you'd better come on home, muddy waters....
in astoria on a thursday afternoon, the low buildings somehow further from the sky than the grass and low rolling hills i've become used to. across the river the buildings climb and clamour for the atomosphere like children playing king of the mountain on a pile of dirt. it was enough to make a mountain then; astoria would be enough for a city if i were younger, if i didn't know that the lights and steel across the river were cities too.
wriston & gary's train pulls into penn station two hours late, it was already past six when they arrived & i'd been nursing glasses of whiskey and water for two hours on an empty stomach. somehow the anticipation of the arrival has burned at the effects off the whiskey, i feel alert, sitting on a milkcrate and staring at the junction of hoyt ave and twenty-fifth road. several times i mistake other people for them; it occurs to me i don't know what to expect. despite the fact that every time we hung out together, back in the spring, fall, winter, and spring (never summer because somehow i only ended up back here), climbing into buildings and subway tunnells only to see what was there using the mechanical memory of a camera and shutter, i don't have photographs of them; though they are in the photographs, as much a part of the making and experience of them, the emotion of them, there are no figures within. my memory is unreliable and hazy with their forms, but i remember the glow of accomplishment, the adrenaline and excitement they incited in me: the remnants still flicker somewhere, but when they walk down the block, carrying their packs on their back, looking truly like the hobos they are, it strikes me how far removed i am from that person, the one who dreamed and planned and thought about chasing jack 'n' neal through the long desolate freight tracks laid out through middle america.
everyone hugs: wriston is eager, but gary still hesitant, shying away from physical contact until the pile of arms reaches out for him, anchors him. both are filthy, a kind of filth anchored into the grain of their skin-gary's hands and arms are literally blackened by grime. dimitrios lights the grill, and places the kabobs over the fire. it turns out gary converted from a vegetarian for the trip and i laugh, remembering how adamant he was that he wouldn't be cornered into eating meat on the road. when the idea first formed between us, wriston had asked if we eat meat out there; i was milder, saying if i was hungry i would eat whatever was offered to me. he eats two kabobs, a hot dog, while i munch on bread and ketchup and smile and sip whiskey, amused.
we exchange gifts: for gary, a pack of cigarettes and the books i wanted to give him the last time i was up in the end of july, before their departure when wriston was sure he would be going alone; for wriston, pink flamingos; they hand out bottles of water train operators and bulls had given them on the road; the bottles proaclaim they have been purified by "reverse osmosis". i pour another whiskey and forget the water, we pass the glass between us. the trip is a progression of adventures: hitch-hiking with narcoleptic truck drivers, evading and befriending the bull from one turn to another, lost wallets and wired money, the different positions one has to take while riding certain cars, tripping on bad food scored free from a brothel, reading to bums from a volume of walt whitman, and wyoming. the different kinds of fourties one can find all across america.
it is just before three am when i decide to leave: i have to be back in connecticut before ten for work, and i have drunk over half a liter of whiskey since the afternoon; steve was nice enough to give me the key to his apartment and directions and his bed to sleep in for the night. gary has to mooch off my subway card for his return fare, so he comes along, though wriston and dimitrios and joe are on their way to shaun's house. i'd like to see the kid, who drunkely confused me with wriston everytime we drank together and with whom i channelled the spirit of hunter s thompson in an attempt to find the most efficient way of making a homemade pipe out of gaffer's tape, a bottle of soda (empty), a broken stem of pen and tinfoil wrapping from kabobs bought on roosevelt ave, but...responsibilities. the same damn: gotta go to work, gotta go to work, gotta have a job.
walking to the elevated n,w on hoyt, gary and i are quiet, smoking cigarettes rolled from top tobacco... the worst cigarette rolling tobacco one can find, coincidentally the cheapest. he has not improved any at rolling his own. he recalls a conversation we'd had earlier in the summer, when i'd told him i probably wouldn't go on the trip if he didn't come too, because i had this vision of the three of us doing this together, as brothers and chumps. he didn't know he was going until the last minute... in fact, he hadn't even told his parents, just took one hundred dollars and left a note. If you had known I was going to go, would you have come?
And I look above the buildings, study the skyno stars anywhere, not like Wyomingnot like Wyoming which I've never seen, but I hear is full of deer and grass and stars. And I admit, No, probably not, pause to pick tobacco from my lips and I admit: I knew I couldn't go... and I guess I just wanted someone to blame. Because in the end, I had made my choice, the slow acqusition of camera, lens and tripod, money. Gotta go to work, gotta go to work, gotta have a job.
In the station, Gary reads to me from his logs. Though we sit close, his smell doesn't bother meyes, it is ripe, strong, yes, but not altogether unpleasant. In it, I smell Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. This dream of mine. Liberation, freedom from fear. I am comforted as I lean close to decode Gary's characteristic mumble; I know these boys will be what brings you closer.
