Don't Look Too Closely

If you are one of those folks who plan their lives out to the finest detail, I bid you step back from that view for a moment, and hear the story of my old friend Dave, who had no time to prepare.

Dave was impossible to miss. His skin was the color of buttermilk; he had bright orange hair (well cut) and a heavily freckled face, and at a skinny six-foot-one, moved effortlessly and with a surprising grace. At 23 — unlike me at the time — he was comfortable in a suit and tie. And though he could not get a date to save his life, he would describe his married life to-be in detail in the breakroom at Simmons Burke as we wolfed down donuts and slurped coffee out of little cardboard cups with poker hands printed on them.

Simmons Burke, Inc., the family run Baltimore company, specialized in the selling, servicing and supporting of photocopiers and word processors. The word processors were made by Wang, which should give you an idea of when this story takes place. (Hint: 1984).

I recall Monday mornings, looking in through the conference room window at the sales meetings where all the golden boys hatched their plans for market domination. The delicate, ethereal Dave stood out among the sea of BS artists. They hated him. Why? He had the gift. Dave sold the hell out of Xerox copiers and Wang word processors.

I would often tail him, motoring around B-more in my clunky Celica with the racing stripe on the side, sweating through wool suits I stupidly wore in July and August. Getting lost; circling blocks endlessly before finally locating our customer companies. Then, leaning over the shoulders of the secretaries, I would enlighten them in the ways of word processing while doing my best not to stare down into their V-neck sweaters and blouses.

Sometimes, when Dave would allow himself to pause in his sales calls we would meet for lunch. Over burgers at TGI Fridays, I learned that he had a very specific design for his life. He was saving up for a house, coalescing plans for a wife and a family, investing his sizable paychecks in stocks. He had it all lined up; I was impressed.

That year at Christmas I received a Gwaltney 10-pound ham as a year end bonus. Dave won Salesman of the Year — an all-expense-paid trip to London for two.

A few days later he waved me into the conference room, and under the glare of the fluorescents lamented the lack of a woman in his life. Someone who might be wooed by a whirlwind trip to England. Then he got an altogether different idea.

“Hey, you want to go with me?” he asked with his characteristic enthusiasm. I was his best friend — something I didn’t even know.

“Hell yeah,” I said without hesitation.

My excitement lit up the subsequent days. I spent two weeks actually enjoying the job. Everything just glowed.

But I never made it to London. And neither did Dave.

He didn’t show up at work — for a week. I phoned but there was no answer. Erma, the HR lady, would only say that he was sick. I knew little about his family and I wasn’t even sure he had any friends. I rapped on his doors and windows to no avail.

Dave was gone.

The weeks ticked away. The calendar pages flipped up and whooshed off into the vortex. Tumbleweeds blew across Dave’s desk. (Well, it caught some dust.) Eventually, I forgot about Dave and got on with the task of being undirected, at which I excelled. Every so often I lamented the trip that was not to be.

Months passed.

Years.

Decades.

I moved around the country — the Bay Area, L.A., Washington,  Boston — hoping to find myself, or at least a clue, for an embarrassingly long time. I worked jobs in marketing communications and got pretty good at it.

When I fell out of the clouds in 2010 I found myself back in Baltimore on a visit to see family. It was a cold March afternoon as I buttoned up my coat against a razor-edged wind and marched into the Pikesville public library. I settled into a chair and picked up the closest book, a photo essay of the Caribbean.

A few minutes later a homeless man shuffled by in ripped jeans and old Reeboks trailing dirty laces. He was cocooned in a balloon-like coat, straining under the weight of a backpack on his shoulder.

I recognized him immediately. Dave’s trademark orange hair was now gray and had grown long and wild. His face was cracked granite and white-whiskered, his eyes yellowish. He was still thin. He paged through a magazine but I could see he wasn’t really reading it.

I stared over the top of my book, flummoxed. As Dave drifted by I watched him tote the big pack, which contained many things, maybe even all those plans and dreams — the wife, the house, the stock portfolio — buried under cans and bottles and who knew what else he’d picked up. I imagined his other future, the unlived one, pressed into some inner pocket, pulsing with latent energy.

He took a long time to look around but when he saw me I smiled and offered my warmest hello.  He examined me uncomprehendingly, then turned away.

“Dave,” I said.

But he wouldn’t look at me.

“Do you remember me? Simmons Burke?”

His blank expression was my answer. He gathered himself up and hurried to the other side of the room.

I took a few breaths, then went over and asked the librarian about him. She nodded. “Schizophrenia,” she said. “He’s been coming here for years. Poor guy.”

“Jesus, man.”

I thought about it. Apparently, back in the almost London days, Dave’s genes had tripped a switch that set off a time bomb in him. The Dave that I knew — that Dave was gone. The illness, I knew, could hit perfectly healthy people as early as their teens and twenties.

I stared at my old orange friend, felt a gust of cold air blast through the London-shaped hole in me. My mind flitted back to the trip that was not to be, the mystery now explained. London, I realized, had been, and still is, for me, not a world city but a place that will forever be tinged by the injustice of nature’s wrath — which was written as plain as day on the man’s face over by the wall.

Dave was squatted down, examining something on the ground. Looking at him, I wondered if he ever thought about London, if he remembered being salesman of the year, or that he had once been a young man with a bright future.

* * *

There is scene at the end of the movie Saving Private Ryan where we come to understand that many soldiers have given their lives to save a single man. The captain of the rescue team, who is about to die himself, whispers his last words to Ryan, the man who will return safely home to lead a normal life. ”Earn this,” the captain says. “Earn it.”

Sitting there in the library, I imagine the old — the young — Dave there beside me, drawing his last healthy breath, just like the captain, saying those same words to me.

In October of 2004, I drove my 1995 Camry out of suburban Baltimore to Los Angeles — without actually knowing, at least at the time, that L.A. was my final destination. My ignorance of this fact led me to stop in Boulder and live there for five years.

I had flown to Boulder in August 2004 to visit a friend. I recall the plane bumping down after a wind buffeted, stomach-wrenching descent. I remember looking out the window of the Super Shuttle speeding down Rt. E-470 from Denver, feeling excited by the 70 mph speed-limit, and awed by the mountains in the distance and the dancing sun above them.

During my time in Boulder I learned much about the behavior of mountains.

Item one: mountains don’t like people. This sounds extreme. I know. Hear me out. The mountains see us in just about the same way that cows view the flies that pester them.

The Rockies draw many physically fit humans (such as the hikers who wear T-shirts bearing the slogan, “Sea level is for Sissies”) and these people will claim, or assume, to have a friendly relationship with the mountains. But the fact is, they simply can’t hear very well. If they could, they’d know better. This is through no fault of their own. It is in their nature. They are not equipped to receive the kinds of messages that mountains send.

To them,  the mountains are beautiful and awe-inspiring. Locales in which to sport. But to those of us who can truly hear what’s really going on, it is quite another story.  A more sinister one.

The mountains, if the truth be known, are narcissistic.  They are cold and self-congratulatory. They are haughty. A mountain is like a beautiful and unattainable woman who cannot give herself to anyone because she is constitutionally unable to. And I can assure you that every one of the fifty-five 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado is vain.

Often they are rude. One day, I heard Long’s Peak, a devastatingly gorgeous forteener, actually tell me to f-ck off. And I was not even standing on it.

The problem is, we have been admiring them for too long. They know this. They take for granted their beauty and have no understanding of their gifts or the way they affect other beings.

As I say, I lived in Boulder, in the shadow of the Rockies. Boulder, as a town, is ideally suited for two kinds of people: 1) well-to-do young couples with children, and 2) a certain kind of athlete including skiers, cyclists, hikers, climbers and runners. I have envied the physiology of the latter type on many occasions. These folks, few people know, spend their exercise-laden days as high as a kite, gorging on one tidal wave of endorphins after another.

