Disclaimer: First, this is fiction. It may be very thinly-veiled fiction, but the the characters in here are not mere copies of people in my life. Don't flatter yourself in trying to see where you fit in. Just read it, if you  want to in the first place.  There's some somewhat graphic language / imagery in here.  It's nothing especially disturbing. Actually, it's supposed to be funny.  So loosen up and laugh a little. And enjoy.  Ok, I'll shut up now.


 I didn’t want anyone to know that I had fallen for Laura. Of course, Jerry still found out. Of course, Jerry didn’t care. 

       I didn’t want anyone to see my arm draped around her shoulders. I didn’t want anyone to see me staring at the screenshine pooled in the corners of her mouth.

      The pre-film advertisements leaped from the projector.  One for Student Legal Services featured a lanky man-child with a gleaming jaw line and too-broad shoulder pads.  Then another for Amish furniture.  And then the organic (13 dollars for a goddamned sandwich and soda) grocery on the East side of town.  And the used Chevy dealer.

      “What’s this called again?”

      She smiled at me, benign and flat. “I dunno. It’s like a Russian action movie or something that my brother told me about.”

      “Y’like action movies?”

      She shrugged, plucking a popcorn puff from the carton in my lap. I heard myself stammering a half-lie:

      “I, um, really liked talking to you earlier. At the library, I mean.”

      “Yeah,” she said, plantlike.

      Truth: “I’m still thinking a lot about what you told me.”

      “Uh-huh”. 

      Maybe I’ve been duped. She’s got a twin, maybe. An interesting twin with a fucking brain.

      I literally ran into her at the bottom of Court, ten minutes after the day’s first class.  Plowed, really. When I helped her up, she turned away to re-situate her bra, letting off twinkling ripples of laughter.  I gaped.

      She had said “I know you,” still bubbling all the while.

      I stared for moment: “Yeah…yeah! From the orientation, right?”

      “Uh-huh.”

      I went for it, jerking my limbs into a hopefully nonchalant pose, but the words charged forth, idiotic and brutal, “Wanna get a coffee?” 

      Laura’s eyes lasered mine, then swept the sidewalk.  A few oak leaves fluttered between us, torturously curled, gnarled and arthritic.  In creaking hesitation she said, “Well…I was actually on my way to check out the new library.”

      A lie: “Oh! I was heading that way too. I heard it’s nice in there.  Lotsa new stuff.” So we went. And then what?

      At the theater, she leaned, lips to my ear, whispering, “What are you waiting for?”

      “Huh?” The previews rolled.

      I remember it with wincing clarity.  Laura wrapping her hand around the back of my skull, wrenching me to her face. Laura’s tongue lolling into my mouth, lapping my gums, writhing in cold saliva.  The cinema filling with jabbering voices, laughing, rolling, howling in terror, arguing, sobbing.

      I pulled away, startled by my hardness.  She put my hand on her thigh, crossing her legs over it, a bear trap; I could feel her seeping heat in my fingertips.  I looked down at her feet, slimly slipped into blue canvas flats, and traced my way up her shin, around the crook of a legging-lined knee, around the swell of her hips, around her bra’s underwire, swooping along the nape of her neck.  I arrived at a dirty blonde filament, burnt out in the projector-glow.

      The movie began.  She looked ahead; iridescent splotches creeping around her cheeks; shadows framing her wide-set and tragically bored eyes.  Onscreen, a Russian gangster named Ivan muttered something terse and vaguely profound before clobbering whatever chumps happened to be in his way.  The action continued; spastic and paranoid jump-cuts punctuated tiresome narrative exposition. 

      Something had happened at the library. I’m rummaging, here.  Something happened, right?  A bone-deep timeslice when we waded through the mire of small talk.  I don’t know how this happened.  I remember looking around the room, seeing the students at their workstations, faces glazed in computerlight.  I saw them, and I saw Laura, and somehow I had spoken when I only meant to think.

      I had said: “Either I never knew myself to begin with, or I’ve forgotten.”

      I don’t know what I meant by that. I wish I could say that I’d pulled it out of some cannabis-ridden cavern or inebriated fog, but my thoughts were stingingly chlorine clear.    I wanted her.  I wanted anybody.  Two weeks in Athena and everyone ceased to be a stranger. Maybe that’s what I was saying.  We were amnesiacs waiting for sunlight.

      And then the conversation turned to God. Damn it all. I’m at a loss about this one.  I can see the constellations and the pinprick memories forming them, but I’m otherwise lost in an abyssal part of the sky, floundering between nebulae, swinging at comets and stardust.  Somehow I tumbled into space and the oxygen was getting low. That’s it. I was just a little loopy.

      Laura had said, “I couldn’t live if I didn’t think there was a God. There has to be a God or I can’t be happy.”

