by Tod A
I caught another whiff of rotting flesh and looked around for the source. A highway of copper-colored ants led to the bloated carcass of a dog. It lay near the tree stump, writhing with insects. Huge black butterflies, their wings daubed with sanguine eyes, flapped listlessly through the fetid air. Hoisting my muddy suitcase to my shoulder, I moved on.
Fifty feet from the beach a black basalt shrine stood on the stream bank. An old woman passed bearing a tray of offerings. Our eyes met, but she did not smile. I turned to watch her light sticks of incense and place the offerings inside the shrine. As I made for the sea, a strange cry drifted from the sand.
The sunset that night was lurid. I stumbled out onto the beach and there it was, like some tabloid disaster splattered across the sky. Massive clouds, the cumulation of vapors sucked from the sea and soil, loomed above the city, as heat lightning pulsed in an omen of the coming monsoon.
Cicadas, aroused by the imminent atmospheric violence, rattled like an angry chorus of maracas. Flying insects took to the air in their millions. Swallows and bats followed, summoned by the smell of blood. Swooping and diving in a frenzy of feeding, their flight paths scrawled erratic lines against the gory backdrop.
I opened the liquor bottle and took a tentative sip. A freezer-burn in my throat slowly warmed into a glow that filled my body. It wasn’t beer, but the arak would likely do the trick tonight.
A fresh breeze blew in off the sea. The air finally began to cool as the cruel heat dissipated along with the sun. I sat down atop the dune with my back to a crumbling wall and tipped back the bottle again, longer this time. Lights appeared at small beach-front establishments across the bay. The city seemed to revive after the suffocating heat of the afternoon.
From the distance came the ringing of temple bells and the call of the muezzin. The lights of fishing boats hovered at the horizon line against a dark strip of land to the west, probably Java.
A delicate amber crescent emerged from behind the curtain of clouds. It was as if the moon had allowed the sun to indulge its vanity before taking center stage, cool and mysterious, to the roar of the cicadas.
I was startled again by the same unearthly cry, much nearer my ear. Now I found its source. A large, brightly-spotted lizard clung to the wall, snaring mosquitoes with quick flicks of its tongue.
I gathered some driftwood off of the beach and dug a pit in the sand. I pulled out my copy of XXX and began tearing out pages, crumpling them and throwing them into the pit. When I had ripped apart half of the book, I lit the pile, which quickly ignited. I threw on jetsam from the beach: driftwood, plastic bottles, old flip-flops. My fire quickly blossomed.
I took a deep draft of the booze and threw what was left of my book onto the fire. It sat there ponderously, a pale rectangle framed in black smoke. Then, slowly, flames began to lick its edges. Pages curled and began to burn. Sparks spiraled up—dead words describing strange trajectories.
The crecent moon seemed to smile, blushing in the sultry atmosphere. If the moon tonight held any threats, they were threats veiled in promises. This lipstick smile seemed to hint at the answers to questions I hadn’t yet the courage to ask, questions that loomed just over the horizon.
Life gave the illusion of forward motion, but my own life was as cynically cyclical as the seasons: the depression, that led to the drinking, that brought more depression, that lived in the house that Mark built. Self-pity, recrimination, regret—only drink could wash them all away, swirling like urine down some foul drain.
There was one thing I could feel good about. I had escaped America and its endless Crap. The divorce had freed me, yes. But it was the Crap that had finally driven me out—the Crap on TV, the Crap that crept though the mail slot and spewed from the radio, the Infotainment Crap that passed for news. It was relentless.
Catalogs and magazines were devoted to American Crap in all its infinite permutations. People hawked it to you on-line and down the phone. Billboards bombarded you. Americans were simply mad about the stuff.
Our education and health care systems were Crap. The president was full of it. The sky over every freeway exit glowed with corporate logos promising the dizzying array of Crap on offer there.
