New YouTube Channel

Okay, so at the suggestion of my old newspaper editor, "The Names of Places" has a new YouTube channel.  It is linked to the blog and will be replete with audio posts, slideshows, and Bub songs.  Here's a repeat of a recent Bub song, now available at YouTube.

My favorite Bub song

Perhaps it's a bit sentimental for a half-baked ditty, but what can you do?

You Don't Say

Anyway, there you have it.  Another half-baked Bub ditty.

Insufficient Chairs

Another weird memory.  If anyone can correct or corroborate the details, or add to them, I'd be much obliged.  Chris, Arlen, Primetime Sean; was there anybody else?  Aron, were you there?  Anyway, so as I remember it, we were on a canoe trip down the Sanaga River, in Cameroon.  We were laughing real hard about stuff, like when one of the canoes hit a whirlpool and flipped over.  Then, that night Sean was drying his shorts on the grill and burned a big hole in them.  Man, we laughed so hard.  Arlen kept on yelling: "Prove it!" every time anybody said anything, making some kind of hilarious point about epistemology or something.

After a while we figured out that if we stopped at the riverside villages, the local chief would be obliged to sit down with us in the center of the village and serve us drinks and send us off with armloads of fruit.  As soon as we figured this out, we stopped every time we saw a pirogue tied to the reeds in hopes of coming away with mangoes, guavas, avocados, and lemons.  We'd be paddling away, scanning the forested shoreline for evidence of people, water lapping, long-tailed birds flashing in the green.  When we saw a trail or froth in the water where people washed their clothes or a pirogue, whoever saw it first would shout, and Arlen would yell "Prove it!", then we'd double over laughing as we we made our way cross-current to the shore.

I seem to remember a deserted village.  We wandered up the trail, mouths watering in anticipation of palm wine and fruit.  We came upon a silent cluster of mud houses.  Then a woman scurried into view, waving her arms.  She grabbed us and pulled us around the village, showing us house after house.  "Uncle used to live here.  Brother used to live here.  Cousin used to live here.  Come!  Let me show you!"  She yelled for her son.  A skinny, scared looking boy came into view.  "We have guests!" she said.  "Do you want to see the plantation?"  We followed her at top speed all through the plantation, trees heavy with cocoa pods and oranges.  Then she said, "Come! Let us sit."  So we followed her back to her house and she yelled at her son once again to go find some chairs.

There were not enough chairs.

The Best Company

Listen to Bernardo's story about friendship and fire and what the direction that a house faces can tell you about it's inhabitants.

Bernardo's Point of View

These photos are from Bernardo Morillo's Public Privacy Collection.  Bernardo also tells some great stories. 

 title - bride

title - caledoscopio

title - beso
                                                                                  -by Bernardo Morillo

Blue Grotto

I took this photo on a small motor boat on the Napoli sea off the island of Capri, Italy. It was October of 2011. I remember taking it and liking how simple it all seemed. Just one old guy; one small boat and one little flag. Stark contrast to the horde of tourists on little motorboats and rowboats staring him right in the face; though most outside the range of my camera/phone. I like this picture not only because I secretly wish I was this guy and had this boat and that little flag, but because it reminds me of that particular day. 

The day started off normal enough in the coastal town of Sorrento. I got up when it was still relatively dark. I had a weird fried egg for breakfast which had a round yellow yolk that refused to run. I also mixed some type of cereal with some type of yogurt, had very strong coffee and a piece of bread or Danish probably. The weather was cool but promising. It was early but the sun was already fighting its way into the sky.

I took a taxi with my mom down to the port with an eye toward getting to see the “blue grotto”. I had no idea what the “blue grotto” even was but I figured why not. I like the water. I like the color blue. Sounds like a plan.  The people we were with decided to walk down to the port. Our taxi driver blew right past them as he whipped the taxi around a few scary switchbacks on its way down to the water. After we got out I walked around the port taking a few pictures as mom looked into getting boat tickets. I came back and she was talking to this strange man with an odd look to him. I didn’t pay much attention. I was on vacation and I make a point not to think too hard or worry too much. 

This odd guy ends up leading us down to where this boat is moored. This boat was huge and probably could hold about 200-250 people. I was a little skeptical about being able to get on it because all that I saw were steps. Our odd friend wasn’t as put off. He simply led me around the twenty or so people in line to this side gate that had a ramp down to the loading area. This was no ADA ramp. The grade to this thing had to have been somewhere close to one foot for every one foot of drop. Plus, it was slippery as all hell. Not my idea of a good time but it got the job done and I didn’t fall on my face. We got down to the boat and the folks working the thing loaded us up no problem. Our odd friend disappeared. Apparently, he was trying to sell my mom on a private tour but wasn’t convincing enough. Too bad for him. Again, I really wasn’t paying attention to the details. The way I figured it, even if this boat ride turned into a Gilligan’s Island type “three hour tour”, it beat being at work. So they loaded everyone else aboard and we sailed off the Sorrento coast for Capri.

The trip took all of about twenty-five minutes. It got interesting when a second odd and somewhat creepy old man approached me and my mom. This time, we were both sitting at the back of the boat. ( I wish I knew if this was the bow or the stern but I really have no clue.) Anyway, this guy was trying to sell a private tour too. Only he took it personally when we brushed him off. He scoffed at our plan to get to the blue grotto.

“The grotto is closed!” he said in a sort of half angry, half amused way. “You’ll never get to the grotto!”

This guy was serious. You’d think we insulted his mother or something.  When we finally got to Capri and headed off the boat, he made a point to confront us one more time as he stood with a group of people who apparently took him up on his tour offer.

“You will have a very unhappy time should you try to get to the grotto! You remember that I say this!”