      And she had reached – what the fuck was I thinking? – for my hand. We laced fingers, animals huddled in a plastic hutch, veins straining below our skins to touch.  When we left the library I’d offered to buy her dinner.

      “Oh, oh no,” she’d said. “I’m already three pounds over for the month.”

      “What do you mean?”

      She dawdled, dangling a foot from her ankle. “I have a shoot this weekend.”

      “And they can tell you’re three pounds over?” 
 “They can always tell.”

      “What about coffee? Shit, I already asked you that.”

      “Actually, I gotta get to class.”

      “When can I see you again?” We agreed on the theater.

      Later, the film flounders.  Her fingers slither again around mine, legs crossed, ensnaring my hand.  First pulling it to her thigh and then further up.  A little more.  She pushes up against me and I feel her steaming through the spandex.  She squirms a bit and stares ahead.  I look at the screen, digits installed in her crotch, and I watch a tiresome fight scene slug onward among the ruins of some allegedly Mayan temple.  Laura clamps down when I tug at my hand.

      “What, you want me to -

      “Shh!” She’s serious and terrifying, practically predatory. 

      “But what if they see –

      She nudges my hand again.  I nudge back and I hear a tiny moan hissing from between her teeth.  I press again and she’s wriggling, gyrating, grinding.  The rest of me surveys the theater.  A few people in the back goggle the screen, faces awash.  Their eyes roll around in sunken shadowy caves; their mouths hang slack and vacant. There’s an obese family – mammoth man and mammoth wife and two mammoth fucking children - poured in the back corner seats, sluglike and squirming, idly cramming popcorn down their gullets. 

      Laura comes, grunting.

      I smell her on my hand as the daylight sears my cheeks, glaring my vision.  I try to laugh.

      “Well, I’ve, uh, never done that in a movie theater before.”

      She smiles, suddenly sunny and beatific. “Oh, that’s what my last boyfriend said.”  Again, I’ve got nothing to say. 
'

     I don't know when I missed the exit for 33 East; it takes me until Guernsey County to realize it.  Something kept me spellbound on I-70, like a syringe drawing me out of Columbus toward West Virgina.  Something injected me into Guernsey County. Have I heard of Guernsey County? I look around, recognize  nothing, realize my mistake and  continue  East.  Exit signs point the way to Cambridge. 

**
    Lois invites me to her Halloween party and I drive up 33 to Columbus. I find her house.  I find Lois, sit on the couch while she goes upstairs to prepare her costume.  Little plastic pumpkins hang from strings in the dining room door, somehow resembling notes on a musical staff.
    I grapple for the notebook in my back pocket.
    I find a blank page.
    I write, in the key of F, an eight note phrase, and throw in some potentially interesting chord changes. I close the notebook. 
    Lois  bounds  downstairs, dressed in black with cat's ears and a painted nose.  “You look just like him,” I tell her, pointing at Schwartz. Indifference from the cat.  A smile from Lois.
    She asks where my costume is. I say I'll get a cigar from the corner store and wear my Grandpa Jerry's old hat.  She asks who that would make me.  “Someone else,” I say. 

**
     I swoop out of the farmland.  A dip in the road and a few twists.  Where am I?  
**
    Where am I?  The kitchen.  A pot of cider on the stove.  Somebody pours in several glugs of rum.   I nurse a Dixie cup, cozying up to the warmth.  An hour passes by, chattering, muttering, giggling, roaring, booming.  The cider sloshes in my belly.  I'm on a couch, in my clothes, in my skin, in my skull, in my brain, somewhere.  The muscles in my face yank at my mouth, jerking a grin out to my cheeks.  There's a camera; I sit up and chomp down on my cigar, raising my eyebrows. A ghastly flash. 
**
    A blue sign leads me to the “Tourist Information Center”, located near the town center. Sunday.  It looks to be the only place open.   The rumble from the highway fills the vacant streets and I cast about for a moment before entering.

**
    Later the music gets cranked up. They're dancing in the other room. Then they're dancing in here.  I wobble to my feet and throw myself into motion. I dance for a minute and then I'm lost among the jostling bodies; no one calls out or looks my way.  Lois is somewhere. I'm somewhere else. I'm lost.  There's the Viking again.  And Ethel from “I Love Lucy”. 
I'm backstage at an abandoned theater, wandering among the dusty costumes and junk and props and the torn-down set pieces.  I'm underwater. 

