Special Feature

1999 by Christie Hodgen

A train is coming and I need to beat it. This particular crossing can be tricky, as the train approaches from around a bend, one of those deals where if you can see it, it’s already too late – you just have to judge from the sound, the trembling of the earth, the feeling in your chest. I’m on foot, on my way to work. It’s a few minutes before six in the morning. Dark, a bit cold. I’m still a good stretch from the crossing when the bells start clanging and the lights start blinking, the traffic arms start to drop. I break into a sprint. Fuck it, is what I’m thinking. What I’m always thinking these days. I dodge the boom gate and scramble over the tracks, up the little bank. It’s not that close, though by the time I clear the gate on the other side the train is coming through, and it is so massive, its horn so loud, a bit of terror goes through me anyway.

I turn around to watch the train pass and that’s when I see him, the dwarf again, standing by the blinking traffic signal. I’ve seen him every morning for the last two weeks, since I started working at the coffee shop. He is an older man, perhaps in his sixties, and he dresses with the formality of a bygone era – in gray felt slacks and a mustard-yellow dress shirt, a brown tweed jacket, wingtip shoes, a fedora with a feather springing from its band. Our timing is so precise that we tend to cross one another’s path right on the tracks. Because it is misty at that time of morning, the dwarf often emerges out of a cloud, and even though he is just a person on his way to work, minding his own business, keeping up a routine he’s probably been keeping for years, still there is something about this daily meeting that strikes me as macabre – as if my life has fallen into the hands of a B-movie director. Behold our heroine, is the feel of this little scene, walking to her minimum-wage job in the dark, crossing the tracks between one world and the next, whereupon she encounters a strange creature, one whose presence portends something, though for good or ill we cannot yet imagine. . . . The dwarf and I have never spoken before but today he shouts, in a voice so high and pinched it startles me: That was a damn fool thing to do.

Sorry, I say. A reflex of mine – I apologize to people all day long. I give a little wave, keep moving, scramble off.

Damn fool thing to do, he says again. I pluck this phrase out of the air. My brain is an antenna shifting, searching. Certain phrases break through the static of my day, come in clearly. Bits of dialogue overheard between strangers. Questions lobbed at me from customers, or men in passing cars. I gather them up, tuck them away. My head is full of other people’s voices.

Just over the tracks is the White Castle. At this hour of morning its lights stand out brightly against the dark sky, and the people inside, hunched over their plates at the counter, offer me my own personal Nighthawks, though instead of the well-heeled figures in the Hopper painting this is the Louisville equivalent – men in blue coveralls coming off of or on their way to factory shifts, their posture a matter of exhaustion more than existential despair.

Then past the White Castle is the car wash. Even at six in the morning the car wash lot is full of men in track suits, standing around in a circle with rags in their hands, waiting for cars to come through, clean but still dripping, and what they do is towel off the cars hoping for a tip. These men are all convicts, I was told during my training at the coffee shop, and they are always on the make – they will come into the shop asking for free coffee or spare change, they will steal from the tip jar when your back is turned if you’re not careful – and it’s best to stay away from them. But I don’t. Though I could easily cross the street and avoid them I walk right through their lot, listening, because I want to hear their voices. The same two men are always fighting. Today one of them turns his back on the other and bends over. Kiss my ass, he says, presenting his ass, pointing to it with both index fingers. Go on, kiss it. The second man turns his foot sideways and sort of kicks the first man. There’s a moment where things are tense – certainly in another context this might have started a fight. But here they just laugh.

Every single person I see on my way to work is black, and it hasn’t taken me long to develop a theory about this. The theory is that I have now become privy to a truth that seems like a fable, but a fable too sad and terrible to pass along to our children. The fable goes like this: that while white people sleep, another race of people is working hard in the dark to make the world ready for the new day. Then the white people wake up, having no idea what effort has gone into the making of the world, and they walk around like they own it, like they run the place. Why do some people work while other people get to be sleeping? I imagine a child asking me, after I have told her this story. I don’t know, I say. Can’t they take turns? the child asks. No, that’s not how it works, I say. Why not? says the child. Because, I say. Because why? she asks. It’s complicated, I say. I don’t know. It’s not my fault. Stop bugging me.

