by Brad Listi
I nodded and shrugged.
“Are you ever gonna shave it off?” he said.
“I haven’t decided.”
“How long do you think it’ll take you to make it up through Virginia?” said Matthew #3.
“We’ll see,” I said. “The heat makes it tough to gauge.”
There was no response. The campers were silent. I looked at the ground and shifted in my boots.
“Well,” I said, “I should probably get going. I’ve got a ways to go before the day’s up.”
“Sure thing,” said Matthew #3.
“Say,” said Matthew #1, “you mind if we say a prayer for you before you take off?”
“A prayer?” I said.
“Yeah,” said Matthew #1. “A short blessing to send you off and wish you well on your way.”
“Does it matter if I’m a Christian or not?” I said.
An awkward silence.
“Not really,” said Matthew #1.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Matthew #2.
“What’s your affiliation, if you don’t mind me asking?” said Matthew #3.
“I don’t really have one,” I said.
“None at all?” said Matthew #2.
“Not really,” I said.
“No matter,” said Matthew #1. “Just a short prayer. For good luck.”
“Yeah,” said Matthew #2. “You never know, it might do you some good.”
I said okay.
The Christians stood up, held hands, and encircled me. They closed their eyes, bowed their heads, and stood in silent prayer. Birds were singing. The sun was shining. I stood there, blinking. I felt like I should say something.
Matthew #4 cleared his throat and broke the silence. “All right, guys,” he said. “How about a little Lord’s Prayer for Wayne here?”
The campers bowed their heads and prayed:
Our Father, Who art in heaven
Hallowed be Thy Name;
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us;
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil. Amen.
I was a lapsed Catholic. I knew the Lord’s Prayer by heart. It had been recited at every Catholic Mass I’d ever attended during my youth. I’d heard it so many times, in fact, that I could even remember the exchange between priest and congregation that took place right after the Lord’s Prayer during a standard Catholic liturgy. It went like this:
PRIEST: Deliver us, Lord, from every evil, and grant us peace in our days. In Your mercy keep us free from sin, and protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.
CONGREGATION: For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are Yours. Now and forever. Amen.
The Four Matthews and the young Christians finished reciting the Lord’s Prayer on my behalf. After a brief moment of silence, Matthew #2 offered up a few supplementary requests to God and/or Jesus, in an effort to further ensure my safe passage into tomorrow.
“Dear Lord Jesus,” he said, “we pray that You will shine Your light upon our friend Wayne as he walks among Your splendid creations in this vast and beautiful kingdom that You have given us to enjoy.”
“Amen,” said everyone.
“Christ Almighty,” said Matthew #1, “we hope that You will see fit to bless our brother Wayne here with an abundance of peace and joy as he makes his way forward, not only here on the Appalachian Trail, but also on the trail of life. In Your name, we pray.”
“Amen.”
“And may we also pray, dear God in heaven,” said Matthew #4, “that Your son Wayne be blessed with as much pleasant weather as possible as he marches onward through Virginia and beyond. Should You see fit, I think it’s safe to say that a small reprieve from the sweltering summer heat would be greatly appreciated.”
Everyone chuckled.
“Amen.”
“Dear Lord,” said Matthew #3, “in Your profound and holy perfection, please see fit to clean the world of its sins and to keep our brother Wayne safe from harm as he wanders forth in Your honor. Please give him strength to overcome whatever obstacles he may be faced with on his path through life. Whatever grief and sorrow may reside in his heart, whatever pain may rise up from within, please see fit to remind him of Your ever-abiding presence in all things, so that he might proceed with courage and wisdom, free of all fear and all doubt. For this we pray with all our hearts.”
“Amen.”
The Christians opened their eyes. They looked at me with what appeared to be an air of expectation. I was feeling a little bit odd at the moment, a little bit uncertain of myself. Their attention overwhelmed me. The unnerving earnestness of the prayer circle had me tongue-tied. Nevertheless, it seemed appropriate that I should offer some kind of comment at the end of it all, in response to their extended efforts.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thanks very much. I really appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome,” said Matthew #1.
“You’re welcome,” said Matthew #3.
“You’re welcome,” said Matthew #4.
“You’re welcome,” said Matthew #2.
“Thanks,” I said again.
The young Christian campers told me that I was welcome.
I nodded and made my way out of the circle slowly. Truth be known, I was feeling pretty uncomfortable.
“God bleth you,” said the kid with the backcountry lisp.
“You too,” I said.
“God bless you,” said the others.
I broke the circle. The smallish boy with buckteeth stuck his hand up as I passed by. I gave him a high five and walked away northward, completely alone, off into the shade of the trees.
IV.
1.