**
    A beachball-shaped woman squats at the desk and I don't know how to talk for a moment.  Then I'm babbling.
    “Hi. Um.
    “I was wondering if you could help me. I think I'm kind of lost. I'm trying to get to Athens. You know, where OU – well, I'm trying to get there but, well I'm not sure how.  I don't even know how I got here. I guess I forgot to get off of 70 at the right – well, I don't know. Y'know, nevermind. Can you help me?”
    She stares. 
    “Is. Is? Is something the matter?”
    No response.
    “Well, do you have a map?” Wordlessly she reaches for one, hands it to me.  “Does this cost  anything? I don't really have any cash.”   She says no and I shuffle out the door.
**
    They're still partying downstairs when I crawl into Lois'  bed and roll up against the wall, leaving a space to my left.  I press my ear against the wall and listen to the vibrations from below. I long for a neck to nuzzle.   A curling feather of breath in my ear. 
**
    I get a map and get lost. I stop at a gas station and get new directions.  I open the map on the hood of my car and a trucker points me toward Athens, tracing a nicotine-yellow finger down Ohio's veins.  I get back on the road and wonder where home lies.

**
    Lois is asleep at the other end of the bed when I wake up.  We eat diner food for breakfast.  Scrambled Eggs.  She points me in the direction of I-70.  We embrace.
**
    Five years old and I stand barefoot in the front yard. The sky arks down to the horizon ahead while the summer settles in my lungs, honey-thick and glowing.  For a moment I'm convinced I can get there.  To the edge, to the dome, to press my palms against it.  I get to the neighbor's backyard across the street and I'm no closer, no more distant.

"A government that declares a state of emergency against fifteen-year-old kids. A country that takes refuge in the arms of a football team. A cop in a hospital bed, complaining about being the victim of “violence.” A city councilwoman issuing a decree against the building of tree houses. Two ten year olds, in Chelles, charged with burning down a video game arcade. This era excels in a certain situation of the grotesque that seems to escape it every time. The truth is that the plaintive, indignant tones of the news media are unable to stifle the burst of laughter that welcomes these headlines."

The Comedown (22 February 2010)

"Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse"

-TS Eliot, from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915).



I bought it at Wal-Mart. Call it a wardrobe, I guess. A construction of hollow metal poles and plastic support brackets, it was encased by a zippered shell made of some sort of woven blue plastic and stood about six feet off of my bedroom floor. Hazel would claw her way to the top in a desperate scramble, then perch on the corner nearest the window, her eyes rapt and ears pointed in swiveling surveillance. She'd curl up and then stretch out, luxuriating. A yawn and a rolling purr would bring her a doze.

At night, we could hear her tugging at the fabric, hooking a claw into the fibers and popping them loose one by one. She towered over us in the twilight, feline queen of the apartment, mistress and protector of the bedroom. If you tried to lift her off, she'd cling to the wardrobe, yowling in wild-eyed panic. She'd lay up high and mighty on that damned thing and groom herself, mashing saliva against her fur with little squishing noises. She would wake us up when she jumped, thudding.


**
Sunday afternoon. Nickey and I crouch in my kitchen, naked beneath our blankets. Delectable serenity. Our elbows gleam in the cold white light. Our cheeks redden at the bones, our eyes glint with the snowshine from outside. The sprigs of dried cilantro hanging in the window carve a silhouette in the brightness. Grinning, I hold out a tangerine, digging my thumbnail into its skin. “Listen,” I whisper. I pull back the skin as she leans in closer. The fur-edged crinkling fills our ears and our smiles stretch a little further. I pull off more of the rind and gently nudge my fingertips between the fruit's folds, easing the segments apart. As they separate, we hear the tiniest sigh, a delicate kissing crackle, a thrilling hiss of joy.
“Do it again,” she says in breathless wonderment. I pull off another segment and we lean in closer; my nose nuzzles her cheek. I hand her a piece and tell her to eat it. The juice erupts in our mouths; our tongues sing a biting citrus melody. Staccato sparks of sunlight race up our gums. Our lips meet in the electric silence.

**
Nickey and I huddle on the bed and Red Turtle Rabbit shows us her tattoos. A lapine shadow stands against a crimson turtle shell. The lines on the shell on the flesh of Red's forearm dance. I can see her pores and the hairs and the skin cells. I look up at Nickey and see the capillary webs clustered at the ball of her nose, wine-red gauze caressing her cheekbones. I see the redness in my own fingertips, in my knuckles, my kneecaps; the blood races in elation to our faces. I get up to walk and the floor sinks with my steps, yielding and elastic.

**
Hazel is sleeping on top of the Wal-drobe when it starts to collapse. I enter the bedroom and look up to see her scurrying back and forth in alarm as her throne tumbles beneath her. I call Nickey over and she braces her hand against the top. The wardrobe wobbles like it's made of toothpicks and marshmallows. “There's too many clothes in here,” I finally manage to say. “ It's gonna collapse. What'll we do?”
Nickey suggests taking the clothes out and we begin to do so. We heap them in a pile, laughing. We moon-bounce into the other room for more tangerines. Seen through the kitchen window, a silver maple erupts from the dirt next to the gravel parking lot. Myriad twigs and branches nestle in the sky's skin. I hold up the tangerine rind and we examine the veins on the inside wall. We see the same map etched into our palms, in winding rivers and forks of lightning. Nickey splays her fingers; I lock my own in hers and our hands join, a heart pumping new magic between two bodies.