Not fitting into either category, I often didn’t know what to do with myself in Boulder. So when my friend Tom offered to loan me his Suzuki 350 dual sport (road and dirt) motorcycle, I rushed out and got a motorcycle license.

I rode the purple-and-white fun machine for two glorious summers. I would motor from Boulder up into the canyons and backroads and endless dirt capillaries, visible and invisible, that snake through the Rockies. I sped along the Peak to Peak highway from Nederland to Estes Park with the sun at my back, jaw-dropping views at every angle and the wind sandblasting my face and creating a hair phenomenon that was truly frightening. I was a white Don King.

I traveled as many roads and trails as I could find. Bumping or speeding along, forgetting for a spell my life down at 5,430 feet, I let my mind mingle with the terrain. I would pull over and cut the engine often, and sit or stand there in the total quiet. Sometimes I’d spot an interesting trail and just veer onto it and ride as far as I could, or dared. There were no people, no police, nothing. I was free to do as I pleased.

I saw the beauty. I felt the majesty. Secretly I listened to their spare exchanges. But even as I opened up to them, I had the impression they were lying in wait.

One time they hit me with a torrential downpour, and I rode grimacing in the knife-pelts of rain until I could take it no longer. I pulled over, dropped the bike and crouched under the protection of a friendly tree until I was able to ride back down, sopping wet and freezing cold.

Their consciousness, of course, isn’t like ours, or even close to it. It operates at a wavelength that is difficult to find, like a radio station that isn’t, say, 87.5 or 91.1 but more like 85.2234. But find it I did.

On the Peak to Peak, there were always other riders. There is a hand signal that bikers give to one another. In some ways it is not unlike the unspoken acknowledgement that New Yorkers or Parisians feel—that here we are, together in this, the coolest place on the planet. The motorcycle wave goes like this: You lower your left hand down and point your index and middle fingers toward the road surface. Very casual.

You only do it toward bikes similar to your own. A rider of a smaller 350 cc bike like mine, for instance, would never sign to a passing Harley. Personally, I believe that the message in the sign is this: The mountain hasn’t gotten me, either.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, my body never adjusted to the high altitude, the thin air or the aridity of Colorado. I will say that I had never encountered such hungry air in all my life. Often I sensed it sucking the moisture right out through my skin. This, I will say, seemed very greedy.

The air in Boulder and Denver, at more than 5,000 ft., contains 17 percent less oxygen than the sissyfied air at sea level. As it turned out, I need that extra bit of O2. There were health issues.

In August 2009 I decided it was time to head out, or rather, down.  Packing my car up very carefully and scientifically, with the help of a very organized friend, I drove the heavy and listing (now) Nissan Altima west. Out of Boulder I rolled – down Rt. 93, up Rt. 70, into the Rockies, toward Utah. The day was cool and cloudy.

Listening to the Counting Crows belt out some roadworthy tunes, I mentally asked the mountains for permission to leave. As I passed Silverthorne and Vail and Glenwood Canyon, I complimented all these places on their majestic sights. And I drove very, very carefully.

I remembered the hikes I’d taken on the Mesa trail at Chautauqua, how I marveled at the broad leaves of bushes and trees which were completely unblemished by insect bites. Pure, crystalline glowing and untarnished flat green. I recalled – shall I say it? – actually missing insects. This is when I knew it was time to go.

As I rocketed down the western slope toward the state line, I realized I hadn’t left soon enough. I had become jaded. My bad. I’d started to take things for granted. One gorgeous place started looking like the last. This, I am certain, was yet another reason why the mountains were angry. I’d gotten over them.

The moment I passed the Welcome to Utah sign, I pulled the Altima over, got out and silently thanked Colorado and the Rockies. Then, because I just couldn’t help it, I did a little fist pump.

There exists on this planet many types of human beings, and one wonders if we incarnate from wholly different interdimensional origins. I think about those folk riding their bicycles along the Boulder creek path or ascending the trails of the fourteeners, and I just know they are different from me in very fundamental ways.

There is no fault or judgment in this. It is like considering the difference between yourself and a person from another race or culture. The differences are one of the great things about being human. Maybe the Earth is like that tavern in the original Star Wars with the bug-eyed creatures enjoying cocktails side to side with humans, everyone discussing business, or their woes and tribulations, or whatever. Maybe one of the points is to wake up and see this.

I lived among the Colorado people. I learned from them.  I wish them all good things in place that is at once gorgeous and forbidding, home to strange and unmoving beings, and definitely like no other.

Sonia sits at a high table near the tall windows that look out onto Ventura Boulevard. In profile she is attractive in a sun-melted, deserty kind of way. But there is madness in her eyes. The gray tangles that sprout from the part in her raven black hair add to this effect.

Her tabletop is obscured by a mountain of papers. Sometimes, as she stares at them, she will pull three or four marbles from her purse and pour them, back and forth, from hand to hand. She is unaware of the chilling effect this ritual has on others. But she is very smart and perceptive. Perhaps she doesn’t care.

The papers are handwritten. The writing is childlike, with many misspelled words. The sentences, which travel across the unruled pages in perfectly straight lines are highlighted in green, yellow and orange. From six feet away it looks as if Sonia is holding small canvases of abstract art.

There is something compelling in Sonia and her papers, and the overflowing grocery bags that sit on the floor at her feet, and the strange and muddy mixture she drinks in the café cups, which she says is essential for her stomach condition.

When I look at her, sometimes I see the John Nash character from A Beautiful Mind, the man who wallpapered his toolshed with notes that detailed the intricate plots which existed only in his mind. I wonder if Sonia’s writings map the madness in her as well.

The other day I was looking across the cafe while wearing my reading glasses, which blur everything more than an arm’s length away. I will often gaze for a few moments at the unfocused shapes ordering mocha lattes or the amoeba-like heads of the writers leaning toward their computer screens. I didn’t realize the dark shape I was staring at was Sonia.

“What is that tea you have?” she says with a practiced smile that belies a side of her that is not evident when she is immersed in her compulsive pouring.

“Sencha,” I reply, setting my eyeglasses down.

“It smells like fresh cut grass.” She blinks like a bird. I can’t place her accent.

She asks for my astrological sign—a subject that comes up a lot in Los Angeles. I tell her and she asks me guess hers.

When I do, and get it right, she squeals delightfully. “That’s amazing!”

But I have an uneasy feeling that any guess is a correct guess.

Sonia asks me about the writing device on my table, which is called a Neo. The Neo is simply a keyboard with a 4-line LCD window which stores the words you type. Unlike a Mac, the Neo does not try to lure you into cruising the Internet or trying to find just the right background song for whatever it is you’re doing. The NEO is a 1965 VW bug to the Mac’s Lexus.

Sonia asks if I’d be kind enough to check the spelling on her pages. As I approach her table, I feel a sense of privilege, as if I’ve been invited to spend time at the walls of John Nash’s shed.

I take the pages from her. They are, as you might guess, a little unnerving. Many letters are left out of the words, but I am able to make out what she’s written. Across the tabletop, I hear her pick up the marbles.

Her story is shocking. It details the many sexual abuses she has suffered at the hands of local police officers, and the years she spent as a sex slave. The text includes the lines, “He pointed a gun at my v—-a and told me …” and “I was locked in a room and starved for a week.” “They made me …”

She was poisoned, which is why she must drink the muddy concoction. She had been held hostage and abused in horrible ways. She is preparing these notes, she tells me, to send to the newspapers.

“When did all this happen?” I ask, shifting in my chair.

“Five years ago,” she says.

When I ask why she is doing this now, she doesn’t respond. She turns to the window. She is both looking and not looking at the people outside.

I finish the edits, even as I wonder about leaving my own trail on the sheets. I hand the pages back to her. She stares at me, saying nothing, and I see that the crescents beneath her eyes are not just dark but rich in deep lines.

