“Before you go, there’s something I want to stay.”
“F*****G WHAT!?!”
“Just wait! It’ll come to me.”
“F**k this. I’m gone.”
With that she departed, and I haven’t seen her again.
This is not that kind of story. It’s not a story about boy meeting girl, boy being weird, boy losing girl. All of that plays a part to be certain but it’s just not that kind of story.
The problem with all of this is that then it was me. I was weird and it drove her away. She should have left me. She had to. If she hadn’t every thing that has become me could not have happened.
This story is not about September 11th or the war that followed. It is about me.
I missed the first several hours of that day. It followed closely on the heels of above described argument and I was sleeping a lot. More than was healthy probably. I didn’t actually find my way to the living room and the television until early afternoon. I was unemployed at the time, unemployable really. So by the time I was caught up with the world, s**t, as they say, had happened.
I was unique among Americans for the first two days or so in that there were whole minutes, sometimes several in a row when I didn’t think about terrorism. Once even an entire afternoon dedicated itself solely to personal turmoil rather than fear. I had become a cliché quite intentionally. I was drawing unemployment and using my savings. I had no intention of looking for a job. I spent the checks at a bar a few blocks from my apartment. I was at El Myr every evening/night/early morning except for Sundays when they were closed and I drank at home. It was at this bar where my removal from the world came to a sudden conclusion in the form of frequent press conferences on the old TV that hung at one end of the bar.
I had always preferred baseball on the radio. I liked the silences and the space they created for conjuring images of the action. Until I saw baseball at El Myr where they always played the games on the TV but with the sound turned off to accommodate the jukebox punk music or the DJ’s selections of old, obscure soul music. It was intriguing that I could conjure the inverse of those images as description in my mind. The reaction in the bar to the silent action was as entertaining and as exciting as the rise in voice of Pete Van Weeren or Skip Carey. I’m no die-hard Braves fan but I’m from Atlanta and I was living in Atlanta so I was faithfully cheering my hometown team every night in that little dive bar. I was poised to become a much more serious fan until the games and music were usurped more and more often by press conferences and speeches. The bar was situated right on the edge of a dumpy slowly recovering neighborhood in a gentrifying city. So much was new at the time there. Developments, buildings, people… I loved that the bar was being stubborn in the face of all of this and creating its own niche. The vibrancy of the neighborhood was intoxicating. I grew up in the suburbs east of the city proper and I was finding it interesting to live among people who loved and cared for their neighborhood. These were the people who came to the bar with me. The people I waved to as they walked their dogs after work in Freedom Park. The people I passed when taking the long way to the bar. The people I chatted with about the news while I got my mail. It was this news it was no longer possible to ignore at the bar or anywhere else.
The other reason for the faithfulness to that particular bar was Carmen. After the exit of the nice young lady mentioned earlier I was desperate for female companionship. I’m not the lecherous kind of guy who needs to have sex every night or begin to question my virility. I craved the conversation, the touch on the forearm. The smiles at my sarcastic comments were little confirmations that I was still OK and that my company could be enjoyed. Carmen as the bartender offered all of these things easily. She was about my age and lived in the neighborhood. Striking is the only real way to describe her. I’m sure when I was first showing up regularly her friendliness was simply part of the job. Slowly though we were spending more time with each other than anyone else. She quickly became a friend. Many days I wouldn’t string together more than four or five words in a row before I sat down and Carmen would say, “What tonight honey? Sailor Jerry or Newcastle?”
“After that speech W gave last night I’ll have to go with Jerry.”
“You saw that too huh?” she would say mirroring my expression of incredulity, as she’d hand me the bottle and a glass full of ice and an empty one for the drink.
“Let me know how many you’ve had when you need more ice,” she said just like she always did.
Returning to the original topic I said, “Why is the answer always war? I know that they have to blow up some s**t in Afghanistan after that, I just wish there was some other answer.”
To me, even then, while I understood that some battle was justified even necessary there was a real idealistic reticence about war.