**
I heard a report on NPR last week, stating that a third of the world's socks are produced in one town in China. One town makes buttons. Another makes novelty light switch covers with pictures of Jane Austen. These products are then sold in American stores. Toxic sludge is dumped into rivers; smoke blossoms in the air. More and more of the earth is devoured as more and more stuff is made. Thrift stores abound with clothes nobody wants; people trade junk at garage sales. Storage units are rented out; mansions are built to house material belongings in an economy that seems to thrive on infinite growth, spurred by infinite consumption of finite resources. More factories are built. More products are made. More more more.
I think about this as I poke my head into the newly gutted-out wardrobe. There is a factory somewhere (probably China) that makes and packages millions of shittily constructed wardrobes to be sold at Wal-mart so that people like me have a place to hang all the clothes that they never wear (also from China).

**
What if, at the instant you finish reading this sentence, all factory-driven clothes-making on this planet came to a halt? What if they stopped making pens, or cell phones, or plastic bags? What if they stopped building drive-thrus or Hummers? What if they stopped making Styrofoam cups or crown molding or doorknobs or gasoline-powered lawn mowers? Who would suffer? You could probably clothe and provide for several generations of people with whatever's left. Suddenly landfills would become treasure troves, and garbagemen would be treated like Santa Claus.

**
I now sense the evil presence lurking in the wardrobe. The unzipped flaps hang open; abomination gapes like a busted-open pustule, spewing gluttony across the room. The structure lurches forward and the clothes bulge into the room.
The thoughts buzz in my brain; with surging urgency I look around at all of my belongings heaped in piles. I look at the two bookshelves from Big Lots, swooning beneath their oversized loads. Too much. There's too much in here. I'm going to get rid of the wardrobe. I never even wear most of these clothes. I'm getting rid of those too. I'm going to tear this goddamn thing down. I'm going to tear it down right now. I'm going to tear it down and I'm going to simplify.
I look up at Nickey and the words burst from my mouth as the thought detonates in my skull. I shake my head, finally awake. “None of this has any value to me! These things don't mean anything!”
Red woo-hoos from the other room.
Elia and Nickey help me take it apart and we wrap the metal rods in the blue plastic cover. I cradle the remains of the wardrobe as I descend the stairs, a demon corpse in my arms, hunted and exorcised. I heave the bundle into the trashcan. “Out,” I say. Then, with more certainty: “Out! We don't want you here. You aren't wanted here.” I scurry up the stairs.
**

Hazel meets me at the top of the staircase, giving me a long indignant “mroowrr” before trotting into my bedroom. Bewildered, she sniffs the floor where the wardrobe once stood, pawing at the pens and dustballs and spare change that have accumulated in that space. She looks up at me, then Nickey, and lets out a long dolorous whine, grieving at the loss of her dominion. I begin sweeping the floor and she watches every motion, puzzled and scared. “It's ok, Hazel-bear,” I tell her. “You're still in charge. You've still got us cleaning up your shit.”
**

We lay face-to-face, cocooned on my bed. We lock eyes, smiles stretched in ecstasy. Our pupils engulf galaxies; star clusters shimmer in our tears. My arm encircles the small of her back. We look at each other and we understand.
**

There's a memory of the waiting room at Hudson. I wait to see a doctor. A wide screen TV obliterates the possibility of continuous thought. We are all sucked into an episode of General Hospital. Everyone on the show argues or cries. A woman wakes from a coma, frantically demanding to know what year it is. A twelve-year old talks to his dad, a twenty-something wrapped up in a super-trendy leather jacket. Two lovers stage a heated argument about something relating to a text message. He says something like “But, you know I love you.” None of the actors seem to believe their own words. They plod along through the plot, talking and gesturing, laughing and sobbing and shouting right on cue.
Right on cue, I rise as the nurse calls my name. I automatically remove my sweatshirt so she can take my blood pressure.

**
With my arms around her waist, I tell Nickey I love her. She says the same. The bed disappears. The room is gone. The walls and bookshelves, the broken ball-point pens, the dog-eared paperbacks, the blankets strewn around the floor, my guitars, my notebooks, my clothes, my shoes – they're all gone. We remain. I say it again. She says it too. We feel every thought, every laughing melody, every shiver, every grin and gasp, every breaking wave within the other. “This is it,” I tell her. “This is love. This is God. This is everything. Do you see? This is it! We're it. ” She smiles, nodding her head as tears pearl in the corners of her eyes.

**
Right on cue, Elia and I are buffeted by a chicken breeze from the KFC down the alley. We stand in the kitchen, barley and vegetables cooking on the stove. I swallow my nausea. At night, the giant fuck-all light from the Sonic drive-thru blasts our kitchen and Elia's room.