We deboard, head to different platforms at Queensboro, to take the 7 in different directions. We hug, despite his protests: it turns out somethings never change, Gary is still afraid of vagina. I recall quoting him in my journal on the way back from King's Park, that despite his refusal to call Wriston and I anything but associates, that "let's just say I like you guys". I realize as I wait for the train that unconsciously I have begun to smile. Just a little bit, the muscles have memory: The same trip, the same train, I had been staring at Long Island and Queens passing me by, confronted by the fact that I would be leaving New York for the summer, and an indefiniate amount of time thereafter, Gary asked me why I was smiling as Wriston slept a few seats in front of us. All I could say was that my muscles were tired to do anything else.
But I was happy.
*
But I was happy.
Funny to find happiness on the threshold of departure. I realize now, months later, a day after seeing them again, I will probably never feel happiness like that again. The kind of happiness that just happened, feeling so full up of life I was constantly surprised that I never managed to explode, to fall into cardiac arrest, because how can a heart hold this much happiness?
It tapered off. At first, it was easy enough to remember. Knowing I was coming back, well, it was enough, to know that maybe I could have that again. But time goes on, and you forget. The people of Stratford are different inside. They listen to my stories, offer none of their own, are content to listen to my legends, not to make thier lives into modern myths. Not long ago, I began to think perhaps it is our best friends who bring out the greatest potential in us, making us want to push ourselves to becomes something great or at least greater that what we are. It occurs to me, as I pour the last dribble of whiskey from the bottle into my tea, I have become old: the value of my memories is more valuable than my experiences, what is happening now disposable, NOT EPIC ENOUGH.
It turns out, though I used to scoff at those my age who marveled at being twenty, twenty-one, that they were old, it is easy feeling old. Here I am, it is one thirty on a Saturday, I am alone in an empty house and I drink the last of my hot toddy (now lukewarm) and pick cigarettes butts out of the grass to smoke, I have been awake for nearly seventy-two hours and I've been awake so long I can barely remember how to lie back in bed with my eyes closed in a parody of sleep.
Sometimes you live your life like this. Now is just a temporary incovenience: you do what you have to in order to have the most freedom to live your life the way you want to. You don't yet have the future, and the past: it is funny, isn't it, that memories can make you feel (you remember the panic when you saw Gary fall from just below the roof at King's Park and see him rise, collapse, rise, then collapse, the way you woke out of sleep like a victim of shellshock at the edge of the soccer fields when Zeeb arrived and he shook you awake, but you don't remember the sensation of roughness of the pillar you climbed beneath your fingers or being shaken awake), but you can't feel your memories.
Some days, I forget to feel the present.
*
I hate to go home this morning, man... ALRIGHT, man...
wriston & gary's train pulls into penn station two hours late, it was already past six when they arrived & i'd been nursing glasses of whiskey and water for two hours on an empty stomach. somehow the anticipation of the arrival has burned at the effects off the whiskey, i feel alert, sitting on a milkcrate and staring at the junction of hoyt ave and twenty-fifth road. several times i mistake other people for them; it occurs to me i don't know what to expect. despite the fact that every time we hung out together, back in the spring, fall, winter, and spring (never summer because somehow i only ended up back here), climbing into buildings and subway tunnells only to see what was there using the mechanical memory of a camera and shutter, i don't have photographs of them; though they are in the photographs, as much a part of the making and experience of them, the emotion of them, there are no figures within. my memory is unreliable and hazy with their forms, but i remember the glow of accomplishment, the adrenaline and excitement they incited in me: the remnants still flicker somewhere, but when they walk down the block, carrying their packs on their back, looking truly like the hobos they are, it strikes me how far removed i am from that person, the one who dreamed and planned and thought about chasing jack 'n' neal through the long desolate freight tracks laid out through middle america.
everyone hugs: wriston is eager, but gary still hesitant, shying away from physical contact until the pile of arms reaches out for him, anchors him. both are filthy, a kind of filth anchored into the grain of their skin-gary's hands and arms are literally blackened by grime. dimitrios lights the grill, and places the kabobs over the fire. it turns out gary converted from a vegetarian for the trip and i laugh, remembering how adamant he was that he wouldn't be cornered into eating meat on the road. when the idea first formed between us, wriston had asked if we eat meat out there; i was milder, saying if i was hungry i would eat whatever was offered to me. he eats two kabobs, a hot dog, while i munch on bread and ketchup and smile and sip whiskey, amused.
we exchange gifts: for gary, a pack of cigarettes and the books i wanted to give him the last time i was up in the end of july, before their departure when wriston was sure he would be going alone; for wriston, pink flamingos; they hand out bottles of water train operators and bulls had given them on the road; the bottles proaclaim they have been purified by "reverse osmosis". i pour another whiskey and forget the water, we pass the glass between us. the trip is a progression of adventures: hitch-hiking with narcoleptic truck drivers, evading and befriending the bull from one turn to another, lost wallets and wired money, the different positions one has to take while riding certain cars, tripping on bad food scored free from a brothel, reading to bums from a volume of walt whitman, and wyoming. the different kinds of fourties one can find all across america.