You see what I mean, intense. I felt like I was in some horror movie for a second there. I felt like he was that old person that tells the kids not to go to crystal lake because some killer with a hockey mask is loose but they don’t pay any attention to him and end up dying as a result. At this point I was fully preparing myself for the “grotto monster” should we even get there. It was not to be though- the monster that is, and we never did run into our intense friend again. Instead, we were able to find a second small motor boat that took us out of Capri’s  docking area and back out into the Napoli Sea. We skirted around the rocky edges and stone cliffs of Capri until we made our way out to where holes, both large and small, began to open up in the cliffside of the island.

I remember thinking that the boat we were in had no chance of getting into one of those holes. This boat could only seat about twenty people but it was obvious that you would need a boat much smaller to make it work. Sure enough, when we pulled a little further around the island, we came upon an area full of these little rowboats that were going in and out of these little holes no problem. When it came our turn, I had no idea how I would even get into one of these things. I mean these rowboats sat right on top of the water. They had to. It was the only way you could fit through the openings that led to the grotto. It ended up not being a problem though. I think they specifically waited for this rowboat that had this big, solid mountain of an Italian man handling the paddles. He basically took one look at me, extended an arm and hoisted me from the one boat to the other without so much as a minor hesitation. Under normal circumstances, I think I would have taken a pass on the whole grotto thing if it meant pulling off a stunt like this. But if this guy wasn’t showing any fear, why should I? The rest of the trip to the grotto was subjectively uneventful. It involved the small rowboat, an even smaller cave, some admittedly pretty blue  water and some Italian opera singing. Oh yeah, and there was the inevitability of being tossed back into the motor boat by that same Italian paddle man.

                                                                                                      -by Mark Collier

Unpublishable Haiku # 16

silent street:
snow gathers
on my beard

                                                                              by Jeffrey Stottlemyer

Unpublishable Haiku # 15

frozen trash can -
a rat jumps out
into the snow

                                                        by Jeffrey Stottlemyer

A Good Book

You know what might be good? is a nonfiction, Gonzo account about violent conflict. Since the end of the Cold War, states have collapsed like Humpty Dumpty across the Global South. The world is rife with national and transnational insurrections, criminality, terrorism, natural disasters, epidemics, and complex humanitarian emergencies. Maybe I'll write this book, you know? About the wackiness of being human among other humans in this time and place, funny encounters with regular people living in apocalypse.  This book of anecdotes, reflections, photographs, and haiku would explore the risk factors of internal and transnational conflict at this point in history and will be divided into three parts.  All these horrible, hilarious stories would persistently be oriented in the broader context of geo-political stresses and strains, oil addictions, and urban decay. It would be a unique attempt to tell the story of America, the last superpower, through snippets of profane dialogue, socio-political analysis, and haiku poetry.

I don't know.  What do you think?  It would be a good book right?

Justice

I think I was about 15, with my friend, Scott. Scott and I weren't best friends or anything, but once we found a huge whale vertebrae on the beach, so we had that in common. We'd been walking down the beach from the fresh water inlet in the monkey-infested mangrove swamp where we shimmied up a tree and jumped twenty feet into the water from a skinny branch, splashing into the shallow water being sure not to lock our knees. We were walking back to camp when we saw something on the beach. What's that, I said. It's shoes, he said. It's not shoes, I said. It wasn't. It was a huge-ass, stinky whale vertebrae. We dragged it all the way back to camp. I got to keep it. I forget how we negotiated that, but that's how it ended up. Maybe he didn't want it. Anyway, we had that in common.

So the way I remember it, we were sitting in a restaurant in Douala, Cameroon, on our way to the airport, eating french fries and chicken. My dad's friend was keeping an eye on his car outside, through the open door. So when his alarm went off, he was pretty quick. All of a sudden he was bolting out the door.

Me and Scott ran out after him. My dad sat there at the table, shaking his head at all our foolishness. He sprinkled more salt on his fries. My dad's friend scuffled in the middle of the road with the guy as cars honked and swerved around them. Then we were all sprinting through the city with a spontaneous mob of vigilantes armed with pipes and strips of rubber.

Eventually we caught the poor bugger. The three of us went back to our meal and left him in the mob's clutches. I don't know what happened to him after that.

Everything is Broken

Unpublishable Haiku # 14

this is called _Cahuita Haiku_

Marijuaneros
befriend me with oranges
and coconut milk

                                                          by Fred Shultz

Manu Chao - Rainin In Paradize (Emir Kusturica) (HD)

Unpublishable Haiku # 13

Here's another little poem.  Fred writes these little poems.  Not sure what they are but I like 'em.  A whole lot.


Parrot fish, thank you
and all you other fish too
for sharing with me


                                                                  by Fred Shultz

Unpublishable Haiku # 13

Your wind in these trees
sounds like cars on a freeway
Boquete evening

                                                                            by Fred Shultz

Another Weird Thing

So I've written about a couple a weird things since Christmas.  I wrote about the time I accidentally broke a curse on an old slave trading island in Cameroon.  I wrote about getting robbed by a deaf-mute with a spear gun and a snorkel in Guatemala.  I wrote about getting a tattoo in Tijuana, Mexico from a guy with a bull ring in his nose and a fetish on his desk.  I wrote about chasing a black bear down a hill.  There's a bunch of others, too.  Ben wrote about a lot of weird things, too.

Another weird thing happened when I was about nine years old or so.  It was hot and muggy in Yaounde, Cameroon, so I used to sleep with a fan next to my bed.  One night I went to unplug the fan in the living room so I could take it to my room.  My pinky stuck on the prong before the fan was fully unplugged.

Wham!  I was soaring through space.  I saw planets and stars.  I figured I was dead for sure.  But just in case I wasn't dead yet, I yelled for help.  The babysitter heard my halfhearted tone (Help, help, help, help), and figured I was messing around.  Eventually she told my younger sister to go check on me.  Tammy came in the room and saw me on the floor, shaking.  She went back and told the babysitter that she'd better come and see.

