Flattened by a night of cocaine and tequila I rose damp and twitchy with unplaceable fears. Got up and had a stretch in the doorway: arms up and back, pressed into the doorframe, not stepping through the door, standing there, pulling, waiting for that stupid sunshaft of optimism that would get me home. I did not have to wait long. The sunshine here breaks over the land explosively, that's the only reason I or anyone else would live here.

Okay all better now, new day bright and gleaming; smiles and contentedness strolling the sunwashed sidewalks home.

With a head full of plans and intentions I bound up the stairs, burst into my apartment, jog into the  bathroom and quietly faint. Waking up and seeing the toilet bowl from that particular angle tells me to spend the day in there, safe amidst the cool tiles and comfy shag. Late afternoon comes a thump. A knock at the door.

"Yes?"  

"What are you doing in there? Are you masturbating?" 

"No, of course not." 

"Then what are you doing?"

Of course I could not tell her that I was writing - that evil, secret lust.

She kicked the door with her foot and walked away. The problem of course was not that I was locked in the bathroom. Nor that I had not been seen for days. The problem was that I was too genuinely disturbed for those whose weirdness is practiced and polished. People get very angry when the illusion of safety is yanked out from under them. What can I say? So I'm in the bathroom, you can't pee across the street at the Chinese restaurant?

Here's the thing: I came from the land of cabbage and the smell of it haunts me the way the syrupy smell of roadkill might haunt you, if you are the sort of person who - seeing the mess of blood and fur still quivering - pulls over to investigate. 

          I.

Going back some years. Christmas in the country. Fine etched stone round the fireplace lions and framed photos too. A propsperous family, busy governing businesses and exotic auto leases. They were tough and noble, they had fought hard and now celebrated their victories with acquisition. Grave with demands and expectations they ripped the wrappings off the presents in a blizzard of flying paper, while I, upstairs in the bedroom, like some wretched hustler who they'd picked up off the street, screwing the daughter, getting head from the daughter, or at the dinner table, eating their fine food, saying smart things, with my hungry and tortured eyes, the pain so close and obvious, I was of a wholly different kind of nobility, unpleasant for all the morbid feelings it summoned. They were attracted and repulsed in turns. I was a kind of cherished unpleasant reminder, a bitter herb that walks and talks.

They served the best food and I enjoyed the flavors and ate everything on my plate but afterward felt just the same as I would had I eaten boiled cabbage. After dinner she and I raced away from the house. Driving carefully in the rain, feeling the cool night air through the windows open just an inch, bundled up in warm soft clothes, driving, flying. We listened to punk songs and nodded our heads vigorously.

If anyone else had a thimblefull of such love they would dissolve in bliss. If I felt it now I would disintegrate; believe me I was stronger then. We slept. We slept the sleep of the contented and happily exhausted. We slept for hours and hours and felt good all the time. I'm not kidding. It was for real. We had comfort and food and safety and sex: glorious, continuous, unstopable sex. We had exceptional appetites. It was an impossibly vast, healthy, oceanic love.

What happened?

What happened was it soon became evident that I was an imposter and a refugee. It was always evident to them, but it one day became evident to me. I was going about my city activities - I had money to buy clothes and eat in restaurants then - and found myself on seventh street, I believe it was, or maybe eleventh, I walked past an open window where an old Ukrainian woman was cooking cabbage. That smell! It forced its way up into my nostrils, it reminded me that I was out of place, that it would take only the tiniest prick from the tiniest needle to deflate me into a . . . Yes. And here I am now - I look around my room, this hovel. This roach infested filthy char room. Hideous.

          II.

The Blatherist.

Alone at 11:25 with Jackie McLean and a dirty Lakewood portable fan. The white sheets are billowing before the open windows, billowing as I always imagined they did on lush tropical islands, such as Tahiti, where Gaugin starved to death, amidst papaya and breadfruit.

Scribbles everywhere. This particular stuff is so bizarre it has gone beyond the boundaries of bad, it is heinous, abominable; I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing. Reading something over I instantly recognize that it makes no sense, but I can't stop, my mind is fried, I'm burnt, uninspired, still hot and frayed from the laundry cycle, busted. Not since my woolly and cellar-moldy childhood have I smelled so much cabbage.

Morning. Morning is the sound of coins jangling in pockets and kettles whistling.

Through the scratched subway windows I see the brown buildings of Queens, the sun has varnished them pink. The passengers are reading and adjusting their leans to compensate for the jerky motions of the train. The day accumulates in poison and unread messages. I want to make a sacrifice, spill some blood in the Temple, just the purest bit of genuine feeling.

Nothing. There is a clock on the wall. Nothing. Even the microwave is counting down. The cars honk and rev and the snow begins.

Out the door, weeeeeeee!, I go frantically whipping and whooping through the blizzard, blinded, frozen, "Yah! Yah!" mushing huskies for the party; busy busy, running to buy wine and food and cleaning, cleaning under the table, under the arms, with the soap up and down, clean clean, the alarmclock is buzzing and the lights outside the window are changing to yellow and the people are coming. The People! Is the cabbage ready? It is? Mmmmm!

