Rich Meyers

NEW by Rich Meyers...

A WORLD MORE DANGEROUS

THE ISLAND OF DOPAMINE

WHERE HAVE ALL THE SPIRITS GONE

THE MUSEUM OF FOOLS

JACK'S BEADS

MARIACHI

SHADOWS AND APPOINTMENTS

THE QUANTUM THEORY OF AUNT ROSE

THIS COULD BE THE BIG ONE

The Templed Air of Solitude

HOUSE OF THE NUMB

The Man Who Slept Through Heaven

THE DAWN FOR TYRANTS

A DESIRE TRANSLATED

KHAO SAN ROAD

AND SHOULD NOT I PITY NINEVAH?

WE DON'T NEED NO STINKING BADGES

Once on a Jewish holiday when most kids were in school, my brother and I were allowed to go to the movies. We waited for my father to drive us to the Apollo Theater where we would present our mother's hand-written letter to the ticket booth lady. It read: "Please permit my two sons to today's matinee (September 24) as they are excused from school for a Jewish holiday." She signed it and put it in an envelope and handed it to Harold, who was two years older than I. We were excited as our father's car pulled up and we beheld the radiant marquee: Humphrey Bogart double feature "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and "Key Largo." After the second feature we were to go immediately to the front of the theater under the marquee, where father would be waiting. As our father walked us, holding our hands, to the ticket booth, we felt a nervous exhilaration, anticipating entering the empire of the dark.
Our father said, "Always stand up for what's right. It's your holiday so don't let these gentiles
try to get one over on you. You understand?"
Standing outside the ticket booth, Harold handed the lady mother's letter and bought two child's tickets for sixty cents each. We looked towards father's car and watched Dad light his cigar and drive away.
We entered the slanting sunlight entranceway and walked past the red velvet rope on its silver post into the artificial glow of the red lobby with its thick rug and glass-covered candy counter. The Apollo's light turned from a mysterious dusk of lobby into a sudden decisive darkening where the blue folds of the curtain, slowly parting, revealed the swift shining of a screen. The seats were mostly empty which made our presence in the dark both conspicuous and very exciting. A few adults in the back row turned around in their seats and looked quizzically at Harold and me. An old man walked down the sloping aisle and chose our row. He slipped past six chair-arms and pulled down a faded velvet seat, close to us. I leaned back impatiently, waiting for simulated nightfall, whispers of ushers, the beam of flashlight in the darkened aisle. The old man made a brief glance in our direction and then returned his eyes to the screen. A moment later he turned again and tilting his head towards Harold, asked,
"Shouldn't you boys be in school now?" The man's voice startled us and we hesitated while looking at one another in a puzzled way, waiting to see who would answer the question. Harold, older and more responsible, timidly replied, "It's a holiday today."
"What holiday is it today?"
"It's a Jewish holiday," Harold cautiously replied, pressing the back of his head against the fuzzy velvet seat.
"Are you two boys Jewish then?"
As the question was asked the lights went out totally and on the luminous screen the bright letters of Coming Attractions flickered. The letters flashed over the black and white images dancing on the screen. The old man's voice intruded upon a world bathed in the screen's glow. "What's the name of this holiday for the Jews?" I turned towards the man two seats away and saw his large hard black shoes caught in the cone of the flashlight beam in the darkened aisle. Harold looked at me and turned towards the man and whispered, "I don't remember its name. It's a high holiday. I forgot the name."
"You're Jewish and you forgot the name of your own holiday?"
"It begins with an R, but I forget."
Even in the dark I could almost see my brother blushing. We both felt a sense of awkwardness that was often followed by shame. We longed to escape this discomfort by submitting to the alluring powers of the dark.
Our dad should have made us remember the name of the holiday was the first thought that came to me. Our parents did not know much about the religion itself and never went to synagogue, but we were handed down a set of rules on how to stand up and be proud for being "what we were." Dad had modeled that message on a few occasions. Once we had been dropped off at the St. Anthony Public Swimming Pool. We undressed in the locker room and rushed to the chlorine depths of the outdoor pool. Maybe some of our clothes and things never made it into our metal cubicles that had no locks. When my brother Harold and I went to the front of the building upon leaving, we saw Dad frowning at his watch. His look of stern authority turned to anger when he realized we had left something important behind. It appeared we had lost the silver necklaces that Jewish parents bought for their kids. They were called mezuzahs and were embroidered with the Star of David. They had been stolen our father concluded and he would confront the gentile management of the pool to "get to the bottom of this." Dad raised his voice to the janitor, demanding to see the manager.
"Those are sacred things and expensive," he shouted, "this is a public pool. Don't think we Jews are fools. We want that jewelry given back." He ranted and raved while Harold and I stood embarrassed against the corridor wall. Our father's face was flush with defiant anger. His rage continued even after the janitor came out of the office with our mezuzahs and explained that we had left them sitting out on the locker room bench. The necklaces had been sitting safely in the lost and found box in the office. Our Dad grabbed our hands and walked out briskly, slamming the front door. His face remained red on the drive home and when he told Mom the story he shouted wild recriminations at St. Anthony's. "See how they try to insult us." Later he claimed: "I had to force the truth out of them."
I had fallen into a stupor, for a shuffling sound startled me. The old man stepped out of his seat and on to the upward sloping aisle. I felt relieved by the leaving of the man and slipped back into the comforting darkness, filled with the smell of the tattered red seat cushions, popcorn and soda-stained floor. The curtain fluttered and closed momentarily and then reopened, signaling the end of the previews and the beginning of the main feature. Humphrey Bogart was walking down a street in Mexico after the titles were shown. I leaned back contentedly and slouched down resting my head against the seat. Harold turned to me and said, "I'm glad he's gone. Hey, don't put your head on the seat. You know what Dad said. It's a good way to get an infection, ringworm or something."
"Shh, Harold. Watch the movie." I felt the urge to look behind me to see where the old man had gone. I was nervous and restrained turning around as if feeling I had been guilty of something. The theatre was empty in the rows ahead of us. The nearly deserted rows of seats deepened a growing sense of a forbidden experience that enveloped us. The feeling of being absorbed in a dark movie house while the majority, the gentiles, were in school, disclosed a slight danger in this clandestine violation of the usual. It was far too early to think about my father waiting for us outside the theatre yet I pictured him pacing back and forth, smoking his cigar and looking at his watch.
Down the sloping aisle came the tread of feet and I could see the stiff shoes approaching,
lit up by the single bulb at the end of our aisle. In that uncanny light I could see the outline of a suited man developing. The figure stopped at our aisle and leaned over the first seats and looked into our faces. A deep voice emerged which at first was difficult to hear separate from the voices on the screen. The man walked close to our chairs and his face was encircled by the aura of the throbbing glow of screen light as he bent over near us. "I'm the manager. Do you boys want to come with me?" I nervously looked at Harold whose face was invisible in the obscuring light from the dim image of Bogart and Tim Holt in the night gloom of a grungy flophouse. "Come on boys to my office," the voice continued. "We need to talk." I knew some reproach was about to happen, but I met it with an outward calm. Harold rose from his seat stealthily and budged me to follow. Seats brushed against my knees, a coin clinked but I didn't bother to pick it up. My foot kicked a popcorn box and a seat shot up with a thump. The aisle sloped down more sharply than I had remembered. I followed behind Harold and the tall man whose shoes shimmered in the light bulb blush of each row of seats. As I passed the arms of seats I felt a pulling at my calves, as if I were being pushed forward against my will. Wouldn't we be allowed to finish watching the movie? Looking ahead and up at Harold following behind the elevated head of the manager, a heaviness came over me. I could scarcely drag my feet. Outside after a while, my father would be waiting under the marquis with his arms folded, the stump of his cigar clutched in thick fingers. The screen was fading behind us and the music grew dim. Worry overshadowed the desire to watch the movie that I had waited years to see. I felt that something was slipping away, but my thoughts were murky and flickered out of reach.
At the top of the aisle I paused, cringing with disappointment toward the glint of sun peering through the front entrance door. The manager led us past the red velvet rope on its silver post. Suddenly we were back in the well-lit lobby with its red rug and glittering candy counter. The manager who we now saw was a gray-haired man in a suit, motioned for us to sit down in the armchairs just outside the door with the sign reading OFFICE. "Are you boys playing hooky?" the man asked leaning over our chairs. "What's this about some Jewish holiday? What school do you go to? Let's see the note you showed at the ticket booth." The manager glanced quizzically at the note that Harold took out of the envelope. The man shook his head skeptically and focusing on Harold said, "And you don't even know the name of the holiday? We'll have to look into this. Just sit here for awhile as I straighten this out."
"Can I go over and get a drink of water?" I asked. I went over to the water fountain and took a long swallow. At the darkening end of the corridor I saw a sign that said REST ROOMS, with a blue arrow pointing down. I was walking in that direction when I heard someone shouting at me. It was the manager of the theater. He walked towards me now accompanied by an usher. "Where are you going? To the rest room? The usher here will go with you. Come back soon and sit over there by the other one, your brother. He said your father's coming for you. We're calling your school and then we'll wait for your father to come and get you."
In the men's room the usher, an older teenager in uniform, stood, shuffling his flashlight from hand to hand as I slipped into the stall and listened to the usher's black shoes pacing the floor. I opened the door of the stall and walked up the stairs while the usher followed close behind. At the top of the stairs was the corridor, now empty except for Harold sitting in the armchair outside the office. I tiptoed towards my brother whose face had a discomfited expression in the dim light cast from the candy counter lit by a single bulb. The theater appeared to be still, almost deserted. I sat in the chair next to Harold and heard the manager fingering papers in the office. Ahead of me I could see the row of closed doors leading to the entranceway. Under the doors I could see an unsettling line of sunlight. I was anxious and composed, worried and calm.
After nodding off for some time, I suddenly saw our father coming through the entrance door, bursting through the glare of sunlight and striding swiftly up the carpeted slope. As he approached nearer I could see the stub of cigar poking through his fingers. His gruff and decisive
gait was briefly interrupted by the teenage usher who said something to father while pointing to a "No Smoking" sign. Father reached over the red velvet rope and pressed his cigar into one of those tall ashtrays with white sand. Father's face was angry as he shouted at Harold and me. "Why didn't you kids wait for me outside like I told you? When I tell you something I mean it. What am I talking to, the wall?" The manager, hearing the loud voice, came out of his office and began speaking to my father. I was so nervous that I couldn't hear a word spoken. I only saw my father's hands moving and the manager pacing in his large black shoes on the carpet. Then Dad came closer to us to deliver his admonishment. "Didn't you tell him that it was Rosh Hashanah today? It's New Year. You had a note. No school. Didn't you tell him? Look at you. They've got you looking like prisoners here. What is this, Auschwitz?" Father continued his rage, raising his voice and flapping his arms. After speaking a few muffled words, the manager went back into his office. Father grabbed our hands and pulled us roughly towards the exit. The young usher followed us furtively past the candy counter and along the red velvet ropes. Nearing the entranceway, he turned abruptly around and turned sternly, facing the cautious usher and shouted, "Where are their scarves. These boys came in here with scarves, expensive ones. Where are they? Go look. Don't you people have a damn lost and found. Go look!" The pale usher was stunned and winced as he turned sheepishly around and walked up the incline and into the manager's office.
Harold and I looked at each other in astonishment. What was father thinking? A flush of blood snuck up and reddened my face. Harold looked puzzled and uncomfortable. We could hear the voices of the manager and the usher
grumbling in the office. I didn't know what to do. I did not move and remained silent. Something should be said but I felt my will slipping away. The manager emerged from the office followed guiltily by the young usher. The two walked past the red velvet rope on the silver post and the manager lifted up the flap that led to the rear of the candy counter. The manager shuffled around searching behind the popcorn machine
while the usher pointed the flashlight on the floor and shone it upon the glossy candy wrappers and stains of sticky butter. The two of them could barely squeeze in the space behind the high popcorn machine where the candy lady was seated. The manager clumsily shook the yellow glass that turned the popcorn butter-yellow. He turned to the usher and raised his voice grumbling some irritable words. The blood again surged to my head, trickling down to a thumping in my face. I reached for my father's jacket sleeve and gave it a tug. "Dad," I said.
Father whispered, "Shhh", and gripped my hand and gave it a sharp squeeze.
Some complaining words flared up between the manager and the candy lady. He then ordered the women to stand outside the counter. The manager and usher continued their search, tossing around boxes and sweeping out debris from under the counter. A strange feeling crept over me. Something pleasant, a secretive enjoyment at watching their fumbling search, slipped into my awareness. Harold reached behind father's back and nudged me. I didn't respond and stood still and silent. Again I was prodded. I didn't move. "Dad," Harold blurted out. "There are no scarves, dad. We didn't bring our scarves." I could feel Father's body tighten up and he looked down at Harold and in a voice, surprising in its calm and warmth, quietly said, "That's for us to know. Not them. You understand?" Again father squeezed my hand, affectionately this time, and smiled. The manager staggered out from behind the candy counter and uttered some cantankerous sounds to the usher before disappearing into the office.
That subtle sensation of pleasure returned for a moment. The teenage usher awkwardly shuffled down the sloping carpet towards us. His words were low and muffled: "The manager says that if we find the scarves we will let you know. We have your telephone number."
"And who gave you that?" Father asked angrily.
"They gave it to Mr. Williams, the manager, I guess," said the usher cautiously. He looked not at my father, but away with embarrassment. "We'll call you he said and you can come pick them up."
"Pick them up?" father barked. "I'm a hard working man, not like him. Do you people think I have time to leave my job to come down here?"
The usher glanced away and nervously replied, "Then write down your address and we'll mail them to you."
"Address," father yelled. "We don't need to give you no damn address. No lousy address. Tell your Mr. Williams that you can't play us for fools. Come on, kids, let's go. Let's get out of here. Mom's waiting. We don't need the aggravation."
Grabbing our hands and pulling us along, father marched us to the crimson glow of the exit sign. In the car Father paused to light up a cigar.
"When we get home, tell Mom how I told off those goyim. I grew up with that kind in a tough neighborhood. My father wouldn't let me hide from them in the house. I had to go out and fight
or I wouldn't be allowed home, not even for dinner. I have half a mind to go back there and get my money back."
"Don't Dad," Harold pleaded. "We saw the movies! We got our money's worth." I looked at my brother in amazement. Harold cast a harsh glance at me and shook his head, urging that I cooperate in silence.
"We'll as long as you stood up for yourselves," father conceded.
"We did. They couldn't kick us out on a holiday," I answered quivering with honor.
"Good then. That's a good movie, that Bogart one about gold. What is it that bandit says, the Mexican guy with gold teeth? Funny! What the hell is it he says? What was it, Harold?"
"I went to the bathroom in the middle of it."
"What was it?" father asked me.
"He doesn't remember," Harold hastily answered. "He doesn't remember names or anything."
The car sped home past Jefferson Street and up the hill to Rosewood, the Jewish neighborhood.