**
I once walked past the Sonic on the way to class and watched a truck empty out the grease dumpster, hoisting the galvanized metal box up into the air, tilting it forward. A cascade of sickly brown splashed down into the truck. I remember that now, as Nickey and I contemplate the glass of Coke on the bench that somehow passes for a kitchen counter. It looks like motor oil. A jar out of Mordor, brimming with vileness and ruin.

**
Nickey and I take my clothes off of their hangers; while the garments are folded and neatly stacked, a pile of plastic tangles grows on the floor, and once more I remember working at the dry cleaner. I would walk into work and Dave would point at a cluster of plastic garbage bags, filled with metal hangers. Customers, having nothing better to do with them, bring their hangers to us for re-use. It was my job to untangle the hangers and shove them into boxes. Meanwhile, some factory in China cranks out more hangers; an entire town built up – an entire generation and more – dedicated to satisfying our need for organized closets, bloated with the fruits of others' strife.

**
The garbage truck comes by tomorrow; hopefully they'll accept my offering to the Landfill Gods. I think Hazel has forgiven us for destroying her queendom. This morning she curls up in the crook of my legs, kneading the blankets, occasionally pricking my skin with her claws. Nickey lets out a restless dreamy sigh and I kiss the back of her neck, feeling my breath slide out to her shoulders. Before I drift back into slumber I glance at the wall once obstructed by the closet. The paint is sea foam green, and I imagine little waves rocking the apartment, the street, the whole town down into sweet tranquility.

**
There are stars the size of our solar system. There are nebulae that are light-years wide. Light years. Light, which will flee from your childhood room faster than you can even think about leaping under the covers, takes a year to travel that far. Right now, in the same space we occupy, galaxies are colliding. We are tiny people on a tiny planet, a dust mote on the universe's eyelashes. But we're here, and that's something, even if we crowd ourselves off of our own world and out of each other's lives with mountains and mountains of stuff.

True enough to my nature, it has taken me a dozen false starts to get anywhere with this essay. That first sentence took three attempts. But I've got it now and I'm riding it out. Perhaps not. I burn through what little fuel I have; the flame slurps up all the oxygen in the jar and I come to a dazed halt at the end of a far-too-short-introductory paragraph, tyrannized and traumatized by the page's pristine blankness.

I don't know what the hell I was thinking. Creative writing, I told customers at the dry cleaner when they asked about college. Creative Writing. I'm going to major in Creative Writing.

Is that part of OU's journalism school? They would ask, invariably.

No, I would respond. This is Creative Writing. Journalism is not Creative. This is Writing that is Creative. Because somewhere I've gotten it in my head that I can cull together enough bullshit to actually call myself a Writer. I will elucidate Human Experience; I will carry the Promethean Fire. I will make you cry. I will arbitrarily capitalize Nouns and Adjectives to make myself appear Clever.

As I said, bullshit.

And, right on schedule, that's all I've got. This the part of the essay where I go check my email. Or take a walk. Or log on to Facebook. Read over this essay and nitpick. Call my mom. Cry. Remember the essay topic. This, for me, is the writing process. My therapist tells me that my distractability is the result of a neuro-chemical deficiency (ADD) which leads to an effectively under-stimulated brain. The brain, as a result, reaches out to any available stimuli, self-Heimliching back into functionality. This is what I'm doing. This is what I am experiencing. The most desperate thumb-twiddling.

I don't know why I write, and it's only recently (five minutes ago) that I've shown the faintest shadow of understanding on the matter. My classmates peck and scribble away, focused and contemplative. Have I said anything of consequence? Have I, in the last forty-five minutes, chewed my way to the core of the matter, spitting seeds of wisdom or insight? Probably not. But here's my chance.

This is the part of my [now disappointingly] brief essay where I Get to The Point. Maybe an abundance of the right kind of neuro-chemicals would have afforded me a longer, more elaborate essay, replete with startling metaphors, insightful similes, and intriguing anecdotes. Here's where I could Bring it All Together. But I won't. Because while I hear the cadence of my unwritten conclusion, I do not have the words. This is what I have learned. I have learned to be patient with the fidgeting, cuticle-picking, foot-tapping, lip-gnawing engine of my mind. I have learned through all of my nervous ticking and neurotic blathering that sometimes quality comes snaking out of my pen, curling in contentment between the margins.