“You should probably adjust to the idea because it’s coming either way.”
“I know it’s childish but I just don’t think I’ll ever be able to adjust completely to that idea.”
“That’s why I love you Benny. Eternally dedicated to pacifism you are.”
“Not pacifism exactly, just planning. What exactly should we do about all of this? They haven’t convinced me that they know any better than I do. Besides you love me for me boring-ish looks and wickedly annoying sarcastic streak.”
“That’s it exactly,” she said with a smile and a comforting touch on my forearm.
She turned her attention then to the man just sitting down beside me. The initial bond between Carmen and I was that neither of us got it. We hated the idea of war and were brought up short by its mongering on talk radio and grew to despise yet devour all of the news we could. We shared newspapers and I now handed her the days New York Times in exchange for the Washington Post. She turned her attention to Jack who was just arriving and adding the AJC to our pile.
Jack came in every night as well though he didn’t stay like I did. He sipped a scotch for an hour or so and then headed home to his condo. He worked in the booming local real estate market and came by on his way home from the office most nights. He was single like the rest of us and wanted to be a filmmaker. I’d had many wonderful conversations with him and I had grown very fond. As Carmen handed him his drink and picked up her glass of vodka rocks that she had behind the counter the three of us nodded toward one another and swallowed. I began to ask him about his screenplay. Jack was adapting Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, which he said led to his “research” at the bar. I understood the real reasons though. The first was a pathological fear of the six o’clock news, which he knew he’d watch if he went straight home. The second was his love for Carmen. He had no interest in ever acting upon it but it persisted nonetheless. Carmen and I had developed a heartfelt platonic friendship with no illusions of more or intentions otherwise. She was just intelligent and beautiful and comforting to me. Jack needed to be around her. He had become caught up in a career that paid well and had acquired all of the things which that implies but he had sacrificed his artistic love to do it. Unrequited love kept him inspired. It was what made him feel like an artist.
Jack came over sometimes on Sundays when I drank at home. We would sit on the balcony talking about the news and Carmen etc. while we smoked cigars. I enjoyed our time together. Like me he lived alone after the hasty departure some months before by a significant other. In my mind she remained vague. She was little more than a blonde haired green- eyed gray cloud of a woman. He didn’t like to talk about his and I didn’t like to talk about mine. At times it was inevitable yet the discussion always remained out of focus. It was always necessarily oblique and punctuated by the tap of a finger against a cigar and the tinkling of ice in a glass. Both of which echoed loudly in the brief but intense silence that followed these conversations. I kept a bottle of Balvenie single malt for him. I’ve never been much of a scotch drinker. I drank Sailor Jerry spiced rum at home which meant that his liquor cost some four times my own and every time I bought it I felt that I was being selfless the way friends should be. I realized, often at the same instant, that by knowing this and acknowledging it I was negating a large portion of that selflessness. I bought it for him though. I knew he liked it and I also knew that he wouldn’t buy it for himself. I bought it because I wanted him to come over.
Slowly I was consumed in the news, as were all of my friends. There were entire days when I did nothing accept watch the news. Flipping back and forth between the hated CNN and the despised Fox News. On these days it was impossible not to be taken in and feel this odd sense that the world really was ripping apart. That anything could happen anywhere. The insulation of being in the west no longer applied. During the Anthrax scare it became apparent that whether we should be or not the media was going to insist that we were afraid. Being afraid was good for business. Our government also needed us to be afraid. It needed us to be desperate only to be told what to do. Bomb shelters, plastic sheeting, duct tape, absurd procedures in airport security, threat level color-coding. We bought it all and most never said a word or thought about why they were afraid. But some of us did.
I was not blind to what was going on. Yet even then there was an unavoidable sense of impending… something. Not doom exactly, it was more general, more caustic. The kind of impending that is hysterical on the Daily Show or a David Cross album even while the knot in your gut is slowly tightening. Preparing to uncoil and shoot you in a direction. I was twenty-five at the time and all of us in our twenties shot in one direction or another. Into the military, to hedge fund management, to family, into home ownership, into the kind of manic home improvement that makes you concerned a little for the improver. Some of us went back to school. Some moved to a new city or neighborhood or job or country. Some of us cut ties to conservative friends. We drew lines in the sand every single day for a year. Every one of these things was a reaction. The direction we were shot when the knot burst.