it is just before three am when i decide to leave: i have to be back in connecticut before ten for work, and i have drunk over half a liter of whiskey since the afternoon; steve was nice enough to give me the key to his apartment and directions and his bed to sleep in for the night. gary has to mooch off my subway card for his return fare, so he comes along, though wriston and dimitrios and joe are on their way to shaun's house. i'd like to see the kid, who drunkely confused me with wriston everytime we drank together and with whom i channelled the spirit of hunter s thompson in an attempt to find the most efficient way of making a homemade pipe out of gaffer's tape, a bottle of soda (empty), a broken stem of pen and tinfoil wrapping from kabobs bought on roosevelt ave, but...responsibilities. the same damn: gotta go to work, gotta go to work, gotta have a job.
walking to the elevated n,w on hoyt, gary and i are quiet, smoking cigarettes rolled from top tobacco... the worst cigarette rolling tobacco one can find, coincidentally the cheapest. he has not improved any at rolling his own. he recalls a conversation we'd had earlier in the summer, when i'd told him i probably wouldn't go on the trip if he didn't come too, because i had this vision of the three of us doing this together, as brothers and chumps. he didn't know he was going until the last minute... in fact, he hadn't even told his parents, just took one hundred dollars and left a note. If you had known I was going to go, would you have come?
And I look above the buildings, study the skyno stars anywhere, not like Wyomingnot like Wyoming which I've never seen, but I hear is full of deer and grass and stars. And I admit, No, probably not, pause to pick tobacco from my lips and I admit: I knew I couldn't go... and I guess I just wanted someone to blame. Because in the end, I had made my choice, the slow acqusition of camera, lens and tripod, money. Gotta go to work, gotta go to work, gotta have a job.
In the station, Gary reads to me from his logs. Though we sit close, his smell doesn't bother meyes, it is ripe, strong, yes, but not altogether unpleasant. In it, I smell Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. This dream of mine. Liberation, freedom from fear. I am comforted as I lean close to decode Gary's characteristic mumble; I know these boys will be what brings you closer.
We deboard, head to different platforms at Queensboro, to take the 7 in different directions. We hug, despite his protests: it turns out somethings never change, Gary is still afraid of vagina. I recall quoting him in my journal on the way back from King's Park, that despite his refusal to call Wriston and I anything but associates, that "let's just say I like you guys". I realize as I wait for the train that unconsciously I have begun to smile. Just a little bit, the muscles have memory: The same trip, the same train, I had been staring at Long Island and Queens passing me by, confronted by the fact that I would be leaving New York for the summer, and an indefiniate amount of time thereafter, Gary asked me why I was smiling as Wriston slept a few seats in front of us. All I could say was that my muscles were tired to do anything else.
But I was happy.
*
But I was happy.
Funny to find happiness on the threshold of departure. I realize now, months later, a day after seeing them again, I will probably never feel happiness like that again. The kind of happiness that just happened, feeling so full up of life I was constantly surprised that I never managed to explode, to fall into cardiac arrest, because how can a heart hold this much happiness?
It tapered off. At first, it was easy enough to remember. Knowing I was coming back, well, it was enough, to know that maybe I could have that again. But time goes on, and you forget. The people of Stratford are different inside. They listen to my stories, offer none of their own, are content to listen to my legends, not to make thier lives into modern myths. Not long ago, I began to think perhaps it is our best friends who bring out the greatest potential in us, making us want to push ourselves to becomes something great or at least greater that what we are. It occurs to me, as I pour the last dribble of whiskey from the bottle into my tea, I have become old: the value of my memories is more valuable than my experiences, what is happening now disposable, NOT EPIC ENOUGH.
It turns out, though I used to scoff at those my age who marveled at being twenty, twenty-one, that they were old, it is easy feeling old. Here I am, it is one thirty on a Saturday, I am alone in an empty house and I drink the last of my hot toddy (now lukewarm) and pick cigarettes butts out of the grass to smoke, I have been awake for nearly seventy-two hours and I've been awake so long I can barely remember how to lie back in bed with my eyes closed in a parody of sleep.
Sometimes you live your life like this. Now is just a temporary incovenience: you do what you have to in order to have the most freedom to live your life the way you want to. You don't yet have the future, and the past: it is funny, isn't it, that memories can make you feel (you remember the panic when you saw Gary fall from just below the roof at King's Park and see him rise, collapse, rise, then collapse, the way you woke out of sleep like a victim of shellshock at the edge of the soccer fields when Zeeb arrived and he shook you awake, but you don't remember the sensation of roughness of the pillar you climbed beneath your fingers or being shaken awake), but you can't feel your memories.
Some days, I forget to feel the present.
*
I hate to go home this morning, man... ALRIGHT, man...