          III.

Vacation on the mountaintop. No fair false advertising, it's just a grass-planted landfill. Observe the detritus: plastic and glass containers, whatever print may have once been on them long rubbed or deteriorated away; dispensary shapes - cones and squeezebottles and bladders - dressings and flavorings, ancient sauces and condiments, more condiments than I ever knew existed: tiny mustards and relishes and sauces; dainty pickled fruits and chutneys; please oh please just give us a little flavor.

It's so quiet I can hear my own memories. Suddenly I'm a child again, sitting in my grandmother's little cottage in the woods. I can hear the finch in the crabapple tree, and on the far end of the field the old tractor is silently rusting. Silence is the greatest sound of all. In silence you can hear the sunflowers being three-feet tall.

I was bored back then. I was cultivating a mustache. How ridiculous, sitting there with that miserable fuzz on my face, sulking. In my memories I try to see myself as having been comfortable and open, but that's probably not true, probably I was petty and intolerable. I'd like to think that I wasn't, that I was very zen and appreciative, but let's face it I stewed in misery like a carp in tomato paste.

Within my memories I can exist for an hour, two, and I do not sense time passing. This is my true gift. I have a great archive from which to draw my distractions and I can dream away the hours brilliantly, allow memory to mix with fantasy and float away. I float with such skill that when time and place abruptly reassert themselves it feels like the nauseous heave of a sudden stop on a bus.

I woke up from a dream set in North Africa - Tunisia maybe, or Morocco. I was walking on hot white sand, under that raw endless sky. The blue and salty Mediterranean rolled up the sand and foamed round my feet. Up ahead some children of different sizes were screaming and slapping the water with joy, jumping and doing backflips. When I got closer I saw that they were celebrating a capture: a small whale, wrapped up in nylon lines and stuck all over with sticks and plastic toys. They were torturing it. I saw the whale's half open, bleeding eye, and decided it was still alive. As I ran up and began undoing the webbing I suddenly found myself, along with the whale, in deep water, as if the tide had come instantly. Taking a breath and then diving under I continued my attempts to free the suffering animal. The water was clear, like pool water, and I could see everything as I worked. But I was slow, or the animal was too far gone and unable or unwilling to move or inflate the air bladders that it uses for buoyancy control. It sank to the bottom. I watched it sink down. When I lifted my head out of the water I saw that the kids on shore were throwing things at me.

          IV.

Subway fast forward twenty years. Air-locks and seals are being activated all around me, marked by the wooshing and zipping sounds of electric closing. We rumble through the tunnels. Moving through the car an insane Chinese cripple performs manic seat-to-seat transfers. One eye socket is empty, muscles contracting in remembered motions of blinking. He has a complicated tatoo on the back of his hand and around his fingers. The way he holds the hand out seems to allow the tatoo to survey and screen the car, making up for his lost eye, scanning the people through dirty skin ink prisms. He sits down and gets up again, moving from one empty seat to another, holding his tatood hand out like somebody's prophecy.

Surface into snow and slushing yellow taxis. The stoney kids couldn't make it, the Airship left without them, now nanoenhanced robotic-assist pharmohumans do the daily commuting.

I run into a restaurant and straightaway into the bathroom. It's huge. An ancient tin ceiling, exposed, far above my head. The floor and walls are painted white. I feel like an errant spider in a corner of a porcelain tub, hairy & trapped, wanting only to scurry away.

Oh yeah, I can tell the withdrawal from this particular gig will be just enormous.

          V.

A few years ago, Pacific Heights, it was raining. Jimbo was peeling potatos and I was looking at the rain. OH MY GOD!! There, right there in the street, oh Jesus it's my whole fucking childhood! Fucking Christ.

Point one: My grandfather worked with the skins of animals. Twelve hours a day on his feet, hunched over a pelt, gripping a sharp knife. He knew many things, whereas I know only those things that he had no need for knowing.

Point two: Love. And what about it? What about that long weekend on the ocean, the pretty motel room and the empty beach, the gray Atlantic beating a mist out of the sand. What the hell was I thinking?

Going to sleep, hoping to escape, I dream that I am in some Roman ruins, back on the shore of the Mediterranean, sitting with my father and uncle and brother - except in my dream my brother is a helpless little retarded/autistic boy. I wonder anxiously if this is because of me, because I dropped him on his head when he was little. Only when I wake up do I realize that he's not autistic or retarded, and the fall on his head was not all that bad.

Just a few days ago: A long road through Texas. The trooper seems to know who I am. We stand on the highway alongside my car. He looks at me through green tinted glasses. He is almost as scared as I am. A cold wind blows down from Oklahoma. A frosty yet vegetative smell. Cabbage?

He tells me to never come through there again. I tell him not to worry.

Back on the road, wasted from bourbon, mescalin, and schwaggy weed rolled up into cigar leafs.

Impatient. Can't wait. Can't wait to just go fishing and let my mind flap away and nest in some dead branch stuck out over the placid waters. And there we could sit, me and my brain, watching the bobber in the water, and when we no longer care if it moves or not I'll know I've arrived.

The End.