I cross the street to the coffee shop and unlock the door, turn on the lights, lock the door behind me. The shop is a wide, low building converted from a former muffler garage. Its entire front wall is made of glass. As I busy myself with grinding and brewing coffee, filling thermoses with milk and cream, stacking the pastry case, I am vaguely aware that anyone passing by can see me. That against the darkness – it will not be light for a few minutes yet – the shop is lit like a movie screen. Occasionally I look up and see the men across the street, who have pivoted toward the shop and are watching me work. Another theory I’ve developed since starting here is that people seem to enjoy watching other people’s labor. I don’t yet have an idea for why this is the case, but it’s something I’ve noticed, something I’m thinking about.

The last thing I do before opening is carry all of the patio furniture out to the front deck. It is light now, and a few customers are idling in the lot, watching me from the purring warmth of their Mercedes and BMWs. They know better than to come through the door before 6:30 – other staff have trained them on this point of etiquette – but they monitor the little digital clocks on their dashboards. I take my time arranging the tables and chairs. I have a few minutes yet. A few minutes before I have to be nice to them.

Back inside I see that Jim is behind the counter, pouring himself a cup of coffee. Jim is short and stout, with a full beard and a mess of russet-colored hair styled in the fashion of a garden gnome. He wears the same thing every day – a pair of rust-color corduroys and a black t-shirt turned inside out. There is some image printed on the shirt but I can only guess what – I can only see its outline. The image itself is secreted against his heart. The shirt means something to him, I heard him explain once to a coworker, but the meaning is private.

I like working with Jim. He keeps his cool no matter how long the line is, no matter how demanding the customer. He talks very little and moves at a slow but steady pace. Every twenty minutes or so he abandons the counter and disappears into the bathroom for approximately two minutes. I don’t know what he does in there and don’t really care. Whatever it is calms him, calms me too.

Jim is in a band, something I have filed away under the heading: Of Course You Are. Everyone our age is in a band, or writing a book, and we are always singing our songs to each other, telling our stories. I haven’t heard Jim’s music yet and have no reason to believe it is anything special, any more viable than the idle strumming or screeching angst I’ve heard from dozens of other friends and coworkers. But in ten years he’ll be a millionaire and he’ll be everywhere, everywhere I turn. I’ll hear his music on the radio, and in the background of scenes in movies and TV shows. I’ll see articles about him in magazines, ads promoting his tour with Bob Dylan. Bob Fucking Dylan. Sometimes when I see him he’ll still be wearing the shirt, the shirt that means something to him, something private he won’t name.

Then it’s 6:30 and the customers start lining up. They are a suit and tie crowd – doctors and lawyers and drug reps and real estate agents, salesmen and executives from the insurance companies downtown. This is 1999, before there was a Starbucks on every corner, before stopping for coffee in the morning was quite such a universal thing, as we say now. The people in the shop – our city’s version of Starbucks, but locally owned and roasted – display the aggression and enthusiasm of pioneers, feeling themselves part of an elite crowd that has discovered something others don’t know about yet. There’s still a bit of negotiating going on regarding this habit, this territory, the customers feeling like: Hey, I don’t have to spend six dollars a day in this coffee shop, you know, you should be glad I bother to come in here. And the staff feeling like: Why don’t you just stay home, then? We don’t really want to be here, either. These dynamics play out in little skirmishes all morning long, the customers sort of uncomfortable with the amount they’re spending, feeling they’re getting a bad bargain and wanting something else in exchange for their money, wanting the opportunity to criticize us as we work, or wanting a little chat, wanting us to laugh at their jokes, listen to their problems, flirt. Often they ask us personal questions. What our love life is like, how come we’re serving coffee when we could be doing something else. I want to know why a young man like you has a full beard, someone says to Jim today. And he says: I believe all men should go forth into the world with their God-given beards.

I don’t mind the customers, don’t mind talking to them and making their drinks, don’t mind the liberties they take. With one exception. Every few days a man strolls in and, even though the line is long – sometimes stretching out the door – he walks straight up to the espresso machine and orders his drink – a four-shot decaf cappuccino. Then he puts a twenty-dollar bill in the tip jar. I was instructed during my training about this man’s custom, welcome by some baristas and resented by others. Just deal with it, I was told. This isn’t someone we want to piss off.