When the baby sitter touched my arm, she got a shock herself.  I guess she grounded the circuit because then I came back to my house from outer space.  I seem to remember that I was pretty proud of myself.

Unpublishable Haiku # 12

This one is called ¿Tienes fuego, Amigo?

Man in the hotel
In San José, lights a match
As if his millionth

                                                                        By Fred Shultz

Monkey Wrench

Yellow police tape zigzagged the block; emergency lights flashed through the darkness in the rain.  I stood outside my car wrapped in my trench coat with my notebook and micro-cassette recorder, wondering where to begin.  I stood behind the yellow police tape looking at the lights reflecting off the wetness of the road.

I began knocking on doors, trying to find an eyewitness--somebody who saw something or heard something or knew of someone who had.

They police kept saying there would be a press conference but it was getting real late.  I was tired and hungry.  So I left and drank some beer at The Gables.

In the morning I went to the office and went to work filing my story.

"Roselle man reportedly spent his 45th birthday yesterday, shooting his wife in the head, ramming a squad car in a high speed police chase, getting shot by an officer, and ended the evening finally by drowning in a Carol Stream detention pond." Then I spent two hours with Ben, Mark, and Bill sitting out on the loading dock smoking cigarettes and watched the sun go down behind the train tracks and the clock tower.

I had an idea for a game.  According to the rules, each week we would agree upon a word, and once agreed, would spend the duration of the week figuring ways to fit it into our stories.  When the papers were printed we would determine the winner based on the quantity of occurrences as well as quality—extra points for headlines, double extra points for quotes.

We decided that the first word would be “monkey.”  Then we watched the sun going down in silence--each of us thinking of how to get our sources in city hall, school boards, cops, and park districts to say, “monkey.”

My stories, that week, took longer than usual, as I went through all the possible combinations of the word "monkey" in my head in every potential context.

That week I scoured the Carol Stream community for monkey business.  I nosed around in search of people monkeying around in a newsworthy manner.  This game proved much more difficult than I had anticipated.  Finally I came across a monkey wrench, though perhaps it was a bit of a stretch.  Turns out a West Chicago school district had to reevaluate their construction plans because of limited funds.  Normally in such a situation they would ask the voters to pass a referendum.  This time, however, the bad economy proved to be a monkey wrench.  The voters would never pass a referendum in this economic climate.  Talk about a monkey wrench.  I even attributed the sentiment in paraphrase form to the school board president himself, who felt there was a monkey wrench in the referendum idea, or so I inferred from his comments about the economy and all that.

Unpublishable Haiku #11

To reach customer
service call one eight hundred
two five eight three sev
                 -Andrew Schwalm

Unpublishable Haiku # 10

I am given change
for renting a bicycle
with three cigarettes

                                                                by Fred Shultz

Unpublishable Haiku # 9

Bowl of cereal,
half-ton of Cabernet grapes,
Last iceberg melting

                                                                   by Benjamin North Spencer 
                                                                  (an actual real-live winemaker)

(Definitely) Unpublishable Renga # 1

wrote haiku
tried hard
never heard from you

                                                                   by Adam Crohn

Hey Adam, I thought
A haiku was supposed to
have five, seven, five? 

                                                                   by Costa Tsiatsos

Nate, you are so close
But you must be quite busy
Yeah, that must be why

                                                                  by Costa Tsiatsos

Unpublishable Haiku # 8

Dipping her fingers
slowly in the sugar bowl,
Djura, the Dutch girl

                                                                by Fred Shultz



Fred explains:  "Here's one from a long time ago that got rejected because it did not have a proper juxtaposition of two images and because its syllables were too perfect"

Unpublishable Haiku # 6 and 7

cherry blossoms bloom
from old rugged bark


  
                   spring

tomorrow no long underwear
cool breezes blow

                                                              by Gordon Drinen

Cat Eyes

I was hitchhiking through Mexico with a guitar and a duffel bag. I scored a ride with a mango truck: cases and cases of mangos in the trailer of the eighteen-wheeler creaking groaning across the land.  The smells of dust.  Smells of mountains.  The smells of a dead horse lying by the road (narrow endless roads).  Young girls selling fresh juice at the crossroads in the daytime.  The smells of scrambled eggs and black beans and tortillas in the heat of early afternoon.

The kind and vulgar, smelly truck driver sat next to me, most of the time saying nothing, just staring through the smudgy windshield as I read a dilapidated Faulkner book even though my eyes couldn't focus on the words too well--the truck was lurching violently.  After several days, he turned to me and asked my name.

"What is your name?" he asked.  It was dark.  There was a comet in the sky surrounded by the stars that shone above the dark dark road (and headlight beams) in the nighttime as I fell asleep, my head against my arm against the window sill.  The breeze, the warm tropic breeze rushed by as we drove along the dusty road.

"Nate," I said, as I shook myself awake, shaking off the images that had begun to pass before my eyes of their own accord, fragmented images blending with other fragmented images--images of people I'd known, and places I'd been, and books I'd read, and thoughts I'd had, and prayers I'd prayed, images moving to the hypnotic sound of shifting gears and the squealing creaking groaning engine.

He was sleepy, too, and wanted conversation to help him stay awake.  So I tried to accommodate him as best I could.  "Your Spanish is very poor," he said.

   

One time we stopped in a little town:  three or four shacks on the left hand side of the road and everything else flat and empty as far as you could see with the shimmering of heat on the sand and on the road.

The driver took a nap in the truck and I went outside with my book, The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner.  A head popped out from one of the shacks far away...an old man furtively gesturing to me.  So I walked the length of the world until I approached him.  He invited me inside with great grandeur and I bought a coca cola. (Dusty floor and darker shadows.)  His wife talked to me a while.  Then he asked me if I would like to buy some medicine.  "Cat Eyes," he said.

