Part One

Einstein disguised as Robin Hood,
With his memories in a trunk,
Passed this way about an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk.
He looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette,
Then went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet.
You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row."
-Bob Dylan

1.

"Let's sue the bustards. I'm studying to be a lawyer."

I didn't question at the time why restaurant workers being served chicken bones and potato peels for their pre-shift dinner warranted the services of an attorney. I had taken this job to help me get through law school, and my sense of indignation was stirred by the thought of another aspiring mouthpiece as a fellow busboy. Little did I grasp then how all the true sages of America come through the revolving doors of restaurants, and how I would soon be a part of the reserve army of artists, madmen and visionaries working these velvet anterooms of the night, carrying slime in hushed tones from the carpeted darkness to the well-lit filth of the kitchen.

As is expected in such places, he and I were soon in each others shit. Glasses were broken, butterballs were not composed in proper Zen-like circularity, Gunga Din had not doled out the ice water in the requisite twenty seconds after seating. As newly hired busboys who had lied about their experience, we each sought to drown the other to stay afloat. After it had quieted down, I found out his name was Lester and he was not only not studying law, but he had no intention of ever going to college. He mentioned this in passing after spilling some tomato sauce on his shirt. And, as he diligently rubbed the stain deeper and darker into his uniform, my read on him changed. Instead of a curly-haired, green-eyed, golden and muscled giant, I saw what every mother feared: the darting eyes, the cringing laugh, the matted hair, the semi-beard, the perpetual slack-lipped expression of apathy. After the shift, the other new hire, who had been quietly learning the job while we two were hurling lightning bolts at each other from our brows, offered us sticks of Juicy Fruit gum. The next time we showed up to work, the FBI was waiting, looking for the juicy fruit guy, an armed robber from Georgia it turned out.

2.

To work in a restaurant, you must move continuously between the kitchen and the dining room, constantly facing paralyzing ironies with each flap of the door: you're required to inspect in vampire light the minutia of crumb particle on the carpet, then, WHOOSH, in fluorescent display, free-range cockroaches are climbing the white, spattered tiles like children on a monkey-bar.

You hear the gentle, professional obsequiecies of waiters then, WHOOSH, the same servers come into the kitchen and yell things like "whew, that lady's bag broke" or "that one's got a golden broom up her ass."

You deliver menus promising the choicest delicacies prepared with the utmost of care and skill, then, WHOOSH, frozen food is pulled from huge steel drums by a disgruntled ex-Arby's employee who prepares five meals at once while lifting ribeyes off the floor, spreading raw slabs of lard with his fingers, and pouring the excess fat into other steel drums to be sold either to the soap or candy company.

You see happy, normal people graciously pretending to be royalty, dropping huge sums of money in the attempt to see how much abuse they can take before becoming worthy of some later raw sex, then, WHOOSH, an army of malcontents pretending to be students, actors, playwrights, musicians, not really working there at all, it seems, and paid to, as they do, chatter contemptuously to anyone who passes by and turn down the constant hawking of instant sex no matter how inebriated they become.

You watch obviously hungry people pushing plates of food away from them, then, WHOOSH, restaurant workers vie to devour the entrails of anything left on a plate; you see customers happily pay hundreds of dollars for alcohol they can get at a liquor store for a fraction of the price, then, WHOOSH, the boys who carry out the trash angrily wheel kegs of beer and cases of whiskey out the door after the manager has left; you strain to hear music without hint of a melody line, suggestion of a beat or trace of passion and wonder how many years of study are required to reduce real music to this syrup, then, WHOOSH, you are assaulted by the unremediable agony of some group you've never heard of doing songs you can't conceive of finding yourself shuffling by its medium with the rest of crew as one holy organism.

Restaurants are all the proof one needs that what you think is real is far more real than what is real. Even restaurant workers are never what they seem. The sad-eyed 19-year old unemployed gay actor turns out to be a 40-year old accountant out of rehab with a weakness for Hunter S. Thompson books who has taken this job to be closer, despite the restraining order, to his family. By the same token, the gray-haired, balding king of the waiters with the disturbing lesions on his neck, who knows where are all the condiments are buried and has first dibs on uneaten lobster tails, is actually an 18-year old urban goober who blow-dries his hair so much it cankers his skin and dreams of one day skateboarding professionally at Grateful Dead shows. Such things happen so constantly that it is easy to, as I did, misread the clear signals. My new slovenly, dropout, always-screwing-everything-up-as-if-by-design friend had a habit of bringing a different book to work each day. They always looked as if they were devoured by a flood —yellowed, waterlogged, the pages littering out of the collapsed binding as from an accordion file.

Since it was apparent he was using them to blow his nose and wipe his ass and not to read, I did not think to wonder how bizarre the selection was: a little Huysmann, some Knut Hamsen, a book about the Mafia that linked the closing of the bordellos in 1920's New Orleans with the killing of Pope John Paul I by some of the Cardinals, a biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, a Ruth Rendell murder mystery, "How To Play The Flute in 3 Easy Steps," an industrial solvents catalog, a 1950's nuclear regulatory commission classified report, Nietzche's last book "The Genealogy of Morals," "The Theory of the Leisure Class," "The Blue Cliff Record," Bukowski...One day, while we were working, I finally asked him if he enjoyed his latest book, the 600-page book of gossip and taxicab receipts called "The Andy Warhol Diaries." He simply said, "New York City is the most provincial town in the world."

I asked where he got all those books. He said he picked them out of the antiquarian booksellers on Read Street where they would probably draw a gun on you if you actually tried to buy a book. He said it was a lot easier to steal from there than from the public library. I mentioned how a bookseller frisked me when I was nine, and this was in a town where not separating brown from green bottles for recycling was considered street crime. How, I asked, could he get away with it?

"There's a million stories in the naked city, man. Just stick it under your coat and pretend it's grocery meat. They're usually so happy you're getting out of their store they leave you alone. They picked most of those books out of the trash and sell them to rich collectors looking for Rosebuds. Your man probably just wanted a cheap feel."

As we kept talking, we became unconscious of our jobs, and so could, for once, actually do them. As most restaurants are, this one was built for the most profitable use of space, which was murder for busboys. Trays literally had to be lifted over the heads of customers or else the whole place would implode into the space/time continuum. One had to stand on tiptoes to move between tables even when the place was empty. The trick to maneuvering was to think like an Italian driver; with enough velocity, any object can fit through a smaller space. Our speed naturally increased when we were each trying to get to the other side of the restaurant to get a few choice words in.

When passing on one side, we would pose a question: Who's greater, Babe Ruth or Muhammad Ali? Was it Lennon or McCartney? What was the greatest TV show ever? Who was television's greatest character? On the other side, we'd answer the question: "Larry Bird," "George Martin," "The Prisoner," "Barney Fife." On the other side again, while careening huge trays of dishware through the obstacle course, the alternate answer would be argued: "Roberto Clemente," "Bob Dylan," "Highway To Heaven," "the one-armed man."

3.

We continued this after work, walking without any thought of the places we might end up. As sunset in Baltimore daubed the dusty courthouse gargoyles with the blood of life, we took turns arguing the case for Aristotle vs. Plato, Rousseau vs. Voltaire, Locke vs. Hume, Hamilton vs. Jefferson, Lincoln vs. Douglas, DuBois vs. Garvey, Stalin vs. Trotsky, Kennedy vs. Nixon, Martin vs. Lewis, Bruce vs. Sahl, Sears vs. Roebuck, we were attorneys on leave, representing the dingy venetian blinds and empty display cases of the deserted downtown. We played chess in front of city hall, wondered under a bank's Hellenic columns whether Gandhi was the ultimate Machiavellian, walked past a half-demolished block where the facades had been ripped away like skin, our voices echoing in the sinuses of the buildings, gravel and plaster at our feet, hoping the inhabitants could hear us discuss the two kinds of fun: fun fun and carnival fun.