We don’t want to piss him off because he is Papa John, the richest and most famous man in Louisville. Every time Papa John comes in, as he does this morning, he appears to me to be glowing, pixelated. Probably this is just the effect of seeing someone in real life you are accustomed to seeing on television, but perhaps it is something else – it is starting to seem to me that rich people glow from within. That they are our new saints – that we have placed little halos about them, have vaulted them into the clouds. Lately I have been reading Randall Jarrell’s book of essays, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket, a collection written in the sixties in which the poet predicted our culture would one day arrive exactly where it has – at a time and place where commerce has taken on more importance than government or religion or education or anything else, where a person’s success is defined by one thing alone: his wealth. In a land such as this, Jarrell writes, the thinking goes: anyone who is rich must be smart. And anyone who isn’t – well, the reverse is also true. The line I remember best from the book is one Jarrell said he felt coming at him all the time, and one I imagine coming off of Papa John: If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?

Four-shot decaf cappuccino, he says, and puts his money in the tip jar. I don’t want to make the drink and consider not doing it. I’ll just let him stand there, see how long it takes him to figure out I can’t be bought. Andrew Jackson is upside down in the jar and regards me with an expression that looks like a challenge: I’ve brokered bigger deals than this one, bitch. I load the shots and steam the milk and do everything just as it ought to be done. But I glare at Papa John the whole time. I’d like to face him in some kind of challenge having to do with Shakespeare, or art history, or not cutting in line – any of the things that matter to me – and I’d like to watch him lose. I’d like him to feel for a moment that his money can’t save him. Because there are still some things, I insist on believing, that money can’t buy. Even money can’t keep you from looking like a Jet, I think. Like you just walked off the set of a community theater production of West Side Story.

Jim and I get through the morning rush and then we clean everything up, prep for the afternoon. I gather all of the dishes from the tables and place them in a tub, carry them to the back, where I wash them in a giant metal sink. No one else likes this job, the rubber gloves and the bleach, the lipstick prints smeared on the rims of mugs, but it is my favorite part of the day. I am alone again, and can think. I have two favorite topics I like to dwell on and one of them is: how and when I will kill myself. Lately I have been considering jumping off the Second Street Bridge, which stretches across the muddy Ohio River, connecting Louisville to the industrial wasteland that is Jeffersonville, Indiana. I go over my plan. Try to picture it, try to name its virtues. The main advantage of the bridge is that it will be quick, and no one will have to clean up after me. I like, too, that the bridge has a good history. In 1960 Muhammad Ali walked out to the center of this bridge and hurled his Olympic gold medal into the river. He did this because you could win a gold medal for your country but they still wouldn’t serve you a meal – he had been denied admittance to a restaurant that very night. Because Ali, then Cassius Clay, did this alone – he walked out onto the bridge under cover of darkness and flung his prized possession into oblivion – there are some who doubt his story, some who believe he kept the medal and only claimed to have thrown it. These are the people who can’t imagine throwing something away, something of that much value. Surely he made the story up, their logic goes, to make some kind of point, surely he had walked to the middle of the bridge and considered throwing it, but didn’t really do it, just decided to tell people he did. Of course it was tucked safely in his sock drawer and would one day be revealed. I suppose I put a bit of stock in this idea, not wanting something so valuable, that had meant so much to him, to be lost in the bottom of a river and also not wanting it to be true that he had been so hurt, so wronged. But now that I am older I have no trouble at all imagining throwing that medal over the bridge. After you’ve lost a lot, suffered one too many indignities, a thing like a medal doesn’t matter any more. What matters is personal integrity. What matters is being able to say fuck you. That’s all that matters, I think now.

I dry the dishes off and bring them back to the front, restock the shelves. Jim and I talk for a bit. He tells me about an abandoned mall on the edge of town with a roller rink inside. It’s like a time capsule, he says, a time capsule you can look right into. You can still go out to the rink and press your face against the glass door and see everything, exactly the same as it was twenty years ago. It’s like the fucking seventies preserved in formaldehyde, he says. Everything is just as it was during his childhood, the disco ball still suspended above the rink, the DJ’s booth and its lo-fi sound equipment, everything. What he wants to do is make enough money with his music to buy the mall. And then bring back the roller rink so he and his little brother can skate there again, like they did when they were kids. His brother is sick with some kind of chronic disease. And so it is one of those dreams, desperate and sad, a dream of trying to make something whole again, of trying to get back home, a dream that will never come true.