THE SHOES OF SAINT GREGORY

We admired the saints, snuck into the church schoolyard and hid while our friends went into the confession boxes, and we led them later to the woods of Fairmount Park that were considered forbidden territory by the nuns.
Anna-Marie Kelly let me carve her initials into a tree. She wouldn't allow the heart and arrow to be drawn. My younger brother wanted to wrestle with Loretta Hines who was a tomboy and stood a foot taller than him. He was only eleven and crazy about girls. I was two years older than Robbie, and I was wild with desire for Anna-Marie. We followed the girls to church often and usually waited for them at Snyder's Drug and Soda Fountain on their way back. We never dared enter the church itself although we had more than once snuck a peek inside. We were the Jewish kids in a neighborhood of Catholics.
Anna-Marie made it very clear that she would not "go all the way" with a boy. Robbie and I didn't really know what that meant. The gentile boys said they knew, but we didn't believe them. I was crazy that summer to find out. Davey Ryan had a crush on Karen Farmer, but she was a reverent Catholic girl and nobody could get to first base with her. Karen was serious about her upcoming confirmation, and she was anxious about choosing the name of a patron saint. Butchy Mueller elected Anna-Marie his "patron saint of pussy." We hated that word and Robbie told Butchie never to talk that way around the girls. Robbie secretly told me later that he had offered Anna-Marie his entire collection of Phillies cards and ten spider man comic books for a peek at Anna Marie's breasts. She refused. Anna Marie without a doubt had the biggest tits in all of West Philadelphia. It was in the same conversation that Robbie told me how much he wanted to convert to being a Catholic. Being Jewish, he said, was boring. He loved the look of churches "with the altars and statues and all those stained-glass windows." The gentile guys get all the "nookie", he insisted. I tried to explain that conversion wasn't that easy. Although I didn't really know much about it, I told my younger brother that Judaism was a good religion and much older than Christianity. "They're different from us, Robbie. They don't like us. The nuns tell them that we killed Christ. They don't really want us. Someday maybe you'll find out."
Butchy Mueller's mom thought it would be all right for Robbie to go with the other kids to the St. Gregory Church Shoe Sale. Robbie followed the others down the dark carpeted aisle past the stained glass windows portraying the Stations of the Cross and through the corridor of statues. It led to the stone staircase that spiraled up to the social hall where the donated shoes were on sale to the public for less than half price. In the entrance to the hall stood a statue of the Virgin Mary. One of the Patton kids said, "She's the reason you can't get into Karen's pants. She's in love with the virgin." Mike Casey laughed, saying. "Two years now that I'm no virgin. What about you guys?" No one answered.
Butchy Mueller bowed slightly and said good evening to Sister Margaret. Robbie knew that name. The girls often talked about the nuns. Sister Margaret was the strict one who used the stick as punishment. He knew about Sister Alice who stuttered and Sister Elizabeth who gave hours of Latin for homework. He recognized Father Anthony. He was a stern priest but he had a sense of humor, Johnnie Grady said. Johnnie had been an altar boy studying with Fathers Anthony and O'Rourke. Robbie saw the priests talking to Sister Margaret. Among the shoes Robbie found the perfect ones, a pair of seven and a half Buster Brown's. When he took the pair over to the cashier, Sister Cecelia, she told Robbie to wait a minute. When Robbie told me what happened he said it was Sister Margaret who took the shoes away from him. He said it was Father Anthony who came over to him from across the hall and told him that the shoes were not for sale. When Robbie questioned the priest, it was the other one, the tall priest, Father O'Rourke, who answered, "This sale is for St. Gregory's parishioners, not for Jews. We're sorry, son, but who told you that you could come here?" Robbie cried when he told me, and in time he became interested in girls from another neighborhood, girls "more his kind." It was the summer that Robbie learned the difference. It was the summer he found out.