As such conversations inevitably do, ours turned to food. I asked if he wanted to get something to eat. He then proceeded to recommend a particular item at every restaurant in the metropolitan region, despite the fact that neither of us had a car or more than $12 apiece in tips, nor could we get into a strip club in the ridiculous costumes we were wearing. We found ourselves in a ghetto White Tower, despite Lester's warning that inner-city food is always twice as expensive. He wanted to get a bag of burgers, but it turned out that this was now a White Castle. Closer inspection showed that, despite the White Castle name layered on the dishes and menus, it was actually a White Coffee Pot. "We've been White Coffee Potted!" Lester exclaimed after the food was served. "They always take me by surprise. My, those viruses are insidious."

He wouldn't let it go. He felt it necessary to explain to everyone that White Tower toasts their buns for just the right amount of time while White Coffee Pot puts sawdust and wallpaper paste into their buns. This soon became embarrassing, not because we were the only actual white people there, but because everyone knew deep down that, somehow, he was right.

"Excuse me, could you top off my Sprite with a little Fresca?"

The guy at the counter tried his best to ignore him, but he persisted. "Hey, Holmes, could I get a solid over here?"

The guy finally muttered something about no alterations, and Lester asked for the manager. Unbelievably, out of a tiny hole in the back, an actual manager appeared, with nametag, tie clip and the requisite bad orange tie. They leaned into each other, like players in an epic struggle whose outcome had been predetermined. Lester pointed out the aesthetic necessity of that splash of citrus insouciance. The manager was fixated on soft drink quotas and calibration parameters of cup size.

"Are you trying to tell me you don't dump half that stuff out back at the end of the month?" He said it in a way that made me think of men in sunglasses and raincoats, dumping Sprite in the dark of night along with used motor oil, batteries, and tires.

"Inventory only provides product to cover same-store sales projections," the man replied.

"What about the shrinkage factor?" Lester later explained to me that he had no idea what this term meant, but he had heard retail store people use it whenever windows were broken.

"Look, man, our profit margins are thin. We can't make any exceptions."

"You don't look so thin, my man. Where do your profits go, the Sandinistas? the Contras? the Church of Satan? the Christian Coalition? Coke? Pepsi? Henry Kissinger? Don King?"

I took this as our cue to leave. As we headed out the door, I tried not to look at anything, not the glares and carefully displayed indifference concluding this encounter, not the stainless steel counters or the black and white tiles, most of all not the light in anyone's eyes. But passing by the window outside, I saw our reflection like two buzzards in matching pastel blue shirts, and I couldn't help but see that the man inside was laughing.

We were heading in the general direction, so decided to walk to Lester's place. It was a new experience for me to be in these neighborhoods. Where I came from, even the lawn jockeys were painted white. I had been warned not to even drive through here unless I wanted a brick thrown through my window, and here we were, dressed like escapees from the School For The Insane, walking past high-rise housing projects after dark, arguing without any sense of irony the pros and cons of college basketball players getting jammed so that student athletes in archery and curling can have better equipment. Vacant lots of joe-pye weed and charred trees abounded. Evicted furniture was scattered like flotsam along our way. The only visible economy was a liquor store that literally and figuratively looked like a prison, some boarded-up, often burnt-out churches, an old chapel still wearing its cross that had been converted to a Chicken George's (or was it an old Chicken George that had been converted to a church?), and, of course, a number of eyeglasses boutiques. We were weighing the proposition that Bill Wyman was the greatest bass player of all time when I noticed bulldozers tearing through a section of the neighborhood. Each part that was hit sent some people scurrying wildly away, and others holding their ground, screaming madly. Lester seemed as oblivious to this scene as the bulldozer drivers did. As he was pontificating on Titian as the first painter, I finally asked him if he saw what was going on. He only said "Ronnie's putting the squeeze on this neighborhood." When I asked him to elaborate, he stared at me with a dispirited look and said "Complicity, eh?"

4.

He lived in an area not much better off, among the stodgy row houses of Butcher's Hill, so named because these homes used to be slaughterhouses, and there were still little sluices on the side of each where the blood used to run down to the harbor. Before we entered, he mumbled something about being careful around the uptight hippies he was living with. He had forgotten or lost his key, so he started banging on the wrought-iron gate and shouting "Splice," "Hummer," "Dread." After 15 minutes of this he said, "follow me," and we went to the back alley. Amid the peal of Rottweilers, we climbed over a formstone fence onto a tiny backyard choked with weeds and sumac trees. The overgrowth felt like concertina wire. He grabbed an old laundry line pipe that was lying there and used it as a sickle to keep from getting swallowed by the miasma of vine. He jumped up onto a rusted fire escape, motioned for me to follow as it was tottering precipitously, and jumped up onto a sagging back porch where more weeds grew in between what appeared to be the spindly remains of an old Christmas tree (it was late May). As I hopped up amid the quivering leaves, I noticed, barely visible on a back wall of green roofing shingles, a window with a broken pane. Lester slithered his hand in between the shards and tugged on what looked like a string. In an instant, the top half of the window dropped from the casement. He lit a butane lighter and with an undertaker's grin said "Good eve-ening, and velcome to my laboratory." We climbed into a room full of what looked to be mound-covered tables, topped with white sheets caked with years of dust. In the corner was a tiny refrigerator.

"Welcome to my nightmare is more like it. Is this the morgue?" I asked.

"Pay no attention to this room. Downstairs," he said.

The smell of sandalwood hung heavy in the air. Still using his disposable film noir lighting, he escorted me past walls of Day-Glo graffiti full of pentagrams and maniacal stick figures. In throbbing, distended lettering, sentiments such as "Cops Suck," "Anarchy is the best policy," "Long live the Dead" and "Pot is for Pussies" glowed like neon signs while the bloated shadow of the staircase flickered over our faces like the bars of a cell. Mylar balloons and kites clung distantly to the ceiling. I almost tripped over a mandolin. I expected to be sucked down the stairs to a funhouse while an insane clown (played by Richard Widmark) laughed uncontrollably. Instead, I opened the beads at the bottom of the stairs and saw a room full of drug paraphernalia: long-stemmed peace pipes with feathers, purple, red and green bongs, a strange plastic canister called a "Power Hitter," one-hitter pens, roach clip wrenches, scissors and jackknifes, faux flasks and boxes, and a huge hookah with a stern bust of Beethoven in the middle. Posters of Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia looked down righteously on us (or were they looking at the even larger posters of sinsemilla that looked like something out of "Dayof the Triffids?") A few hand-stenciled R. Crumb-like drawings were half-finished on the walls, and musical instruments were randomly scattered about the room along with piles of clothes, apple cores, tops, balsa wood airplanes and a collection of small display cases full of sand and blue viscous liquid. The only book in sight was "The Compleat Vegetarian Cookbook," on which lay an ashtray full of butts. An amplifier was humming, its red light the only warning.

"You smoke pot?" I asked, not knowing what else to say.

"Is it that obvious?" he replied. "Want some smoke?"

"No, but you go ahead," I answered, feeling high just looking at the sitar.

"I'll scope it out. Let me put on some tunes first."

He put on at a savage volume the Pretenders song "Ohio." As soon as I heard the opening bass riff of "Duh Duh Da-da-da Dong," I knew it was the house speaking, or maybe it was the ghost pigs. I started shaking out the bones as he went upstairs and started rummaging through all his roommates' secret stashes. He apparently knew which books to unshelve and which paintings to pull off the walls.

"No blow," he said when he came back downstairs. "Maybe Pancho the psychotic Indian can fix us up later."

"I went back to Ohio..."