Late July. New York City. I had arrived by train, having exited the Appalachian Trail on a whim forty-eight hours earlier. By that point, I’d traveled nearly six hundred miles on foot. Six hundred miles seemed like enough. I was tired. I walked out onto a highway in rural Virginia and thumbed a ride to the town of Marion. From there, I caught a bus to D.C. In D.C., I caught the train.
A friend of mine, Morgan Lynch, was living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment on Grand Street at the time, deep in the heart of Chinatown. I had arranged to stay with him for a few days while I assessed my trajectory and contemplated my next move.
The city was sweltering, as hot or hotter than the Appalachian Trail. I’d never been there before and hadn’t anticipated that kind of heat. The pavement, the concrete, the bodies, the cars—all of it conspired to make Manhattan a kind of convection oven. And the stench was fantastic, particularly near the subway’s many orifices.
I was sweating bullets.
There were a lot of Chinese people around.
So much had happened in so little time.
My train had arrived in the early evening, a couple of hours before the sun went down. Lynch and I set out on a walk right off the bat so that I could check out my surroundings and get the lay of the land. We wandered the city aimlessly for more than two hours, looking at people and things and talking nonstop. On our way home, we happened to pass a dead body. It was lying on the sidewalk at the corner of Houston and Ludlow. An elderly man. I could tell by the spots on his hands. He was laid out on his back, dead as a stump, and he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. A cop was standing there, waving people by, waiting for an ambulance to arrive. The cop had spread a jacket over the dead body’s face, but the rest of it was exposed.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Welcome to New York,” said Lynch.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Heart attack,” said Lynch. “Heart attack or aneurysm.”
“I wonder who he is,” I said.
Lynch shrugged. Then he coughed, briefly.
Thunder rumbled overhead,
and it started to drizzle a bit.
A taxi driver laid on his horn.
Hordes of pedestrians walked past the dead man, relatively unfazed. They were in a hurry to get out of the rain.
Sirens sounded in the distance.
The summer wind smelled of heat, inclement weather, body odor, concrete, and hot dogs.
2.
Lynch was two years older than me, someone I’d known since the earliest days of my childhood. After graduating high school, he’d gone on to Vanderbilt, where he studied journalism. From there, he’d moved to New York City, where he landed a job at a magazine called The Bomb. The Bomb catered to the eighteen to thirty-six male audience. Its contents revolved around women, automobiles, weaponry, celebrity, and gadgetry.
That particular week, Lynch was racing against a deadline, hard at work on an article for an upcoming issue. He was writing the third part of a six-installment feature on unusual weaponry and/or methods of torture. The previous month, he’d done a piece about Molotov cocktails. This month it was the Taser.
Here’s how you make a Molotov cocktail:
Ingredients:
1 glass bottle
3 cups flammable liquid
1 rag
1 lighter
Mixing Instructions:
Fill glass bottle with flammable liquid. Stuff rag into mouth of bottle. Ignite rag with lighter and throw cocktail at desired target.
Here’s the definition of Taser:
Taser n.
A trademark used for a high-voltage stun gun.
Tasers look like pistols, essentially. They fire small, dartlike electrical probes a distance of approximately 20 feet at a rate of about 135 feet per second. The probes are connected to the Taser via thin, high-voltage, insulated wire. The probes sink into the flesh or clothing of a human target, delivering a formidable, pulsing electrical charge. The charge cause massive loss of neuromuscular control, thereby stifling the target’s ability to perform any kind of aggressive, coordinated action.
Generally speaking, the force of a Taser’s charge is plenty enough to knock a large, angry human being flat on his ass. Generally speaking, the charge is nonlethal. Tasers are not considered firearms and are perfectly legal for private use, without permits, throughout most of the USA. (Note: Tasers are restricted from citizen use in Hawaii, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.)
Advanced Taser M-18L with Laser Sight
A couple of weeks before my arrival in New York, one of the world’s leading Taser manufacturers had sent Lynch a demo Taser in exchange for a plug in the magazine. Lynch and his buddies at the office had been shooting each other with regularity ever since.
This was technically illegal.
3.
My second night in town, I made some telephone calls to people I hadn’t spoken to in a while—my parents, my sisters, some friends. I informed them of my whereabouts and my decision to leave the trail. Everyone sounded good, for the most part. They seemed supportive of my decision. They sounded relieved to hear that I was out of the woods, immersed in society, associating with other human beings again.
The last person I wound up calling was a guy named Henry Long, an old friend from film school days. I couldn’t reach him at home in Boulder, so I tried him on his cell phone.
“Hello?” he said.
“Henry,” I said. “It’s Fencer.”
“Fencer,” he said. “Where the fuck are you?”
“I’m in New York,” I said.
“You’re shitting me,” he said.
Henry, as it turned out, was in New York as well. It was his hometown.