"It has often been suggested to me that the Constitution of the United States is a sufficient safeguard for the freedom of its citizens. It is obvious that even the freedom it pretends to guarantee is very limited. I have not been impressed with the adequacy of the safeguard. The nations of the world, with centuries of international law behind them, have never hesitated to engage in mass destruction when solemnly pledged to keep the peace; and the legal documents in America have not prevented the United States from doing the same. Those in authority have and always will abuse their power. And the instances when they do not do so are as rare as roses growing on icebergs. Far from the Constitution playing any liberating part in the lives of the American people, it has robbed them of the capacity to rely on their own resources or do their own thinking. Americans are so easily hoodwinked by the sanctity of law and authority. In fact, the pattern of life has become standardized, routinized, and mechanized like canned
food and Sunday sermons. The hundred-percenter easily swallows syndicated information and factory made ideas and beliefs. He thrives on the wisdom given him over the radio and cheap magazines by
corporations whose philanthropic aim is selling America out. He accepts the standards of conduct and art in the same breath with the advertising of chewing gum, toothpaste, and shoe polish. Even songs are turned out like buttons or automobile tires--all cast from the same mold."

-Emma Goldman, from "Was My Life Worth Living?" 1934

Maybe they’ll make a movie about me one day. Based on a true story, the trailers will say. I’ll be filthy goddamn rich, resting on the laurels of a successful lifelong musical career. One day. Maybe they’ll make a movie about my childhood in suburban Cincinnati. They’ll get some exquisitely precocious-looking boy to play me at the age of eleven, when I first played through “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with both hands on the piano. The sunlight will hit the young actor’s face at an inspiring angle, while the soundtrack swells with a legato both soaring and incisive, cutting right to the viewer’s heart and filling him or her with pure ebullience. A standing ovation at Cannes. Oscar buzz. Paparazzi. They’ll get some up-and-coming teen heartthrob to play me at age seventeen, when I wrote my first song. They’ll give me a heroin habit, while they’re at it, for drama points. They’ll pull me out of my resplendent retirement so I can record my big comeback record. I’ll get my own channel on satellite radio; I’ll be beamed out into space on the airwaves. Their most beloved commodity. God, the romance of it all.
It’s usually at this point in the fantasy when the screamers show up and I’m jarred back into reality. Court Street, 1:30AM on a Sunday. I sing and play guitar for the bar rush. I sit on a stoop outside of the Attractions Salon, numb-handedly pounding out tunes into the January air. You don’t notice me. Most people don’t. Those who do like to yell. This is what I’ve learned about drunken people in Athens. They wholeheartedly enjoy a good yell. Perhaps it’s cathartic. OMIGAWD LOOK AT THE GUY WITH THE GIH-TARRR.
Some of them really know how to scream, too. Voices arrive in all manners of frequency and tone: grating, piercing, nerve-twisting, squawking, yelping, snarling, caterwauling. Two constants exist. Screaming and slobbering. A strapping young man in a child-sized cowboy hat strode up to me, raised his chin and intoned, “You fffffucking suck, man. You suck!” He had saliva Jackson Pollocked all over his shirt. Allen Ginsberg may have seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, but at least he saw them. I'm still wading through spit and idiocy.
.

Poland swerves in and out of the rearview mirror, crouching in blind corners before roaring ahead into the vista. I remember pitifully little of my experience there. Perhaps I should have eaten better.

My diet in Poland consisted mostly of instant powdered soup and hard bread slathered with Nutella. They wouldn't let us eat the local food because it wasn't kosher. I stood outside of Auschwitz sobbing and choking down a Nutella sandwich. There’s a memory. I bought a notebook at a museum. There’s another. I could list all of my memories of Poland on a single sheet of paper in bullet-points. I could speak them one-by-one into a tape recorder. I could list them out on a Bingo board while you call out letters and numbers. I-7 is the fire-breathing dragon statue in Cracow; O-12 is the mass grave filled with the skeletons of children. N-16 is the seven ton pile of human ash still standing at Majdanek, around which a memorial has been built. Majdanek operated on the outskirts of Lublin. The Nazis murdered nearly eighty-thousand people within walking distance of a thriving city. There is a building in Majdanek containing nothing but shoes. Shoes from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, front to back. Baby boots. High heels. Loafers. Flats. Work boots. That is most of my memory concerning Majdanek. I ate a Nutella sandwich after that, also.

The Nazis nearly obliterated European Jewry; sixty years later I stood at the site of countless murders, numbly mucking my gums with chocolate and hazelnut. My journal remained hopelessly blank. How could I write? How can I write now? History eclipses me.

I think there were forty of us. Twenty-odd Americans and a similar number of Israelis. We traveled all over the country, visiting concentration camps, death camps, mass graves, memorials, parks, museums and various piles of rubble. Memories pervade, murky. Between six-hour bus rides, we sleepily shuffled from site to site, slumped and staggering. Overwhelmed. Exhausted.

Behave yourselves, the guides told us at the hotel in Lublin. That was at the beginning of the week. You are not here on vacation. Party some other time.

I went upstairs with Jon, my roommate, who fell asleep immediately. I turned on the TV and couldn’t find anything in English. Powdered soup-induced heartburn made my insides shout; I spent twenty minutes in the bathroom ready to vomit before reclining on my bed, a cold washcloth across my forehead and another across my abdomen.