It is said that as a country we were united after September 11th. I don’t think that’s true but I do think we all felt that action was necessary. When that action was taken in Afghanistan and people began to die the voices began to rise tentatively. I’m not sure if this is the only option…” Now we are a nation of factions. I know when and where and why this happened I believe.
On September 12th, 2002 things as they say took a turn. Our great and unquestioned leader began a public campaign to pray on the fear that we nursed as a nation. I was at El Myr when that press conference aired. When the president was on the sound got turned up. At my bar we did little but follow the news. There was no sharp or sudden reaction as he spoke. He staggered with as much brevity as he is capable of and as we listened we heard “Iraq” and “weapons of mass destruction” and “terror” over and over… As a group we all became confused.
“What the f**k does Iraq have to do with it?”
“Another war? Another f*****g war?”
“No it can’t be that. This is a war on terror not a war on dictatorship.”
“He’s just waving his dick around because he’s angry.”
I looked at Carmen and said, “This is the start isn’t it. We’re going to go back to war in Iraq aren’t we? This has no end anymore.”
“I hope you’re wrong but I can’t really disagree with you,” she said never taking her eyes off of the TV.
That was how it started. We know what happened next. Rumsfeld chuckling at the absurdity of questioning anything they were doing. Cheney and Rice on the Sunday morning talk shows talking about the importance of avoiding mushroom clouds. Finally the great crescendo being George Tenet and Colin Powell selling their country and their careers for awful intelligence and a liar’s word at the U.N. I devoured it all. I was reading three newspapers a day. Watching British websites and PBS documentaries. El Myr stopped watching baseball with the sound off altogether and went to the news with the sound up and the music off. Jack stopped selling houses and took a leave of absence while I was deep into my second year of joblessness. Extensions to unemployment benefits were helping and my savings was holding up better than expected. I had no plans to work anytime soon. This sharing of news and opinions was strengthening things between Carmen, Jack, and I.
Because Jack and I were not working we spent more time together. He kept a bottle of Sailor Jerry at his place to mirror my Balvenie. We frequently slept on each other’s couches. Too tired to walk home after hours at the bar and more in front of the TV.
We were at the bar the night the war began. At last call Carmen looked at us and said, “it’s going to be tonight isn’t it?”
We knew what she meant and our twin response of silence was her answer. “Where are you guys headed?” she asked.
“Mine’s closer,” I said with a shrug towards Jack.
“Fine with me. No f*****g way I’m going home to watch this s**t alone. The only thing sadder than war is watching it on TV by yourself.”
“Would you mind if I come with?” Carmen asked seeming to see the wisdom in Jack’s words.
“Of course not. We’ll help you close so we can get out of here,” I said a little anxious. For some reason I felt it was important to watch the start of this war and I was afraid it might happen during the eight-block walk to my apartment. We left the TV on while Carmen cleaned and restocked the bar. Jack set about putting up the chairs and bar stools while I followed behind him with a broom. None of us spoke. Intent as we were on the vigil being kept on the television. Carmen didn’t shut off the TV until Jack and I were waiting at the door and the lights were off. She turned it off and hurried to where we stood waiting. As she locked the door she said, “Thanks for helping guys.”
“No problem,” I said as Jack nodded his agreement.
“I just didn’t want to go home.” No one said anything then because we all got it.
“What if it’s not tonight?” I asked after two or three blocks.
“It’ll be tonight Ben,” responded Jack while looking straight ahead.