Images assail my mind. It can’t be helped. I see her doing to me the kinds of acts that they did to her. The abuses that have ruined her. To make matters worse, I believe she knows what I am thinking. She smiles thinly, knowingly.

Trauma is a deep gulch. I wonder if the rift she is trapped in is just too deep to pull out of. I wonder what is true and what isn’t. Five years ago her life started to unspool, and it continues to come undone.

I retreat to my table and I put my hands on the Neo, comforted by the familiarity of the little machine. I glance toward Sonia and see something that surprises me: a story of boredom written on her face.

There is a man, Scott, folded comfortably into one of the deep leather chairs. I watch Sonia smile invitingly at him. I see energy flow into him. She calls out, her words traveling across the space in which I’m sitting, as if we’d never spoken a word.

“Are you an Aries?” she chirps.

Scott, whom one look will tell you is a lonely guy, is attracted to her form, her smile, the little workout outfit, her lithe and petite body which has been both a blessing and a curse. She smiles a smile she has used many times, then jumps down from her chair. She asks him about his coffee drink, tells him about the history of java. She can no longer drink coffee, she says. I can no longer type.

There are rivers of thought and emotion flowing beneath what is visible to the eye and the mind. There are untold passages through which these rivers flow. We all have them; not just Sonia.

Scott takes out a scrap of paper and writes down his phone number, as Sonia’s face takes on that far-away look. She is staring out the window.

Open up. Go deeper. This is your time — use it.

JL’s voice drifts down from the speakers high up on the walls of the spacious chapel, mingling with The Fray’s How to Save a Life as if it were written right into the song. Sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor I watch his slender form meander through the softly lit room, stepping deftly through the sea of bodies.

Go inside. Let it happen.

JL wants us to turn our vision inward, to discover and sit in the steaming center of our personal goulash, to mingle with it — and, hopefully, to cast it off.

I’m so ripe for this. I’m at a time of life when I’m losing patience with my past conditioning and old patterns – ”the long bag we drag behind us,” the poet Robert Bly calls it.

In early 2009, I was straining under the weight of that bag. And I’d been noticing my friends struggling with the same challenges, limitations and insecurities they had been for years.

The exteriors always changed, to be sure; the interior, though, remained suspiciously the same. It was as if our evolutions had been slowing imperceptibly, and were now threatening to grind to a halt.

A woman named Rene told me about a meditation group called the Miracle of Love. She said the work was cathartic, that it could loosen some blocks. That sounded good to me, so I drove down to Denver for an introductory meditation held in a chiropractic office in a dark and empty strip mall, then I was invited to a longer, more intensive gathering at the group’s chapel.

Go deeper. Let go.

I close my eyes. It is hard to not be moved by Donna De Lorey’s imploring In the Sun. I’ve never meditated to background music before, and I kind of like it. I climb up on a diving board located somewhere in my frontal lobe and swan dive straight into the melody.

When I bob back up a few minutes later, I hear someone sobbing. It only takes a moment to realize it’s me.

Wow. That was fast.

The glowing face of my 15-year old daughter fills my mind. Blades of love and longing cut a crisscross path through me. But before I can even consider what is happening, she is gone, replaced by another image: me, as a ten-year old boy.

Go with it.

My throat tightens. Donna’s soprano notes beckon me to push in further, and I sense not just this one memory burn but many others connected to it.

Spider webs shoot out to my childhood in Brooklyn. Playing stickball with a pinky in the courtyard at Montauk High. Dashing between parked cars to catch a football. My refugee mother and her sister placing jars of cucumbers that will become pickles on a windowsill of cracked green paint. The pinups thumb-tacked on the walls in Uncle Alex’s basement. Superman and Archie comics stacked in the foyer of our brownstone. My rage at being moved away to suburban Baltimore.

I’m connecting to an archive that feels far more real than anything going on in my current life. In fact, compared to this, my real life feels powdery, thin.

Around me, many shadowy bodies stir. Sounds wrench me from the grasp of 41st street. There is much activity: moaning, crying, writhing, crawling, jumping, dancing, clothing being shed. I’ve been transported to a graveyard on Halloween night.

JL’s lips are a millimeter from the mic. It’s okay, go wherever you need to.

You got it, JL. I reach deep inside the long bag, intoxicated by primal power, and jump right into the current. Stress and worry fly off of me like roof-shingles in a hurricane. I’m in a hurricane.

At one point I freeze in mid-pirouette when I hear a sustained scream from a few feet away. It is powerful but muffled as if by a pillow. I notice more of these quiet animal-like wails. I realize they have been going on all along.

Then I remember. Of course!  I reach down for my scream-towel and hold it tight to my mouth and throat, as instructed.

There’s no reason to hold on here. This is your time. Go in. Let it go.

The wrenching 15-second scream is powered by the energy of the 10-year old in me. I do it again and again, until I start to sweat and my throat dries out, and then I run over to one of the bowls of cough drops and suck hard on one of the little disks.

The air is pulsating, heavy with the chemicals of raw emotion. Colored light vibrates off the stained glass windows. Figures rise, fleece-shirted arms lift up. The meditators spin in circles, run, punch the air, swoop their arms heavenward; pad, stocking-footed through the huge space. Everyone lost in their own world, their own dream.

There is a different story at the back of the chapel. There, meditators kneel at an altar laden with sacred objects, communing with photos of the gurus. Others sit up, scribbling notes on pads pulled from their kit bags.

A half hour later I fall into a heap on the floor.

At the end of the three hours, the participants, who have journeyed both solo and en masse to places that will not be discussed, lay motionless on the carpet for a cool-down period, after which we pick up our things and congregate on pew-like benches in a waiting room. I see quite a few very serious-looking women and men, many, if not most, upwards of their forties and fifties.

I’m spent and energized at the same time, walking out into a frigid wind, following the pack, saying nothing.

As I drive home through a night that is unusually crystalline and clear, I am certain I can reach out of my window and catch some star dust floating down from the sky. I feel somehow different. Lighter. Something is missing, and I know what it is. That damned bag.

There is madness in all of us. The detritus of the past, seen or unseen, pushes up out of us and seizes us and we become it and lose who we truly are. The human experience is wound up with such bloody interference. It is unavoidable. There is no way around it because we are structured this way. We can erect walls to box it in; we can try to manage it. But that doesn’t change the fact of what it is and does.

But there are ways to release from it. For awhile, anyway. If it means howling like a wolf in a den of the possessed, so be it. If means spiriting off into uncharted territory and leaving behind a conservative and increasingly restrictive culture, so be it. I wonder if what I’ve experienced is akin to the tribal practices led by shamans of the past. 

I think about the Miracle of Love hosts, a population unto themselves. They are a spiritual community or a spiritual cult, depending on your point of view. The three or four hundred (worldwide) devotees of the guru Kalindi are determined to break free and bring you along, if you care — or dare — to join them.

Indeed, there was something about them — a peacefulness, a serenity. Perhaps it is their practice of reaching into the bag so often and hurling out whatever they can grab.

They appear physically younger than their years, shockingly so, though many are far past middle age. There was a freshness to their faces, an openness, an absence of distress or dis-ease.

And there was something else. Something that even now, months later, I can’t quite put my finger on.

I will get back to you on that.

Sunday at One World Café — a brick-walled, triangular-shaped bistro bordering University Ave., 39th street and a few nondescript alleys, huddled in the shadow of the Johns Hopkins lacrosse stadium.

Outside, a misty rain sweeps down the sidewalks, whispering that spring is in the air. So, despite the damp forty-five degree sting, one is optimistic. And to think that only a couple of weeks ago I was smashing tennis balls in L.A., shirtless  in eighty-two degrees. The strange dislocations of modern life.