The shift ends and I walk home. Past the car wash, the White Castle, back over the tracks. To get to my apartment I cut through the back parking lot of a flower shop and always peek over the lid of their dumpster, where there are often not-quite-dead flowers languishing in the open air. Roses, lilies, daisies, sometimes even a bird of paradise. When I find them I pluck them up and take them home, cut their stems and put them in a glass. Today it is carnations. A disappointment, but better than nothing.

Once home I stick the flowers in water and go right to bed – a mattress on the floor – and write the day’s events in my notebook. Damn fool thing to do, I write. And, Kiss my ass, go on, kiss it.

I am trying to be a writer, trying to be someone on whom nothing is wasted. I want to write one perfect book before I go. A group of stories in which I say everything I have to say about life. I have some notion that these little moments I scribble down at the end of the day are important, or could be. Though if pressed, and sometimes I press myself on this point, I couldn’t say why. The best I can do is: If I don’t write about these people, no one will. If I don’t remember them as they are, they will never be remembered. In a way this is true – it is only with the help of the notebook I can recall these moments now.

Immediately following this day’s entry I see I have tried to work out a scene from a story I was writing, a story I never finished. The story is about the grocery store meat department I used to work in when I was in high school. So far it’s a collection of scenes with four butchers standing around the cutting table, insulting each other, and a high school senior, the lone female in the room, standing in the corner wrapping and weighing and pricing packages of meat while eavesdropping on the butchers. I have long wanted to write a story about the meat room, as we called it, and the men who worked there. The imagery is good – the room itself, with its white walls and concrete floor and stainless steel equipment, the flickering fluorescent lighting, the giant carcasses hanging from hooks, the little rivulets of blood sloping along the floor toward the drain. And the butchers – bulky and red-faced, the tips of many of their fingers missing, their white coats smeared with blood. The plot of the story, insofar as there can be said to be a plot, is in the relationship between the high school girl and one of the butchers, Jim, who looks like the lumberjack on the Brawny paper towel packaging – a broad-shouldered man dressed in a red plaid shirt with a mustache so full it obscures his mouth. There is a certain amount of tenderness between this butcher – a Vietnam veteran whose wife has never been able to bear children, supposedly because of something Jim was exposed to in the war – and the high school girl, who is a bit of a sad case. But this tenderness is threatened by the environment they’re in, which thrives on sarcasm and aggression and vulgarity. The moments they have together are fleeting and often silent – friendly waves and little glances of commiseration.

On this day I see I’ve tried to reproduce one of the conversations I remember from the meat room, wherein one of the younger butchers, a kid named Giovanni DiCaprio, is trying to solve a problem. Giovanni is the lead singer in a Def Leppard tribute band and is something of an anomaly in the room, in that he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life cutting steaks, in that he still talks of his plans for the future. One of his dreams is to expand his repertoire beyond the hard-driving anthems and sentimental ballads of Def Leppard – to start writing and performing his own music. But the writing is hard. He has an idea, he tells the other butchers, an idea he badly wants to express, but can’t think of how to phrase it. Presenting this problem at the cutting table is a risky venture, because the cutting table is where you go to be mocked and humiliated, to have your ideas and opinions sliced down to nothing. Only once did I ever witness anything taken seriously at the table, and even then it was because, I sensed, no one could think of how to turn the problem into a joke. This was the problem of one of the butchers wanting to see his kids but owing so much back child support he couldn’t see them, not until he’d saved enough money. No one said anything, until someone said: Shit.

So the song is about a blonde, says Giovanni, and the guy singing the song is into her, and he’s saying, the guy is saying, like, ‘I know you’re a blonde up there but I won’t know if it’s for real until I can see if, you know, you’re a blonde down there,’ is what I’m trying to say, but I can’t think how to say it.