Carmen walked between us silent and pensive. She seemed so small then. Her hands were shoved into the pockets of what looked to be a pair of worn in comfortable jeans. She wore a white tank top underneath a black Damien Rice hoody to protect against the non-existent chill of the March night in Atlanta. Her long curly light-brown hair splayed out around the hood on her back. Her feet led us silently in dark brown tennis shoes. The curve of her hip accentuated when she walked. I looked over at Jack then. He stared straight forward and I smiled a little at his new ‘I-don’t-have-a-job-so-f**k-it’ Mohawk. A pair of black Dickies and a green Dropkick Murphy’s t-shirt, red and yellow Vans and the chain from his wallet made him look completely at home as a Little Five Points punk. It was a far cry from the new jeans, brown leather shoes, and white linen shirts he’d clad himself in as a real estate agent.
I wondered how they saw me in my favorite ripped up jeans and brown Sketchers. I wore a wrinkled brown shirt and a brown tweed driving cap. A beautiful hand carved pipe I’d recently been experimenting with poked through four months worth of beard and mustache. The pipe was unlit but fragrant so I left it in my mouth as we walked on. Nearing my place all three of us unconsciously sped up our pace. Carmen’s slight frame now seemed to have returned to its former powerful confident state. She wore her mood outwardly. We went in and Jack immediately turned on the TV. Its light was the first in the room since he reached the TV before Carmen reached the light switch. As they settled in the living room I looked at the liquor cabinet. A bottle of rum for me, a bottle of scotch for Jack, and a bottle of vodka for Carmen. I started buying Ketel One for her when she began coming with us more. Jack and I regularly helped her close the bar or run drinks to tables when she was busy. On these nights she would wordlessly give us each a cut of her tips or pay for our late night meal at the Majestic. Slowly, naturally she was just there. What had once been my bottle and me became Jack and I and our bottles. Now it was Carmen, Jack, me and three bottles. Her presence was bright and comforting. I appreciated the femininity she brought to our situation as Jack did but the deal between the three of us had become one of platonic mutual dependence. All the stories had been told. All the barriers crossed. Now it was just us. Tonight though we were not quiet because we didn’t need to talk. We did not speak because there was too much to say and no words for any of it. It felt like it would be a long night so instead of the liquor cabinet I went to the refrigerator. I retrieved three Newcastle’s and the bottle opener. I opened each one as it was handed out, Carmen’s first and mine last.
I sat in my chair and faced the television. In my mind I was staring it down against anything traumatic. Maybe Saddam and his sons had left. Maybe word as coming from Jordan or Syria, “We have them. You don’t have to do this.” Somehow I knew that even that would not save us from the fate that had been laid out. I had no image of what this war would come to be. I had no knowledge of insurgencies or Sunni – Shia fighting. Nor did I envision the endless occupation. We knew nothing yet of all the lies and fabrications we’d been sold. Some we believed. Some we rejected without knowing exactly why. We just knew that this war, this new war, this second war was a bad idea. But to the three of us sitting in a Candler Park apartment at two o’clock in the morning watching live, night vision footage of a quiet Baghdad skyline… It felt like we’d been taken. The administration did not care that the U. N. and the whole world thought we were crazy. It didn’t bother them that Tony Blair was the only world leader lining up with them. They thought it quaint that everyone was too ignorant to see that what the U.S. said was right because the U.S. said it.
We didn’t think that. We had no cold war set of ideals. We had grown up in the ‘global community’ Clinton era. Isolationism was not part of our picture. The Internet and the ease of travel and communication had given us ideas beyond our political borders. These people seemed like our stodgy McCarthy era grandparents who couldn’t work there microwaves and were shocked to learn that gay people lived in their town. They didn’t ask us what we thought this time. That had been too problematic in the past. They asked us in 2000 and we picked the nerd over the oil moneyed good old boy and then they had had to spend a lot of time and energy defrauding voters in Ohio and f*****g up machines in Florida in order to go back to ignoring us.