The guy was a true character, one of the most interesting people I’d ever met. His energy level always seemed to be off the charts, and his life story was one for the record books. Born on a commune in upstate New York in the mid-1970s, he’d been adopted by a well-to-do couple from the Upper West Side. Six months later, his well-to-do parents divorced. Henry’s mother, Jane, got custody. She later discovered she was a lesbian. Henry was homeschooled until the age of fourteen, at which point he went on to Stuyvesant High School, where he was deeply antisocial and excelled in the sciences. Somehow he wound up at the University of Colorado, where, like me, he studied avant-garde film. The past few years, he’d been living in Boulder with his girlfriend, Rose, subsisting on a modest stipend given to him by his adopted father, whom he hated terribly and hardly knew.
At the time of my call, Henry was operating in a state of deep emotional turmoil. As it turned out, Rose had left him a few days earlier after five years of dating. The whole thing had happened completely out of the blue. Apparently, she’d been cheating on him, conducting a clandestine affair with a man she had met on the Internet. And then, out of nowhere, she’d flown the coop. While Henry was out running errands, Rose packed her bags and took off for Iowa to be with her new lover until the end of time.
She left Henry a note.
It said good-bye, essentially.
Henry was now at his mother’s place on the Upper West Side, attempting to come to terms with the situation. He was wildly upset, talking at a rapid clip, telling me all about Rose and her midwestern Internet lover. He rambled about it at length, sparing no detail. And then he delivered even bigger news.
“And to top it all off,” he said, “I called my biological mother yesterday.”
“You what?” I said.
“I did it in a fit yesterday afternoon. We’re having lunch together tomorrow. I’m losing my shit. I’m fucking panicked over here.”
“What do you mean you called your biological mother?”
“I mean what I said: I contacted my fucking birth mother.”
“Just like that?”
“Yeah, just like that.”
“How did you find her?”
“She lives in the city. I’ve known about it for years. Up until now, I haven’t wanted to call. But for some reason yesterday afternoon, I said fuck it and picked up the phone.”
“And what happened?”
“She said hello.”
“And?”
“And we talked.”
“About?”
“About nothing. I can’t remember. It was quick. I said hello. I told her my name. She was silent. I think she might’ve been crying. I said that if it would be okay with her, I’d like to meet her. And she agreed. We made a hurried plan. It happened fast. Neither of us could really handle being on the phone for long.”
“What’s her name?”
“Selma.”
“Selma?”
“Yeah.”
“Selma what?”
“Selma Hoffman.”
“I’ve never met a Selma before,” I said.
“Me neither,” said Henry.
“And what about your biological father?”
“He’s dead.”
“Shit.”
“It’s no big deal. I’ve known about it for a long time. He died years ago. Haven’t I told you that?”
“No.”
“Yeah. He dropped dead back in, like, 1984.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah, well, at least he’s not alive to torture me.”
“So what are you doing now?”
“Sitting over here, drinking vodka.”
“Do you want to go out?”
“No.”
“Should I come over?”
“No. Jane’ll get suspicious.”
“She doesn’t know about this?”
“Hell no.”
“Why not?”
“She’ll freak.”
“I want to meet her.”
“Not a chance.”
“Why?”
“I’ve got enough shit going on right now. I’m not about to start leading people on tours through my alternative home life.”
“So what are you going to do all night?”
“Sleep. I just took two Valium. I need to be rested.”
“Where’d you get Valium?�
��
“The medicine cabinet.”
“Can I have some?”
“Maybe. I have to check how many are left.”
“How do you feel?”
“I feel softheaded. But I felt softheaded before I took anything. I think it’s just making it worse.”
“So where are you and Selma meeting tomorrow?”
“We’re having an early lunch at a place called the Gandhi Café, over on Bleecker.”
“The what?”
“The Gandhi Café.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Don’t ask. I’m not the one who picked it.”
“The Gandhi Café.”
“Yeah.”
“That sounds terrible.”
“I know.”
“That’s almost like having a Martin Luther King Café.”
“I know.”
“Or a JFK Café.”
“I know.”
“Imagine what it would look like.”
“Stills of the Zapruder film on the wall…”
“Oswald burgers…”
“Magic-bullet milk shakes…”
“Warren Commission fajitas…”
Henry half laughed. “Warren Commission fajitas,” he said. “I’d probably order those.”
4.
Henry was a documentarian. He’d been keeping an exhaustive video diary for several years. It was his life’s work. He carried a digital video camera on his person at all times and had recorded himself, talking about himself, every single day for the past six years, logging more than one thousand hours of tape.
We had arranged to meet up in Tompkins Square Park after his lunch with Selma. When I arrived, Henry was slouched down on a park bench and appeared shell-shocked. I sat down next to him, and he immediately handed me his camera. I noticed he was drinking a large can of beer wrapped in a brown paper bag.
“Get this on tape,” he said. “Interview me.”