"I can't believe there's no pot in a place like this," I laughed.

"But my city was gone..."

"Welcome to America, dude. They got all the access roads blocked. Crack cocaine, on the other hand, you can walk out the door and they'll practically beg you to take it."

"There was no train station..."

"What are you talking about?" I asked. I was a good Republican from Toledo, Ohio, the vacuum cleaner capital of the world, and the idea that someone could magically cut off the supply of a plant that had been commercially grown for thousands of years and not stop an addictive chemical synthesized in some backwater jungle struck me as preposterous.

"There was no downtown..."

"Don't you know what's going on? It's called mass extermination. Don't you know where this shit is coming from? See, the Nazis had the wrong idea. They had to parade their lepers around to feed their war machine. It's one thing to invent enemies so you can scare more people away. Every two-bit tinhorn has tried that. It's no big deal, even, to want to dominate the world. You'd have to be a madman not to want to if given the chance. But to talk about it, man, that's bound to piss some people off. These guys have learned from those mistakes. The name of the game is public relations. Say nothing. If you can't get the lepers to kill themselves, and make a little profit on the side, you'll never take the moral high ground."

"I was stunned and amazed..."

"If this is all some plot to control undesirables, why wouldn't they want to flood the market with every drug?"

"All my childhood memories..."

"First off, daytime television has killed more people than herb. Second of all, do you live in some kind of fucking cave? Don't you know the deal between FDR and William Randolph Hearst? There's a reason marijuana has been banned from every society on earth."

"Slowly swirled past..."

"Because it causes people to be antisocial idlers with no stomach for fighting?"

"Like the wind through the trees..."

"I'll pretend you're not that naive. It's quite the opposite. It has more power than paper or oil or politics. It's the threat of the examined life."

"Oh no, O way to go Ohio."

"Turn that DOWN!" Our reverie was broken by a stampede of Timberland boots. Some hippie with a clipboard assumed a reconnaissance post while a more scraggly, bearded one made a beeline to turn off the stereo. A third in psychedelic army fatigues went to peer nervously out the window.

"May we share your name?" the leader asked me in a voice like Joe Friday.

"Felix Brady," I said, wondering why a balding man would grow his hair so long.

"I see," he said, as if he already knew.

"Who is the rich suburbanite pretty boy? We've talked about bringing UNcool people into the house, haven't we, Lester?"

"I was rich once, too, you know. It's highly overrated," said Lester with a charming smirk.

"Hey, I like rat droppings as much as the next guy," I replied in my own defense.

My inquisitor's mouth was a graphed line that only went one direction—South. "Your rent is two and a half days late," he said to Lester, then, to no one in particular: "At 0900 hours, we're going to have a free-form jam in this room. Whoever gets the smoke gets to play the sitar. I want a powerful vibe. If you can't deal with the energy, I don't want to have to tap into your negativity. You know who I'm talking about."

No one had a clue. I for one wasn't sure if I was being asked to join a band or being told I wasn't good enough for the Moonies.

"I'm going to my room with the book," he concluded in the same laconic, unmodulated voice, "Until I get back, Pisces in Venus is a great way to cleanse your chakras."

Before he left, I asked him if I could make a phone call.

"You've got two minutes."

Lester pointed me in the direction of the kitchen. Again, white sheets covered everything. Except for a strange black syrup on the floor, it didn't look like food had been here since 1958. Inside the refrigerator were a bunch of potted plants and some coat hangers. The phone looked just like the Batphone.

"Hi, it's Felix. I'm just calling to let you know I won't be home tonight."

"What do you mean? Where are you calling from? What are those strange noises?"

"I'm at a friend's house."

"What do you mean, a friend's house? You don't have any friends. Who is it?"

"Just someone I work with at the restaurant. Since I have to work tomorrow morning, I figured I'd camp out here tonight..."

"What? You meet someone working at a restaurant and you're staying over? What were you thinking? Where are you?"

"I don't know. Somewhere in Butcher's Hill."

"Is that in the city?"

"Most definitely."

"You should never stay in the city after dark. I hope you learn your lesson."

"More than 700,000 people live in the city..."

"Hey, dude, time is up. I'm trying to keep the lines o-pen." Joe Friday again, cutting in on the conversation.

"Who is that?"

"Just some deadhead who lives here. It's no big deal. Calm down."

"Do I know him? This whole thing is very strange. I'm your fiancée and..."

"No personal calls on this line, okay." The guy in fatigues came into the kitchen and pulled the cord out of the wall.

"Gotta go," I tried to say as the line went dead.

I went back out to the bong room. The bearded guy was whittling something on the sofa. "Hey, my name's Splice."

"Why do they call you that, are you a film editor?"

"Actually it's because my uncle invented the colander. In fact, that's my last name."

"Someone actually invented the colander? I'm impressed."

He looked as if he wasn't sure if I was being facetious, but he kept talking anyway. "Yeah, man, I got a killer collection of vinyl. Pick out anything you want and I'll spin it."

It didn't take long to find something I liked. "How 'bout some Sun Ra, Spice?"

"Splice. That's too foggy for me right now. Pick something else."

"OK, how about this bootleg Zappa?"

"Wo, not on an empty stomach, man."

"I've been wanting to hear this Warren Zevon tune."

"I'm too fragile right now."

"How about KC and the Sunshine Band?"

Lester chimed in, "'Boogie Shoes' is one of the greatest masterpieces in music history. Put it on."

"Oh, I agree," said Splice, "but I'm not sure Hummer would like it."

"Yeah, he seems more like an Archies kind of guy," I said dryly.

"The group that had those records on cereal boxes? I don't think he would like that." Why don't hippies have a sense of humor?

"What do you want to listen to?" I finally inquired.

"October 15th, 1976 in Montreal has a version of "It's All Over Now" you might not recover from, or if you like the bitching funk, November 3rd, 1980 in Davenport has a crispy multi-track of "Shakedown Street" so fortified it will blow out your sockets. Phil plays twenty minutes straight on that one."

"Does the tape have the label: WARNING: TWENTY MINUTE BASS SOLO?" asked Lester.

"No, man," he laughed, "but it should, it's pretty proper."

"Hey," I said, "what's that book Hummer was talking about?"

"Dude, that's Jerry's book."

I knew I wasn't going to go anywhere with this guy, so I got up to leave. Lester brought me upstairs to his room. It was completely empty except for a record player, a few records scattered across the floor and a strip of blanket. "What's the deal with Sgt. Garcia and the free Mexican air force?" I asked.

"They think they have some kind of band because his uncle owns a recording studio. They're really a bunch of sad, aimless people. Here, check out this Supremes record I found in a warehouse."

The tone arm of his record player was detached from the turntable. There was bus fares' worth of change taped to the top of the needle. All the knobs were gone, leaving bolts behind, which he manipulated with a pair of tweezers. One speaker was completely blown out and the other had only two volumes: earsplitting and barely audible. He put the record on with a gigantic TWACK. A few notes, then he picked up the tone arm and TWACK, he hit another location. It seemed he went through the whole record like this; after a "I can name that tune in three micro-semi-hemi-quavers," he'd rip it away until he finally found the song he wanted to play. The record was so warped the speed kept changing, and so scratched Diana Ross sounded like she was singing with cotton in her mouth. The pops and pings were so bad it sounded like part of the music, a short-lived experiment with earth-moving equipment.

When I pointed out that it sounded like gargling from the bottom of a well, he said:

"You act like that's a bad thing."