Two college girls are camped out at the next table. Their half-finished mimosas sit untouched, the crumbly superstructure of a blueberry muffin stands like a Roman ruin on a plate between them. I’m impressed at how slowly they can eat. My own oatmeal cookie has been begging for mercy from my compulsive chomping ever since I unwrapped it. Sorry, bud.

The girl’s laptops touch at table center as they multitask, fingernails dancing on plastic Chiclets. The talkative blond in the gray hoodie glances occasionally down at a massive textbook as she fingers her hair and steals glances at her Facebook homepage on the laptop. The page goes away often, but seems always to find its way back.

Everyone is documenting their lives these days, broadcasting all those excruciating minor details out to the world. We are communicating in far too many ways; we are like drunks at a still. A glass or two lifts the spirit, yet we guzzle as if trying to fill a bottomless hole.

A friend of mine last week, with whom I voice-mail often, told me we really must try to talk soon in real time. The statement struck me as odd. When else would talking happen?

I have been sitting and thinking about this for a while, in my Boulder-bought clothes, which have traveled to meet me in several ways: crammed in suitcases, shipped in Home Depot boxes (by far the best place to buy them) and wedged into most every cavity of my Altima.

I have hauled the stupid threads a long way; our relationship has become strained. They are not notable or extraordinary, these clothes. I could have gotten them anywhere. I did. But they trail me like a lover who does not realize the relationship is over.

I took them everywhere, never understanding that it was I who was being brought along for the ride. Perhaps if I’d wrested the reigns from them things may have been different.

What does it matter?

Not far from the Facebook girls, over at the long, open-angled bar, the corpulent guy in the army fatigues, who was reading Proust, has metamorphosed into a wiry guy in tight jeans and Converse low tops. Time has passed.

In so many ways.

Two weeks ago people were slender and bronze-colored and acutely conscious of automobile makes and models. Now they are compleckted in shades of anemic rose and bone white and read textbooks and go around flannel-shirt clad, subject to an altogether different social register.

The California portion is over for now. (So very sorry, Meghan.) This here is the Old Line State, where history oozes out of every stone and brick structure in a far more powerful and compelling way than it did in the wild West. There it hardly mattered what had happened. Here the past grabs you and holds you and demands your attention and respect, and you’d better give it or else.

One afternoon, when I was in fifth grade, I wandered the child-strewn fields of Randallstown Elementary School. The chaos of children unleashed; every grade, everywhere. Playing ball, fighting, swallowing down inchoate sexual energy. Me minding my own business. Just walking.

Suddenly there is an explosion in my eye. I reach up and feel a solid mound of dirt embedded in my left eye socket. The clump starts to crumble and spill down my cheeks. I hear the footfalls of kids scattering.

I’m spinning, crying. I’m on the ground, tasting grass. Cupping a palm over the eye, wanting to rub the dirt out. But not doing that. Knowing, instinctively, I’ll be scraping the tender structures of the eye into blindness.

Then my mother is there, that hysterical tone in her voice, the internalized screaching horrific  fear that is the Camps internalized. She doesn’t know it but I do.  A lot of us do. She can’t turn that way. (I wouldn’t, either.)

At the hospital, the doctor picks out the dirt with tweezers. “Smart kid,” he says. “If you’d rubbed this, the eye would have been blinded.” I’m glad to know that. My mother, though, has a hard time hearing such things.

I must wear an eye patch for several weeks. Eventually it heals and I can see again.

Years later, in high school I am struggling to maintain my grades. Then in eleventh grade, an eye exam indicates I need glasses. I’d been passing the exames up until then by relying on the good eye.

The left eye needs a large correction; the right, not so bad. There is astigmatism — the eye is misshaped. But I wonder, Did the dirt bomb do that? Or was I born that way?

The Akashic records are a library of every thought and action that ever occurred on planet Earth. The Akashic records don’t actually exist on this plane of existence. They are in some in-between world, where we go when we finally shuffle off the mortal coil. The Akashic records could be a fiction, of course.

If I do run across them one day, I will absolutely check into the eye affair. I will see if the dirt bomb caused the astigmatism or not. I will learn who threw it and what became of him. I will see if he admitted the crime to anyone. If he felt guilt over it. If any karma resulted, and what that karma caused.

I will get some answers.

P.S. I will also find out what happened to the dinosaurs. And Elvis.

On a December day a few years back, I drove the Pacific Coast Highway up to Zuma beach to kill a few hours before meeting my daughter at the fast-food emporium of the Westside Pavilion. Malibu seemed a pretty good place to spend it.

It was a warm and sunny weekday, and the beach was empty. I kicked my Tevas into  the car and legged it barefooted across the sand. I jogged the hard-packed surface near the breakers, stopping occasionally to cool my feet in the water.

A small dot up ahead slowly took shape as a lone man sitting on the sand. As I approached I could see that he was roundish and pink and smiling unabashedly. Long strands of thin gray hair danced on his shoulders, tossed about by the wind. He was shirtless, wearing only bathing trunks, his arms wrapped around his knees.

When his face came into view I couldn’t help but notice I was looking at Anthony Hopkins, the famous actor.

I stopped, dumbstruck. I scanned north and south — over by the dunes and toward the bluffs — for security guys, spouse, onlookers, fans. Anyone. But I saw not a single soul.

I was alone on a beach with Anthony Hopkins.

I had been working a spiritual program back in Maryland and one of the practices was to try to separate from the barrage of thoughts that constantly assail the mind. The idea was that you are not them. You are the pure being who is glomming on to the damn things and then calling the resulting unstable construct me.

Most thoughts, the teaching said, are repetitious and useless. Worries, past conditioning, fears. Ninety percent is just garbage.

And so, standing in front of one of the world’s mega-celebrities, I was aware of the rattlings in my head growing rather intense, my mind telling me things like how much more important Mr. Hopkins was than myself in the grand scheme of things. In fact, I realized, I was a mere speck of dust by any reasonable standard of comparison.

I felt myself start to ride the damn thing into crazy-land.

But I didn’t. I caught it. I un-glommed.

My knees didn’t buckle, as they had once when I ran into Jackson Browne hiking up a river path at Temescal Canyon. Back then I didn’t have the mind-detachment mojo, and I dissolved into a heap of jelly. I practically genuflected, simply because the man’s early song lyrics catalogued the peaks and valleys of my teen years so uncannily.

Some gulls landed a few feet from Anthony Hopkins and started to squawk. I looked squarely at him.

“Hi,” I said.

“Gorgeous day,” he replied pleasantly. He was bare-eyed and squinting, staring out to sea.

“This beach is usually crowded,” I said. “This is amazing.”

“Is it?”

“Sure.”

I didn’t want to walk on just then. That would have been the easy way out. I wanted to enjoy not being tangled in the mind. I want to prove it. So I started chattering away, commenting on this and that, and within a few minutes (and I cannot recall how this happened), found myself sitting elbow to elbow beside Anthony Hopkins. Two buds digging their heels into the sand.

“I absolutely love it here,” he said. “I’ve lived in many places. There’s nothing like this. I moved here and it feels like home to me.”

“I never found anything in L.A. that feels like home to me,” I said.

“Really?” he said, genuinely surprised.

“It’s so transient. I never get comfortable here.”

“Hmm,” he said. “I find it very welcoming.”

We talked awhile. I laid out how I was dealing with the emotional side of visiting my daughter after being away, and the situation with her mother. Then I wound into some lighter areas, like the way the traffic and intensity of L.A. tended to bruise my sensitive nature, and how I wished it didn’t.

He waxed on about the beauty of the ocean. He looked like a guy really enjoying himself there on Zuma beach. When I examined him I was struck by how vibrant and, I don’t know, clear, he seemed.

We looked out at a dolphin or something jumping up.

Soon we were both standing up. He looked at me, kindly, and reached out his hand.