I got the idea for the washcloths from an experience two months earlier, when I donated a pint of blood to the Red Cross. I watched my blood flow through a tube sticking from my arm, filling a plastic sac hanging next to my head. Then I had what the nurse called a “bad reaction”. Nausea clutched at my stomach. My skin clammed up. Thirst choked me. They gave me a can of Sprite and leaned me back, blanketing me in ice-packs. My body responded to all of this by flooding my brain with feel-good neurotransmitters. Afterward, I sat at a cafeteria table, nibbling sugar cookies and giggling at how I'd just given an eighth of the blood in my body to strangers. That's twelve-and-a-half percent.

On my eighteenth birthday, we visited Treblinka. Little remains of the extermination camp. Just thousands of rocks placed in memoriam and eight-foot-wide slabs of concrete symbolizing the now-destroyed train tracks. At Treblinka and many other camps, prisoners’ heads were shaved before they were killed. Their hair was woven into thread and used to make socks for German soldiers. Which is worth more to a stranger? A pint of blood or a head's worth of hair? How many pints of blood have I made in the years since Poland? How many inches of hair have I grown? I am told that my hair will continue growing after my death. This is not the case for most Holocaust victims - they were incinerated. The Nazis had little interest in mere killing; they were also in the business of full-scale erasure. By the thousand, they tried to expunge the Jewish people, paring them down to the flesh, stripping them of clothing, socks, shoes, jewelry, family heirlooms and hair. When the poison gas settled, the Nazis would wade through the corpses, digging through horrified mouths for crowns and fillings, to be melted and made into rings.

While recovering from the powdered soup in my hotel room, I found a game show that was possibly in German. It seemed to be a sort of Hangman game, in which callers tried to figure out a secret word. For each correct letter, a leggy blonde woman with enormous breasts removed another item of clothing. There she stood in gorgeous gleaming nakedness; meanwhile, I half-expected Gestapo troops to storm on-camera, shaving her hair and hurling her into a van with a tube running from the exhaust pipe to the cargo.

I switched off the TV. Then I fell asleep. The next day we went to Auschwitz, where I ate a Nutella sandwich. Then we visited Auschwitz II at Birkenau, where I ate another. I don't remember where we went after that – if it was a three or six hour bus ride. Maybe I slept. Maybe I listened to Bob Dylan. I probably listened to “Mr. Tambourine Man” at least thirty times that week. “Take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind,” he probably sang while I watched the crematoriums fade on the horizon.

Once at the hotel, a friend offered me a shot of absinthe, covertly purchased at the airport’s duty free store. “Eighteen’s old enough to drink here,” he whispered. “C’mon, just a shot. They won’t know.” I took the shot and lay down, burning in straw-hollow confusion while the absinthe sang in my throat. Anise seared my stomach lining and I belched black licorice.