YOU LOOK LIKE GOLD TO ME


At the north end of Ackland Street in Melbourne looms a huge figure of a clown whose wide-open mouth is the entrance to the all but abandoned Luna Park, a tawdry amusement park, and a popular haunt for family outings sometime ago. Children had been amused or frightened of the giant clown.  My Australian host's boys called it the "boogie swagman" or more amicably, "look at me mates, no worries."  Lying on the grass under the old wooden roller coaster, a voice reached towards me, "My God, you're here too." It was Sweet William who like me had journeyed to Australia from America for the grand family reunion.  All of us would gather in a few days on French Island, south of the city, an ecology farm reserved for the week's occasion.  William had come from Austin, Texas; others had come from Rochester, New York, and Hawaii and England and France. Most of us were Northern Californians.  Hosted in our spiritual families' Melbourne houses, we awaited the long anticipated train and ferry journey to the island. "You made it," William said. "It's magic, this family of ours.  I saved, I prayed and imagined this, Australia, 2003. It's a party." He looked around him and gazing up at the Ferris wheel and palm trees, added, "It's a circus, an international circus." 
For my birthday and as a gift to my spirit, I took this journey down under. On my way in Thailand I bought a T-shirt with a colorful image of Ganesh who I adored in the aspect of the destroyer of obstacles.  The elephant god said to me, "No worries, mate."  Here every Aussie said it, on the street, on the trams, after every thank you, at every encounter.  Australia was a gift, the way travel often is, and once I accepted its expense and occasional ordeal , the world took me in.  I glimpsed the details of this anomalous continent.  It had a subdued inclusion, never an assimilation of ethnic variety; I glimpsed its Victorian yet rugged amalgam of suppression and vigor, its brusque casualness as well as its terrain of novel, unadulterated mystery. The incongruous and ordinary were swallowed together. My friends, all part of a divine movement, a family, inspired by our Bengali teacher, had all been  born here and adapted with that uniquely terse and sardonic humor to the character of this young continent. Their lives grew up in this unusual environment and absorbed into it as though swallowed up by that snickering and gaping mouth of the clown at Luna Park.
The grass whispered under my body. The afternoon wind had brought those tenacious flies to my mouth and ears. The constant need to wave away those menacing, buzzing insects was a common gesture known locally as the Australian salute. The world slipped amusingly over the glassy rounds of my
eyeballs with images sparked in crystal spheres. Flowers were suns in fiery spots of sky strewn over the beach and park in St. Kilda. Birds, magpies and parrots, flickered like skipped stones across the vast inverted lake of heaven. An early moon hung low in the sky. Its shadows seemed on the wrong side, its shape, veiled in its waning, appeared reversed. Yet that seemed appropriate, I thought. At night I beheld entirely new galaxies. Orion's belt tumbled beneath the falling warrior as his head tipped down towards the bridge that spanned the harbor where ferries glided off in the night towards Tasmania. It made a kind of sense. After all I was at the very bottom of the planet, down under
I sat on a bench feeding some doves the remains of my curried steak-and-kidney pie when I caught sight of three dark and wild haired men. It was a shock suddenly seeing these swaggering and heavy-limbed men. They laughed while passing to one another bottles of hard liquor. The men walked past me. Not far behind them, walking in a stupor, weaving back and forth, were their women, squat, round, black limbs in shabby pants. One of them extended a plump and tattooed arm to me and said, "I am Pixie. This Doria Woolangu and sister Nori. We are aborigine. You don't see our kind here in Victoria, do you?"
"I am American," I said defensively.
"Ah, he is Yank, " Doria said to the others.
"Yank?" Pixie replied playfully, slapping Doria's wrist. "Well, I tell you, he looks like gold to me. Yes he does, like gold. We are meeting our family here from the bus from north. We are going back home. Westland Yakadangang.
You want some drink. Join us! Yank man?"
"No Thank you," I replied nervously. "I have an appointment. I must go meet some people."
"Family?" the one called Nori asked.
"Hesitating for a moment, I replied, "Yes, family."
"Family best. Always best!" Pixie asserted. Her eyebrows were arches of penciled black under a mane of dusty and tangled hair. Doria was thin with a mouthful of crooked teeth protruding from wide gums of smeared lipstick. Nori's face was cavernous and scarred. The three of them had huge bony heads, which made them appear misshapen, somewhat lion-like. I felt uneasy and timid in their presence and wanted to pull away. I saw the men, loud and drunk, stumbling back in our direction. They joined their women and staggering together spoke wildly in their language. Theirs were deep and untamed voices and I was uncertain whether it was quarreling I was observing in their excited and frenzied pitch. Pixie pulled on one's sleeve while the sisters rifled through the bundles the men had carried over their shoulders. Pixie turned to me and said, "Watch, Yank. We can show you something!"
I replied fretfully," I have no money. Honest. Really I don't"
"Nobody talking money. Come, drink with us. We can show you the dance, our family dance," The bundles they had carried were spread upon the grass and much wild talking back and forth went on. Pixie turned to me and said, "Don't you worry, mate, you watch this." The men talked among themselves with voices rising and falling, searching their bundles and pulling out things. Pixie and the sisters smiled at me while the men continued fumbling through their things. I was on edge with their every movement. I watched one of them pouring water from a bottle into several coconut shells which contained what looked like mud of different colors. The men smeared each other's faces with the ointment and the women rubbed it over their limbs. It all happened quickly. The shouting was muffled and slurred by the whiskey drinking that accompanied the swaying of bodies in the dance they performed. The dance was clumsy and brief. It was the oddest thing. The women clapped as the men swirled and circled before me on the grass. Above their arms tossing and their heads gyrating, I saw again in the now darkening sky that lopsided moon. The sight helped me avert my eyes from the dancing and the garrulous women. I was embarrassed and had no idea of what was possibly expected of me. Almost as soon as it began the dance ended and I paused and then looked with bewilderment at Pixie.
"Thank you but I must go. I'm late. Sorry, people are waiting. I must go."
"These people?" she asked. "Who these people?"
The words quickly came to me. "My family," I answered.
I ran off along Fitzroy Street in the lights of the cafes and past the tables of the outdoor restaurants. Smoke and lights slanted out of bars and voices crackled amid the sound of clinking glasses. My heart was pounding but I was hopeful of the relief that my escape from the aborigines would bring. I rushed away under the buildings of Victorian facades and wrought iron latticed balconies. Waiting for the light to change at the crosswalk at Grey Street, I looked behind me. In the distance. I could see them, crossing Ackland Street walking away from the clown at Luna Park. There was no doubt that they were following me. I cursed them. Worried and frustrated, I wandered what they wanted of me. I couldn't imagine. Did they think I owed them something? I hurried further towards the Espy Hotel and Pub. The traffic noise blared. It was just another street and I would arrive at my destination, the birthday party for Kalki. The entire Melbourne family would be there. Some were coming down from the country north of the city. Others were driving up from the southern coast. Much of the Australian family would be there.
Ahead of me I could see glimmering in the twilight the marquis of the The Espy, announcing music events for the night. "Kalki's 32nd Birthday" was happening on  in a nightclub called The Fish Bowl. At the columns of the hotel, I looked back again and could see them still advancing, the men and their women. I thought I saw Pixie leading the group and waving her arms, perhaps shouting at me. I mounted the stairs and at the entrance of The Fish Bowl sat two young women at a table collecting an entrance fee. Next to the entrance was a long window that looked into the bar and dance floor.
"Five dollars, please," one said. I paid. "Do you want your hand stamped?'
"What did you say?" I asked. "Your hand. Do you want it stamped?
You know, so you can leave and come back. Not be charged again."
"Yes," I said distracted. I considered warning the women that I was being followed. By a pack of aborigines I would say. It all seemed too absurd to even mouth the words. I didn't hear their footfalls. I walked rapidly to merge in the anonymity of the crowd. There were two crowds, the drinkers at the bustling bar and the dancers swirling to pounding disco rhythm on the dance floor under the balloons and flashing lights. I saw but could not hear the voices of my friends. I was hugged and then abandoned in the roar of clamoring music. I ordered a brandy and drank it quickly. Behind me stretching the length of the dance floor was the window that from outside The Fish Bowl the activity inside could be viewed. There was no sign of Pixie and her group. I swallowed a second brandy
and turned my eyes to the dance floor. Some family dancers beckoned me forward to join them. The disco throbbing sound waned as the lights went on. There was a pause from the loudness. The streamers and balloons glided along the ceiling. There was the stir of anticipation. Then came the announcement. It was time for Kalki's performance.
As Kalki walked into the spotlight wearing her glittering costume, there came a prolonged roar and applause and laughter pierced occasionally by a scream. Kalki began her dance. Encircling her feet were nine hoops. As the music built, she maneuvered her ankles and calves to start the hoops twirling about her. Amazingly, the hoops spun wildly up her body, a few at waist level, others around her neck and several about her arms. The music increased its tempo and the performer gyrated wildly, adding the remaining hoops. Hands were clapping; arms were hugging me as the loving crowd cheered on the birthday girl. A kiss was planted on my cheek and when I turned to see who it was, I saw gazing from behind the window the faces of the aborigines. Through the murky light of the smoke-filled nightclub their faces looked diffident, almost furtive at first with their broad heads pressed against the glass. I was shocked at their sudden presence. The music grew louder, the applause increased. I could see a change come over their faces that now reflected the enjoyment of the celebration. Pixie's wide eyes and expansive nose pressed against the glass; her mouth was all teeth and smiling. I don't know if she saw me, but a few people caught glimpse of her and the others. Pointing at the window where the group was peering in was Pixie, raising her arm above her head showing the V-shaped peace sign. The others followed imitating her gesture. I felt awkward and bemused. A shiver of delight crept over me. Goosebumps and shivers of delight encircled me like Kalki's hoops, overcoming my reticence. Kalki was dissolving, it seemed, my entire unease and apprehension as she twirled and spun, ravishing the crowd in a momentum of rapture. Casting my eyes again at the pleased, even ecstatic faces of the strangers at the window, I saw a violet shift of light moving across the nightclub, across the ceiling of balloons and streamers and the shadowy dance floor. It was an arc of light that reached into the beam of my imagination where I saw the rose-colored premiere of a new picture. In it were ships landing with white men upon a new continent and embracing its indigenous people. The vision of harmony rushed past any images of dominance and land grabbing or rabbit-proof fences or genocide. It was a brief glimpse into a promising world of miracles and with eyes closed I languished in its spell. My eyes opened again to the last movements of Kalki's wondrous hoop dance. The colored rings began to unfurl from their dizzying circles around her body, from legs to hips to arms. The music stopped; the lights went on. Kalki bowed as the crowd roared with applause.
I walked through the swarm to the exit where the two women still sat at the table. Pixie and her group had already started down the stairs. They apparently had watched the dance from the window; they never entered. Pixie turned around and looked at me at the top of the stairs. "Yank," she yelled, mounting the stairs like a round, lumbering animal. I felt like a child in her robust presence, both amused and a little scared as though she was the giant clown at Luna Park. She smiled and reached for my hand; it disappeared in her dark fleshy paw. "You watch our family dance," she said contentedly, "Now we see yours. Family, best. Number one. We go home tonight. Peace to you, Yank. Family is peace. Yes." The men and the two sisters were descending the staircase staggering in a laughing swell of drunken revelry. Pixie continued to hold my hand. She looked at my hand and said, shaking her gourd-like head, "I want something from you. Then we go west. I want to have the tattoo on the hand like you." Pixie walked over to the table at the entrance to the crowded nightclub and held out her hand. The young women looked in confusion at one another. Hesitantly, the one with the stamp pressed the black ink symbol to Pixie's hand. "Good," Pixie shouted, descending the stairs and waving her stamped hand for her family below to see. "We go home now, Yank. Good! Peace to you, mate. No worries."