This time not only were they ignoring us, but they were sending us to war. In the neighborhood people made signs that said “NO BLOOD FOR OIL” but it was never that simple. We weren’t invading Iraq for oil we were doing it for money. It never occurred to any of these cold war criminals that we would be anything but successful. Successful at least in the ways they defined success. They all remembered Vietnam and how much money had been made so they feigned surprise when people mentioned it now. They simply didn’t need to pay any attention to us. They mumbled “damn kids” under their breath and went about there business. That night in my living room the arrogance became overpowering. We were being ignored and it was us who would be doing the fighting. It would be our friends, our brothers and sisters and neighbors. Us. How dare you? How dare you send your children to there death out of sheer unabashed arrogance?
It made me want to cry or scream or both. But instead I clung to the presence of my friends and I did not move and I did not speak. It was there that I sat when the war began.
At 3:09 A.M. it began.
“We’re getting reports of explosions in Baghdad…”
“We can here air raid sirens…”
“At _____ Operation Iraqi freedom has begun…”
As we stared silently at the television Jack leaned back and ran a hand through his ‘hawk mussing it a great deal. Carmen stood up from the couch and kicking her shoes off she climbed onto me in the big blue recliner and curled up. I wrapped my arms around her and kissed the top of her head. None of our eyes left the television and Jack said quietly, “It feels like the world is ending.”
The first few weeks were a blur. The three of us were swimming in a sea of vague patriotic phrasing, half-truths and all out lies. We watched the mission accomplished speech in my living room on a Thursday afternoon and wondered what exactly it meant.
“So in ninety days everyone will be home?” said Jack sarcastically to the TV.
“Yep! All’s well. Go back to sleep America!” Carmen said in reply.
“Anyone else feel like we’ve just begun,” I asked rhetorically.
“I guess we’ll see…”
This particular day there was no Newcastle for us. It was three glasses, each with three ice cubes, each with three fingers of three different liquors. As the war had gone on we were getting more angry and sarcastic. Since that night a few weeks before we’d been shifting from a sense of foreboding to a feeling of outrage and anger.
One stormy Friday in July I came in from the liquor store to find Jack standing in the living room remote control in hand. As I entered he spun to look at me.
“Look at this s**t…”
“What?” I said turning to the TV. A tornado had ripped through the downtown area passing within a mile or so of the apartment in which we now stood.
“This is crazy s**t man.”
“Holy s**t!” I said sitting down to be engrossed in the scenes of destruction on the local news.
“Wait… That building. I’ve seen it before…”
“You’ve seen all this before. It’s right over there,” said Jack gesturing to the East and south.
“No man. Shut up a minute.”
“Oh f**k,” we said it at the same time.
The pictures were from a news helicopter and they were describing the scene below them.
“These were lofts that we think were under construction.”
The building had completely caved in but what worried us both was that directly across the street from this we could see Carmen’s house. It looked to be intact but it was at the foot of this destroyed building. I put the liquor down and Jack and I made the same move at the same time. Down the stairs to the car we hardly ever drove. I drove while Jack called her over and over during the short drive through the rain. When we arrived she was sitting on the front porch looking defiant with a cigarette burning between her fingers.
“Are you alright?” Jack and I spoke simultaneously.
“I’m fine. F*****G EXPENSIVE A*S BUILDING!” She cursed in its direction. “Will you get me out of here please.”
“Is the house alright?” Jack asked out of concern not for the rented house but for The sake of the woman who had to live in it.
“It’s not to bad. Broken windows and such. I just don’t want to be here…” she trailed off.
That was how it came to be that we all lived together. I’ve left out how Jack moved in. Carmen said we got married and I guess in a sense we did. Jack sold his condo and I sold my truck. We put all of the money into one joint checking account. So between us we had one home, one vehicle, and one checking account. We also had enough money to last us for quite a while. Granted Jack’s contribution was much larger than my own but we shared it equally and we never fought about money. I had a three-bedroom place and it took little moving of furniture to get Carmen in also. Carmen’s landlord let her out of her lease due to her living at the base of a pile of rubble and all. So now the three of us lived together. We all used the same bank account, which seemed the only way that made sense. Carmen was the only one with legitimate income but the majority of the money had come from Jack but the place was mine so we agreed it was generally pretty fair. As I said we never fought about it. It just seemed logical.