 

"Are they the eyes of a cat?" I asked.

He shook his head and hobbled, disappearing into a room.  He came back out with a bag of seeds.

"They are for what?" I asked.

"They are for every illness," he said to me.  Both elderly people, they gazed at me, his wife quietly nodding her head.  They looked at me tenderly.  And waited for what I had to say. 

I said I wasn’t sick.

I walked outside into the blistering sun.  The flat empty land.  An empty land.  I went back to the truck.  The truck was rumbling into life.

Eventually I got to the border town of Nuevo Laredo, a town that I've been through several times.  I was walking towards the border when a drunken man who had eight children and no job came up to me to see if I had anything to give to him.  When he found that I did not, he offered to be my friend.

"You are crossing the border?" he asked.

"Yes," I said as we walked along, together.

"Which way are you going?"

I pointed vaguely towards the bridge.

"No, do not go that way," he said, grabbing my hand to lead me down another road.  "Do not go that way.  The current there is much too strong."

San Pedro

In Guatemala, the tourist trail for backpackers and dropouts begins in Antigua, usually on Holy Week.  I was there for a couple Holy Weeks.  One day on one of those Holy Weeks, a bunch of us was sprawled out in the grass, playing music underneath a tree.  An Austrian was singing.  A hippie girl from Canada was beating out rhythms on a drum.  A Frenchman was smoking my cigarettes. “No you don’t have to speak to understand the people,” he kept saying.  Everybody was real excited about the fact that there was a lunar eclipse scheduled for later that night.  Hale-Bopp was in the sky that night, too.  So everybody was talking about the crazy vibes.

The Holy Week processions moved through town, along the narrow streets, first appearing as a glow and then the noise of feet and singing.  Then they emerged around the corner, hundreds of people passing by, men dressed in hooded purple robes carrying long wooden floats upon which the figure of Christ stood holding up his hands.  Hundreds of men and women walked by, flanked by priests with incense, swinging censers back and forth from chains, singing.  It was a somber and festive affair. 

Eventually, the park became less crowded. Throughout the town, people were working on the carpets for the next day, sifting sawdust of different colors, sifting it through strainers and then through the stencils, laying out the flowers.  They were working on them all night long.  The volcanic mountain cones, dark against the dark night sky loomed around us.  The French guy suggested that we go somewhere to drink beer.  We went to several bars that night, sat in many courtyards, fountains trickling underneath gargoyle grimace and flowering vines.  His German girlfriend, Julia, joined us along the way and the three of us trudged around in the dark, stopping frequently to urinate, sometimes in an alley, sometimes within the crumbling walls of a five hundred year-old boarded up church or monastery.  There were many picturesque places to piss at night in Antigua, Guatemala.  We pissed in as many as we could find.  We drank many shots and insulted many people.  Trying to communicate, I spoke in bad Spanish to Julia.  I spoke in bad French to François.  Julia spoke German to the Germans.  I spoke in English to the Germans.  Sometimes we actually met Guatemalans.  They spoke Quiche to each other. 

We were looking for a certain special bar that François liked, "très sympa" he kept saying over and over again.  Julia became discouraged by the whole ordeal, and just wanted to go back home and go to bed.  But François insisted that the bar was indeed very "très sympa" and so we walked some more, stopping to piss in the moonlit ruins of antiquity.  Julia became yet more discouraged.  We walked past many carpets of colored sawdust and purple bougainvillea flowers arranged in intricate designs.  Finally, Julia sat down in the middle of the street and I walked on ahead as François pranced around her saying loving things, and urging her not to be dismayed.  He kissed her and he prodded her until she rose up to her feet and trudged on once again.  "We're almost there.  We're almost there," he whispered in her ear.

Sure enough--around the corner we heard the music and saw the lighted doorway.  We walked towards it in the dark.  The smell of beer.  The sound of music.  François loved this bar because in the bathroom there were glow-in-the-dark stars pasted to the walls and ceiling.  "Do not forget.  You must visit the bathroom," he reminded me again, as we sat upon the tall bar stools. 

We stole an ashtray and some other stuff.  We thought that was really funny.  We stole a flower in a vase and gave it to a homeless woman later that night sleeping in a box by the cathedral.  We thought that was poignant.

Anyway, Antigua is where everybody starts.  Then they end up in San Pedro on Lake Atitlan, a weird little tourist trap that you need a boat to get to.  Backpackers and dropouts like it because they feel like they discovered it themselves, or heard a rumor about it or something.  You can buy crepes there and take weaving lessons.  Anyway this was years ago.  Maybe it doesn't have the same mystique now.  I was laying on a rock one time, in a pretty secluded spot, about to go swimming, when a deaf-mute with a mask and snorkel and duck-fins waddled out of the bushes with a spear gun and gestured wide-eyed and earnest that I should go swimming.  Then when I was out there in the water, he stole my money out of my pants.  

I also found a tiny scorpion in my swimsuit at that same spot, on another day.  Thank goodness it didn't sting me.

Unpublishable Haiku #5

leaving the tunnel
my face in the window
disappears

Unpublishable Haiku #4

Unpublishable Haiku # 3

between tours
jokes about
not being dead

Unpublishable Haiku # 1

picking out Pegasus
a bat

Jewelry Thief

Then there was the time I interviewed a jewelry thief in jail for the newspaper.  This was the same jewelry store where I bought my wife her ring.  He threw a brick through the window, grabbed a handful and ran.  Although his trial was still pending, he told me straight out he was guilty as sin and deserved to be convicted.  I didn't publish that detail, though.  This interview was about Christmas in jail.  Or maybe it was about DNA evidence.  Anyway, he had an accomplice--a guy who was mentally handicapped.  He felt sorry for him and that's why he invited him along.  Everybody needs a helping hand.  He said he probably wouldn't have been caught if it weren't for his accomplice.  But it wasn't his fault, really.  He was mentally handicapped.  He was a good guy.  I stuck a tape recorder on the table and we chatted for an hour or so.  The guy was eloquent and funny.  He talked about going on suicide watch.  "You tell them you're thinking about killing yourself, they say okay then handcuff you to a little bed.  That was horrible!  I'm never doing that again."  He leaned into me and arched his eyebrows, then slapped his hand on the table and laughed.  Man, he was funny.  I sure wish I kept the transcript.  I got yelled at later for leading with him instead of the State's Attorney.  But the truth was, the jewelry thief was more eloquent and more funny.