VANISHINGS AT THE CAMEL MARKET

Early morning hours. A knock upon the door....I don't want to be a bother, but I really must talk to somebody. Were you still sleeping? I can bring up some mint tea if you and your friend would like....
.....Oh I see. Would a beer suit you guys better? I've gotten accustomed to mint tea, but I know we Americans prefer a beer now and then. If you change your minds I'd be happy to get some. I know a place in the Medina where they'll sell me some Spanish beer, Tecate and El Oso Negro. This merchant wraps them up in my djelaba I bring to him for that purpose. Just let me know when you want me to get some.....
.....No don't worry about the cost. I'm grateful to be able to talk to someone. It's been so difficult to sleep ever since this thing happened. I know I babbled on last night. I don't know if it made any sense. Thanks for bearing with me. I need someone to listen to my story. I don't know what to do, really I don't. When I saw that woman in the market wearing Angela's bracelets I freaked out. You can imagine.
....Yes I've spoken to the police. A number of times. First I filled out a form, missing person's report, gave full description of my two friends. But of course they were useless, the police. Two women missing? They were suspicious, looked me up and down. What was my relationship to them? That's all they were interested in. What was I doing traveling so far south with two women? Was it sex, was I having sex with them both? It came around to that, again and again. They didn't even take time to write down a description of the men involved. I must have told them ten times that the men were Moghrebi, not Berbers. "So you know the name of the Sahara people?" They said that over and over but didn't write down a damn thing, not a word of my description. I don't know whom to turn to, really I don't.
.....O.K. yes, thank you. I will calm down. I'll try. My nerves are in a knot. I can't help talking about it. Nothing but talking about it helps. It's the only way to keep my sanity. Believe me, I'm not on drugs or anything. Just fear. I used to do speed some months ago when I was here alone in Tangiers, but I wouldn't touch that shit again. After a while you talk yourself into a corner. I know people in the hotels who were so wired they stopped talking to one another and began writing notes back and forth to communicate. I never got to that point. Actually kief is what I prefer. It's for mental relaxation, more meditative. But I don't even do kief anymore. Not since all of this happened. See there I go again. I can't seem to stay focused.
....Yes I'll tell you how this started. Just interrupt me if I go too fast or stop making sense. I met Angela and Francine here in the Zoco Chico some time back. They were two schoolteachers from Boston. Angela and I kind of flashed on each other, but Francine tried in her way to keep us apart. Francine was tall. She liked me but knew how to keep everything at a distance. She thought I was crazy, imaginative. She called me "Nameless." We smoked kief together, went to Marrakech where I lived in a room next to theirs in a cheap hotel. We talked on through the nights. We learned to make majeung, hashish candy, from dates and ground nuts and pressed kief powder from the Riff Valley. We three were high much of the time, stoned every day. But not the day Francine came up with the idea to go south to the camel market at Goulamine. She had heard about the weekend just after Ramadan when the camels were sold or traded. It was supposed to be a spectacle when the buyers from the caravans came from all over Morocco to select, trade and barter for camels. The traders came from everywhere south beyond the Atlas Mountains, even from as far as the Sahara. We'd make the journey together. It was best, they thought, to have a man along. They were bored and I was lonely. We were companions.
....Dangerous? No, not that we knew of. We had no idea about the remote regions. We never looked at the tourist books. We knew how harsh and rude the Berbers could be,but we had heard about gentle people in the south, the blue people they were commonly called. And there were at least two villages that were entirely Jewish, yes Jewish Moroccans. We had heard nothing of the plundering Reguibat tribes and that there had been the war of the Sarrho, but I don't know what that was about. No, we had no thought of danger. In fact, Angela who was quite the businesswoman packed jewelry and some leather bags from Fez that she thought she could sell among the merchants at Goulamine. Angela was the fearless one and Francine, always detached, a real snob, went along for the adventure. It was Angela that turned me on to the lost travelers' check scam. She knew all kinds of things,; she knew the angles.
....Oh you haven't. You haven't heard about the travelers' checks. Well, I'll tell you about it in a moment, there's some risk, not much. Angela loved risks. My God, in Taroudant she talked us all into leaving a restaurant without paying. She was crazy that way. She had it figured out that when the bus beeped for the passengers, she'd wait until everyone had boarded and then we'd make a run for it. She walked into a circle of men playing music at a bus stop...what was the name....anyway she walked into this tent near where the bus rested and picked up a drum and, joining the group, all men, began drumming. Francine was always warning her, "This is Morocco. Don't get us in trouble here." I'd tell her, "If we got in trouble it would be my throat that got cut. I'm the man. Remember that. I'd pay for your mistakes."
...What's that? What mistakes did she make? Well not mistakes exactly. She pushed things to their limit. It was her nerve, she had incredible nerve, and it was her nature. Not really mistakes. She dominated circumstances, always. From the moment we arrived for the camel market in Goulamine, Angela took over. I had no power, and that made me fearful from the start. It was nighttime when we got there; the stars were all around, some shooting stars every few minutes, it seemed. A large tent was set up for the foreign visitors, but there were surprisingly few. A few French guys and the two German men who came on some kind of hunting trip with rifles in their jeep. But Francine and Angela were the only white women, you know what I mean, the only European females among all these Moroccans. We were charged ten durham to stay under the big tent including couscous and vegetables. All night you could hear the snorting and grumbling of the camels and in the morning we were surrounded at every turn by swarms of camels pacing in circles, turning about, craning their necks, lifting their rubbery lips over brown and yellow teeth. It didn't take Angela long to befriend some merchants. Francine followed.
These men, it was later revealed to me, were from the Moungari tribes that had come north from the Mali border, hundreds of miles along a caravan trail that began in Timbuktu. I felt instantly cut off from their conversation with my women and it wasn't long before I felt totally isolated. The second day I didn't lay eyes on either Angela or Francine and when nightfall came they did not return to join me in the foreigners' tent. In the early part of that night there was a kind of entertainment, an assembly of men in robes and jelabas playing music and telling stories. There was an Oud player, several other string instruments I didn't recognize and drums and tambourines. The stories were told in Berber, but a French Moroccan from Fez translated the stories first in French then English. I found all of the stories although magical and spellbinding somewhat spooky, even horrifying. A dark tribesmen, dressed in a blue robe and scarf, sang a song about the unholy winds of the Sahara that created quicksand in which nomads were known to slip down into. And falling into what became a well of time they would surface somewhere else completely. Some victims became invisible and others were transformed into animals or caught and trapped in the realm of the dying, a dark world said to be located near every oasis. The stories went on, each one more bizarre than the last. Truth is I couldn't pay much attention, as I was too concerned about the girls. What was keeping them, I wondered? What the hell were they up to?
When the Oud player began playing to introduce the next story, I slipped out of the foreigners' guest tent and walked out in the direction of the Moungari area in the Goulamine square, the place where I had last seen the girls talking to the men, camel traders or merchants, whatever they were. I didn't know exactly where to find them so I listened, eavesdropping on the talk from within the tents, hoping I might hear English and the voices of Angela and Francine. A good while after wandering around from tent to tent, I heard some faint sounds of English. It surprised me. I stopped after moving closer and listened. The voices were too hushed to be identified, but something told me I had found the right tent. I continued around the side of the tent to an opening of a seam for a better view. The voices seemed to stop, leaving silence. I saw a black cape I thought to be Angela's. Her back was to me and she was facing two men, perhaps the same two Moungari men. I eased around the legs of a few camels that had huge packs loaded onto them. I needed a better view. The beasts snarled and spit and tossed their heads, irritated. A voice in the tent reacted nervously to the camels' sounds. Clearly, I was certain it was the shrill voice of Francine. Afraid to be seen, I hid in the shadows of the camels that stretched out along the side of the tent. The voices resumed.
....Well I'll tell you what I heard. It shocked the hell out of me. What? No, it was the men's words I heard first. I grabbed a word here and there, thick accents, garbled words. Hard to take it all in but the word "diamonds" I heard clearly and "ten thousand American dollars", that too I heard distinctly. "Not dangerous" the deeper voice repeated. And again there was silence until I heard Francine again, although her voice was also muffled, and she seemed very agitated.
I listened intently and for a long time until I could not make out anything at all. Francine was upset, at last I heard Angela responding. Her voice was really faint. It sounded like they were arguing and the two men, the merchants or traders or whatever were interrupting the two girls, trying to calm them down, it seemed. It was Francine's voice I tuned into. She said clearly and nervously, "We can't take that kind of risk" and later on, more shrill and angrily, "We are not smugglers!" and later she called out Angela's name and said that they had better leave. Arguing continued. The men said something about passports and "arrangements" and continued to reassure the girls to carry out some plan. One man raised his voice in irritation. The other was trying to calm him. "Ten thousand dollars" I heard again. "Very simple". Suddenly a sharp pain lodged in my back. A camel had kicked me, struck a hoof into my back, just hard enough to take the wind out of me. I never felt anything quite like that before, I tell you.
....No, it didn't trample me or bite me. I felt no blood, just my back ribs caved in. No I couldn't! Thank God I couldn't cry out to give myself away. I stumbled off away from the tent trying to get my breath back. I couldn't talk at all. For a moment I walked in circles in a daze. Then quickly I leapt down and remained crouching among some rocks, reaching to touch the spot where I had been kicked. Before I could rise, a man was upon me, reaching out his hand to help me to my feet. He wore a dark burnoose and I understood his words to be Berber.
.....How did I know? I lived in Marrakech for months. I knew the sound of the language of those people. Well I stared up at him. He smiled and lifted me to my feet and mumbled "kief?" and then "hashish?" and then "come". I followed. I didn't want any dope. I just wanted to go somewhere safer, away from the camels and the hard earth and that damn conversation. The Berber smiled, showing his yellow teeth. He put his hand on my mouth and shook his head "No parlez-vous?" I shook my head responding in gesture that I couldn't speak at all. My voice suddenly disappeared. People came up from behind me; it seemed they were running about. It sounded that way and within a few moments a group led me into a clearing away from the tents and the camels. There was a lot of commotion in this place, people meandering or scurrying around. Berbers and some of those blue people and various other tribesmen. Now there were two men assisting me, an arm held by each. We approached a crowd that had gathered around several men, lying among a herd of sheep and goats. What was I doing here, I wondered? What would happen to the girls? Anyway before my eyes, these men, unrobed and half naked, were rolling in the dirt among the animals, shouting as they kicked up clouds of dust. What the hell was this? The men at my sides were laughing and shouting into the center where the men continued twirling and rocking back and forth under the hooves of the nervous sheep and bleating goats. Several men turned to me, smiling and laughing. One pushed me forward to enter the circle. I was really confused and scared. Another man pulled me back. Someone spoke English, "Watch!" There in front of me, a man who had been lying down among the animals stood up and before my eyes began making animal sounds, bleating like a goat. It was more than just imitating. I swear to you that man for a moment took on the visible form of a goat. The animal sounds came deep from within him while at the same time something, some force pushed its way into my chest, filled my lungs and my voice.  I swear to God, I let out a goat's cry. Unmistakably, I was breathing a sound that grew into my chest, rising into my throat. Fucking unbelievable! I had gotten my voice back. Deep and loud, my voice returned to me saying: "Oh my God".