The song he put on was something I had never heard, a Holland-Dozier-Holland song that like most of theirs ruminated on the desperation of desire. On this one, though, one could hear the cost of committing oneself totally to "hugs and kisses," the subtle way that giving oneself over to the actual person, as opposed to the desire, starts to consume the soul. He played two other songs from his warehouse collection. One was another glimpse at the dark side of Motown, as it were, a sadistic and painful live version of "The Days of Wine and Roses" by Marvin Gaye where he had the teenage girls in the audience sobbing hysterically along with him. The other, even more anguished, was "Summertime" by Sam Cooke, his lilting voice and the untroubled song conspiring to hit all the dark notes. By the time he got to "Hush, little darling, don't you cry," you'd have to be a record company executive not to weep.

"Is this what you live with?" I asked Lester, still unable to pierce his tattered veil.

"I had some great Graham Parker the other day. He does everything David Lee Roth does one hundred times better, and then he gets down to his own business. He has this great way of phrasing (sings) 'You are not listening/ You do not care' so that each word drips with such sorrowful wisdom, with such joy at being rejected, such compassion, finally knowing the truth, and the happiness of saying it comes right out, man, it just kept me going all day."

"Can I hear it?"

"It's gone now. But if you want a really uplifting song, Splice has this great acoustic version of Dylan's "Idiot Wind" I can probably borrow."

"I'm not a big Dylan fan."

"Have you ever heard him?"

"Well, to tell you the truth, I can't get past the voice. It's so nasty...accusatory. That and the ridiculous harmonica playing. It all seems like a big put-on, as if he didn't go to Woodstock so he could make a profit off of it."

"He wears a stolen crown of thorns just to fuck everyone up, agreed, but you could not be more wrong about his harmonica playing."

"I know in the deepest fiber of my being that the man cannot play the harmonica."

"I defy you to name anyone who is more original and more technically perfect."

So now we were back in adversarial position, and so the endless conversation could drift on. We ended up on the roof, tar sticking to my boots, him strumming a guitar, comparing the moon to a rotted tangerine. The lights on the chemical plants, steel mills and refineries of East Baltimore glistened with their own special pulse. Each throbbing light was welcoming me, beckoning to be discovered. A warm breeze of polyethylene brought me back to summer cookouts and paraffin. The Dominos Sugar sign seemed to hold the key to all I was seeking when, nine years old, my world revolved around red wax lips, blotter candy, and gold rush gum in the yellow prospector's bag. It was at this point that I first sensed that everything that had ever lived in this city was still here, and still desperate to merge its soul with mine.

"Urban implosion," said Lester.

"Excuse me?"

"Urban implosion. That's the solution to all of our problems. Everything must fit together better. Layers, you dig?"

"You mean we somehow collapse everything into new dimensions of space?"

"Eggzackly."

5.

I slept like a log on the floor in my uniform. We awoke with 20 minutes to get downtown. I ran cold, sweet, sulfurous water over my face and hair, smoothed my hopeless shirt, and we fell out into a brilliant Sunday morning. On every block, bells were ringing. We zigzagged between roads, trying to meet up with one of the buses. Our route took us through the brick streets, whitewashed stoops and painted screen-windows of Highlandtown. Whirlwinds of happy people were our escorts. Colorful rowhouses with carved pineapples in the wooden edges of the roofs seemed to smile on us. I looked up at the baby blue sky. It was unmarred except for a long pencil-thin cloud from a jet. It looked like a landscape by Cole, so much so I thought someone should add a jet streak to the painting.

Our jobs covered the waterfront, plying the tourist and convention trade by the harbor's edge. The city fathers had the bright idea to turn this dying, industrial town into Disneyland. They built an amusement park on a rat-infested wharf two blocks away from the heroin trafficking center of the East Coast, built replicas of 1890s world fairs and international exhibitions that celebrated the infinite grace of industrial progress, and populated them with the tinkerers, craftsmen and general store keepers of the public imagination: a potato chip emporium, a store that sold hats no one ever wore anymore, a fudge-swirling master baker who told the kids stories in an Irish brogue. It was the America people would pay huge sums of money to pretend they remembered. And so, blocks away from an America that everyone was trying desperately to forget, the harbor market filled up like the New York city subway, an efficient machine feeding hordes of people hungry for small-town nostalgia and willing to swallow just about anything, even the food served by the restaurant where Lester and I worked. Today was expected to be busier than usual, with what our manager tersely described as a "beeg" convention in town.

Rolling in that Sunday morning, we were totally unprepared for the horror that awaited us. The entire market was a sea of rhinestone. Thousands of men and women were dressed like Hank Williams: buzz cuts, bouffants, cowboy hats, boots with spurs, ridiculously wide-flared skirts and (I shudder even now) string ties. When we arrived at the restaurant door, there was a line to the harbor of angry country folk dressed in pastel frillery. Our Pakistani manager, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Fred Flintstone (he even said "Yabba Dabba Do" when he wanted to motivate us), let us in and said, "Square dan-cers convection. You mek batter balls, you get h-ice.Doe-si-doe!"

The rest of the day was most notable for the many stares: all of them carrying the pointed reminder that I, indeed, was ineluctably damned to hell, and not one of them showing any trace of pity or remorse for my fate. Reeling from the hyperactive fiddles and the endless calls of "Suh" and "May-am," I begged a thousand pardons and must've jigged on a hundred toes. The best part was that these people at least had the decency not to leave any tips. On the other hand, it was yet another reminder to the kitchen crew of how embarrassing it is to be white. This time I was lucky, only a remark about my early 70's buckle shoes: "you be steppin' in 'dem Abe Lincoln shoes nah."

Lester was not so fortunate. After most of the square dancers had left for their afternoon nap, and we were no longer, as they say, "in the weeds," I looked to the menu board. If the kitchen had run out of something, say, veal, it would be posted on this board as Veal 86. This time, along with collard greens and catfish, the board said Lester 86.

I caught up with him reading an X-Men comic book in the harbor newsstand and asked what had happened. He just shrugged and said "creative differences, so I left to pursue other career opportunities." In "restaurant tour" code that could mean anything from hiding from the assistant manager in the freezer to refusing to give the headwaiter a blow job, so I decided not to pursue it. "I'm sorry," I consoled. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Thanks. You can do me a real solid, and I hate to ask you, but Hummer is going to kick me out on my sorry rump unless I come up with rent money. There's this other guy I owe, too, see, and of course I'll pay you back, and, well, it's a way too long, complicated and sordid tale, but..."

I decided to put an end to his squirming. "How much do you need?"

"$100 should spot me."

You know by now, dear reader, that I gave him the money. Where I came from, people wanted to give you collateral to buy a Coke. I had money in my law school fund, and would need to pretend to my fiancée that I was pulling down even less in tips than I was, but that was okay, I was sure I'd get the money back. It wasn't like I was buying drugs.

I went to an ATM with the friendly name of "EasyBank." A group of businessmen in black suits was behind us, eyeing us it seemed with the half-curious, half-frightened look one might expect at a zoo. Lester was making small talk about how one day, you wouldn't have to go to banks or shopping malls or even leave the house, as everyone would be feeding like bees through tubes hooked up to the phone/computer/TV hive. I wondered what the expressions I saw on those people as I handed him the money meant. Did they fear for their children or for themselves? Did they pity him, or me?

6.

Months went by before I saw him again. I used the time to master the finer points of wedding stationary. My counsel was constantly sought on every tiny, monumental detail related to the wedding preparations. Unfortunately for all concerned, I tried to have an opinion, and it was quite embarrassing the way the committees always had to delicately inform me that my preferences meant less than nothing. I also settled in to my first year of law school, learning, more than anything else, just how disillusioned my professors had become with the legal profession. They all seemed bitter shells of the men and women who were able, at one time, to dream the biggest of dreams. And here they were, reduced to belittling Supreme Court justices and terrorizing any grain of compassion out of their students. And I continued to work at the restaurant, meeting many dreamers but not finding one who understood my jokes.