The Curse

When I was in high school in Cameroon, we all went to the beach for a spiritual retreat.  The program included lots of long presentations.  Some of them were pretty interesting.  The basketball coach drew a big heart on the overhead projector with a chair in the middle of it.  First he put ME on the chair, then scribbled over that and drew another one with a cross on the chair.  He drew a check mark next to that one.  Then they separated the girls from the boys and talked about sex.  This talk also involved Ven diagrams and such.  

It was a pretty good time.  There were games and good food.

So one day we all went out to the beach, by the old cannon, during our free time.  There was an island about a mile off shore.  Nothing better to do so we all swam out to the island, all us kids.  It took longer than I thought to get out there.  And way longer to walk around the periphery than I expected.  Pretty soon it was just me in the jungle, picking my way across cliffs and inlets.  Up ahead I could see Lawrence coming in and out of view.  I saw a huge orange iguana leap from a boulder and splash in the surf.  

"Did you see that, Lawrence?" I yelled.  I'm not sure he saw it.  I'm not sure I saw it either, really.  It's one of those things.

Anyway, the next day we were about to leave.  We were all sitting in the pavilion and the owner of the camp showed us old colonial slave-trading trinkets they had found on the property.   I guess he was the owner.  Maybe he was the manager or something.  He passed them around, like old pieces of metal and stuff.  He told us stories about missionaries who came all the way over there from Europe and then died of malaria.  Then he turned real serious and said that until we walked around the island, nobody had done that for two hundred years because of the curse.  He thanked us for breaking the curse.  That made me feel pretty good. 

Somebody to Talk To

Poland in October is gray buildings and pink skies and wet maple leaves skidding across the pavement.  Me and my two buddies, Arlen and J, went there just for fun.  We spent a couple days in Warsaw, long walks through the Old City.  We drank a lot of tea.  Then we got on a train for Krakow.  There were no seats.

J chatted up three girls.  The train lurched.  He plunged over to where Arlen and I stood, holding on.

“Hey, I told them that you two were trouble makers and had both been to prison,” he whispered loudly.  Then he went back and talked to the girls some more, telling them more lies.

In Krakow we got off the train.  The three girls waved at us and wished us well.  They liked that fact that we had been to prison.
 
Straight away, we went to a bar and began to drink. 

Arlen wanted to go to Auschwitz so we went: wrought iron fence and a grid of two story brick buildings nestled among the trees.  The maple trees were turning a deep red and the oaks, still green, were dropping their leaves when the wind blew in gusts.  Clouds gathered and it began to rain.  The rain turned to hail.  We hunched our coats tighter around us and began to stroll slowly through the camp.

“Hey!  Are you guys Americans?” said a girl in a blue raincoat.  We were standing at the door to the crematorium.  Her voice echoed inside.  “God,” she said, peering inside.  “It’s so morbid."

The girl recounted how she'd been working as an English teacher for two months in a small Polish village and had nobody to talk to.  It was so good to run into some Americans, she said.

Arlen walked off so he wouldn't have to talk to her.  He disappeared behind the chimneys of the crematorium.  Then I walked off so I wouldn't have to talk to her either.  I looked at the room full of shoes for a while.

In Block 11, adjacent to the shooting range, I walked down the stairs into the basement.  Down the hall at the far end of the building there was a little room with "standing cells."  Prisoners had to crawl through a tiny door to get inside then stand up in the darkness.  The cells were three feet by three feet, so they couldn't sit down, sometimes for days or weeks.

There were bars across the opening to keep the tourists out.  But the chain was unlatched so  I nudged the door with my toe.  There was nobody around.  I worked up my guts. I knelt down and squeezed inside. 

I stood up into the darkness and touched the walls with my hands.  Stood there for five seconds, six seconds, six and a half, then crouched back down to my haunches, ducked my head and backed out the door, finger tips dusty on the floor.

I wandered around the camp until someone in a uniform came and told me the camp was closed.

Back outside, Arlen and J stood there, waiting for me.  We walked to the bus stop.

Quién Sabe?

I cleaned shrimp as fast as can be, piled them up in a bucket of water.  Solomon washed the dishes, singing under his breath.  He didn't say too much to anyone but me, cause we were pals, and I didn't say too much to anyone cause I could hardly speak in Spanish.  I just minded my own business, cleaned the shrimp, cut the carrots, made the garlic bread, grilled the lobster, and heated up the soup.  But as I worked in the kitchen, cleaning the shrimp a bucketful at a time, slicing through the gray meat in the water, he was there, washing dishes.  From time to time he reached over and snagged a freshly cleaned shrimp and popped it into his mouth with a grin.

Years before, Solomon came to St. Thomas in a boat at night with forty others.  Upon beaching the boat in a secluded spot, they all jumped out and scattered in the hills.  The police didn't find a single one.  All forty to this day lived happily on the island.  Solomon found a wife for two thousand dollars and became an American citizen.  It was a good deal.  He lived with his sister, who ran a beauty parlor in the Dominican and Rasta part of town.