.....Honest. Well, I'm sorry if you don't believe me, but it's true. You stay in this country long enough and you'll see the magic that can happen here. O.K. yes, I'm getting back to the girls. I pulled away from this crowd after awhile. The men were laughing, some embracing me, very friendly. All of them seemed to know what had happened miraculously to me. They seemed to know about this trick or magic. These men were not shocked at all. It appeared that they were familiar with the technique by which these men who groveled among the animals gave me my goat voice and then my own voice returned. It was like a joke, an intricate strange joke was being played on or though me. I don't know which.
......O.K. I'm getting back to that story. I can see how skeptical you two are. Have a little understanding, compassion __ something, because I was really freaked out, at this point. Hey, I'm sorry. You're kind enough to listen to my crazy story. What the hell's the matter with me coming down on you at all. Man, I really appreciate this. You must be starving. Do you want to go into the Medina to eat, I'll pay. Money's not my problem. You sure. Really you want to hear the rest.... now. O.K.
So I go to seek out the foreigners in the tent. One of the German hunters is there, so I told him about the girls and what I had overheard. Well I might as well have been talking to the moon. He stared right through me, muttering, "None of my business." He spoke German to his friend who shook his head insisting that he had never seen my female friends. In fact that could be true, but it was their coldness and unconcern that amazed me. The Frenchman I later saw was more compassionate when I told him what I had experienced. However, he questioned how accurate my hearing had actually been. Because, he said, if I had heard exactly what I said, that it was still fragmentary and had to be put into some context. I understood his skepticism, but when I pushed further asking him to interpret the best he could what I had overheard, he surprisingly put it very simply. "It sounds like these men were trying to convince these women to smuggle diamonds." I was shocked to hear such definite words.
"Smuggle diamonds? Where to?" I asked.
"Anywhere," he said, "Central Africa, along some route to maybe Sudan or Egypt. There's a lot of that going on. Diamonds, money, drugs, of course. Women are considered less suspicious, less likely to be searched."
He explained to me that he had come to North Africa many times. There have been scams and secrets and 'arrangements', as they were called, going on in this part of the world for centuries. What was I to do, I pleaded
"I'll tell you what to do, my friend, and I mean this sincerely. Do not interfere. Do not! Tres dangerous. Your friends got themselves into this; it's their fault, their involvement. So if they don't want any part of this 'arrangement', then they can get out of it. Wait for them to return after they realize the risk."
Then I explained how one of them enjoyed risks and that the other just went along with her, although reluctantly. "Then I can only wish you luck," he said. "It's their fate. Westerners do not understand this part of the world, especially the Sahara. There's every kind of mischief here.... You can't imagine. Half these tribesmen were once bandits, thieves.... some still are. You wouldn't believe what happens here. Wander far enough into the Sahara and the law ends. There are caravans that attack others, warfare. This camel market here in Goulamine is the frontier; beyond here it's tres dangerous, 'no man's land'. Believe me beyond this place, south of here, anything can happen and does.... even white slave trade. Honest my friend it's true."
His knowledge, its danger and intimacy, scared the hell out of me. My sense of helplessness was the worst of it. What was I to do? Beside myself with worry, I ran after the Frenchman hoping he might suggest some action, but at the same time expecting that his words would increase my fear and deepen the darkness. "Please, monsieur," I pleaded. "What is there that I can do? What did you mean what you said about white slave trade. Did you mean white women?"
"I meant white European women sold among the tribes. I meant becoming part of the caravans. I meant sold as entertainment as sex slaves. There's no proof exactly, but this is not a country of facts or proof. I mean my friend, in all sincerity, that women, Western women, have just disappeared into the Sahara and into void of the tribal world."
I questioned him, tried arguing. It wasn't a rational and modern world we're talking about, he said. Women could easily make wrong choices; forget themselves and their roles. If they showed a weakness and lost the sense of who they were. Well they could disappear. He had known it to happen to a few women, one English girl who was foolish enough to be begging on the streets of Fez. Just disappeared. The Frenchman walked hurriedly ahead. I followed him. I had to know more about these things. When I reached out and touched him on his shoulder, he turned around and angrily shouted, "Stop your following me. Stop it at once, do you hear me!" And I insisted that he tell me more. At this point he raised his voice violently. "You have heard enough. Go away from here. Stop your sneaking, prying and following. Don't you have your own path, monsieur? Don't you know how to keep inside yourself? Follow your own path. I know your kind __ you depend on others' stories, their lives. Find your own! You are one of those Europeans. E'tanger passion. And you are 'quelle que chose de preoccupation' I tell you, young man, in all sincerity, find your own story, follow yourself."
...What did he mean? Well I'm not sure. It puzzled me then and it baffles me now. The French words? Oh something like that I am a stranger of passion or what it means is a passionate stranger. The other word. Something like a creature of preoccupation. Anyway it was like a curse, his words and his impatience. I felt identified and scrutinized without the benefit of knowing what he actually meant by it. I was struck motionless. Literally, I swear. I couldn't seem to move at all, and my leg, the one the camel had kicked, felt like it was sinking heavily into the sand. It was like I was succumbing to quicksand. My leg was getting shorter as it was swallowed up in a whirlpool of sand. The Frenchman was now some distance ahead of me. I continued to sink down helplessly. At last I cried out to him again and again. He turned around and saw my predicament and came running towards me and grabbing me tightly under my arms, pulled me up and away from the hole that was swallowing me. "This is serious" I remember he said that because it seemed funny at the time to be saying that. Of course it was serious, whatever it was that was happening. "Come with me, you foolish man. Come, you must be taken care of. You are a danger to yourself and possibly to others. Forget your lady friends for now. Come, we must go to see someone who can help you."
I just decided to shut up and follow this man and we walked past a camel herd and their auctioneers and past several tents and circles of musicians. We came to a little hovel covered by a corrugated roof. A tall Negro, a man with ebony skin, entwined in a robe and a blue mountain of a turban, met us at the thick wooden door. The Frenchman spoke a few words to him in an unfamiliar language and we were led inside to a room where an old man sat on a thick woven carpet. Around him on the walls draped with animal skins were a collection of baskets and gourds and several glistening swords and shields. I turned to the Frenchman to explain what was going on and he said that this man he had brought me to was Abban don Halal. He was known as faqih, a sage, a kind of wise man who could counsel people who had fallen under certain spells, people like myself who were in trouble. I was in trouble and that he would explain my problem to him. The Frenchman spoke the man's dialect, a Southern Atlas language, and he would translate to me the best he could what the fqih said. So that's what went on. The two of them talked back and forth. The fqih got up paced around on the carpet, listening to the Frenchman tell the story. The fqih folded his arms, released them, and threw them up in the air, gesticulating. I waited and waited, having no idea what was going to be told me. I was anxious, felt feverish. After some time the Frenchman pulled me towards him and sat me down on the carpet and I sat at the feet of the old seer and listened to the Frenchman translate the words.
The old man wanted me to describe to him the two ladies, their physical features and then to pronounce each name, Angela and Francine, first softly and then loudly, almost shouting their names.
...Well, it sounded silly to me as well, but I was in no position to argue. What then? Well the Frenchman translated some very weird ideas that came from the old man. How could I ever know if there was truth in them? But I was convinced that I was headed for great danger so I listened carefully. What the Frenchman told me was very much like the story the dark tribesman had told under the tent my first night in Goulamine. As in that story I had been caught up in an unholy Sahara wind that had tried to pull me into one of those gaping holes or fissures in time. I was still in danger, the old man told the Frenchman, and that at any moment I could still be swallowed up. I was at risk of falling into an earthquake, a fault in the sands of time. It was my "obsession", he said, that was to blame. At any instant my own mind and its driving fury to rescue the women could pull me hopelessly down into a whirlpool of dessert sand and I might just disappear. The Frenchman added vehemently. Oh he was angry. "Stop worrying about them disappearing when it is you who may disappear. Do you understand? Love your own life, leave this place, and go back to Marrakech. You have fallen way out of time with your self and you must escape the trap you have created."
...What? What did I say? I'll tell you what I said. I told the old man that those Moungari men were the dangerous ones and I described them again and again but I was told that they were not important. The Frenchman translated my words to the fqih and the old man laughed but the Frenchman had no patience and screamed at me. He said, what was it, what were his words, something like me being a victim of, let's see, a victim of my own preoccupation. And I got impatient myself and argued back at him, saying that it was he who warned me of European women falling into trouble and finally disappearing into tribal caravans. "Don't you remember?" I shouted at him. "The English girl you told me about disappearing. Don't you remember?" I further argued that he had told me of a white slave market and women sold as concubines. "Do you think I want that to happen to my girls!" I shouted. "They are helpless alone out here in this savage world of madmen."
The Frenchman raised his hands to quiet me down and turning to the sage said something. Again, the old man laughed and smiling at me said something over and over again. What did he say, I insisted. The Frenchman, calming down, turned to me with a kind of benign disinterest and said, "The fqih says that you are a child in this world, one who creates any and every excuse not to live his own life. You are the kind of being at the mercy of every wind that will take you down every hole in the desert."
The Frenchman looked at me, directly into my eyes and, then turning to the old man, took out some durham from his own pocket and gave it to the fqih. Then he turned towards me and taking my hand led me to the door and said, " Young man, foolish man, I say to you 'bon chance'. Live a good life, your own life. I say this with all sincerity." And that as they say was that. He walked off across the sand and disappeared.
… Yes, that was all he said. Except something else but it's not important. Well it was just a thing the old man had told him. How could the old man surmise that just from my description of the girls and by speaking out their names? I said "Angela" softly and then I shouted it. Then he had me say "Francine" in the same way. Right? Well, after meditating on my description and the pronouncing of their names, he concluded that the two had already departed Goulimine. He said they were gone, but how could he know that? Further his vision revealed that they were frightened and fled north and had actually left Morocco entirely. It's a trick; he was a fake just like his title, just trying to divert me from my search.
… No, I don't. I don't think it's possible. Leaving Morocco and not telling me? Not my girls! I mean as close as we had become? No way! I didn't think you guys would fall for that. Just abandon me? How could you believe that shit? They're here I tell you and they're in great danger. I saw that bracelet the Bedouin woman was wearing. It was Angela's. I saw the native woman wearing it in the marketplace. What? Really. That's absurd! You're sitting there telling me that Angela could have sold the bracelet to the native woman. Well, yes I did say Angela had brought jewelry to sell at the camel market. So what? That doesn't explain anything. Christ, whose side are you on anyway? I can't believe it! I'm all alone in this. Everyone wants to turn their backs on the truth. Even you! I thought I could trust you to listen and believe me. God damn it, I thought you understood. The Frenchman was right, I am a fool. I honestly, yes, genuinely thought you wanted to understand. You're no better than that faker, worse than the police! Damn it. Hey, wait a minute. Where are you going? You're leaving? Hold on; wait a goddamn minute, would you? I haven't even told you about the travelers' check scam yet. There's a lot you haven't heard. I'm not asking you to help me search for them. Just stay and listen to my side of the story. Can't you be kind enough to do that? Wait now, wait one fucking minute! Don't abandon me. Not now. I'm all-alone in this weird and horrible country! Wait! Hold on. I'm all-alone. Wait.

