soldiers see all these thing and, also, it seems have, time for a couple of romances along the way and, maybe, a Broadway show and, then, when the great clock sends them back to their duties, they are exhausted but happy and it is the middle of the night, midnight or later with the MP’s scouring the harbor dives for drunk sailors and the fleet about to sail...

Raised on films like this, of course, I had certain expectations about New York City, most notably, the sense that it was very compact with Lady Liberty peering down into the cages of the Central Park Zoo and the Empire State Building dancing cheek-to-cheek with the bright gilded slab of the Rockefeller Center.  So we hit the ground running, hustling uptown in the subway to see Central Park, plunging forward without really understanding how the mass transit system worked.  Emerging from underground, you don’t know what direction to go and the streets are straight and aim themselves toward infinity, towers looming overhead and little crowded neighborhoods everywhere, then, vast empty stretches of filthy sidewalk leading through deserted parts of the city, cavernous warehouses and mountains of ice melting alongside the roads, yellow cabs scooting in all directions.  We found ourselves on the steps of a famous museum, climbing upward toward a colonnaded portico with domes half-embedded in roofs upon roofs extending back into the park.  Within the museum, banners announced a retrospective of works by Francis Bacon.  “Is this some kind of joke?” David P– said.  “Bacon?  Francis Bacon?”   A towering triptych decorated the wall of the rotunda – purplish figures, crouched like monsters in a nightmare, lips and bared teeth and a disembodied mouth, a painted shroud hanging from the shoulder of a disfigured personage.  “What is this?” David P – asked.  “Some kind of joke?”  Through a great, open door, I caught a vista of a long gallery and big pictures hanging on the walls – two men, with their skin flayed off, wrestling or locked in a sodomite embrace. 

“Let’s get out of here,” David P– said.  We went down to the sidewalk and decided to walk across the park to the Natural History Museum.  The park was intricate and enormous.  Freeways bisected the forest and big slabs of brown-black rock were extruded from hillsides.  Most sidewalks ended in dead-ends, entrapped by the roaring cross streets – we had to angle sideways through urine-drenched tunnels under the roads.  It took a half-hour to cross the park and we were exhausted from walking, sitting at last on a metal bench while South American au pair girls pushed babies in perambulators or walked large flamboyant-looking dogs.  We got up and hiked the rest of the way to a big north-south road that ran along the park.  I could see the long marble walls of the Natural History Museum about fifteen blocks to the north and there was a subway entrance with a green bronze balustrade right across the street.  – We can ride up to the museum on the subway, I said to David P–.  He looked at me skeptically.  We went into the bad-smelling subway and passed some kiosks and, then, found our way down to the north-bound platform.  A trained marked with a big A on its glass forehead roared up to the platform and we hopped on – the car was crowded with Black people and Latino couples speaking Spanish.   

“This is the A train,” I said to David P–.  “It’s a famous train.”   “Never heard of it,” he said.

The train jerked forward moving into the darkness and, then, it accelerated and screamed past the next four stops – all lit platforms full of people gazing down at the Harlem-bound A-train as it shot like a bullet uptown.  This was an “express” train -- indeed, if I had recalled better the lyrics of the Duke Ellington song, I would have known that we had just hopped the fastest way to get to the center of Harlem. 

“Why doesn’t it stop?” David P– said.  “I don’t know,” I replied.  “I just don’t know.”

The train slowed down and skidded to a stop at 125th and Central Park West, aka Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, I think.  We jumped off the train and zigzagged up the escalators and ramps to the sunlight.  A cloud of pigeons flew up around us as we emerged onto the sidewalk.

“This is the center of Harlem,” I said.

“Why are we here?” David P– asked.  “Lost,” I said.  “We’re lost.”

We were afraid to return to the subway.  The underground railroad screaming in its sheath of metal and concrete was too unpredictable.  Who knows where it would take us next?  The trains swept you this way and that – next thing we knew, we might end up in New Jersey or, even, Connecticut.  How would we ever find our way back to the car?