Across the street from where Solomon lived was a little bar with a billiard table inside.  There was no music in this bar and the cash register was left unattended.  You had to be an insider to frequent this particular bar.  In the corner sat a man who could not walk or enunciate his words.  He often he spoke to himself.  He laughed and hugged himself when a player missed a shot, grinning with his eyes squinted shut.  He lacked several of his front teeth and when he grinned, hugging himself with his eyes squinted shut, he stuck his tongue through the gap in his toothless mouth and said, "Lucky!" over and over again.  He sat in the corner and watched the men play billiards.  He was an insider.

There was a Rasta man with golden teeth and his own private billiard stick who waited for his turn out on the door step, smoking a joint.

There was a Mexican man, slight of build, with lines in his face and a swagger to his step.  He was glad to meet the friend of a friend and offered to buy me a beer.  His six year old son, Louis, sat watching him play billiards.

These people were all insiders.

One Saturday afternoon, I was playing a game of billiards against Solomon and losing miserably.

"La esquina," Solomon said, calling the shot, and sank the eight ball.  I went to shake his hand, when a woman began to growl from across the room.

"I know dem boots," she said menacingly, gesturing with a crooked finger at my big black boots.  "I knoooow dem boots," she crooned.  "Dem's traceable boots.  Dem's POLICE boots!"  At that she began to shriek, speaking curses in Patois that I did not understand.  I was speechless and it did not occur to me to try to persuade her that I was not an undercover cop.  I just stood there dumbfounded as she hissed and spat.  Solomon grinned at me and knocked on his finger with his temple as Miguel showed her to the door.

At two forty-five every afternoon, Solomon stopped at my apartment and yelled for me at my window. Then the two of us moseyed down Main Street past all the jewelry shops and cruise ship tourists and then past the bakery and then the primary school building spilling out small children dressed in blue and laughing.  Solomon always recognized a lot of people sitting in their cars with the windows down diving slowly by in the traffic jam, or standing on a street corner or walking arm in arm. He shouted his greetings as he passed.  They shouted to him and waved.  As he walked, he touched the walls of buildings, trailing his fingers against the rebounding texture of the bricks and of the light poles and trees and fences.  He stopped to pick up sticks and bits of trash and he tossed them for a time until he noticed something new.  Somberly, he paused to look at women from behind as they walked by and honored them with whispered words of praise.

As we walked to work at two forty-five every afternoon, Solomon and I asked one another many questions.  Thoughts occurred to Solomon suddenly and he quickly turned his head, grabbed my elbow and he said, "Did you play billiards yesterday?" or "Are there really two hundred distinct languages in the country of Cameroon?" or "How do you say 'fork' in English?" or really anything that came to mind.  He spoke machine gun Spanish, biting off the 'Ss.'  He loved to talk about basketball and baseball.  He knew the names and stats of all the teams.  But he often got confused about which was the city and which was the state.  Sometimes Solomon told me that he did not want me to leave the island.

I asked many questions about the Spanish language, which is the language that we spoke together because Solomon could not speak English or hardly.  But he spoke slowly and he pantomimed what he said expressively to help me understand with greater ease.

"What is it called, that animal, like a bird with hair?" I asked.

"The birds do not have hair.  They have feathers."

"Yes, but there is an animal like a rat that flies in the air."

"Oh!  A bat."

"A bat?"

"Yes, that animal that smokes," Solomon said matter-of-factly.

That confused me.  I said, "That smokes?  Like a dragon?"

"No, if you give a bat a cigarette, it will smoke," Solomon laughed.

"That small animal like a bird with hair that flies about at night?"

"Yes, it smokes."

"It smokes?"

"Yes."

"What barbarism."

These were the sorts of conversations Solomon and I had.  Every day as Solomon walked to work at two forty-five he stopped by my apartment and yelled out my name at the window.  And then I ran downstairs and the two of us slowly made our way down through the town and up that long steep hill to A Room With A View.

One afternoon I was not at home at two forty-five.  So when Solomon saw me at work, he said, "Where were you?  I went to you house and called 'Nate!  Nate!' but you were not there."

"No, I was not there.  I thought you were at the gym."

"I was playing billiards."

And then, after a long day of work, we sat outside.  I smoked a cigarette and drank a Presidente, Solomon urinating in a bush, staring at the sky, the Caribbean stars above, thousands of stars, thousands of stars.  "I wish for you not to go away," Solomon said. 

"What?"

So he repeated it in belabored English.  "St. Thomas is a good place.  It is small, but good."

"I like St. Thomas very much."

"Yes!" Solomon grabbed my elbow excitedly.  "And in May we can get a better job!  I know the one.  I used to work for Governor Schneider, cleaning the streets for ten dollars an hour.  Every day at seven thirty in the morning to four o'clock in the afternoon.  We will have the afternoons off to go to the beach or play billiards and also weekends!"

"Really?" said I, but I knew that I was leaving.  I always knew that I was leaving.

"Yes!"

"That sounds great."  Then:  "Vamos a ver."

"Quizás."

"Quién sabe?"

"Nadie sabe."

"Es posible."

"Tal vez."

We thought that talking like a thesaurus was funny.  It was a script that we went through and expanded upon every couple of days.

Behaving Responsibly

Hitchhiked to San Diego one winter night with a boot knife in my pocket and a cardboard sign that said San Diego: Please.  There were palm trees waving in the humid air and rolling mountain hills.  I called up Rachel and Stephen on a pay phone then sat down on the curb and smoked my Harley Davidson cigarettes one after the other.

When they drove up, I said, "I'll sleep in your car.  Is that all right?"

"You won't sleep in no damn car," said Stephen.

"Yeah, man, I'll sleep in the car."

"You look scary," Rachel said.

The next day we went down to Tijuana and we walked around and bought stuff.  I bought a poncho and a cow’s hoof.  We decided to get tattoos.  A knife salesman gave us the address.  It was up above a pharmacy and down an empty corridor, blank doors on either side and at the end of the hallway, on the left a wooden door had scrawled upon it the word, “Tattoo.”  Stephen knocked.