Fast food chains flogged their Crap in a thousand irresistible flavors. Supermarkets, convenience stores, malls, and discount chains overflowed with it. Meanwhile the armies of the obese, grown dull and thick on a steady diet of all this stuff, spewed yet more Crap into the air from their bloated SUV’s.
And just when you thought you had endured all the Crap you could possibly stand, that’s when you were wrong.
Late into the night, think tanks were hard at work envisioning new Crap, better Crap, the Crap of the Future. Still in its conceptual stages, this theoretical new Crap would be developed by designers, tested on focus groups, revised and refined by engineers, marketed by PR firms, and finally unveiled—shiny, seductive and soon to be obsolete—to a country ever-hungry for more.
The ingenuity of our great nation was boundless. We’d invented the assembly line, and made a religion of convenience. Today, Crap flowed from manufacturer to distributor to consumer, passed swiftly from tongue to anus, and drained from toilet to sewer to river to sea. So much Crap had been produced that the oceans were filling up with it. Sea levels were swelling. Soon America would be awash with it, swimming in it, drowning in its own Crap. But nobody seemed to worry—as long as they could get the latest, shiniest version. In America, Crap was king. I’d had enough.
Waves pounded the beach as I sprawled under the palms, suckling at the bottle, trying to anesthetize my brain. Without a whisper, the moon was gone, swathed again in deep velvet near the horizon. The night sky unfolded above me like a map of heaven.
I stumbled down the beach toward the surf. The stars peered down like the eyes of nocturnal animals. In this latitude the big dipper was up-ended, spilling into the sea. I did likewise, pissing into the waves. I imagined swimming out into the blackness, farther and deeper. They probably would never have found me. Back on Coney Island one bleary night I had almost done it. Instead, I discovered I didn’t even have the balls to take the coward’s way out.
“Yaaaaaaaaaaah!” I screamed to sea and the wind and the stars. I was some captive primate at last released. “Yaaaaaaaaaaah!”
I stripped off my clothes and staggered into the tide, waving the bottle, as the waves surged in around me. A big breaker knocked me on my ass, and I sat there laughing madly in the shallows.
One star now caught my eye. Burning low over the sea, it glowed with a supernatural brilliance as it wandered lazily up into the darkness. Others soon followed. I realized that these were not stars, but paper lanterns that floated on air, lit on auspicious occasions. Somebody was launching them from across the bay. I emptied the bottle and grinned.
It was a sign. These lanterns were for me. Losing my passport wasn’t bad luck, it was part of the plan: no identity, no past, a clean slate. This was a baptism. I was being reborn.
Things would be different here. I’d finally finish my book and find the success I’d always deserved. No more worries. I’d live like Gauguin in a bamboo shack with some tropical nubile. I’d show them all.
Soon there was a long line of lanterns dancing like a luminous snake. Swaying in their gentle skyward motion, they rendered in drifting lights the currents of air that flowed, mysterious and invisible, toward the infinite.
{ 2 }
Electric City
Buster used to say that life was just one decision after another. In my case it had been one bad decision after another. I was well aware of my weaknesses. But sometimes the simplest choices can have the biggest repercussions.
My little disaster had really begun at the party. Because the Big Bang, the one event that had sent me spinning forward on my current unknown trajectory, would never have happened if I had stayed home that night. It was the night I met Frank. And like
every other choice in my life, major and minor, booze had made the decision for me.
Ralph, my former neighbor and erstwhile drinking buddy, had called me that morning before work.
“You’re coming tonight, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, it will do you good. You’re like the Invisible Man these days.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be seen.”
“Well, I want to see you, man. Next year, who knows?”
His wife Jen was four months pregnant and they were looking at houses upstate.
“Will Blake be there?”
“I don’t know. Jen may have invited her. But, Jesus, man, it’s been, what, three years, already?”
“Two and change.”
“Whatever. You’ve got to get over that shit. Time to move on and live your life.”
“It’s not that. It’s just I’m feeling like I might be coming down with something ... or something.”
“Or something. You’re such a lousy liar. Suit yourself.