I cease to be human beginning every Thursday and ending each Saturday night. During this period I become the Pizza Guy. That is who I am. The Pizza Guy. No name, no birthday, no dreams, no fears or hopes. The Pizza Guy. I am a man who drives a car and gives people food in exchange for money. I am the voice you hear on the phone in the inebriated predawn, asking for your address. I am silently giving you the finger because you and your drunk friends have kept me waiting with three other lines on hold as you debate pepperoni versus banana peppers. I am tired. I am the Pizza Guy.
Scene. Interior. Room 143 at the Ohio University Inn. A goggle-eyed woman wordlessly thrusts a a bundle of cash into my hand, muttering “keep the change”. The cringe-inducing sweetness of tequila.
I am the force that causes food to appear in your hands and money to disappear from your wallet or checking account. I am endowed with the power of near-nonexistence. Like some sort of fairy, I am often visible only to children and those who believe in me. I am a hero to the stoner legions, who answer the door with incredulous twisted smiles, forgetting they ordered anything.
Scene: North Congress St. Or Palmer Street. Or Elliot Street. Exterior. Spring. Front porch. White paint peels from imitation Tuscan columns. I stand with three large pizzas stacked in the crook of my left arm. A plastic bag containing two two-liters of Mountain Dew and a smaller paper bag with twenty teriyaki chicken wings dangles from my right hand. I elbow the doorbell, or bang my elbow against the door. Or kick the door. I remember the credit card receipt in the breast pocket of my uniform shirt and the pen tucked behind my ear. I fumble for these as the door opens. The customer is a twenty-something male with a horizontally-striped and close-fitting polo shirt, open to the chest. Leather sandals. Baggy cargo shorts. Dave Matthews babytalking from the speakers in the other room.
CUSTOMER: Oh shit! Did we order a pizza? [Calling to his other friend] Dude! Cody! Did you order a pizza?
CODY [stoned]: You ordered it, man.
CUSTOMER: Shit! Yeah...uh, hey, how much is it?
ME: $20.89. Just fill out this form. And sign it.
The customer leans with the receipt braced against the door frame, staring fixedly. Turning to me, he smiles sheepishly.
CUSTOMER: Shit dude, I'm so fucked up. Gimme a justa minute. [With trememdous concentration and effort, he fills out the form, carefully retracing each curve of each zero in the zero-dollar-zero-cent tip he is giving me. The time is 2:43AM.] Dude, drive carefully. Uh, 'night.
My job is relatively uncomplicated. When not delivering pizza or ringing up customers in the shop, I do prepwork. Stretching dough to fit pizza pans. Saucing. Cheesing. The work is made less tedious by the company of my coworkers, who share with me the understanding that – despite a sizable number of well-mannered and friendly customers - many remain who are impatient, insolent, impudent and incredibly irritating.
There are customers with stultifying senses of self-entitlement. There are customers who complain. There are customers who call in with simple-minded and insultingly transparent schemes in the name of Free Pizza. Most of the time, they're simply moronic.
This isn't right, they say.
This is wrong.
This isn't what I ordered.
I drove to my house fifteen miles out of town and my food is cold. This pizza is cut into squares instead of triangles. There is a mushroom on a slice of my pizza. The pizza you delivered does not have cheese spread all the way out to the edge of the crust. I ordered a pizza with jalapeño peppers, and I was delivered a pizza with jalapeño peppers. My girlfriend doesn't like jalapeno peppers. This is your problem. I had to interrupt my girlfriend while she was studying to show her a pizza she doesn't even like.
This is your problem. This is your fault. I want Free Pizza.
They all want Free Pizza.
Free Pizza awes me. It has the power to wed cunning and stupidity. The girl with noxious pink sweatpants tucked into her boots approaching the counter sincerely believes with every clump of mascara mashed between her lashes she deserves Free Pizza. She deserves Free Pizza because there is a fleck of pepperoni stuck to the crust of her pizza. There is a two-millimeter-wide cube of cheese that landed on top her salad before someone closed the container. She and Kimberly from suburban Columbus have been on a vegan diet for going-on-forty-seven days. This is my problem. This could ruin everything.
Scene. North Shannon, East side. Mr. R. approaches my car in his driveway.
“Oh, you sure got here fast,” he says, with creeping smarmyness. Sidling up to me, he hands me a twenty dollar bill. “Just give me three back”. While I go through my billfold, he stands within a breath's reach and I can smell the saccharine stickiness of his hair pomade. People in this town don't lock their doors. They hole up in their houses while the zombie hordes wander , stilettos slung over shoulders, pants belted below the ass. Porch parties are the worst. The bilious masses flow out onto the sidewalk; the women cluck and screech. The men howl and bark, swinging cases of beer from orangutan arms. Not that I wish to insult orangutans, who at least handle themselves with some scrap of sophistication. The Mill Street marauders show only the dimmest promise of self-awareness; with slack-jawed vacancy they rummage through their mental pockets, digging for something to yell at me as I drive by. Many are silent, staring with pupils rivaling those of a giant squid.
Top five remarks shouted at me as I drive around town:
1. PIZZAAAAA! YEAH! WOO!
2. WOOO! PIZZA GUY! HELL YEAH!
3. BLAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH (heard at both extremes of the frequency spectrum)
4. WHERE'S MY FREE PIZZA? FREE PIZZA! DO YOU HAVE ANY EXTRAS?
5. GET A JOB, YOU FUCKING HIPPIE!
Most of these students are attending the nearby university. They will get degrees in communication or business or marketing or fine arts or engineering. They will be hired by megalithic corporations who deluge the American mental landscape with torrents of advertisements - who influence our self-perceptions, our biology, our culture and our technology. Many will work for the media, trumpeting the trivial and sensationalizing the wholly inane. Sometimes, in a panic, I see the future of America cradled in the arms of these drunks, who carry the promise of a bright, intellectually-stimulating and bountiful future for this country with as much delicacy as an NFL defensive lineman stomping on egg cartons.
I'm not teetotaler. I've been smashed, blitzed, blazed, baked; I've been at least three dozen varieties of stoned. I can forgive people for having a good time. Hopefully others can forgive me when I scream “Back the fuck off!” at the guy from Palmer Place Apartments trying to steal the sign from on top of my car, or the girl in soffe shorts with visible panty lines pounding her finely manicured fist against my hood. Hopefully you can forgive me if I'm a little surly on my run to your sorority house; I'll do my best to forgive the fact that you can't give me a tip after spending forty dollars on your boyfriend's credit card. I'll do my best to forgive the small but painfully loud portion of the local population who are a novelty at their best and unthinkably loathsome at their worst. It's all pizza in the end, anyway.

"So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new."

-quoted from "How to Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later"