Someone inside shouted something.  Stephen opened up the door.  We went inside.

Señor Paco had long red hair, a long goatee, and a bullring in his nose.  He grinned at us, his gold tooth glinting in the dim light from the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling.  

Stephen showed him the design—Africa with the colors of the Cameroonian flag, red, yellow, green. 

“Are the needles clean?” I asked.  I was behaving responsibly. 

He took a needle from his desk drawer and showed it to me.  “Is it clean?” I asked again.  He handed me a magnifying glass.  Stephen, Rachel, and I took turns peering at the needle through the glass, satisfying ourselves that there were no germs or dirt.  He pulled out inks and a small mechanical device.  He plugged the needle into the device and applied pressure to a foot pedal and the thing made a loud clacking noise.  He shaved my leg, twisted to the side, my foot resting in his lap.  He dipped the device into ink and then stepped on the pedal and applied the needle to my leg.  He held my foot tightly and began to paint, pausing time to time to wipe away the blood.  My mind wandered as I watched him work. 

Stephen was next.  He asked for the design to be put on his left shoulder.

"Is that you?" I asked, pointing to a photo in a tattoo magazine.

Señor Paco smiled.  It was a black and white photo of him in a crowd of cheering, yelling people.  He was in the center of the crowd, his mouth wide open in a snarl, his head thrown back, a beer held in the air.  "That was a tattoo convention in Nevada," Señor Paco said.  He continued tattooing Stephen’s arm.   

"What's that?" Rachel asked, pointing to a jar of dirt and yellow liquid on his desk.

"A fetish," Señor Paco said, "to protect me from my enemies."

Stephen looked up from his trance.  

"A fetish?" he asked.

"Yes, but I don't really believe that shit," said Señor Paco.  "I don't practice black magic, only white."

Stephen grinned, happy as a clam.

Señor Paco finished with Stephen and bandaged his arm.  Then Rachel took her turn and Señor Paco tattooed her lower back.  She bent over the chair and he tattooed her for a half an hour as the sun went down and Stephen and I flipped through magazines, looking for more pictures of Señor Paco.  We never found any more, though we looked through dozens, scrutinizing every page.

When she was finished she gingerly reclasped her belt and stood up to her feet.

"Oh, yeah," Señor Paco said and dug some papers from his desk.  "Sign these please."  We signed the release forms, promising that we were sober, of age, and not afflicted with AIDS or hepatitis.  

As we walked down the street towards the bridge, a man yelled at us from across the street.  It was the knife salesman from before.  "Here," he said, thrusting a butterfly knife into Stephen’s hands.  "Five dollars, okay?"

"Yeah, okay," Stephen said.  "Want to see our tattoos?"  He peeled the gauze away from his arm.

"Very good," said the man.  We walked back across the border.

A few days later, Stephen and Rachel drove me north to Los Angeles.  Then we just drove around until dark, taking random roads into the mountains to the east.  When it was dark, we stopped beside a field.  Music played on the radio and we sat in the car.  We talked for a while.  Stephen rhythmically nodded his head up and down to the music on the radio, looking out at the fields, now a gray color shimmering across the rolling landscape fading.

Valentine's Day

Chase It

I used to think it was disruptive to exert agency upon any object.  I tried to sit still until the mud settled, like Lao Tzu recommended.  Things usually worked out, which proved that Lao Tzu was right.  That’s why I refused to apply for any job. 

Like Fish, the homeless Cherokee man said in Austin, Texas: be like water; water always finds its way.  Then two cops came around the corner and Fish was forced to swallow a burning joint so as to avoid arrest.  Then they arrested him and told me and Cockroach to scram.  

Anyway, I tried to not try, like Fish and Lao Tzu.  Things usually worked out.  Sometimes God even told people to give me money so I could pay for food and smokes.  They told me straight out, “God told me to give this to you.”  Who was I to argue?  Once, when my buddy, Fred, and I were completely broke except for a buck and a quarter between us, we won twelve dollars with a scratch-off lottery ticket and bought two value meals at Burger King.  I felt like Han-Shan on Cold Mountain, biting into that Quarter-Pounder-With-Cheese.

I didn’t consider it wrong to accept when somebody offered me a job, as long as I didn’t apply for it.  It wasn’t exertion that was wrong, but agency.  It was the application for the job that was cacophonic.  So when my dad’s friend offered me a job planting trees in upstate New York, I said yes please.

“We’ll see bears,” he told me, as we drove.

“That’s cool,” I said.

“We’ll probably see a lot of them.  Maybe four.”

I popped my Bob Dylan tape in the deck.  “All I really wanna do, is baby be friends with you,” Bob Dylan sang.

“He’s lying,” my dad’s friend said.  “You can’t trust a man with a voice like that.” 

But I could tell that he was digging the music.  He kept on asking me to tell him the lyrics when he couldn’t understand the words.

When we pulled up to the trailer at the end of a dirt mountain road in the woods, he kept the headlights on while we shuttled back and forth between the truck and the trailer, taking things inside.

Then before we went to sleep he told me the rules.  Rule 1: Don’t go outside at night without the gun.  Rule 2: No smoking in the trailer.

So we spent four days planting trees, driving around on the four-wheeler with soil and saplings and tools.  We dug and planted and watered from dawn til dusk.

The last day I was outside smoking in the morning.  It had rained that night so everything was fresh and green.  He was in the kitchen making coffee and pancakes and bacon for breakfast.

“Psst,” he said.  He had a big grin on his face.  He pointed behind me.

I turned my head and looked and saw that he was pointing at a bear.  The bear was poking around, probably eating some berries or something, minding its own business.

Then he grinned even bigger.  “Chase it!” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Chase it!” he said again.

That was against everything I believed in.  But I chased it.  I ran straight at that bear.  It seemed surprised to se me running straight at it, waving my arms the way I was.  It turned and took off, hurtling down the hill and I ran after it.  I kept on running after it, hopping over logs and ducking under vines, until I was deep in the valley, and the bear was nowhere to be seen.       