One day, I got a call about two o'clock in the morning. It sounded like it was coming from Saigon or something, but one could clearly hear sirens and an angry black woman saying to get off the phone. It was Lester, saying that he couldn't talk long because his neighborhood was burning down, but he had to ask me a question: "Who did Bruce Springsteen say he was, Jack Kerouac or Neal Cassidy?"

"Jack Kerouac," I said, stating the obvious.

"Yeah," said Lester sadly.

As he was hanging up, I tried to get more information on his whereabouts. He mumbled that he lived on Light Street and worked at some comedy club and, if I liked, I could meet him there some night after work.

The next day, I checked the paper to see if there was anything about the fire. I found a two-paragraph notice buried in the Metro section next to the religion pages. I was amazed. Six city blocks were destroyed. The Fire Department spokesman didn't know or seem to care how the blaze began or how many people may have died. "It was not an area where we could have effectively contained the damage," was all he said.

The top local story concerned a jeweler in Towson who foiled a robbery attempt by pushing a button to open a trap door under the robber's feet. The assailant was caught for six hours under this guy's store in a cage that had been used for circus tigers before the police "rescued" him.

A few nights later, I went down to the club where Lester worked. I was happy to see him again, and glad to see he was not disfigured. The place was clogged with cubicle dwellers from the nearby banks and insurance firms. It was one of those gentrification projects where the owner bought the place for $1 and fixed it up to look like the colonial tavern it may once have been. I found Lester behind the bar, popping cashews into his mouth and telling lewd jokes. A crowd of admirers encircled him. They all laughed at his references to this person's lisp or that person's hairstyle, and how that person is a member of the Bulgarian secret police. I tried to join in, but nothing he said made any sense. His only acknowledgment of me came when he commented on the wide polyester collar I was wearing. "Hey, the Seventies ended in 1982. Look it up." Again, uproarious laughter. After I had a few beers in a plastic cup the party moved to the pool table, where Lester proceeded to demolish all comers before juggling ping pong balls on his tongue. I tried to wait it out, but my eye kept getting fixated on the doleful picture of Edgar Allen Poe by the entrance, and after a "power jam" of Rush, Triumph and REO Speedwagon was announced on the loudspeaker, I had to leave.

I saw him a few nights later as I was leaving work. He was standing under a floodlit waterfall smoking a joint. "Aren't you worried about getting caught?" I asked, as the water spilled like cellophane over a concrete pylon.

"Nah. I could use a free cup of coffee," he said, continuing to puff pensively.

"You didn't say hello when I stopped by the other night," I said, more hurt than accusatory.

"Yeah, well, you know," he said sheepishly, "sometimes you have to spend time with people even if your heart is somewhere else. You know what I mean?" He handed me the joint.

"No," I said, backing away from the joint. "I mean, yes, I know what you mean, but you don't strike me as the compromising type."

"Who said anything about compromising?" He flicked the roach into the green pool. "Service is the only thing that isn't a compromise."

"Have you found a new place to live?" I asked, becoming more bewildered by the moment.

"Yeah. I got a room at the Congress Hotel. I'm going there now. You want to hang?"

"I've got a bus to catch," I said, hoping it hadn't already come.

"Why don't you stop by tomorrow afternoon. You can ring for me at the desk."

"Agreed."

7.

The Congress Hotel had the haughty air of a place that had witnessed such things as Jay Gould obtaining the rights to the last of the confederate gold, Gertrude Stein and H.L. Mencken playing all-night poker games, and F. Scott Fitzgerald in a silk suit drinking frosted gin highballs at the piano bar and enraptured by the crisp elegance of the maitre'd. The place hadn't changed much: the marble balustrades, the enormous fireplace, the gold leaf embossments, the petticoat-shaped crystal chandeliers, the haunted, lonely people. The only difference now was that Sonny's Surplus duffel bags had replaced Italian suitcases, army blankets and old corduroy jackets replaced seersucker suits and lame evening gowns, and you now had to talk to the receptionist through a Plexiglas chute. Oh yeah, and it was all men.

The receptionist was astounded that I actually came to see somebody. He rang a sizzling buzzer, and twenty men came downstairs. When they saw it was me, they went sadly back to whatever grifting schemes and self-medications they had been indulging in. Lester wasn't one of them, so I sat down on the velvet couch, and read a leaflet nearby. I was quite enjoying its discussion of money-laundering projects connecting Arab sheiks, Israeli publishers/distillers, Christian televangelists, Burmese drug lords, Swiss drug manufacturers, the KGB, the CIA, the Pope and the Queen of England. At last, I thought, someone who appreciates that politics is really just a form of entertainment. I looked to find the publisher and discovered that it was some guy named McLuhan who was in a federal penitentiary for soliciting donations to send some women to Mars. This, too, seemed to hark back to an earlier day, when candidates would spend all afternoon finding choice phrases to insult their opponent's mistresses and demented relatives in front of picnicking crowds.

Lester met me in a pink and orange shirt that looked like something left behind at a Florida retirement community. We rode up to his room on the 23rd floor in an elevator covered in yellow Formica. The attendant looked like Ratso Rizzo and seemed determined to figure out what crimes we had committed. The car moved in a hesitant, squeaking manner, as if it was powered by little mice scurrying on a treadmill. After an interminable period of waiting while Ratso unlatched the diagonal iron grates, Lester and I tripped out into the dimly lit hallways. There wasn't a soul in the halls, but the noise and smell of life was as dense as a bouillon cube. Gauloises and formaldehyde, Art Pepper and Black Flag, a machine-gun-like cackle in Spanish and the televised sound of Jack Lord's voice, thin and pathetic without the hair. Room after room bled together in a palimpsest of vagabondage.

During our walk, Lester talked excitedly about his friend Jake, also a law student, who always got him to do the most embarrassing and horrible things: offering heroin to the dean of students, getting a small child to yell "orgasm" in a crowded movie theatre, wheeling Jake around the harbor market in a shopping cart. He said he felt exactly like "Benito Cereno," as if that was the point of it all. I had never read that story (and, it turned out, neither had he), but he had such a helpless look in his eyes, I felt I knew what he meant.

Lester's room had mousy carpet and stained, yellow blinds. What once were roses on the wallpaper now were desiccated embers. The furniture consisted of a tilted, unmade bed and a gray bureau. There was a hot plate, a few clothes and about a hundred Atlantic magazines on the floor. I instinctively reached for one, just to see how bad the poems were. He sat on the windowsill, giving a precise, dispassionate rebuttal of all the professional lies he had absorbed from these magazines.

"You oughta go into politics," I suggested.

"No one would believe a guy like me. Besides, I'm corruptible."

"That's never stopped anyone before," I joked.

"Look at me," he said. "What do you see?"

"A tragic waste of a human life?" I ventured.

"Oh, how glorious it would be if it was that simple. The reality is so much more sinister." Lester had a way of taking me to the frontiers of understanding with his power of suggestion, but on closer examination saying absolutely nothing.

"I still could see you going into politics," I said.

"Imagine me as the mayor of Baltimore. My first official act would be to put up a giant statue of Bob Marley in harbor market and require everyone to wear dreadlocks."

"I like the atmospherics. How would you follow it up?" I asked.

"By driving all the BMW's into the harbor," he replied, as if he had mapped the whole thing out.

"That would definitely earn the people's respect. But how would you deal with The Man, take over the armory?"

"No, that's too messy. I'd simply offer anyone who wants one a free trip to Colo-rad-o."

The elegance of this solution was staggering. Anyone who actually wanted to go to Colorado would be just the kind of person who would not appreciate the Rastafarian Revolution. All the yuppies and used car profiteers would be gone in one fell swoop, leaving the freaks to their paradise. "It has texture," I replied, a line from an old movie by Marshall Brickman.