I wrestled with the question all afternoon at my temp job, slumped at the beige keyboard in the gray cubicle, churning out blurbs for a mail-order clothing catalog.
I dreaded any form of social interaction these days. And Blake was certainly the last person I wanted to see. Yet as the day dragged on under the fluorescent lights, the thought of all that free alcohol nagged at me. Maybe I could simply park myself in a dark corner and drink without being compelled to speak to anyone. If Blake showed up, I could make my excuses and split. The alternative was a night at home with myself, sober: a far bleaker prospect.
Rivulets of rain snaked down the windows as the J train crossed the East River. I got off at Flushing, nodding to the homeless guy in his cardboard box under the stairs.
Paying rent was important in this town. Friends soon became acquaintances after you spent enough time on their couch. Overcrowded rabbits resort to cannibalism. And what was New York, if not a glorified rabbit hutch? The few dollars in my pocket were all that stood between me and a cardboard box.
But having set the course of the evening toward inebriation on the cheap, I felt the magnetic pull of Mr Khan’s beer cooler. Arriving at the party without a few warm-up drinks was out of the question. Nothing makes a man thirstier than no beer in the fridge. I would sell some records in Williamsburg to make rent. My feet carried me faithfully toward Mr Khan’s, as they had so many times before.
“Good evening, Mark. How is the literary game treating you, sir?” he said in his melodic way. He’d been to university in Lahore and considered us both fellow scholars, a few heads above the rest of the neighborhood.
“A bit slow recently, Mr Khan. But starting to pick up,” I lied.
“You have come to pay your balance outstanding, I trust?”
“Well, to be honest, I’m a bit short on cash at the moment. But I’ve got a check clearing Wednesday and I’ll settle up then, okay?”
Banks, how I loathed them. Here we were, thirty years into the electronic age, and still they made you wait a week to clear a check from across the river in New Jersey. Everybody knew that the bastards were just clinging to your cash with their fat little fingers for as long as they could.
“And I suppose you will be wanting some beer this evening, as well, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes, actually, if you’d be so kind. Could I put one more six-pack on the tab? And some Chesterfields. Wednesday, latest, I promise.”
Khan lowered his eyebrows.
In his moral framework, drinking likely ranked somewhere slightly above masturbation: an act committed in private, too unseemly to discuss. Yet business was business.
We had a sound relationship, Khan and I. He sold me beer, and I drank it. As an immigrant he understood a life of struggle, and bore me no ill will for my financial dry spells. I always paid my tab, eventually. And he could be dead-certain I’d be back for more beer. Hell, I was probably his best customer.
Khan placed the cigarettes on the counter and gestured magnanimously toward the beer cooler.
“Thanks, Mr Khan. You’re a prince.”
“Enjoy, Mr Mark.”
Enjoying anything was difficult these days, but I was determined to try tonight.
The elevated train roared and rattled overhead as I crossed the sodden street. Though it was only the end of September, I could feel the chill breath of winter on my neck. My boots were three years old and my feet were soaked.
The Dutch had clearly got the better end of the deal when they traded Manhattan for Banda, an idyllic island in the East Indies.
Back in my flat, I warmed my hands over the hotplate. Then I put some Skatalites on the stereo and cracked the first beer of the night. I needed to brace myself for the unpleasantness ahead.
Beer. There’s nothing I don’t like about it. I love the smell, the taste—even the sound of it. The cool thunk of the cap coming off the bottle, the silvery crack of the pop-top can. The cold sweat of the container against the fingers on a sultry afternoon. Every drinker has their poison. I am a beer man.
Blake had loved her cocktails, her coladas and caipirinhas, her margaritas and mojitos. She was a sucker for anything with an exotic name served in a poncey glass. A trendy new flavor would breeze through town every couple of months.
For me, drinking that stuff was like putting a filter on a cigarette. There were no smokes with diapers for me, and no umbrellas in my glass. Like Buster, I swore by my Chesterfields and brew.