SO  PROUDLY  WE  HAIL

He looks in the mirror at himself in uniform while imagining someplace in the nebulous future. A place in the mountains-he closes his eyes firmly to see the lake and feel the splendor of dawn- contains a cottage, calm and serene. He is a father of grown children. For a moment, his actual life dissolves, the one in which the world expects him to return to combat in Iraq, and he feels this preferred life slip over him like a soft robe. He sits at a long table near a roaring fire surrounded by friends and children,maybe they're his. He can't quite make out the man sitting across from him, but he thinks if he can hear his father's voice in his imaginings then it will become his father. "So glad to have you home with us, son," the voice says. "Mom and I were so worried about you getting killed over there. And for what, godammnit, for what!" He tries to wander back toward reality just close enough to discern the sound of his own voice but instead hears his brother's and feels Damon's hand in his. "You don't have to go back, Davey. This war is a lie, a fiction. There's always Canada." He hears the radio blaring, T.V. vibrating the news, the front door cracking open. He wants to stay seated at the table at the mountain cottage, but feels himself slipping back into the weight of his life. He hears his mother worrying about him, "The casualties, they say, are increasing. Everyone's proud of you, Davey. We've got to keep those terrorists from attacking us over here. Maybe it'll be over soon or maybe you'll be rotated back home soon," and he remembers the bloodstained, mangled bodies of Gary and Eddie after a mine exploded their jeep.
With his eyes peering at the uniform in the mirror, he turns to the clock and remembers that he has only two days left before reporting to the military airbase for the flight back to Baghdad. He sees a younger boy staring back at him from the mirror. The boy is a boy scout and he's waving an American flag and reciting from a patriotic credo. "Bless the republic, it's freedom and mercy, the generous hearts of the brave, its prayers for the foreign souls it must save from oppression…" He stands uncertain and faint before his reflection. He suffers the image of the innocent boy and he wants to kneel down and pray and he is ashamed that he never prayed before, never before he gazed at death in Iraq.
He began praying for the first time when he saw the streets of dead bodies, mostly women and children, civilian casualties after the bombings. He began to see praying without restraint as a testimony to the horror because what he saw needed witnessing. He began to view Jesus as his personal ally whose eyes saw and heart felt as his did the brutal killing of innocents. The world saw nothing of the devastation, knew nothing of the suffering. He came to believe in Jesus in the way he believed in a secret. Together they saw the murders, the bodies torn apart and scorched. Now he is entangled in the shameful secret. He turns to his brother Damon and tells him that he saw a bombed marketplace  full of blood and severed limbs. "Damon, that was no accident. Our forces knew. It was covered up. Lies. I am part of it. Tell Mom and Dad someday that I hate myself."
Davey prays while his brother listens, "We must forgive them in their ignorance, Lord Jesus, for they have not your holy eyes to see the truth," and he whispers wiping a tear away. Damon isn't really paying attention. He's busy at the family liquor cabinet, preparing the drinks for the toast to the departing soldier. He is tearful just thinking about it. Damon calls the parents down from upstairs for the farewell drink. Father comes down and smiles and says, "We're sad, my boy, but we're so proud of you." Mother has tears as well and says, "I packed at least twenty pairs of socks. It seems that not even the 101st infantry can keep its socks matched." Davey takes his vodka and tonic in hand and excuses himself to go briefly to the bathroom. When he emerges the glasses are raised as it's time for the toast. Davey volunteers and toasts in the form of a prayer. All eyes are on him as he prays, "And be kind to us in our darkness and show us the way to love our neighbors as ourselves and remember that what we do to the least of yours we do to you. In your blessed name we pray." The family says amen and watches Davey as he lowers his head in solemn prayer. He staggers. Damon reaches out to his brother's shaking hand. He sees Davey let go of his glass, hears his mother gasp. When Davey collapses against the wall, Damon rushes forward to catch the falling body. Damon looks afraid. His brother's eyes are closing now and his hand is gripping something. Father shouts, asking what has happened. Davey slides slowly down the wall to the floor. His hand opens. "Sleeping pills! A whole bottle of them. My God, help us," Damon cries. As Davey fades away to another world, he comes upon a vision as if it were a landscape, the whole world sinking into a lake, the vast realm contained in the image of the cottage he is moving towards. "Are the others coming too? Gary and Eddie and the others?" he asks Damon who is bent over the fallen body, holding Davey's hand. He wants to tell Davey again that he doesn't have to go but realizes the folly of that statement. He holds Davey against his heart as if they were in eternal embrace. He wants to tell Davey that he is forgiven and that the war is a mistake that too will be forgiven. He rises up from the floor and looks at his parents in bewilderment and wants to follow his brother far away to the sunlight and peace of the mountain cottage.