“Tony,” he said.

“Warren,” I said, feeling his palm on mine.

“Nice to meet you, Warren.”

A moment later, as he walked off, I must say, I felt pretty damn good. I’d kept my cool arouned someone who millions would know. No buckling knees. No jelly.

I wondered what he thought about me not recognizing him. Did it even occur to him? How could it not? Was that why he had hung around so long? Or had he sussed me out, knew what was going on, and was simply going with it? It didn’t really matter, I decided.

I called out to him a ways down the beach. “Hey! Tony!”

He turned around, squinting. I noticed he was in pretty good shape.

“I love your work, man,” I said with a grin. “Thanks.”

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s very nice of you to say.”

He walked off. Very nice indeed. Soon he’d shrunk down to a dot again and was gone.

I had held some jobs in Hollywood, first for Ed Zwick and later for Steven Spielberg. I’d met celebrities, but never like this. Never on a level playing field. Mano a mano. With no one around.

The part of it that has stuck with me all these years, the sliver of that experience that remains precious, that makes me smile, was when my friend Tony said my name. “Nice to meet you, Warren.” In that voice you and I know so well. It felt, I don’t know, like a gift.

Soon I was cruising down Pacific Coast Highway toward Santa Monica. When I arrived at the Westside Pavillion eatery, Meghan was sitting at a table over by the railing, drawing Sponge Bob in yellow crayon on a sheet of paper. She jumped up and ran over to me.

Dec. 21 — my mother’s birthday. Dec. 21 — the anniversary of my father’s funeral. He died on Dec. 20, 1983 of colon cancer at the age of 56.

Though I grew up in an ordinary suburban neighborhood, there was nothing ordinary about the vibes whooshing around our dinner table.

My mother Fritzi was born in the Transylvanian Alps of Romania in 1926. She was married to my father, Harry, for 30 years. They were so devoted to each other that when he died she told us she would never go out with another man. She never did.

My father grew up in a Brooklyn orphanage — even though his mother lived only one subway stop away. What happened was this: her husband, Joseph Goldie lost his business in the stock market crash of ‘29 and based on that one (albeit difficult) event, decided to depart the planet rather hastily.

Thus, Tibbie found herself with three boys to raise and a Great Depression on her hands. Though she had converted from Judaism to Christian Science, I don’t believe that it mattered much. Religion wasn’t going to help in this one.

She decided to keep only one of the boys: Arthur, the oldest. Playing out her own Sophie’s Choice nightmare, she dropped Buddy and Harry off at a Jewish orphanage. The two tykes possessed all of the survival skills that any three- and a five-year-old could, which is to say, none at all. Later, both boys managed to survive a string of foster homes as well.

Fritzi, on the other hand, enjoyed a very happy childhood. Her mother and father, Rose and Wolf, had six children: five girls and a boy. Fritzi was the youngest. Her main childhood occupation was dodging kisses.

The Perls lived in a picturesque village a few kilometers south of the Russian border. The Perl children skied and climbed and swam in of streams so pure you could dunk a cup down into one and drink it right up. Until the Nazis arrived in 1944, Visuel de Sus was a most excellent place to live.

Long before that, in the early 1930’s, Fritzi’s oldest sister, Estie, saw disaster looming in Europe, as so many did, and decided to get the hell out of there. So, when a very cool young Cuban guy passing through fell in love with her, and later proposed from Havana by letter, she boarded a ship and sailed off to marry him.

I once heard someone say that courage is doing something that’s difficult by choice, when you also have the option to back out. I, for one, count Estie as one brave gal for taking that one-way trip across the ocean. (All turned out well.)

When 1944 brought the Nazis to Visuel, the hiking and skiing and idyllic life pretty much ground to a halt.

Before the trains arrived, though, Fritzi’s brother, Anci, hightailed it north into Ukraine. He became a forced conscript in the Russian army. After the war, he walked to Tel Aviv and lived out his life there. He married Rosy and had two daughters, Leah and Ziva. Ziva was runner-up for Miss Israel, back in the day.

Many of my mother’s family died on the transport train to Auschwitz; you know that story. What was really unlucky was this: the Nazis arrived in northern Romania only at the very end of the war. A few months more and none of this would have happened at all (I wonder where that would have put me.) Thus, my mother’s family were  really close to escaping the whole horror scot free.

After exiting the train at the gates of the camp – at the sign, “Work will set you free” – my grandmother Rose chose to go left to help a friend’s large family. That was the end of Rose. My mother’s sister, Shari, went left with her own as well, to the same fate.

Which left Fritzi and her sisters Piri and Susie at Auschwitz – for six months. Then to a work (munitions) factory in Germany.

At war’s end, during the liberation, my mother contracted typhoid fever and was quarantined. Her brain heated up pretty seriously, and she almost died. When she recovered, there were some sizable holes in her memory. She has told me on many occasions that given what had happened, this may have been a good thing.

The three Perl sisters made their way to a displaced person’s camp in France. Since Europe was pretty much toast, they wanted badly to make contact with sister Estie  in Havana.

If God had returned to the Continent and visited a blessing on the Perl sisters, it came in the form of a friendly British officer who wrote a letter to Luis Rosenthal, Estie’s husband.

Estie, on learning of her sister’s whereabouts, was overjoyed, as you might imagine. Luis sent money to a cousin in Paris, who arranged for papers for the girls and got them tickets on a ship bound for Cuba. (Luis, by the way, would do anything for his wife. As my father did my mother. There is something about Romanian women).

After the horrors of Europe, the sisters healed and thrived on Luis’s large estate in Havana. They played tennis and tried to forget the awful things that lurk deep in the hearts of some people, a task that cannot be so easy. Some survivors are better at forgetting than others.

One day Luis sent a letter to an old friend, Alex, in Brooklyn, NY. (Alex, a Hungarian, had joined the U.S. army in the war and became a naturalized citizen.) In the letter, Luis placed a photo of his three sister-in-laws. Alex  circled Piri in pen, then mailed the photo back. And before you could say long distance romance the couple were married and living in Brooklyn. Susie married a great guy in Cuba. In the aftermath of all this amorous activity, many of my first cousins arrived on the planet.

In 1952 my mother visited Piri in New York and met my father on a blind date. He misrepresented himself as an engineer; he was only a lab tech.

He read her the poetry of Robert Service, which was entirely inappropriate for courting. Service wrote about the rough men such as Dangerous Dan McGrew, who tramped up to the Yukon territories in search of gold. But since Fritzi didn’t speak English, and Harry had a great voice, it sounded like Shakespeare to her. They married six weeks later and she moved up from Cuba.

My father surprised everyone, including himself, by turning out to be a scientific genius. But until he got married and settled down, he had no idea he had it in him.

My parents, my sister Rhonda and I lived in a brownstone rowhouse on 41st St. between 15th and 16th avenues. Brooklyn was a warm cocoon to me.

Never having much of a family, my father became close to my mother’s large clan. Everyone got pretty tight back then. Piri and Alex, and my cousins Sharon and Rita, lived across the street. We played in alleys and on stoops and in the street. I played punchball, stoopball and stickball.

All was good, but one could sense Europe seething down there below the surface. My mother and Susie never talked about it. But Piri did tell us some hair-raising tales. There was the one about the kapo who made a lamp shade out of human skin. And the line-ups and selections with Josef Mengele, one the most evil doctors who ever walked the planet.

While supporting our family, my father put himself through college at night. He got a Masters in electrical engineering and invented new ways to protect radars from potentially damaging incoming signals. Westinghouse made him an offer and we moved to the Baltimore suburbs.  (Harry would often wake up in the night and scribble notes about ideas that came in his dreams.)

My parents loved their ordinary lives in suburban Baltimore. In fact, all they wanted was ordinary. They were secure and they were happy. Even though, inside, the currents of their past tragedies continued to flow.