There is a saying for this already, says José the Mexican, which is what everyone actually called him. Does the curtains match the drapes, I think it is.

Huh? says Giovanni.

Curtains and drapes are the same fucking thing, says Dave the Alcoholic.

The carpet, says Jim the Veteran. Is how the phrase goes, I believe.

Yes, yes, yes, says José. Does the drapes match the carpet?

And Giovanni says: Huh?

My plan for the story is that the girl, who has always been lonely, falls in love with the butchers and doesn’t want to leave them. As her final year of high school wears on, and then the summer following, she considers staying in the meat room forever. But at the same time, she can see how there’s no real future here – she can see that if any of the butchers had the chance to get out, he would. Because of the smell, and the blood. Because of the cold getting to their joints. And because eventually, yes, each of them has cut off a fingertip or two – you wouldn’t think so, it’s too much of a cliché, but it happens. Eventually it happens to all of them.

So at the end of the summer the girl decides to go off to college. It’s hard for her to say goodbye, so she doesn’t – she doesn’t even turn in her notice, she just disappears. A year later she goes back to visit – she walks up to the meat case and just sort of lingers, hoping one of the butchers will see her through the little circular windows on the swinging doors separating the cutting room from the rest of the store. She’s hoping Jim will notice her but instead the person who comes out is Giovanni, who never really liked her, but who comes out and hugs her like a long-lost friend, presses her against him. His coat is red with blood and some of it gets on her college sweatshirt. They talk for a while. His band is doing good, he says, real good, playing lots of shows, in fact she should come, there’s a show this weekend. And she says she will. Giovanni starts telling her where the show is, what time, which bus to take, and all the while she’s waiting to ask one question. Finally she has the chance. How’s Jim? she asks. And Giovanni’s face falls. Shit, you didn’t hear? he said. And he tells her that Jim died. Had a heart attack right at the table, fell back on the floor. His family cremated him, he says. They had a service at their church, we all went, and then we had like a reception thing in the church basement, we brought sandwiches from the deli, he says. The girl thinks of Jim’s body burning, his ashes stashed in an urn, set on a table in the tabernacle, gleaming, while downstairs in the basement the butchers eat sandwiches and get drunk and tell stories. She thinks of how she wasn’t there, how she never even said goodbye. She can’t stand it.

The problem I’m having with this story is that it is exactly like all the other stories I’ve ever written. Always a young girl in a blue-collar environment with complicated feelings about moving away. But then she moves away. And when she comes back, things have either changed, or they haven’t, and it’s sad in both cases. I keep writing the same story and furthermore, keep living it. I am twenty-five years old and have a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. I keep moving back and forth between school and the service industry. I can’t seem to make things work in either place. All the while I’m mired in one, I’m dreaming of the other. But this isn’t, I realize, a very interesting conflict. Something bigger has to happen, something permanent. Death has to come knocking. Only death can make the story work, I believe, on the page and in life, only death can bring meaning to this narrative. But how many times? I can’t keep ending things this way. But I can’t think what else to do. It’s the only thought I have.

I work on this story for a few more months, through the spring of ’99, and then abandon it. I start writing a new story. One that eventually becomes the title story of my first collection. It’s about a girl in her senior year of high school who’s in love with a boy from her class, an outcast who keeps trying to kill himself. Several times they come close to making a connection, but in the end it doesn’t work out. In the end he kills himself, leaving the girl stunned and desperate. Of course.

* * *

I rely on this notebook, too, to remind me of what life was like that year, not just for me and the small circle I traveled in, but for the world at large. There are entries that year about Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, Columbine High School, the death of JFK Jr. and his beautiful wife Carolyn Bessette, and, at the tail end of the year, a warehouse fire in my hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, that killed six firefighters. The term Y2K appears several times, an acronym the world coined for the anxiety it felt about its possible impending destruction. A problem which seems quaint now. A bit of hand-wringing about death that turned out to be entirely theoretical, a bout of hypochondria worthy of a Woody Allen character.