THE  LIGHT  FANDANGO

For the fifth anniversary of their meeting Leo gave Melanie a photo album with a velvet cover, soft as feathers. She was sitting beside him, smoothing her fingers over the cover, when the doorbell rang and Leo's ex-girlfriend, Destiny walked in. They were drinking tequila and the ex-girlfriend pulled up a pillow on the floor and all three began looking through the pictures.
"It's all about you," Melanie said. "All the pictures are from your traveling days. I can't find more than a couple photos of us." Leo turned the pages excitedly and paused at one page, totally engaged.
"Oh, here it comes," Destiny said. "The burial scene. I've seen it a hundred times. Get used to it, Mel, you're just one in a series of ghosts. This is the hippie burial. Amy, his road sweetheart. She died in Delhi."
"It was Katmandu," Leo asserted. "It was the worst case of hepatitis."
"I didn't mean disrespect, Leo," Destiny offered. "It's time to get over it. You dwelled on that grief for the years we were together. You might spare Mel some of that."
"It doesn't bother me, really," Melanie said. "I just wish there were more pictures of us now."
Leo didn't turn the page and just rearranged the photo under the cellophane. "There's just a few details here I never saw before. It's Marcel raking the logs. I always thought he had carried Amy's corpse to the pyre."
"Does it matter?" Destiny asked. "Details? You went over them again and again. Mel, when I met Leo in London he was just back from India. He couldn't tie his shoes, Mel. Totally freaked out and then we came into some dope and we made a living. Those were wonderful days. London was exciting then."
"Leo must have had it together then," Melany said.
"He did," The ex-girlfriend added. "I pulled his life together. He was so sweet and lost. We did well until we were busted, twice, and then deported."
"Sure, we were happy," Leo claimed. "We had so many friends, didn't we?"
"Too many!' Destiny replied. "We were never alone. That was the problem. We were hidden from each other among the crowd and parties."
Leo glanced fixedly at the photo. He wanted to turn the page, for the others' sake, but he just couldn't. "Look, Destiny, come look. That's Daniel there. You remember Daniel in London. He's the one who talked me into the public cremation. I didn't want it that way. The embassy didn't want the expense of shipping her back home. Some of us decided to take care of it ourselves. I was against it."
Leo felt the compulsion of his mind to wander and experience again the time of Amy's cremation. Once the body was committed to flames, it didn't take long. After the mourning friends left, Leo stayed on watching Amy's bones crackle and bend in the warping heat. Realizing his preoccupation with that sordid memory, he thought of his tendency in life to rake over the burnt embers of the past. It was kind of the metaphor for his life.
"Leo, did you ever tell Melanie about East Africa? We were living at a campsite outside Nairobi. There was absolutely nothing to do but fuck all day. Excuse my French. The bad news was that the place was full of missionary campers and the children of these Christian fanatics would be sent over to our tent to preach the Gospel. We were big sinners and Leo with his 'unshorn' face and me, his 'concubine' -we were headed straight for hell. I got pregnant on that boat to Bombay. I did the whole rerun of India with Leo. I lost the child in my third month when we were in Rajasthan. There are some pictures of us in India together."
Melanie poured another glass of tequila and offered to do the same for the others. Leo felt a self-centeredness in his leafing through the photo album and pulled away from the pages of his obsession. He inhaled the smoke of the two women's cigarettes and sang along with Procul Harem on the tape deck. "We tripped a light fandango and did cartwheels 'cross the floor"
"Do you think anyone knows what 'the light fandango' means?" Leo asked. "It's a mystery."
"I always thought I did," Melanie answered.
"What is it then?" Leo repeated.
Well, it's like the dance of life, don't you think. It's the feeling of time dancing away with one's life. It's a feeling," Melanie said.
"It's not my feeling," Leo countered. "No, it's a mystery. The whole song's a mystery."
"That's the way you like it, Leo." Destiny said. "You're always comfortable being lost in a mystery. Anyway the music is stolen from classical Italian baroque. Albinoni or someone."
"Stolen?" Leo said. "That's a strong word. Borrowed is more like it. Stolen?"
"Yes, damn it, Leo," Destiny insisted.
"My, my, why so angry?" Leo asked. "Too much tequila! You never were a good drinker."
"Stolen, Leo," Destiny angrily repeated. "Stolen, just like Billy. Your own son was stolen from you."
"Come on!" Leo said. "He went to London with his Mom. He went to school there for a while."
"What are you talking about, Destiny," Melanie pleaded.
"You know what happened. She stole him."
"I don't see it that way," Melanie said. "Myra was a tough cookie, taking custody of Billy. She was possessive and all."
"She took him off to Europe," Destiny said. "Leo didn't see him for almost two years. You shouldn't have let that happen. Leo was fucked up over that. You don't know. I was with him. He brooded and was depressed. We went to India to get it behind us. His wife, that bitch Myra, ruined it for us. Leo, you didn't want the child I lost. You were too busy grieving your loss of Billy."
"Hey, Destiny. You're going too far with this," said Leo. "You're exaggerating. You don't know what I was feeling. Not really."
"Yes, I do. I know exactly what you were feeling. I read it. I read it in your diary. If you want to know anything about your boyfriend, Melanie, just read his diary."
The painful moment of his son Billy's departure for Europe came suddenly flooding his memory. The car pulled up to Leo's house in the drizzling rain. Inside was Myra's boyfriend who had been sent to fetch the eight-year old Billy. Leo gripped the boy's hand tightly in his own and tried to restrain his tears and conceal his devastation. Billy was nervous and confused and wanted the moment to end. The window of the car slid open and the boyfriend's voice said, "Come on, Billy. Mommy's waiting. You're going
to see London and Paris. Say goodbye to your sweet Dad now." The boy began to cry as he hugged his father. Slowly the fragile little hand slipped away from Leo's grip and the rain thickened. The car sped away and Leo watched
the rear lights fading out of sight. Turning towards his apartment on the third floor of the building, he slowly mounted the seventy-six stairs and opened the door where Destiny was waiting. She embraced him for what seemed an interminable time and he then broke away and went to the bedroom. He locked the door and walked over to his chest of drawers. Opening the top drawer, he found what he was looking for. Unraveling the white bindle, he emptied the white powder on a mirror, took a straw to his nose and snorted a huge line of cocaine.
"Leo, you're drifting," Destiny said. "Well, it doesn't matter. It's time for me to go home anyway. God, I got drunk. Didn't I? I hope I didn't get too offensive. I know how irritated I can get."
"No," Melanie answered. "We're all friends here. It's just life, you know, "the light fandango."
Destiny gathered herself up from the pillow on the floor and walked to the door and, smiling, left.
   "Wow, that was intense." Melanie said. Leo walked over to his girlfriend and embraced her.
"What will you be writing about this day, Leo?"
Leo knelt down and picked up the photo album from the floor and craned around to look at his bookshelf. Outside the window it was drizzling in twilight. The lights of the city were blurring in the distance. Leo could smell the rain rising from the darkening streets.
"Tonight, you'll probably write that we've been together for five years, but 'my years with Destiny are the ones that I remember.' You may even write how wonderful I am."
"Melanie, that's not true. I'm not thinking about it."
"In a year you'll write, 'What was it I saw in Melanie? I wonder why she was so soft and accommodating. It's true she never quarreled and lacked a certain intensity'"
"Stop it. I won't write anything like that."
"Maybe, you will. In a few years you'll write, 'No wonder I have so few photos of her. She never does anything memorable. I can't imagine Melanie ever creating any drama in her life.'"
"No you can't," he said. "You can't imagine me writing that, nothing like that."
"Someday soon you'll write, 'She'll be coming home soon. Whatever will we talk about?'"
"Stop it," Leo said. "You see how intense you can become? Surprise! But it's no fun."
"Perhaps I'll start my own diary."
"Don't bother!'
"It may say," she said. " 'I think he likes me ageing and the white streak of hair.' In four years I'll write 'I'll bring Billy here to live with us fulltime. In the winter all three of us will go to India together."
"It doesn't matter," he said.
"Which place do you want to go first. Nepal or India?"
"It's not necessary. It's too late."
"Which place first, Leo? Katmandu or Benares. You don't believe I'll go."
"I do," he said. "It doesn't matter."
"Leo, damn it. I want to go."
"Not in your heart of hearts, you don't"
"You're wrong. It's not too late. We can go."
"Please, Melanie, just be happy in the present moment. Please."
"I'm not afraid to go, Leo."
"Your breath smells like the flowers of India. Do you know that?" he said.
"Is that in your diary?"
"And your hair has a jasmine smell. It reminds me of Kashmir, if you want to know the truth."

THREE WRITES OF PASSAGE 

PASSAGE

When my son comes upon me glancing at the picture of the two of us, tears trickling from my eyes down over the circles into my graying beard, he'll think twice about leaving home. In the last few years, he's made two journeys that I called "impulsive and vague" and I tried to stop him. Sometimes simply words- we never have enough time with each other and your childhood was taken from me ---my arms flailing from my sagging body. Once in Thailand
he wanted to travel off on his own, I held onto the money and told him it was too dangerous. He raged---you only love wanting to love me. Not me, not for myself. He flings his drunk and anguished body on the concrete hotel floor. Now he wants to get away to see a friend in the South. He'll get a job there. He's had years to find work here instead of depending on his mother. His face reddens and his voice rages against me-For once, dad, I want your blessing. I can't bear his condemnation and I walk away. My father walked away often and slammed a door behind him. You're lucky you don't get my strap-ending all argument.
My heart beating wildly I stop at a sidewalk bench after chasing my angry son through the dark Oakland streets. My legs feel numb and feet are swollen in pain, as though they belong to someone else. He disappears under a freeway underpass. I worry-It's too dangerous. What will his mother say when I arrive without him. So many summers I hitchhiked back home from California to see my parents in Philadelphia. My father was unrelenting in his disapproval-You can live here like other kids. We have schools and jobs here. You go wandering the country like some goddamn gypsy and you won't get another penny out of me. You hear me? At his mother's house I wait for the sound of my son opening the front door. I grow nervous. It is the same as my mother's kind of worry.
He'll open the door and run to embrace me. I'll hear his footsteps, the reassuring turning of the door latch.
He'll touch and comfort me the way Mom did when I was sick in bed running a fever. But it is a tenant in his mother's house that opens the door. Only my panic comes closer. A strident voice shouts out and echoes through the cavernous hallway. Where's our son? You're his father. How can you come back without him?