The tornado did much to extend the mood of unreality that pervaded. All our time spent together never grew weary. Atlanta is the city of the transplanted and that meant all of us. No one was from the city. We had all left family and friends in search of new things in this space of quirk and cheap property. Whether we’d come from the northeast because of work or from the suburbs because of family and friends and life. None of us had any relationships in that place that we had not made here. At bars and parks. At shows and MARTA stations. We all made our families up from our neighborhoods. This made El Myr the living room of our Little Five Points home. This was not for everyone. It was the living room full of ashtrays and empty beer cans and milk crate record shelves. An old s****y TV (or jukebox filled with punk music). But for us who found comfort in that informality it was more than enough.
The night after the tornado no one had found any place to stay after the building collapse and roof removals. The people from our family who were newly homeless had nowhere to go but friends homes and their friends were all at the bar. That night was special. By nine P.M. the place was packed. Everyone had come to tell stories and find comfort and drink. We turned the news down that night and turned up the soul. We piled all the suitcases in the corner and we tornado partied. We smiled and laughed and no one was worried that Saturday. Carmen bartended her a*s off. With me backing her and Jack running pitchers and picking up empties we made one hell of a team. The three of us drinking all the while. I’d stack the nearly empty cooler with PBR talls and drink one warm myself. I’d set up the salted glasses for Carmen’s four margarita order and when Jack came to pick them up the three of us would down a shot of some concoction before he ran them. I’d dump two five gallon buckets of ice into the cooler only to feel Carmen stuffing a ten dollar bill in my back pocket and turn around to Jack handing me a Sailor Jerry and Coke in a plastic cup. This I held in one hand and handed Carmen bottles which answered her cries of “Crown!” or “Jack!” or “Johnny Black!” So many stories of roofless restored homes and thrashed classic cars and old Cabbagetown originals hoping it doesn’t rain again as they go to sleep in the park because the closest shelter is eleven miles away and the buses aren’t running and the car is under a tree.
Strange that it took a tragedy, a natural disaster, to give us a vacation from the world. To offer us time off from war and politics.
We talked. We always talked about what we should do. That we should leave. Make our way to D.C. to protest. Stop at this little island called Edisto in South Carolina that Jack knew and rent a house for a week or so along the way. Take liquor and bathing suits towels and camping gear. We should park ourselves on the Mall in Washington armed with anti-war / anti-Bush signs and wait for the nations youth to join us. We would become the army we envisioned we’d be. We would play Bob Dylan and Rage Against the Machine loudly for all the passers by. It would be glorious, glorious and fulfilling. How could it not be? Idealism could triumph finally. Sanity for the masses. We could serve as the counter point to everything our nation was bringing the world. And so we talked. We always talked. What we did in the end was join our generation. Disappear into the horde. Like all the others, all we did was talk. Oh, to be sure, we did other things. We made beautiful art. We wrote. We sculpted and painted. But mostly we drank and hung out. It is strange how sad the description for that time feels now. In retrospect the sadness is evident but then… At the time I felt more alive than I ever had. Opposition to my nations war brought me peace. It brought it so completely that I did nothing. I was the picture of active apathy. I had been so traumatized by what I saw everyday that all but my mouth became paralyzed.
By the time the bombings in Spain happened, I wasn’t even surprised. The specter of terrorism hung over us all as the specter of communism shadowed my parents’ youth. When the news broke Carmen, Jack and I were drunk at the apartment. Well into the evening and the bottles.
“What took so long?” Jack asked quietly. “I wonder when it’ll happen here again.”
“Don’t know but I’m sure it will,” Carmen responds sadly.
While I jumped to outrage at each new atrocity, Carmen grew steadily sadder. Jack got cynical and continued on now.
“I bet it happens the exact same way. Nail files or something this time. Hell, all they would have to do is recruit someone who doesn’t look Arab and they could probably get a gun on board. We really should go to D.C. or if not that, out west somewhere. You know, flee to the wilderness!”