What was interesting, at least to me, was that my father was this brilliant, creative, articulate guy – like my grandfather Wolf, probably, who traveled all over Europe on business – and my mother was this simple, good natured and nonintellectual woman— completely the opposite. If they were dating today, they would have passed up on one another.

Not long after logging his 35th U.S. patent for yet another invention that would make Westinghouse millions (he just drew a regular salary) Harry was diagnosed with colon cancer. He died on Dec. 20, 1983 in the way that cancer victims do: emaciated, drugged and different than the way they lived. It is incredibly sad to see that happen to someone you love. My mother was at his side every day during the illness, often sleeping on a cot in his hospital rooms.

The line of cars traveling to the cemetery for his funeral was at least a mile long. There are a lot of people who miss him. My mother, who speaks to him sometimes in the early morning hours, most of all.

There was one thing about Boulder I had never encountered before. It was this: No one wanted anything from me. In fact, quite the contrary. People seemed content with their lives and didn’t want them changed in any way at all, thank you very much. You never got the feeling of being pulled into anything. People strolling the Pearl Street Mall weren’t sending out tendrils of need, weren’t psychically probing at you all the time.

Los Angeles, on the other hand, seems quite the opposite. You can feel people reaching out to you with their eyes and minds and wills and desire, wanting something. What is it, I wonder? Sometimes I have felt like a shimmering tumbler of Johnnie Walker in a population of very thirsty alchoholics.

I wonder if I have that something they want, simply because I haven’t been back for long, and after a time I will lose it and then start to seek it in others, too.

Gil emerged from the pilings at the base of the Santa Monica Pier, shook the sand from his hair and made his way to Ocean Boulevard. Looking as scary as he did, it took him a full hour to beg a couple of dollars for coffee.

By mid-morning he was sitting on his favorite bench on the Third Street Promenade, watching people walk past. And listening to their thoughts.

Though it was burdensome to bear witness to so much naked truth, Gil never complained (to whom?). Instead, he drank. Liquor, he had decided, was the best defense against the clashing cymbals, pounding bongos and peircing guitar solos that assailed him pretty much all of the time.

Once he got so soused he claimed he could see the pores on his arms opening and closing like little mouths, shooting alcohol out in long thin streams. And maybe he could. He was a man of unusual talents. 

But today he was not drunk. His mind was as clear as the Southern California sky. He was on a mission. He was going to find a pure human channel — someone who could flawlessly translate the holy flaupungementent that percolated up from deep in the human psyche into thoughts, words and deeds.

Leaning against a light post just off the Promenade, he scanned the mass of Christmas shoppers. Listening. The majority of them simply wanted to be distracted. Nothing more than that. Some wanted someone to affirm them as a person. Many only thought about food. Some wanted to touch another, and these Gil drew away from. Some never thought about people; only of their dogs waiting at home.

He sometimes (but not always) felt the full force of the flau moving beneath all the wanting. This deeper level, he was certain, was every bit as true as the first was false.

If you saw Gil, you’d probably do what most people did: walk faster. He knew that. He was no fool. Physically, he was a stooped-over old man with a massive nose and gray hairs sprouting from ears that wiggled when he talked. The street kids called him the gnome. If anyone had taken the time to know him, it would have been obvious that he was some kind of angel. But they never did.

When I first came upon him sitting on a wrought iron bench in front of Wahoo’s Fish Taco on a sunny afternoon, I assumed he was just another crazy old fart, or mentally unhinged, like most people who dressed in filthy overcoats pulled from dumpsters. I found myself to be quite wrong.

He was holding helium balloons given to him by his friend Piter, who made them into animal shapes and sold them to the parents of small children. I stared at Gil a long time. There was a profound incongruity to the man in the dirty overcoat who could see the shifting of tectonic plates inside of people; all this while holding the pink and yellow balloons.

No one had any idea that great turbines of understanding were churning inside the hunched-over figure. None of these well dressed deriders could hold a candle to the goodness that permeated Gil.

Last week I saw him leaning against a cement wall next to Barnes & Noble. I asked him if he’d found the pure human being. I checked the pores on his arms, which seemed to be quiet that day.

Yes, he told me.

Oh, really, I said excitedly. And?

Gil started coughing. I mean, really hard.

I’ll get you some water.

I ducked into the Barnes & Noble. Surprisingly, there was a full pitcher and paper cups, free for the taking. But when I arrived outside, Gil was gone.

(The next day I passed by there again, and saw a piece of paper at the base of the wall, pinned down by a rock. I picked it up. It said “It’s me, ha ha,” in a rough scrawl.)

Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Ventura Blvd. Sunny and warm.

Two pregnant woman showing bare bulging midriffs, an old lady in a dirty charcoal bathrobe, a man and a woman in full motorcycle leathers (but he seems like a white collar pretender), and the usual stunning faces and bodies, the plentiful blond, sunglass wearing beauties. An old woman with a hairy chin asleep in a deep leather chair, the newspaper on her lap rising and falling gently. A sour faced Jewish guy paging angrily through the classified ads.

There is a cooperation among the people here, as if they realize that there’s just too many of them and they’ve got to get along. It creates a kind of communication, a community, a joining that is significant and makes them feel part of a whole. It reminds me of New York.

There are words and there is the sensed energy behind the words. Often when she talks to me or supports me (as has been the case a lot lately) there is a rote quality to it, a going through of the motions. She’s often exhausted, but who knows … At times I have felt the depth in those words with her, but not always. And it chills me when I hear them and there is empty space behind them.

We will have to see.

Kendra found herself on a sandy island surrounded by a fast flowing current, a river that she only now realized she had been in. She was sitting on a mound of dirt, her arms wrapped around her knees. Shivering. She hadn’t even known she was wet.

A crumpled-up cotton blanket lay on a rock beside her. She picked it up and pressed the soft fabric to her face, threw it over her shoulders and pulled it tightly around her. She noticed that the blanket was warm and had the scent of another human being on it.

She looked around, searching, but there was no doubt: she was alone. The island was very small. Perhaps the size of a child’s room.

She didn’t know what to do, so she just sat there. The river flowed, the sun beamed down its warm packets of light, and Kendra gazed out past the narrow shore that ringed the island. The water seemed to be swimming within itself, reaching up hundreds of translucent hands and then plunging them down in a steady, even procession. Movement without end.

The muffled voices of people dancing within the river’s steady roar came into her awareness. She stood up, the blanket dropping from her still-shivering body. Tumbling, spinning, the travelers flowed downstream. Hands reaching up; human hands; tense, electrified fingers extending. Heads plastered with hair, submerging and bobbing up. The ugly clutching at one another. Some floated with ease, others thrashed wildly about.

She gripped her arms tightly to herself and edged backward.

A scream pierced the air. Her eyes flung wide open. She saw him then. A man, struck violently into an accreasion of rocks. His body half-submerged, his hands gripped at the cold stone, his legs fighting the current. Tributaries of blood snaked down his cheeks.

He looked at her. That first contact unnerved her. She felt the pull beginning.

A movement entered her field of vision just beyond the man, in a still pool she hadn’t noticed before. A woman, standing knee-deep in the water, naked and innocent, her black hair covering slender shoulders, her skin shimmering and moist. She reached down toward a little boy who was reaching up for her.

Kendra looked back over at the man but he was gone. She saw only the rock bearing long lines of fingernail dust.

She closed her eyes, took a slow breath, tried to collect herself. She ran her hands down along her arms, her breasts, her belly. She was almost dry. And starting to remember.

She had been walking in the foothills, doing her best to accept the fact of Teddie’s murder. She had grown fatigued, as had been happening more and more these days. She just wanted just to accept it, but she couldn’t; and now, finally, after fifteen long years, maybe she had.