SAME OLD THING, DIFFERENT NOW

Your arms reach up and slip off your shirt, although they have never quite moved like this before. Always you know what places you want to reach for and grab, but you have watched your child slip down wet thighs and suck on breasts like these and your hands
held the newborn, and it surprises you to find your hands again in this position, you who like to hold  offerings over the altar, but your hands take deeper hold as the earth of many years holds you firmer, driving earlier doubts out of your head except oddly your own mother saying "be kind to everybody" when you were twelve and had a fight with a boy in the neighborhood and also the sound, so riveting as the bone in your hand hitting bone and even more oddly the sound of the doctor slapping your baby into breathing---all this slapping, bone and flesh, even the love you feel for all contact running through you so quickly you understand now as your hand reaches down her thigh and the same old sensation stirring, slightly domesticated now, although you don't take the blue pills like others your age, and the thigh you kissed just moments ago was once in a diaper someone changed and before the woman beneath you gurgles and moans with pleasure, the image of your child looks at you first in bewilderment and then in embracing comprehension and the only thing between your hand and the child's face is your mind restless for some image, not clearly shaped, not yet born, the thing you call fulfillment.

FAMILIAR EVERYWHERE

He read longingly the letters from home. They took almost two weeks to arrive in the remote village in South India. The images ushered in a variety of feelings. The ones that were repetitive like his parent's letters were comforting in their familiar concerns, but the ones from a girlfriend and brothers, speaking of changes he was too far away to witness, took troublesome turns in his restless imagination, some fears and murkiness went directly into his dreams. The cook, Swami, hired for his Peace Corps
Group, interrupted these dreams when he awakened him out from his morning slumber under thick mosquito nets for breakfast. After the vegetables and chapattis, he would often talk to Swami in the mud hut kitchen. The content was vague and irrelevant, but that didn't matter. It took him into the realm of being cared for, a kind of mumbling and droning spell that his grandmother cast him in when he was very young. Sometimes Swami would work himself up into a devout lament followed by bursts of tears. That too was familiar. His grandmother would often grieve for family and friends dead or dying in "the old country." The sultry days surrendered to insect-loud nights as it does in tropical jungle and he had the strange thought that he had never been born. The thought appeared kindly and wrapped him in perhaps his earliest memory. He remembered summer nights in Philadelphia coming through the screen door of his house after the neighborhood games and sitting down to supper at the table, a fresh hot supper prepared by his mother's caring hands and grandma in the background whining like Swami. It was a perfect memory and it often floated into his mind when Swami cooked for him.
But after some time the perfection of the image faded and he began to understand with some anxiety what his girlfriend had written, filled with doubt, saying, "It's been a long time, too long. I'm beginning to forget what things together with you felt like." In the morning he sat down with Swami at breakfast and grumbled, "How did that lizard get in here? Chase it out!"

A WORLD MORE DANGEROUS

Every Thursday night in the basement of the synagogue was his mother's Hadassah meeting.
The ladies from Sammy's neighborhood would meet for discussion, bingo and tea and honey cake. The money went for the buying of trees in Israel. Sammy waited until nine o'clock to walk a few city blocks to meet his mother at the front door of the synagogue.
"Did you win at bingo tonight, Mom?"
"I sure did, Sammy. Look, another figurine."
She held it up for her son to see. It was a small porcelain mantelpiece nick-knack. "This one's the fiddler. Pretty soon I'll have the whole set. It's the gypsy dancers."
"I got something too. The rabbi gave me a certificate. It's for my contribution he said."
"For planting a tree. That's wonderful, Sammy. For our new state," mother said.
"For Palestine, Mom."
"No, not for Palestine. That's the other side.
The trees are not for those people. It's Israel, the Jewish state."
His mother played bingo for the prizes and there was only one thing she wanted-a complete set of the figures that would sit upon the living room mantel. For some time now she had been a winner. The ushers stood on chairs by the doors and reached into tall wooden crates. All over the floor were straw and pieces of newspaper, mostly from the Hebrew press called the Forward. Whatever his mother was awarded she would trade in for a figurine at the end of the meeting. Contented with her prize, she was glowing as Sammy walked her home. She stared at the little fiddler as they passed under the street lamps. There was often a moon behind the trees. She'd talk about collecting all the pieces of the set. "I'm very lucky these days," she'd say, holding it at arm's length. "These pieces are precious and, like the trees we're planting in Israel, they will last us a long time, long after all these politics."
Time passed and his parents worried about the Korean War. Things were not clearly going so well in Israel either. Sammy and his mother watched the newsreels at the movies. There were prizes to win at the movies as well. On Saturday matinee there were the Our Gang Races, the comical antics of bicycle or roller skate races. After finishing, the theater awarded those in the audience bearing the ticket number
that matched the winner of the movie race. Sammy never missed a Saturday and won often,
but once and only once was the prize one of Mom's figurines. Meanwhile, the synagogue staff had a falling out with the manufacturers of that line of porcelain. His mom was a few pieces shy of the full set.
Sammy's relatives, uncles and aunts from the New York side of the family, were fervent and stern in their vision of cultivating and transforming the deserts of the emerging Jewish state. Uncle Dan and Ruben and Cousin Joe and wives and family all emigrated and worked on kibbutz's. Some years later Sammy went over in answer to numerous requests. "Come have a look for yourself, Sammy," a letter from Cousin Joe said. "Come see what we're doing here. It's a miracle. Come assess the situation."
Everywhere in Israel Sammy saw fences and barbed wire separating out the Palestinians. In the towns, the cities the buildup of the Israeli army was overwhelming. Constant raids and incessant searches of the native peoples' homes were what Sammy saw everyday. Counter attacks were waged with stones against Israeli tanks and artillery. "Do you see what we're up against, Sammy?" Uncle Dan grumbled. Everywhere Sammy saw broken pieces of crockery. Something compelled him to look among the debris of smashed porcelain and china. There was nothing rational in his search for figurines along the roads of shattered pieces.
Along a beach he found a figure vaguely reminiscent of what his mother had collected.
The sea had washed over the tiny broken limbs and he soon realized that the red shade of the object was formed from hardened blood.
Sammy came home for a visit and on Thursday night his mother asked him to walk her to the synagogue for her Hadassah meeting.
"What' s happened?' Sammy asked. "You always walked by yourself and I'd meet you afterwards."
"Well, things change," his mother replied. "The neighborhood's dangerous now. Your father usually walks me but now you're here."
The two walked under a clouded moon and they paused at Jefferson Street, a block from temple.
"Sammy, we're not going to temple. I don't go to Hadassah anymore."
"Not even for bingo?"
"That's been over a long time ago. Now, it's an investment meeting. Corporate stocks in Israeli companies. Sammy, don't tell Dad. He doesn't know I've quit. He drops me off here every Thursday and when he turns the corner I go to the movies. I'm ashamed of what we're doing to the Palestinians. Ashamed! I don't want to talk to Dad or anyone else. We're doing the same things the Germans did to us."
"And those nick knacks you collected?" Sammy asked." I didn't see them on the mantel."
"I gave them away to Mrs. Narafhat."
"The neighbor from Palestine?"
"Her son was killed in an army raid. It's a disgrace, Sammy. Don't tell anyone about this."
After the movie the green lights flooded the velvet curtain. It was warm inside, but outside it
was dark and cold. Walking home, somber and distressed after seeing "All Quiet on the Western Front", his mother put her arm around Sammy and said, "I guess this world's always been a dangerous place. Sometimes we're given a momentary glimmer of hope."
"So that was Lew Ayers playing the German soldier," Sammy acknowledged. "The First World War, right? Our side shot him dead as he was reaching out for the butterfly in the grass."
"He was just reaching out for that butterfly," Mother said. "That's all he wanted to do."


THROUGH THE CRACKS

When Lonnie, the Gower's boy, came home from Iraq, he hugged his parents, put on jeans and Vegas T-shirt, found his old drinking mug and went down to Haley's, the neighborhood bar. No one was there. He asked Joe Haley about the old gang. Larry and Ray were finishing law school upstate and the Gearson brothers had moved with their corporations overseas to manage foreign labor. "I think it was Taiwan or the Philippines," Joe said. "What you going to do, Lonnie? You must have saved some money from the service." Lonnie had a few beers and turned in his mug to the bartender. He went to the New Day Used Car dealer and bought an old Ford.
In the following two weeks he drove around town and hung out with his younger brother after school at Barton High. He wore his uniform for the girls but soon decided that they were all too young for him. Along with his brother he did some drugs in the bathroom at the Horizon's Disco, but the pills and weed gave him a terrible headache. On the last weekend of the month his car blew a gasket and a tire went flat. He gave the car to his brother and caught a bus to Nashville. The next day at the Grand Ole Opera, he bought a couple dozen pictures of his favorite blues and country western singers. B.B. King was too sick to appear that night but he waited around until Saturday for Johnny Cash. He took in a stand-up comic who told some jokes about the unfound weapons of mass destruction and did a whole routine on the senior Bush and Barbara and their village idiot son. He applauded afterwards but left the club feeling embarrassed. Sensibly, he had left his uniform back at his house in Ohio. He rented videos of some of the movies he had missed that year and lied in a hotel bed smoking and watching movies and occasionally looking at the job listings in the local newspaper. One of the comedies he enjoyed but the porno bored him. "Black Hawk Down" he found disappointing. He had a difficult time following the plot. Lonnie took a Greyhound to New York. The ride was long and slow and for maybe two hundred miles a black man next to him talked on endlessly about unemployment and his battle with diabetes. In the city Lonnie found a cheap hotel room a few blocks from Ground Zero of the devastated Twin Towers. He sent a postcard to his parents of B.B.King on which he scribbled "To Lonnie Gower, Love B.B.King." Then he sat with a