"No more men with power ties and sweepover hair styles," I said.

"No more women dressing to punish themselves," he said.

"No more square dancers dressed up for God."

"Praise be Tuff Gong and the Holy Urban Army!" he laughed maliciously.

A city breeze was blowing through the window, clanking the shade against the sash. Lester's face, as he spoke, occasionally caught the sunlight and wind, making him look like one of Blake's prophets. Then the wind subsided, and a yellow film enveloped the room. At these moments, he looked like a great yellowing beast, waiting to be freed. I asked him why he wasn't going to college or something.

"I tried college. It didn't take. I ended up in this crazy us-against-the-world relationship with a banker's daughter. She was into testing limits. I had none. We ended up at the end of my freshman year in Denver, a trail of department store theft behind us. Her parents came to get her. I was asked to withdraw."

I sensed there was more to it than that, but I let it go. "Do you have any family?"

He grimaced. "Actually, I'm a twin."

"You mean there's someone else exactly like you out there in the world?"

"Damn betcha."

"How do I know you're not playing some trick with my head now, and that your brother isn't waiting outside the room as we speak, snickering?"

"We used to do stuff like that, going into stores five minutes apart and buying the same thing, switching on dates in restaurants. It's amazing how no one noticed or cared, but we were completely fucked up by the experience. Actually, I haven't spoken to him in five years, ever since..."

"Since what?" I asked.

He thought for a moment. "We had a disagreement over who was the greatest blues guitarist of all time. I said Muddy Waters, and he said B.B. King. I can't have anything to do with someone who holds such idiotic beliefs."

"If only he had said Albert Collins," I said, like Pat Summerall to his John Madden.

"Or Lightning Hopkins, or Hubert Sumlin..."

And so we were off to the races again. The descending sun had lent the room a cadaverous color when he suggested we go to the club downstairs, where "intriguing" bands sometimes played.

The Marble Bar was in the basement of the Congress Hotel. Its original door was covered over with plywood, which was in turn covered over with punk graffiti. Walking in, I got the distinct impression that it was once a speakeasy. The workers wore strange brown vests and hats. The same brown color was painted over the wainscoting. Behind the bar, dusty bottles glowed in an eerie purple light. We were the only customers in the place.

As soon as we sat down on a bench like a church pew, a guy said "Thank you, we are Alien Blue," and strummed a decidedly minor chord, fed back with a delicious tremolo that conjured song from the glasses. What followed was nothing less than the discovery, exploration and ultimate rejection of the possibilities of music. The guitarist cradled his Fender like a baby doll and proceeded to show that rock'n'roll was nothing but Irish folk music, which was nothing but Moroccan dervish music, which was nothing but Indian ragas, which held prisoner in its humming gourds the ancient tears of the Chinese, the animal spirits of the Aborigines, and the bent-note ancestral voice of the Ghanaians. Meanwhile, the keyboard player was about demonstrating that Bach was really Thelonious Monk, who was really an Egyptian holy man who traded fours with Pythagoras and then hurtled all his backward theories into the maw. The bass player counter-punched with fat drunk funk, lacing it with 11th and 13th intervallic harmonics, which evoked the tremors of bats, mineshafts, airplanes, drains, and skyscrapers leaning into an alpine wind. The drummer was the puppetmaster of the whole thing, splashing where there should have been a thump, bringing on New Orleans war drums where there should have been a hush, insisting on silence when the drum should have been explaining, making sure, above all else, that the beat never once stayed consistent. The whole demented thing came to a climax, four hours later, with breakneck Bourzoki bluegrass cum Hawaiian surf guitar, as the keyboard took the blue stairway down, then settled into a crescendo more like raw pain than notes, while the bass prodded all the devil rhythms into line like wayward children, and the drummer juggled them on the head of a pin, then forced them through the needle's eye just as all the notes seemed to merge and press beyond the range of human hearing. As dogs somewhere far off howled, there was left only the bubbling of broken tones, a suicidal blue balm. We were still the only customers in the place. We left as quickly as we could.

Outside, the full moon offered no explanation. It only moaned. I remembered I was supposed to be at a Rotary Club function that night. I frantically ran down the street, hoping there was a late bus that could magically take me back to the place I knew.

8.

I spent the night in the train station, keeping one eye out for the bus that never came and the other on the sad travelers. A man came up to me at one point and said "Look, I'm not gonna mess around. I need $9.47 or I'm gonna have to make things hard." I handed him a ten. As he reached into his pocket to get change, I waved him off. "God bless you," he said, and disappeared. A bus came as the rosy fingers of dawn descended on the atrium floor. It was full of nurses, maintenance workers, people in uniforms, making the long trek from the ghetto to the suburbs. We stood packed like sardines as the bus jerked to a stop on each block. I spent the time trying to think of an excuse that was not forthcoming. My problems seemed so ridiculous compared to what I saw on those people's faces.

That sentiment was not shared by my future in-laws. They were waiting for me with bibles and Kleenexes. I wouldn't have minded bondage or holy exorcisms of purification, but what they gave me, unconditional love and a deep desire to understand, was too much for me to bear. I wanted to get out of my skin and look at as many Cézannes as I could get my hands on. I finally got out in the late afternoon, and walked mile after mile of suburban street. Every house was different, each with its own unbearable weight and its small, well-earned collection of beautiful objects. Each seemed sure of what it was, as if it could only be in this one spot.

I cut through a country club, feeling strangely like a bird, only to find angry golfers yelling at me out of concern that I might get hit by a falling ball, as if that could happen. Everywhere I went, the dry cleaner, the gift shop, the tropical fish dealer, the people I thought so loving, so giving, seemed closed off. I went to a liquor store to get some beer, but the owner wouldn't accept my out-of-state driver's license as proper ID. He seemed quite satisfied with himself as he watched me leave.

I suddenly had a strong desire to compare silverware patterns and to find that quirky antique dealer with just the right china closet. Had I really given herringbone a chance?

9.

Months passed. I needed an extra usher to match the bridesmaids. I thought, in my dissociated state of mind, that Lester would be perfect. The problem was contacting him. He had no phone number, no fixed address, no existence as far as anyone I knew was concerned. I discovered someone with the same last name in Columbia, Maryland, so I called. It turns out it was his mother, who wanted nothing whatever to do with me, but who would, if I was going to be annoying about it, deliver a letter to him. I don't recall what I wrote to him, I only remember something about how come nobody had picked up on John Fogerty's portrayal of Ronald Reagan as a voodoo witch doctor in "The Old Man Down The Road" or, for that matter, on the true meaning of any of his songs, uncompromising fusillades on poverty, war, racism, and wasted lives that were somehow seen by the intelligentsia as overcommercialized pap. He called me back and said something to the effect that at least I was trying to say something. He invited me over to his new place and gave me directions. He agreed to be there when I arrived.

He now lived in a neighborhood very much like my own: crocuses and lilies lined the sculpted lawns, hedges were subdued to geometric designs, huge elm trees made the Leave It To Beaver homes seem all-too-human. There were subtle differences, however. For one, there were no children playing in the street. There was also an overpowering air, from the doilies in the windows to the galvanized porch swings, of 1959, as if Eisenhower was still President and the Colts were still playing for the championship. This neighborhood was at the distant southwestern tip of Baltimore city. Just beyond it lay the biggest cemetery on the East Coast. I could see the gates to a school for mortuary science from the top of the hill where Lester lived.

As I got closer to the house, I was serenaded by Bob Seger singing "Rock'n'Roll Never Forgets." The sound was deafening when I got to the house. I could see Lester in the third floor window with his shirt off, singing and dancing like Tom Cruise would if he could sing or dance, was oblivious instead of always hypersensitive to his own sex appeal, and didn't have that annoying habit of always biting on some pipe in his mouth. I politely rang the doorbell.

