in the now of the now

I’m standing on the corner, trying to score something to help me see the gods. 

My mobile rings, and I look at the caller ID and see it’s the Candy Man. I answer. 

“Where are you at?” I ask, and he says, “Between here and there.” 

I cut through the park, where all the kids are trying to con their babysitters into letting them stay a half hour longer, and cross a street that doesn’t seem to go anywhere. People are driving up and down it, but they look like they’d rather be any place else. 

I turn left on Timothy Leary Boulevard, right on Ernest Hemingway Place, left on Jack Kerouac Street, continue straight on William S. Burroughs Lane, and end at Richard Brautigan Avenue. 

By this time, I can smell the Candy Man, a combination of lemongrass, jasmine, eucalyptus, and peppermint, and I’ve found if you stand next to him long enough, he usually has a hell of an influence on your limbic system. I approach him. 

He’s sitting Indian-style under a ficus tree, reading from an old textbook. 

He invites me to sit next to him and teaches me something he’s just learned. 

“Reading about Sophocles, man,” he says. “You know what he said?”

“No, what did he say?” 

“To never have been born may be the greatest boon of all… ain’t that a trip?” 

“Wow.” 

He repeats what he’s just quoted and lets it hang out there in the breeze for a minute or two, and when he thinks I’ve really absorbed what he’s just told me, he says, “That’s deep,” and then a few seconds later he repeats that, too. 

After about an hour or so of imparting all that worldly knowledge and wisdom on me, the Candy Man pushes his hand deep into the pocket of his old overcoat, pulls out a vial of something he calls “Dionysian Goo,” hands it to me and says, “Here’s a miracle dipped in a dream, my friend. It should really take you to somewhere not of this world.” 

I thank him and scamper off into the woods, where I lie down by a creek and focus on my spiritual alchemy.

Eventually, I drift off to sleep and experience that recurring dream of trying to run away from some people. A woman whose eyes don’t lie standing at a living room window, nursing a glass of red wine, saying, “If not for love, then why?” A gravely-serious man with self-delusion in his eyes who’s craving connection but can’t break through. A child filled with luminous details submerged in a remote forested lake whose eyes seem to contain worlds of pain, loneliness, and grief. 

And then I wake up. I’m being escorted by an ex-girlfriend from the county jail. 

“They popped you for public drunkenness,” she says. “You blew an impressive 0.175, roughly twice the legal limit. They arrested you at the scene, took you to the county jail, and posted your bond.” 

“Thanks,” I say. 

“Gettin’ a little old for this kinda s**t, aren’t you?” 

I mumble something incoherent, light a cigarette, and enter her car. She drops me off at the men’s shelter. I lie down on my cot and listen to the guy on a cot next to me mumbling, “Treachery, betrayal, and rivalry boiled over as my hunt continued for…”

And he’s asleep. I reached for my journal, the one my case worker told me to start keeping and writing. What am I hunting for? Maybe to see all this primal rage and self-pity change to exultation. I close my journal, stash it under my pillow, lie on my back, and stare at the slow-rotating ceiling fan right above my cot. Then my mobile rings and I look at the caller ID and see it’s Candy Man, but I don’t answer it. The guy on the cot next to me continues mumbling. “At some point, I’ll return home…” 

That’s about how I’m feeling right now, too, homes, I think. 

And I doze off.