But at the time it is real. A looming catastrophe. The details are fuzzy for most of us but the experts do their best to explain. It has something to do with computers, they say, which we have come to rely on so completely that without quite realizing it we have stretched out prone beneath the shadow of their swords. Computer scientists appear on television talking about the dating protocol embedded in our operating systems, explaining that whoever built the first computer, that idiot savant, only designated two digits to indicate the calendar year, so all of our systems are currently displaying the year as 99 instead of 1999, and as we creep forward to the year 2000, the computers creep forward to the moment they will convert from 99 to 00, whereupon the computers will “think” – this is the language being used – that we have reverted to the year 1900, and when this change registers in the computer brain – again, this is the language of the experts – the computer brain will have the equivalent of a human stroke, the computer brain will freak out, and when the computer brain freaks out there is no telling what will happen. When midnight comes on December 31st no one really knows, all of our records and data might be lost, our bank accounts might be wiped clean, our power might go out, the whole grid might collapse, people on ventilators and dialysis and all the tiny babies in incubators, their fists clenched tight, all of these people might be fucked, not to mention anyone on a plane – we’re told that a plane in flight at that hour might fall out of the fucking sky, and as for nuclear weapons, it’s possible they could launch themselves.

But wait, there’s more: none of this is even the point. Because when the computer experts are done with their piece they pass the baton to the religious experts, who are giddy, who drum their fingers and bounce on the balls of their feet in gleeful anticipation. All of this chaos caused by computer failure will be, they say, just the beginning, just an overture to the end of days that will usher in the second coming of Christ, rejoice, all the people in the streets fighting each other for cans of food and sticks with which to build fires to heat their homes, rejoice, all the tribes of people roaming around commandeering resources for themselves with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders, all the rape and murder and starvation and suffering, all the perished meek, rejoice, it is all part of His larger plan, each day that passes brings us closer to rapture, so we must waste no time, we must get right with the Lord and make ourselves ready for him, we must busy ourselves, we must boil ourselves clean.

Of course if one is not inclined to worry or to believe in God, there is another option – and that option is, in the words of Prince, to party like it’s 1999. Prince said this back in ‘82 and suddenly he seems prescient, a prophet of catastrophe, a messiah in his metallic purple jacket, his hair cut into some kind of bird-like topiary. The song is all synthesizers and electric drums and it is everywhere, it has dissolved into the ether, you can’t take five steps without running into it. The lyrics paint a tapestry of chaos: The sky was so purple there were people running everywhere. And then, beholding the chaos, give it the middle finger: You know I didn’t even care. Of course this is the response I favor, along with every other expression of casual disdain, of devil-may-care in the face of crisis. When I pull a book off the shelves these days it is Camus and Nietzsche and Sartre, it is McCullers and Heller and Carver and Vonnegut. So it goes with me and just about everyone else I know, everyone whose path I cross on the morning’s dark walk. None of us are really going anywhere. The world might be ending and so what. We are all just standing around, killing time, flipping through days like the pages of a magazine, waiting to see what will happen, how it will go down, bang or whimper. We are all down on our luck, all of our dreams have kicked the bucket, and so, the feeling goes, fuck it.

Looking over my notes from that year it seems clear to me now that to have been suicidal in 1999 was to be in step with the world. Either you wanted to die because you were ready to be saved, ready for the rapture. Or you wanted to die because nothing mattered, the whole planet was careening toward oblivion and good riddance. In fact neither of these things were true. But for a while, for some of us – that small segment of humanity caught up in religious fanaticism, or the existential crises common amongst people in their twenties – they felt true.

* * *

There are all kinds of rotten things about working in the service industry. To name a few: the low pay, the total mindlessness and yet also, paradoxically, at times complex difficulty of the work, the toll it takes on your body, the lack of respect with which you’re treated by customers and often employers, and perhaps above all the constant, desperate feeling that you are meant for something better but no one will ever know it – the feeling that you’ll die holding this secret in your heart.