You're a little bit older and a lot less bolder than you used to be.

I rang again, keeping my finger on the buzzer a little longer, and looked expectantly up at the window.

You used to shake 'em down but now you stop and worry 'bout your dignity.

I tapped on the door using knockers that looked like huge cast-iron Ben Wa balls.

And sweet sixteen is now thirty-one.

I tried shouting, but could not hear my own voice.

You get a tired feeling when you're under the gun.

I looked inside the house and saw a huge picture of a Marine boy in full dress uniform.

All Chuck's children are out there playing his licks.

I grabbed a pebble and threw it up at the window, where it landed perfectly next to Lester's ear.

If you need a fix.

I threw another, larger stone that landed on the slate roof with a bing-bing-bing.

You can come back, children, rock'n'roll never forgets.

I threw a third stone and it broke the window. "Hey, man, you should've rang the doorbell," said Lester, opening the window. "So much for the second gunman theory," I thought to myself.

He escorted me to his loft. The carpets were gray, the walls were gray, the paintings were gray, the furniture was gray, the draperies were gray, everything was gray. Everywhere I looked was the generic Marine. It could all be the same guy or a series of grunts, those pictures always looked the same. "Who are you living with?" I asked.

"Baltimore University is paying me all this money not to go to school. These codgers are renting out their third floor to students, and I'm sharing it with this poet. Pretty cool, huh? Be careful not to touch any of his stuff, though. He's very sensitive."

Lester and poet lived in one room. On one side was an immaculately kept desk, bookshelf and bed. Above it was a Civil War rifle and a poster of Arnold Schwartzenegger. Beside it was a barbell. On the bookshelf, trophies were carefully placed between the textbooks. Over the desk with its typewriter were a bunch of framed yearbook pictures, and a basketball in a display case to the side. It looked like the kind of memorial parents keep for their kids after they leave home. On the other side of the room was a sagging cot with a filthy blanket on top. "Is that yours?" I asked. He nodded.

"Where's your library?" I inquired, with the inflection that he should have gold-leaf volumes, a smoking jacket and taxidermist-stuffed birds. He gave me an "aw, shucks" shrug.

Since I had brought a book of poetry with me on the bus, I placed it on the poet's desk. "You better not do that," said Lester.

"But it's Sterling A. Brown," I protested. "I thought you said this guy was a poet."

"Oh, yeah, he is, great stuff, but he doesn't like people messing with his shit."

I sat on the radiator and we talked like two professors in some obscure branch of philology who had no one else to converse with but could not agree on anything. The subject was the self's annihilation of the world in its perception of it, a theme we readily agreed on. He, however, credited the concept to Ludwig Wittgenstein while I looked to Wallace Stevens. I tried to compromise by bringing in Benjamin Lee Whorf while he did the same by bringing in Emily Dickinson, but we could not broach the distance. Finally, he said, "Do you want something to eat?"

Across the hall was a small, dorm-like kitchen. I marveled as he fried up butter, olive oil, romano cheese, bacon and Crisco in a skillet. He poured it over leftover Fettuccine noodles, shook some pepper on it, and offered it to me as a balanced meal.

"Is this some kind of new, inorganic diet?" I asked. "Shouldn't it be served with borax and rock salt grapes?"

"What do you mean?" he asked, seriously.

As we were eating, a knock came at the door. Lester answered it and brought up a huge black man. "Felix, this is Victor Davis."

"Is that...?" I pointed to John-Boy's bed.

"Oh, no. Victor and I go way back."

"Any relation to Al Davis?" I asked.

"The owner of the Raiders?" Lester asked in a puzzled way.

Victor looked intently at me for a second, and then smiled. "No, but I did play football," he said politely.

"Professionally?" I asked, noticing his Redskins practice shirt.

"No, my knee went. I played at a prep school in New Hampshire."

"How did you guys meet?" I asked.

"I was living in some flea-bag apartment in Pigtown," said Lester. "Me and a few of my basketball buddies were getting high and taking bets on who was actually a worse actor on Simon and Simon, Simon or Simon."

"Whew. I don't like those odds," I said.

"Exactly. Anyway, we're trying to concentrate real hard, and then some asshole starts bouncing a basketball on our ceiling. We figured we'd go beat the shit out of the pipsqueak, so we knock on the door. Victor answers it in his bathrobe, still dribbling. We've been friends ever since."

It was obvious this guy was stoned out of his mind. He had eyes like an iguana and talked like William F. Buckley. I felt like lying down on a sofa just listening to him. He talked about scoring an eighth for a quarter. I couldn't tell if this was a football play or a drug deal. Perhaps both, I thought, until it became painfully apparent that it was the latter. Before I even knew what was happening, we were whisked into his Saab convertible. He stuck the key into the floor, and in a cloud of motor oil and rubber we were off. Soon we were going 90 miles an hour over the sedate suburban hills. By the time we got to the highway, he was nearing 120, while simultaneously drinking a Ballantine Ale, thumping his hand in synch with an AC/DC tune, going into this long diatribe about how overrated Bobby Fischer was and rolling a cigar-sized joint. "Don't worry," said Lester to me, "he doesn't get pulled over."

"Speeding tickets are for wusses," yelled Victor in his Brahmin accent.

In hindsight it may not have been the best idea to have picked this moment to smoke marijuana for the first time. But there I was, holding onto the spliff for dear life, just praying for Officer Friendly to put all my puny ambitions and dreams out of their misery. As my life sped so quickly before my eyes I had time to remember all the lyrics to "Seasons in the Sun," Victor sang along with Bon Scott "I've got the biggest balls of all" while Lester leered out the window like a dog. We couldn't just go to Baltimore to score drugs, OH NO, we had to go to DC, and not just to DC, but to the single-most frightening outpost of charred remains this side of Chernobyl. Lester, as if to calm me down, said "don't worry, you're riding with Captain Vic."

We stopped in front of a row of burned-out brownstones. There wasn't a car in the road or a soul on the street. I was told to keep my head back and in the shadows. A young black male in a Raiders sweatshirt came out to the car. Victor and he talked in some indecipherable code for a couple of minutes, the boy gesticulating wildly. A bag was passed one way, money the other. Victor examined the contents of the bag as a jeweler would examine a watch. He finally pronounced it short, and spit in the young lad's face. Within a second, a hundred yo boys came barreling out of nowhere at our car. Victor gunned it, but not before one had smashed his windshield with a tire iron and another had reached into my window and torn off the door handle.

Back in the comfort of the Autobahn, as Lester and Victor were laughing
bout what had happened, I was wondering what nightmare scenario lay in store for me next when I realized that for the last hour I had been completely wasted and didn't even realize it. What had just happened seemed like a dubbed foreign film, absurd and incomprehensible. The enormity of my perceptual transformation hit me like a kilo of bricks. Ray Charles was singing "You Don't Know Me" on the radio. His melting voice shot wave after wave of enlightenment into me. I was reminded of that old philosophical theorem: God Is Love, Love Is Blind, Ray Charles Is Blind, THEREFORE Ray Charles Is God. Perhaps for the first time in my life, something seemed certain, irrefutable; I knew at that instant that Ray Charles was God.

When we got back to Lester's pad, a guy who actually looked like Tom Cruise was there. He was pissed off because I had left my book on his chair. When Lester explained that I didn't understand the rules, he lightened up some and they all started doing shooters and talking about college basketball. After a few bowls, they decided to play some hoops. I was asked to let Lester use my sneakers, and was given what can only be described as oversized clown shoes.