16 Years Ago

The New Millennium

I was sitting in a bookstore, reading with my headphones on. Jazz music filled my head. My backpack was beside me on the floor.

"Hey," said a man in sweatpants.

I slid the headphones off my head and lay them on the table. Still the music played quietly from the tabletop. I looked up and saw the man standing at my elbow. A hood shadowed his face. He was grinning broadly. I could see his teeth.

"Hey, man," he said. "Have you heard of the New Millennium?" he asked.

I paused. "What about it?" I asked.

"The year 2000," he said. "Jesus is coming back," he declared.

"That's good news," I said.

He nodded excitedly, took off his hood and said victoriously: "And here I am!"

"Good to meet you," I said and offered him a seat. "Take a seat," I said.

"Thank you," Jesus said. He sat down heavily in the chair. I picked up my book and began again to read.

"That looks like a good book," Jesus said.

"It is," I said. "A friend gave it to me out east for Christmas."

"Christmas," he said. Then, "Hey man," Jesus said, "you got any weed?"

"No," I said. "I'm sorry, but I do not."

"Yeah," Jesus said. "You probly don't smoke weed. You probly got a good job and a nice house. You probly don't smoke weed."

"I work in a warehouse," I said. "It's a pretty good job."

"Yeah," Jesus said.

It was raining outside.

"Hey, man. Can you spare a dollar? I lost my bus pass, and I just gotta get home tonight so's I'm not sleeping on the street. Shit, you got a dollar? Just a dollar, please."

"I think so," I said and fished a dollar out of my pocket and handed it to him.

"Thanks, man. God bless you," Jesus said.

Through the reflection of the bookshelves and magazines racks in the window I could see the headlights of cars passing by in the rain.

A man was standing behind one of the racks, flipping through a magazine. He tilted his head back and peeked over the magazines at Jesus and me sitting there talking to one another.

Jesus had my headphones on and was talking very loudly. "I dig this music," Jesus said. "It's got a real sweet groove."

The man hid his head again behind his magazine. It was a magazine about automobiles.

Jesus took off my headphones and lay them down on the table. Quietly, the music played continuously from the table top. Horns tooting, piano, and the driving chromatic bass up and down the scale. I could barely hear it. But undeniably, it was there. It was raining outside.

I looked up from my book and noticed that Jesus was staring at me. He leaned into my personal space. "Can I touch you?" he asked.

Outside, it was raining and the cars moved by, puddles splashing in the headlight beams. Jazz music played quietly from the table top.

I responded somberly, "No, sir. You cannot." He was leaning into my personal space. I could smell his breath. I looked down and began again to read.

Jesus looked very sad and made ready to leave. He put his hands in his pockets and stood up. "God bless you, son," he said and started walking towards the door.

I nodded and kept on reading my book.

The sturdy cover of the paperback was green, decorated with interconnected vines winding in and out, merging and diverging bifurcation. All things considered, it was a very nice book.

Jesus walked towards the door. But then he stopped and turned back towards me. He put his hands on my shoulders and leaned down and kissed the back of my head four times in the shape of a cross.

"God bless you," he muttered, and walked out the door into the rain. I just kept reading my book.

The Differences Between Things

In Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands, I spent a week or so in the basement of a hotel, living with the gardener. Late at night, mosquitoes buzzing in the tiny, smoke-filled room, he sometimes had an intense need to communicate. He slept on the bunk above me and scratched on the bed frame to get my attention. I pretended not to notice and he said my name with a loud, hoarse whisper. He leaned his head out over the bed above me, dangerously teetering--his silhouetted face looming, dreadlocks hanging off his beard, and glassy eyes fierce with earnestness. Then he launched into his ruminations. “D’ya check? Excuse me. D’ya check? I don’t know but this world need a messenger, and God, he give me words.” I assured him I was listening to his words and he disappeared back over the bed and keep talking until he fell asleep.

When Ben came to the island, he spent a couple nights with us in the basement. The gardener welcomed him with an especially involved invocation, taking it upon himself to point out the differences between things, or maybe pointing out the fact that there were differences.

"An orange is not like a melon; a melon is not like an apple; an apple is not like a pear. A monkey is not like an iguana; a dog is not like a cat; a fish is not like a butterfly; a Korean is not like an Ethiopian; a black man is not like a white man; a melon is not like a cabbage; a Chinese is not like a carrot."

He just kept talking and talking about how everything is different from everything else. It was a long, narrow room with an American flag in the corner and a musical doll on the table that you could wind up and listen to it play “I Never Promised you a Rose Garden.” The room was so narrow we couldn’t sit facing either other. The three of us positioned ourselves in a row, the gardener closest to the door upon a chair. I sat with my guitar in my arms absentmindedly strumming. Ben sat behind me lying on his back upon the floor smoking his corncob pipe, fingering his harmonica.

The gardener told us that everything is different from everything else, reemphasizing his point repeatedly as if he suspected that we were sorely tempted to suppose the opposite. He kept promising that he would finish off his speech by listing off for us the nine planets. But first he wished to tell us of his secret joy.

I don’t remember if he ever got around to telling us about his secret joy. But I do remember him suddenly declaring that he would recite a poem to us that he had written about how good friends are hard to find and that they are not like cheap wine. But then he kept forgetting the words and standing up and walking over to the door and closing it to eliminate distractions if it was open, or opening it to cool off the room, if it was closed. Intermittently, he stood in front of us again, palms up, pausing to collect himself.

Then next day, Ben left to find his own place to stay. One night he slept in an abandoned bus. Another he spent roaming the island from coast to coast, happening upon all manners of dogs and strangers. Eventually we got jobs and rented a studio apartment on Back Street above Food fo’ Days.