But there is one good thing about what I’m doing, I remind myself, and that is the exposure to interesting people. The coffee shop is managed by a guy named Fortune, and staffed by many of his friends, who take me on not just as an apprentice in the dark art of coffee but in a host of other skill sets and belief systems. It’s like I’m a college freshman again, but instead of the coursework I pursued at school, the books I clung to my chest – Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, John Berryman’s Dream Songs, Jean Toomer’s Cane, The Education of Henry Adams, the complete oeuvres of Kafka and Virginia Woolf – I’m now sitting in on a series of lectures for which nothing in my previous life has prepared me. In the two years I spend at the shop I cram so much information in my head I could sit for finals in a wide range of courses: Eastern Spirituality 101. Dune and Other Science Fiction Novels, But Mostly Dune. Basic Principles of Dungeons & Dragons. Sleeve Tattoos and The Ancient Symbols of Which They Are Comprised. Advanced Piercings. Special Problems in Tofu Management. Potions, Tonics, and Enemas. Mind-Altering Drugs I and II. Meditation and the Recovery of Repressed Memories.

Each shift is eight hours long and I spend it at the heels of my new professors, taking it all in. Mostly listening but occasionally asking a follow-up question, the kind of lob they love to rush over and slam. I spend the most time with Fortune, who likes to come in around mid-morning, after the crowd has thinned.

Fortune is short, about five-six, has dirty-blonde hair that he has grown to shoulder length, and a full beard. He is about twenty pounds overweight, or rather, he is a person who has gained twenty pounds since the last time he bought pants. The only pair of pants he can still fit in is a pair of khakis, so grimy with coffee stains they are nearly black. The waistline is closed by a pulley system involving a rubber band and a safety pin. Fortune often talks of the weight he has gained and his plans to lose it. He has a theory about not buying new pants, because once you buy new pants, he says, the fat wins. He doesn’t shower often, believing that the body’s natural oils produce healthful effects, and seems not to make too much of a deal of dental hygiene, either – his front teeth are marked with a constellation of deep black pocks. Basically his philosophy on his physical appearance is: fuck it. Because none of that matters. What matters is inside, the life of the spirit.

Fortune is into anything and everything said to expand the properties of the mind. He goes to great lengths and expense to do so; for every dollar I have spent on higher education, Fortune has spent an equal and opposite dollar on some kind of workshop or therapy or drug. Once a month or so Fortune goes away on a “man retreat” with a group of men who consider Robert Bly’s Iron John to be more or less their Bible. In graduate school I’d heard talk of Robert Bly – both of his poetry and this strange, difficult-to-define treatise on manhood – and so in a grasping-at-straws kind of way, I latch onto this feature in Fortune’s personality. He considers a book to be important, integral to his ways of being in the world, and I get that. I’m in favor of it. In the course of a few shifts I hear so much about Iron John it’s as though I read it. I mentally place it on my shelf of consumed books.

Somewhat in contrast to all of this is the fact that Fortune can be fun to hang around with. He has a nervous, stuttering laugh and makes himself laugh often. His sense of humor is formulaic and involves launching his voice into a higher octave to describe various people, things, and situations in heightened terms. It gets busy in the shop and he’ll announce to us, ecstatically: We’re gonna power through this rush like a chainsaw through a rotten tree, Motherfuckers! We’re gonna take this line down like a bitch! Sometimes, for laughs, he’ll answer the phone in an absurd way, in a variety of accents, sometimes British – Hallo? – sometimes Australian – G’day, mate! – sometimes with an exaggerated Chinese inflection: Herro?

One day – and this is the day I start to consider myself Fortune’s friend – he tells me that he was born and lived for eighteen years with the name Bruce Smith. But as soon as he turned eighteen he went to the courthouse and changed it. The judge gave him a hard time, he says, asked him what was wrong with the perfectly good name his parents chose. I didn’t choose it, he explained. It’s not about the name, he tells me now. It’s about being your own man. It has never once occurred to me to change my name, even though I don’t particularly like it, and I have a hard time imagining doing such a thing. I respect that, I say. And mean it.

All that matters to me, Fortune says, is that I’m living an authentic life. A life of my own making. Everything he does, he explains, everything he consumes and surrounds himself with, all of his friends, everything has to be as authentic as possible. A feeling washes over me – that I am on trial. I imagine there are some things about me that pass muster with Fortune, and some that don’t. I imagine him calling me in to the little manager’s office one day and firing me. You’re just not authentic, he’ll say. You’re just not manifesting your destiny. And I’ll nod in agreement. I can’t argue with that.