We drove to a court somewhere in Sandtown. Instead of a team insignia, center court had a big graffiti logo: I SMOKE PHILLIES BUNTS. I had been the starting guard on my high school team, and I had learned from Lester that he hadn't even been on the team, so I felt confident I could rule, clown shoes and all. Once play began, however, I was overmatched. Victor was savage in the paint, Lester's fall-away jumpers were as mercurial and unpredictable as quantum leaps, even Tom Cruise, who chanted "Allah" before every shot, was a bottom-feeder with lethal long-range arc. Soon, a group of local guys jumped in. I later learned that these guys were as good as NBA players, but didn't get the opportunity because the schools here didn't offer an education. So they were doomed to stay in this neighborhood, kicking the breeze and spinning rocks into hoops without laces. To them, the Big O, Earl the Pearl, Dr. J, the Iceman, Magic and Air Jordan were arbitrary brand names, what Jello is to homemade pudding or KFC is to Southern fried chicken. What was at stake in these pickup games was honor: the way the rules were obeyed, the way one could conquer any kind of adversity through the will to endure it—not the kind of things that made Andrew Carnegie rich, granted, but the only thing left of any value in these hopeless environs.

Lester got better the more he was challenged, standing in with the ball through eye gouges and flattening picks to bank it like a pinball. My feet were full of welts and there was no end in sight, even as the first neon signs started glowing in the encroaching indigo. I let him have the sneakers and left without saying good-bye. I never did get to ask him if he would be an usher at my wedding.

10.

As the magic day neared, I felt more and more powerless to control my fate. Via the Thurn and Taxis messenger service of Lester's mother, I wrote him an impassioned plea to be a participant in the celebration of my matrimonial bliss. "I don't do weddings," he replied simply, before asking if I could lend him money to buy an amplifier.

"I'll throw in a bong if you go to my wedding," I offered.

"Right on," he said.

As the flood of our collective memories arrived by plane, my fiancée and I were frantically trying to hide our pasts from each other's folks. We had to find a separate hotel for both sets of relatives, I had to pick up my two brothers who had flown in to be fitted for tuxes and to scoff, she had to convince her parents that my parents only drank like that for special occasions, and had to assure her great-aunt that I was not Jewish, Irish or Puerto Rican. An army of well wishers, who could easily have shifted gears to become bereaved mourners, popped up out of nowhere and swarmed around us like flies. Since I had been scheduled to work the day of my wedding, I had been trying for some time to find someone to take my shift at the restaurant. Every person I asked laughed and said, "you're getting married. Don't worry about it." Everyone, that is, except Fred Flintstone, who said "find someone to work for you, or punch out." I tried in vain to convince the other busboys of my predicament, but they all fancied themselves condescending Oliver Hardy's to my dimwitted Stan Laurel.

I spent my wedding morning calling other restaurants to see if I could get a mercenary to take my place. Unfortunately, most of the ones who spoke English had already worked at my restaurant and were persona non grata there. A few philosophical ones questioned why I was playing God, messing with the primal order of the restaurant universe, as if I could miraculously avoid being fired. In hindsight I guess my naiveté got the better of me because I came from a town where the teachers had tenure, the police had tenure, the doctors had tenure, even the street cleaner's job was safe, despite the fact he was a psychotic half-wit who put baseball cards between the spokes of his bicycle and yelled obscenities at all the little girls as he drove by with his stick. Like him, I would have continued to cling stubbornly to my delusion if not for the urgent pleas of my family and bride-to-be to let it go. I did so only to make everyone happy, however, because, to tell the truth, I did not understand their argument. They seemed to be under the bizarre assumption that trying to keep the whims of twenty people in perfect balance (while carrying hot beverages) was somehow less intellectually demanding than, say, rocket science or public relations. It seemed to me that only an imbecile would say that.

And then there was the question of Lester. I spent the afternoon trying to track him down. The phone number he gave me was for an employment agency that was closed on the weekend, so my brothers and I picked up our tuxes first. Lester had promised to meet me in front of the homeless shelter downtown but of course he wasn't there, so I tried to go inside. They very rudely told me to wait in line, the fact that I was wearing a powder-blue tuxedo not remarkable to them in the least. I tried to sneak a peek inside—it was hopeless; half the people there looked like Lester. I ran feverishly around the block, saluted as I turned by another derelict who probably thought I was his CO in Nam. By pure luck, I spotted Lester's Mick Jagger lips in the Hardee's window, about to devour a square burger in one bite.

"Hey, man, there's food at the reception," I said.

"You call this food?" He replied indignantly.

I had to coax him out of the Hardee's the way a psychiatrist might have persuaded Brian Wilson to finally venture out of his house. After a quick stop at Revco to get him a razor and some deodorant, we sped off, back to the tux store, the chapel, and, ultimately, the ecstasies of marital union.

Along the way, with the three of us totally silent, Lester made like Rodney Dangerfield, saying how the cemetery we were passing could double as a golf course and how Hugh Downs must be a total pothead. My brothers sat through this tightlipped like the church lady. I was so proud of him.

It was about 105 degrees in the church. I wouldn't have let the guy who was to marry us within one hundred feet of my kids. I tried to make conversation with my brother while we were waiting to go on stage. I tried golf, fishing, the difference between rotary and internal combustion engines, nothing, he was only going to give me name, rank, and serial number, as if displaying one sign of weakness would send me screaming out the door.

In the surreal zone that usually ensues at such momentous events in one's life, everyone seemed to be animated by some mechanical virus: the lumbering procession, the standing up on cue, the expectant brandishing of handkerchiefs as if everyone had paid their two bits to get in and damnit if they weren't going to get a good cry out of it. I, of course, was trying my best not to fuck up, a task made doubly difficult by the knee-buckling heat and my inability to keep a straight face as the minister lisped his way through the most patently phony British accent this side of Jason Priestley. I felt like a Christian being thrown to the lions. I find it hard to believe any male has ever honestly felt joy, love and rapture at a wedding—it's too much work digging deep to find the emotion you feel guilty about not having. In the end, you can only assume the all-purpose pose of male model #117B—the ravenous audience will accept no other scrap. As is the case with attending college, people should only get married at the end of their lives, when they actually know what they've gotten themselves into and can appreciate the countless ways their mate can be captured in the simple beauty of the wedding vows.

I caught up with Lester again after the pieties of the receiving line. He had cataloged every invitee with some kind of mental illness: "he never recovered from Uncle Ralph," "she scrubs down her walls every day with ammonia," "that one is being stalked by her dead first dog Eunice," and so on. His comments were hilarious, ludicrous—imagine a 60-year old spinster with a hundred bobby pins in her hair lusting for black men's penises—and, as I knew only too well, all-too-true. As I tried to steer him out of other people's hearing range, he continued his pointed commentary, calling my wedding an indictment of man's humanity to man and saying the Tsitlele have the right idea by wearing their wedding rings on the nose. At the reception, he felt it necessary to interrupt whatever awkward conversation I was involved with to comment on each hors d'ouevre he tasted. I tried to think of him as an amusing little sidelight, but there was hopelessness everywhere I turned: old men who I couldn't recall looking at me with intense compassion, as if to say, "sorry, kid, it's all over for you now"; an attempt to get in a few words with my wife, only to find that she was suffering from extreme sugar withdrawal and could not function until I stuffed cake in her mouth; a desire to have a first dance, only to see my mother-in-law dancing with my bride to the "Terms of Endearment" theme song ("It's a beautiful song, besides, I'm paying for this wedding"); a photographer who was in my face at every moment, my own nightmare paparazzi, having more fun than anyone there. Sensing my mood, Lester motioned me to a broom closet. He lit a bowl while we talked about Barcelona chairs.

Strangely enough, nothing that happened the entire night, not the well-thought-out inarticulacies from well-wishers, not the limburger cheese in my crankcase, not the endless rounds of phone calls that needed to be made from the hotel room before we could consummate our marriage, made as much sense as that discussion.

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