She had lain down beside a briarwood bush and fell asleep. She had only awakened when she heard Raine, her youngest, running toward her, calling out. Raine’s blond hair jumping and tumbling, her gait unique to her: clumsy yet determined.

It was at that moment that Kendra, now fully dry, opened her eyes. She dropped the old blanket to the ground and tiptoed toward the water’s edge. She watched calmly as the long fingers of the river reached up and wrapped themselves around her ankles.

And the island was empty again.

The purpose of life not about accomplishments or deeds or anything you can do, though those things can be fun and rewarding. Doing is fine. Doing is what is called the dance. But a dance is a dance; it’s just an activity. It’s not you. Not the real you.

What the real you wants, and the purpose of existence, is nothing less than this: to let the flaupungimentent wash into your life. No, really. What exactly is the flaupungimentent, you ask. Well, it’s just this: the flaupungimentent is what gives rise to everything in this world. There are some unenlightened people who call the flaupungimentent God, the divine, the force .. . There are many names. But that is precisely what gets in the way of knowing it – names.

It’s a weird irony that as soon as you say one of those names, the flow of the flau becomes obstructed. That’s why it has been called the flaupungimentent. You can’t say it. You can’t remember it. You can’t spell it. You can’t shrink it down so that it becomes something it is not. Better to experience than to talk.

Beware of anyone who talks about the flau too much. If they really knew the flau, they would hardly speak its name.

If you see them coming, run like hell.

Stopping thinking about how to be happy.

I am in a room with four other guys. We are all sitting on cots. There is a globe-like green ball in the center. We must all must hit our heads on it. I am the only one who hasn’t, and I am not looking forward to it.

Shift.

I have found the little paper on which the name of someone who knows my grandfather is written. I call the guy but he’s not there.

Shift.

The little paper has fallen to the ground, and think it into my hand.  I can feel how it works, how I must make my mind both empty and desirous at the same time . I think: I have to remember this.

I decide I should keep it a secret from the world because I know that the world doesn’t tolerate people who have such powers.

 I’m on the street in a city somewhere with the three guys from the cots, and some hoods surround us. I hardly notice, talking about my plans and how I have the power and all, but my companions gently whisper that we should get the hell out of there.

We walk causually, and when I look up I see my ceiling. I’m awake, physically tired as usual , but emotionally exhilarated, which is pretty unusual for me.

            The walls of the restaurant are pulsing. Everything has shifted. I feel the first faint stirrings of the beast as it awakens from its slumber. There’s a soft, insistent tapping at my innards, mainly the spleen, and a low moan that I know isn’t indigestion because I stayed away from the carbs. And there is the bulging eyes (mine) that indicate a tectonic inner shifting that is pushing outward. I can point precisely to this moment as the time when it came back to life: Todd, sitting there, stupefied by Andy’s question.

           “It’s your turn,” Andy’s voice bounces off the walls of the little room  in the big steakhouse, the one set aside for our thriving little company. He’s in his element, the MC, a happy go lucky Irishman with a drink in his hand. The new hires will have to get up in front of everyone and humiliate themselves. It’s time for the skits.

          “Pick a number, Todd.”

            I turn my gaze to Todd, my nearest tablemate, a rather large and powerful man. The barrel chest is heaving, there’s a blueberry cheesecake half eaten on the table in front of him, and his dour faced wife who hasn’t smiled or even had a facial expression of any kind tonight, even when Todd lovingly wrapped his arm around her, stares down at the tablecloth. 

          “Okay,” the big man says cautiously, the way you might if it was your turn to drop your pants and do the cow out in the barn, even though you got there late and you’re not sure that the other guys really did go first. “Gimmie ten.”

          Andy reaches into the baseball cap, pulls out a scrap of paper and reads, “Burn the UK flag,” the dare directed at Todd. “You’ve got to burn the UK flag.”

          It’s just a joke, there’s no University of Kansas flag, but Todd’s fleshy face starts to heat up. Hatred roils up and out of his flared and trembling nostrils. I can hear the scream of a train whistle waking up the whole town, but it’s only in my mind, the beast looking for a visual to inflate so it can feel useful.

          Todd remains silent, but he’s saying a lot. He’s reminding Andy that he’s a small human, and that it would be easy to dislocate just about any part of his body. His eyes are Bunsen burner-like flames shooting hot orange damage into Andy’s heart, neck and crotch.

          Andy, relentless good cheer, isn’t even fazed. He waits until the wisps of steam starting to spiral out of Todd’s ears are going good, then says, “Just kidding, I love Kansas.” And the truth is, he does. Not because he’s been there, even though he may have been, but because of the loyalty of the gridiron. And … he doesn’t give a shit. Like many people at this gathering, Andy lives to drink and watch sports and say whatever comes into his mind. But even with his disarming innocence, the time bomb across the table from me defuses only very, very slowly.

          Nearby, I am wavering in an icy wind, shackled to a wooden cross, feeling the flame crackling at my feet. I know, I’m just sitting at a table, sated from a medium rare filet, awash in three single malt scotches. But I feel like they’ve strung me up.

          Dottie is across the table from me, squirming beside her husband, Rob, who is fifteen years her senior and who shields his eager, smiling face with a gigantic digital camera. Dottie is so tight her face is about to split open. She’s praying she won’t be called on to do one of those ridiculous skits. She’s shy, and no wonder, what she must have endured her whole life, burdened as she is by a landscape of acne, even at forty-five, which has ravaged most of the square footage from her chin up to her scalp. There are days her cheeks glisten with the sheen of medicinal cream reflecting the overhead fluorescents; occasionally she is clear but not today. There’s a knot at the base of her chin the size of a milk dud. There’s something about her eyes, too, a gleam , cat-like and moist, the pupils afloat in milk, opaque behind the ever-present glasses.

          “Dottie!” Andy calls out suddenly.

          Shit, her whole being screams out. The split starts to advance across the flesh mountains. No.

          All eyes swivel and lock onto the poor girl. Immediately, involuntarily, she abreacts back in time, to a childhood spent running at full gallop, of hiding out in dark basements and soaking in novels by flashlight in which she imagines herself someone—anyone—who is living life, not just thinking it. Someone normal. Her face shows none of this. It’s blank, her memory un-spooling as everyone looks on. She’s nowhere near the restaurant anymore, she’s not even in this time period; she’s on the trail of Michener or Joyce Carol Oates, away, away, down the pages, across time.

          “C’mon, Dottie,” Andy roars. “Don’t be a spoil sport!”

          Big Kansas slides his gaze at her two seats down. He doesn’t give a shit about Dottie. She’s an odd bird, a bizarre chick from Berkeley. Immaterial. She doesn’t figure into his life or really anything at all. But his companion, whoever she is, smiles ever so slightly.

          “No way,” Dottie squeaks through clenched teeth.

          The chorus of C’mon Dottie’s grows louder.

          “Oh, c’mon,” her husband Rob chimes in.

          She turns to her hubby, boiling crimson. Then, icily, back to the crowd. “Don’t even try,” she says. She whispers something to him, and quickly he stares straight ahead.

          The jeers spin and jump and pirouette and fill up the empty space. Rob carefully places the massive camera on the table, beside the to-go box of chocolate cake, two pieces untouched. “You can do it,” he tells her.

          “You obviously don’t want to get laid tonight,” she hisses, loud enough for everyone to hear. She intends it as a joke.

          Shocked, the crowd stills. Howard says, “Too much information.” Indeed. He’s unable to hide his expression as images flow into his mind, of Dottie’s naked body with the knife-edged angles enveloped beneath her ample husband, his rolls absorbing her like a Boa Constrictor sucking some poor rodent into oblivion. Images  fill not only Bob’s but the collective mind of the group, crowding out anything else and overriding the drunken frivolity, if that’s what this is. The walls of the room are leaning inward now, falling into the deadly quiet center like matter into a black hole, and Dottie, oblivious to her fax paus, has no idea why there is a stunned silence followed by uncomfortable chuckles. In her mind she’s succeeded, deflected the skit, and she sits up straight and triumphantly and smiles in that way of modest way of hers that doesn’t stretch the skin too much.