We set off on foot, walking as fast as we could toward where a few trees showed their brown flags at edge of Central Park North.  It was a warm Spring day and people hooted down at us from the tenements above and you could hear voices in the dark, cool barbershops next to the sidewalk, clandestine voices in semi-underground shops and speakeasies, a few Black drunks sprawled on the sidewalks and, every thousand feet, an insane man, Watusi-tall with his shirt ripped over and his belly lacerated and eyes staring like those of a zombie, fists pumping at the air as he fought off invisible assailants, a strange St. Vitus dance danced down the avenue on which we walked, averting our eyes, as fast as we could without breaking into a run.  Dogs barked at us from hidden dens and girls laughed and we set our faces down to see only the sidewalk and, then, walked quick-step as quick as could be to escape this nightmarish neighborhood.  Sometimes footsteps sounded behind us and we steered away from blind and mutilated beggars who lurched toward us with their hands outstretched, the palms of those black hands strangely pink and shiny.

Then, we reached the park and walked along it all the way to about 50th street – some vast number of blocks, an incomprehensible distance in the howling city.  We turned and crossed the island, going up to its spine of stone and skyscraper, then, back down to the East River and there was the United Nations behind its curtain of flags whipping in the wind and fountains hurling water upwards and, on the river, barges and tugboats navigating toward the harbor which we could not see from this place.  We walked another twenty blocks and the shadows lengthened and, now, the streets were dark and the sky seemed on the verge of twilight. 

“We have to get out of here,” David P– said.  “If we are trapped in this city after dark,” he declared, “we’ll get mugged.”  “But I’m afraid to go into the subway,” I said.  “We have to,” he told me. 

We went down into the chilly, wet tunnel, narrow and half-flooded, drowned people bobbing in cisterns just a little below the sidewalk ramps, kiosks in which no one could speak English and so no one could give us directions, scuttling rats and newspaper-stands and Off-track betting, and several more Black men driven mad by racism or heroin, strutting like storks through the tiled tunnels and pounding on their chests with their fists and screaming out the most vile abuse but all directed inward, aimed at themselves so that it seemed that they would exterminate themselves, and their whole race, like rats or cockroaches if only they had proper stance from which to do that.  A train shrieked into the station, crying like a banshee, and, then, we boarded and rode over a bridge that was made from iron A-frames, the brown river with white wakes towed behind the tug-boats and, then, a tower that we could see just before the train plunged back underground – a great luminous clock face atop a mountain of concrete and steel arranged in precipitous set-backs to hover over the old Federal row-buildings and the big public school buildings, tenements and high dams blocking the roads, high-line railroads atop them with their switches on fire and mobs of firemen, dripping from the hose-spray from their trucks splayed across the intersections. 

Somehow, we found our car – it seemed a miracle that it was still there – and, then, the sun was setting and you could hear the feral cries echoing down the dark, silent streets, the hunting packs, and we found a fast, efficient one-way that poured us onto a lofty bridge that led to Staten Island and, then, the island flashed by and we were on another towering bridge with destroyers and dreadnoughts below us, and, at last, the road ran through comfortless petro-chemical plants flying banners of burning gas distillate, hellish orange flames dancing over the giant web-work of pipes and fraction-towers. 

It seems to me we stayed in Teaneck.  David P– went into the office of the little motel along the side of a frontage road off 95.  The motel was decorated with Dutch motifs and there was a forlorn-looking windmill twisting in the chilly dark wind above the office.  David P– said that there was a convention in town, at least so reported by the Turk at the desk, and only one room remaining, this small as a closet with a single bed. 

There is nothing that makes you feel more lonely and far from home than the local news on a poorly tuned TV.  David P– said that he was running out of clothes and might have to sleep nude in the bed.  I said I didn’t care – that I’d look the other direction.  We both took showers in water that smelled of kerosene. 

The next morning, we rose before dawn and drove for many hours to Ithaca, New York.  I remember a gorge filled with ice and a frozen waterfall.  David P– changed into his suit at a gas station.  It was snowing and I had no coat because my things had been stolen in Chicago.  Some men were playing lacrosse in the flurries of falling snow.  I watched them for awhile, sitting on the marble steps of a building shaped like a Greek temple.  The wind picked up and made the snow flicker in the air and I was terribly cold.  I don’t recall ever being colder in my life.  I had no hat and no gloves and the snow was now falling very steadily, a kind of blizzard here in upstate New York and from the promenades in front of the big castellated buildings, I could no longer see the sliver of the lake in the deep valley below.