“You’re right but we’re not going anywhere. You know that. I’m so sick of making plans and not following through. We’re going to open our own bar. We’re going to get out of here. I think it’s time we stopped doing that.” I felt a little like a petulant child but I was frustrated and I was tired. I was tired of watching the news and reading the papers. I was tired of the pointless drunken plan making. Mostly I was tired of the self-imposed melodrama that infused me. I was exhausted by the terrible sense that something bad was just about to happen. The horror wasn’t about to happen it was always happening and I could do nothing about it. It made me feel futile and childish. It made me feel whiny and empty. It was a circular kind of empty. A feedback loop that echoed on it’s self and caved into a hole at the center.
“So let’s stop,” Carmen looked clear eyed. She looked effervescent in this simple realization.
“Stop what?” Jack and I spoke simultaneously.
“Everything. Turn off the news. Stop talking about plans. Let’s just be.”
We looked at her as though she were joking for surely this was jest. It was more of the big bullshit we were always saying, just a different angle.
“I know it sounds existential but I’m serious. Let’s just stop… Since all of this started to a certain extent, though less than both of you, my life has stopped. I’ve gotten so wrapped up in the drama of the day that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to relax. I’m always waiting for something. For the next atrocity or the plan we make that we follow through on or six o’clock and the News Hour and my neck hurts and I don’t sleep well. You know what else Jim Lehrer does? He writes detective novels. That man is the news and his whole life isn’t the news, so what the f**k are we living for?”
The question hung in the air. The profundity of just stopping seemed so pure. So perfect. I glanced at Jack and he was affected too. What were we living for? The three of us had created this… situation. We were a family and we were so bound up in it that it took crisis to distract us. A tornado brought us all together finally and we had never even noticed the walls we were constantly building. In a world of tragedy the only piece of mind is the calm center. That place you make for yourself and those you love. This is action. This is revolt. The refusal to let chaos run everything became the calm center.
So we stopped. Carmen switched off the news and I rose and walked across the room to the records. I pulled one out and after locating the end of side A, I set it on the turntable. Then all three of us smiled.
“We come on the sloop John B. My grandfather and me. Around Nasau town we did roam…”
It was beautiful. I refreshed drinks and I sank into that harmony. We were smiling together. As I passed out drinks Carmen started to sing. Then Jack, Mohawk and all, stood and joined in. I stood and toasted and helped ruin the harmony.
“Drinking all night. Got into a fight. I feel so broke up. I wanna go home…”
We sand and talked and drank until dawn. Chuck Berry, Bob Marley, Derek and the Dominoes, The Beatles, The Allman Brothers Band… We played nothing that hadn’t been recorded before we were born. Near morning Jack had fallen asleep on the couch and I chose one last record. “Whiter Shade of Pale” played as Carmen and I talked sleepily about poetry. When the glasses were empty we hugged and drifted off to bed smiling. It was a wondrous thing really. It was so complete and simple that it was mystifying to have forgotten it. Old music and the most beautiful bar tender in the world reminded me that night. It isn’t necessary to obsess in order to care. Your own happiness, on some nights, can be more than all of the knowledge in the world.
In the end, it took a while. When I decided to leave we split the money into thirds. I was just going to go and see where I ended up. When the lease was up Carmen and Jack got a s****y little hole of a two-bedroom apartment because it was very cheap. I dropped out and they tuned in. The knot broke in all three of us and we shot in different directions.