        Whatever, the space seems to say …

        The whole crew—William, his wife Connie, the new sales guy Bob, Michael and his beautiful date—hardly care, they can’t follow anything anymore.  Their words are garbled, bubbling up as if from underwater. I think they’re talking about wandering out of here once Bob picks up the tag, and heading to the Reef across the street.

          “Rubio!” Andy suddenly bellows, and all eyes turn to the only man of color in the room. Rubio’s personal life is too complex to comprehend, we just know that there are at least four states where he leaves ex-wives and children grasping at him, and one of these folks (we think) is sitting beside him, giving him a hard look. You get the impression that the smirking, pencil-stashed Rubio has always done something that’s pissed someone off, and it’s probably a she. But on the other hand he’s is the best technical guy in the company, and clients urge Bob to send him in for the next engagement. He makes well into six figures, some of which must have gone into the clinking mass of gold that is hanging around his neck.

          “Six,” Rubio calls out to Andy, who starts to root through the papers in the baseball cap in search of the one marked with that number.

          “Sing a song about the company,” Andy assigns him. Cheers all around. We all want to see Rubio do something, anything, because it’s guaranteed to be a show. He’s razor-tuned into what people want, what they expect, you never have to worry about Rubio being contrary. He’s a pleaser. And he’s pleased a lot of folks, at least at the start; one gets the notion that follow-through may not be his strong suit.

          “Give me a minute,” he says as he starts to scrawl on a napkin. “For the lyrics.” But a few minutes later his wife/girlfriend/ex-wife, who isn’t young and maybe shouldn’t be in that dress (she’s almost keeping herself in) is  trying to pull him up front. The crowd is back to cheering and hooting now that the odd (but typical) Dottie interlude is forgotten. It’s Rubio time! I’m enjoying it all, somewhat afloat myself, spared from having to pray like Dottie because I’ve been with the company more than a year and won’t be subjected to thishazing ceremony.

          Rubio’s not getting up and his lady realizes this, so she sashays up to the stage on her own and starts to sing some drunken song about the way her dad metamorphosed into a bitter old fart as he aged, how he tried to keep her from going out on her own, and how Rubio saved her from all that.

          Everyone calls out for him to get the hell up there and save her but he’s taking the writing of the lyrics very seriously and he won’t budge. Finally, he tears up the napkin and blames everyone for distracting him, and goes up to the stage. He starts to sing, and it’s incredible. I don’t know the song but he’s really good. The room falls to silent and you can hear an ice cube clink. When he’s done, his companion looks pleased and they go and sit down.

          “Dot-tie!” Michael starts to chant, and I can hear the gears moving as people consider whether or not to push Dottie again. Wouldn’t that be fun? She’s sitting there, steely jawed, a block of marble. But the group decides not to venture any farther into her goulash, and Michael’s urgency peters out as he hoists up his beer as a coda to, well, anything. Fuck it! He starts jawing at the long tall woman in the black dress sitting beside him.

          Bob, Michael, William—they’re all successes in this business. They breathe it, eat it, it wakes them up in the night, their subconscious chugs away solving supply chain problems. They are friggin’ machines. Money-making machines. I am so envious. They make notes at 3 a.m., you find emails tagged 4:33 a.m. in your inbox the next morning. Ca-ching!

         “The Reef! Who’s coming?” Michael asks the rest of us as if expecting Dottie, Rob and me to shout out yes, what a great idea. Coats are donned and we step out into the Denver winter nightscape, which isn’t exactly a warm and friendly place. An inch of ice coats the sidewalks and the wind howls unforgivingly. The air seems to guffaw at me as I pull out a tube of moisturizer and start to rub it into my hands.

         The glowing red sign above the restaurant shakes violently, as if an inter-dimensional prankster is trying to tug it loose and crash it down on the creatures standing beneath it.  The sign holds. None of these folks, my coworkers, see anything. They don’t see the wind, or the cold, or even the next moment coming up to meet them. They only see the money, the money and the alcohol, the limbs and laughs and the quips and who knows what else, especially with Rubio around. They know in the end it’ll all be fine—exactly the way that I don’t. As I watch them disappear laughing into the night, slipping on the ice, too numb to care, I think, what a useful skill is that business of looking away.

Dottie and Rob grimace a goodbye and start speed-walking toward the parking lot, and I wonder what that drive-home conversation will be like.

I take a long breath. My lungs drop five degrees. Something’s got to change. And it will.

The morning brought intense sunshine and crop circles on my living room carpet. Two rings eight inches in diameter, one by the front door, the other over by the stereo.  I didn’t wake Svetlana, I was lavishing the feeling too much.

She calls to me in dreams. She is either a woman or a child. Once she came as a little girl, standing teary eyed before me. Her eyes were big and sorrowful and her blond hair tumbled over her shoulders. I think she had traveled far, but I couldn’t translate her presence into words.

We have a bond, I am starting to remember. She is more than a dream.

I am twirling in a field. The scent of honeysuckle fills the air and the sun warms my face. My form is easy to move. It is the body of a small child. The cool grass beneath my toes, the wind caressing my skin, the rush of birds, crickets and dogs — all these sensations flow through me, unobstructed.

Nothing else exists; only this moment that seems so full.  I sense a larger presence. I can almost stretch my awareness out to touch it, but I cannot quite get there. Can it smell the honeysuckle? Can it feel the grass?

I know what this is. It is the school with no walls, no ceilings, no rooms.

Once in a while I see her somewhere, as a girl or a woman. She always looks at me and smiles. She wants me to remember something.  I just wish I knew what it was.

           Each day brings with it another person, and until I open my eyes don’t know who it will be. There are the well-rested mornings inhabited by an optimistic, smiling man, and I revel to see this hale and hardy chap smiling back at me from the bathroom mirror. (He even winks at times.)

          Then there is that cursing, hobbling gollum who slinks down the hallway dreading his reflection, for, among other things, the skin under the eyes of a thirty year old should not be mountainous and yellow. Thank God for the veil of glasses.

            The days are adventurous. Who’s agenda will I fulfill today? Which one? Who am I?  Is this my fault? Or the curse of the DNA?

            Yeah, yeah, yeah. Questions.

            But I do wonder.

The emptiness that stalked me
as a boy
dissolved like a highway mirage
in the strange warmth of the Smith’s house
when Cape Cod’s occasional roads
gathered sand
and tires cut trails
visible for days

We chased each other
through that grand Victorian
rosy-cheeked space travelers
safe in the Smith’s cocoon
where entropy never bothered anyone
and the family never ended

One cool August evening
someone asked, Who are you
of a supper guest no one knew
Why, Mr. so-and-so, he said
and departed after gin rummy with a plate of pie
the relatives left aglow in the TV light
of Ed Sullivan

And me, walking home on the railroad tracks
my cheeks deflating in the moonlight
my gait grown limp
I drag myself into our sterile kitchen
my mom struggles to smile
I feel it even now
the mute pain inside of her

She asks about the Smiths.
I can’t bear to tell her
smiling the way she does
The Smiths are alive, I think
but do not say
I whisk off to my room instead
and wait for tomorrow
the way a child shouldn’t

As I drift into sleep
my mind wanders
down the road
and my heart aches
for the warm richness
of that other family

It was in the Tom Petty song, Last Dance with Mary Jane. The characters meet, fall for each other, share themselves and then decide to call it quits. They do all that in a shorter space than I described it here:

We were introduced and we both started groovin’ / She said I dig you baby, but I gotta keep movin’

Modern life.