David P– returned from his interview.  He was glowing with enthusiasm.  My fingers were blue and numb.  We drove for a few hours on slippery, lonesome two-lane highways.  At desolate intersections, a hanging red light beckoned to traffic.  Ancient farm houses brooded above dark ravines full of thorns and sumac.  The tops of the hills were hidden by the falling snow.  We stopped in a little town on the Pennsylvania border.  David P– said he no longer had any money left for tollways and so we would have to find our way home on the backroads.  When he returned from the motel office, he said that the desk clerk advised that there was a convention of bankers in town and only one room left over in the whole motel, a small closet-like chamber with a single bed.  For some reason, though, the parking lot never filled with cars – in fact, it seemed that our vehicle was the only one on-site.

The room was hot and the space heater made a snoring sound.  The windows were fogged with carbon monoxide.  I think we passed out.  In the middle of the night, someone tugged me upright.  It was David P– saying that we had to get going.  The plan was to be back in Minnesota by the end of the day.  He looked at me with disappointment.  “I guess this trip was a bust,” he said.  “I don’t think so,” I told him.  “You made all your interviews.”  “Yes,” he said, “I guess that worked out okay.”

We drove without stopping except for gas and the toilets and to buy bags of Fritos.  By eight pm., we were back home.  David P– shook hands with me.  I dragged out of the car a couple paper-bags in which I had my stuff, some socks and a couple pairs of underwear and a brochure from a museum in New York City, my sole souvenir, the brochure announcing a retrospective of the paintings of Francis Bacon.  David P– stroked his beardless chin – he had white, porcelain-colored skin that was almost whiskerless.  He looked at me as if I were some kind of puzzle that he had to solve.

David P– went to Cornell where he studied the horticulture of tomatoes.  He finished his doctoral dissertation in record time and, very soon, had his Ph.d.  I wrote him a few letters at Cornell but he was too busy to respond.  He came back to Eden Prairie after completing his doctorate and told me that he was homosexual.  I didn’t believe him and laughed.  “No, it’s true,” he said.  We were shooting hoops under the yard light at his parents’ little farm.  A guinea hen screamed in the darkness.  His mother called us into the house and we had home-made ice-cream with some freshly picked raspberries.  The raspberries were very tart and the ice-cream made them cold and acid.  I don’t think I ever saw him again after that night.

I ran into David L– some years later.  He was working as an assistant librarian at a branch of the Hennepin County library in south Minneapolis.  I had come into the library to kill some time and avoid the rush-hour traffic on the highway – I think I had just finished a deposition.  My plan was to read some magazines and wait for the highways to clear a bit before driving home to Austin.  David L– was still abundantly freckled and wore tinted lens glasses and he was very soft-spoken.  He came up to me where I was reading magazines and shook my hand.  Then, he asked the head librarian, a fat, efficient-looking woman, if he could take his break early.  We went outside and sat on a bench in front of the library.  This branch library is about a hundred-fifty feet from a green, ferny gorge in which Minnehaha creek runs.  I used to work as a night-clerk at a little motel about a half-mile to the south and so I knew the area well.  Alongside the creek, in the gorge, there was a bike trail and I could see the lights of people coming and going in the twilight. 

David L– said that he was ultimately discharged from the Navy as “unsuitable for military service.”  He told me that he was Gay and wondered whether I was Gay also.  I told him that I was married.  “Oh,” he said.  He congratulated me on my marriage.  “That’s great,” he said.  He kept looking at his watch.  When his fifteen minute break was over, he excused himself and we shook hands.  I never saw him after that evening. 

During our conversation, David L– told me that he had been in touch with David P–.  David P– was a professor at a university in Miami, Florida.  David L– said that the other David had become obsessed with a game called Jai Alai.  “What is that?” I asked.  “I think it’s like handball,” David L– said.  David P– gambled a lot of money on Jai Alai – there was parimutual betting in Florida on the sport at all the casinos.  David P– approached Jai Alai the way that he approached his education – he studied the sport and its players and made a lot of money betting on the outcome of games.  Later, I think, someone told me that he was living with a gay Filipino man, a star player in the game.  Whether this was true, I never knew.

The goat-skin ball or pelota moves very fast in Jai Alai – it is flung at the wall using a kind of scoop-shaped launch.  If the ball hits you, bad injury can result and fatalities, although rare, have been recorded.