They got more active. They found niches and tried to affect change when and where they could. We’ve stayed in touch via e-mail. I got a message from Carmen when she was in Louisiana trying to get an aid truck past FEMA and into New Orleans. She had done a lot in Atlanta. She worked at homeless shelters and knocked on doors for public transportation action committees and conservation advocates and gay and lesbian civil rights groups. She even helped found an organization that campaigned for Atlanta to secede from Georgia and become a state of its own. But after Hurricane Katrina she found her cause in New Orleans. She lives in the ninth ward now. She tended bar for a while as she finished school and now she is teaching. Her charges are a class full of kids who lost a whole year in the wake of the storm. I have an e-mail from her where she gushes about the tasks ahead and the students in the picture she attached to the message. It was of her smiling among thirty sixth-graders. She looks as happy as she was when we first met. More beautiful than I thought even she could be. When I was in Australia I met some nice people in Melbourne who printed and laminated the picture for me. It is the bookmark I carry from place to place now. In every book I read. I’ll pull it from my tattered old Army surplus bag and gaze at it from time to time and feel warmed that she’s found her way to stop.
In an Internet café in London I got a message from Jack. He was in Ohio working on Dennis Kucinich’s campaign. He had begun in Atlanta passing out flyers and trying to get people excited. He truly believed in the anti-establishment need for change that Kucinich represented. While acknowledging the fact that Kucinich himself probably wasn’t the one who would bring it to the masses, he sincerely believed that getting people to think was the primary goal. What more noble cause is their than that? The quest for thought. I saw him a short time later on CNN. I was at a bar in Germany and he was seated in the audience of one of the early primary debates, Mohawk still proudly on display. I imagined it was saying, “there can be another way.” Jack had stopped too.
And me… Well I’m everywhere. I’ve been traveling for three years more or less and I’ve never felt more at home. I go somewhere I’ve never been and I work odd jobs if I can. I’ll do some yard work or fix a car if I know how. I’ve helped build barns. And when the kindness of strangers has provided me enough money for a train ticket or a car rental or a plane ticket I move on. I live literally out of the bag on my back. When I’ve gotten all the use I can out of something I pass it along. I acquire new things as replacements, like shoes, jeans, sweaters etc. I’ll pick up a book in a used book shop or library sale and when I finish it, I remove my bookmark and leave the book wherever I am. It gets passed along passively. I have a Mac book and an Ipod, but most everything else in my material world is transient. Two people have remained. We shot in different directions but never so far away from each other that we disappeared.
I’m sitting in a bar at JFK waiting on a flight to Puerto Rico. I’ve been in New York for a while sorting out visas and saving money. I heard good things from a Puerto Rican guy I’ve worked with. He was on a drywall crew made up mostly of Mexican illegals and Dominican transplants. I’ve heard so much about the beaches that I think I’ll rest some this time. I’ll find one of those beaches and a bottle of rum. I’ll smoke a Cuban-ish cigar and sip as the sun goes down over the sea. I won’t stay too long, just as long as it takes. It seems I’ve stopped by going.
But right now I’m thinking of my friends and the night we decided to stop. Jack has all my records and I can picture him in his apartment in Cleveland turning off the TV and putting one on. In New Orleans Carmen starts to sing to herself while she’s grading papers so I really have no choice. I stick the ear buds in and find something old. It’s enough to remind me, to remind us that revolution is as varied as the individual and sometimes even Bob Dylan was just “Going to Acapulco.” The act of smiling during all this does not make me complicit in the betrayals. I’ve not been to Washington D.C. since I was a child but soon I will be drunk in the Caribbean and for me, this is rebellion.
My flight leaves soon so I pay for my drink and stand. As I’m walking to the gate I find the song that summed it all up. I smile as it echoes in my ears and turns the world around me hazy, reminding me that my friends are happy. That they, as I, have found some modern semblance of home. Their home is in the turmoil. I’m traveling again and I can’t help but sing it in my head.
And I’m gone, off to the islands. I’m happy in my curious inertial stopping. It is not quite the same in digital stereo so when I return to the country I’ll pick up Carmen in New Orleans. Then we’ll go to Cleveland and Jack and my records, because it’s time again. Iran and the 2008 election are waiting to be discussed. But this can only happen where that tinny scratchy sound can happen or we’ll all take it too far. Jack has my father’s copy of Pet Sounds and on that album there is a song…
“We come on the sloop John B. My grandfather and me. Around Nasau town we did roam. Drinking all night. Got into a fight. I feel so broke up. I wanna go home…”
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