Some drinkers go for hard liquor: the quick attack of the shot, the lingering after-burn in the throat and nose. But no matter what dilettantes tell you, the hard stuff is basically all the same. Whiskey, vodka, gin are just grain alcohol with pretensions. And they fuck you up way too fast. You need to sip a whiskey. And I was never a sipper. I was a guzzler.
I loved the feeling of it: to open wide the mouth of the soul and pour a cold one down my throat, with my mind racing ever-forward toward the next. I wanted my drunks to last, and with liquor they were over far too soon: you passed out by nine and woke up the next afternoon trying to piece together what the hell happened.
Beer was different. Beer was kind and faithful, like an old friend. I was grateful for its Dutch courage as I dressed for the party.
It really should have been easy. Everything I owned was black. This kept my use of mirrors to a minimum. I couldn’t stand the damned things. The guy staring back at me never seemed to measure up. I would have gladly tossed my mirror into the dumpster if I didn’t need to shave. My sole attempt at growing a beard had been a raging failure. It had looked like I had mange.
I eyed myself skeptically now, sucking in my gut.
There was once a time I might have been considered handsome. But the drink and the depression and the sheer lack of giving-a-fuck anymore had begun to take their toll. I still had a full head of hair, but the widow’s peaks were gaining ground. My unkempt style was starting to resemble more that of an eccentric shut-in than a carefree hell raiser.
There is an art to aging gracefully which I had yet to master. I had never expected to live past thirty.
I put on my wool coat, shoving the last can of beer into my sleeve. Then I stepped back out into the ugly weather, taking the stairs to the elevated train two at a time. I risked a quick smoke at the far end of the platform. I’d been busted for it more than once, but some people never learn. I should know.
The J train was packed as it crossed the Williamsburg Bridge, jammed full of Brooklyn revelers out for a Manhattan good time. I shoved my way forward until I reached the front. Face against the window, I looked out along the tracks toward the city. This had always been my favorite view of the Manhattan skyline: skyscrapers jutting into the night like glittering peaks from the mists of some enchanted island. But tonight it left me cold.
Electric City. When I had first come, the city ha
d been electrifying, a place to re-invent myself and escape the rural doldrums of my teenage years. I had hightailed it from New England, leaving behind the tobacco barns and white cladding for concrete and brick.
New York made me come alive, its summer sidewalks suffused in the sour perfume of urine and trash. I had reveled in the cheap and easy freedom of it all, the crazed lawlessness that had defined NYC in the early nineties, when you could still roam the streets with a joint in one hand and your beer in a sweaty paper bag. By day the streets were dowsed in Salsa and at night they seethed with sex.
Those were the drug days. There was plenty for everybody who knew where to find it. If you were short on cash, you stole a drink off the bar. And though the little bags from the dodgy bodegas always held more cut than cocaine, two tens would keep you up jabbering well into the night.
We all had plenty of ideas then. Everyone was shooting a film or starting a band, writing a book or a play. Everybody had an attitude, a look, an angle. Each new day bore new truths, not all of them kind. Friends had died on weekend heroin benders. And sooner or later you came to the realization that there were some brilliant souls who would never get anywhere, no matter how hard they tried.
I wouldn’t be one of the tragic ones, not me. I had a vision: I would tear down the walls and build something new. I was on fire and the city was burning. I drank till dawn, collecting the stories of any stragglers the night had left behind. As I watched the sun rise from atop the Williamsburg Bridge I could see the whole city stretched out before me like a golden promise.
But the promise had been broken.
Here I was rounding the corner fast toward forty with nothing to show for it. No wife, no career, and no money in the bank. Friends were settling down. There were weddings and baby showers and housewarmings upstate. Sometimes I’d go, but I wasn’t really there. My head and heart were somewhere else.
I was still craving that lost electricity, searching for the feeling of discovery I’d become addicted to over the years. I wasn’t ready to settle for the familiar. I couldn’t face the day-to-day drudgery, haunted by discarded dreams. I didn’t want the wild ride to end.