       I have a soft spot for Fortune’s friend Kalomar, one of those people whose proportions are so far outside the realm of average that he’s defined by them. He’s a giant, a force of nature. Six-five and pushing 300 pounds, with biceps the size of gallon jugs of Folgers. He has long, straggly brown hair. He wears overly large plastic-framed glasses with square lenses, the kind serial killers wear, and he is fond of wearing t-shirts with the sleeves and much of the sides ripped out. And yet his presence is an oddly gentle one. His voice is low and smooth, and he speaks in a slow, calming manner. He moves carefully, as if taking especial care not to knock anyone over. It’s as if he’s spent his entire life trying to curb the effects of his body.

In one of our first shifts together he tells me the story of his name, which came to him in a dream. He always obeys his dreams, he says, because they are portals into the next world, the unseen world, the world beyond our own. All his life he has had the power to reach into that other world in dreams and in the bright flashes and visions that sometimes overcome him in broad daylight. The first time it happened he was very young, three or four years old. He heard Jim Croce playing on the radio, “Time in a Bottle,” and turned to his mother and said: His plane crashed. Which flustered his mother a bit. But not so much as the next day, when news came over the radio that Jim Croce’s plane had just crashed.

In that way it was revealed to Kalomar that he possessed special powers of perception, powers that continued to serve him throughout his life. So when a cloaked spirit appeared to him in a dream and told him to change his name to Kalomar – or rather, the spirit simply announced: Your name is Kalomar – he went to the courthouse and changed it, to the consternation of the judge, who was pissed off not only at the ridiculous nature of the name but also by the fact that Kalomar had only filled out the space beneath “first name” and hadn’t thought to give himself a last name. What do you propose for a surname? the judge asked, and Kalomar shrugged. None, he said. You have to have a last name, the judge told him. Then Kalomar, I guess, he said. You propose to call yourself Kalomar Kalomar? said the judge. Yes, said Kalomar. Whereupon the judge signed the form and told Kalomar Kalomar to get the hell out of his courtroom.

Sometimes, while Kalomar is talking, I have little dialogues with myself.

Do I really think people can channel spirits from another world? I ask.

I’m not here to judge, I answer.

But come on, do I?

Well, I think. Of course not.

With Kalomar, I try my best to compose my face in a sympathetic expression. The last thing I would want to do is doubt what he believes. But I can’t quite get there, not all the way. And so what I’m trying for is kindness, encouragement. I have the feeling Kalomar has been, in one way or another, standing in front of a judge his whole life, a judge who derides and ridicules and then dismisses him. I’m not like that, is the message I’m going for. Though sometimes I think: I’m like that. I’m just like that.

       It’s harder to withhold judgment with Haruki, who is neither fun nor gentle, and whose exploration of countercultural practices and beliefs is rooted not in curiosity or authenticity but in, it seems to me, great bitterness and disappointment. He is the person in the shop whose inner strivings and struggles are most outwardly visible. His head is shaved, he is covered in tattoos, he wears earplugs so large his earlobes sag. He is profoundly nearsighted, and wears glasses so thick his eyes are grossly magnified behind them, to the effect that he looks more animal than human, like a lemur or owl. Haruki’s signature posture is a slouch. He always stands gripping the counter, his head hanging down. It is customary in the coffee shop to speak of the energy or aura surrounding people, and Haruki’s is distinctly dark, feral.

To be fair, Haruki is saddled with greater responsibility than any of the rest of us, because he has a four-year-old son – a blonde, big-eyed child who looks like a sprite and whose name is, in fact, Elf. Haruki only sees Elf every other weekend, and often takes him into the shop and feeds him out of the pastry case. Haruki has pinned a picture of Elf to the corkboard in the manager’s office, so he can see him in the time between visits. So I don’t forget him, he says.

The main problem for Haruki, as far as I can tell, is that he hasn’t yet found something to believe in, something to love, in a lasting way. And furthermore, that he bears the remnants of his past loves on his body but can’t get rid of them. He no longer wants to wear earplugs, he explains, but it’s too late to turn back. No longer wants the particular tattoos on his arms. No longer wants his name. It’s not the name I was born with, he explains, in case you were wondering why a white guy is walking around with a Japanese name. Which I sort of was. The name, he explains, is from his time as a Buddhist, now mostly done with. He keeps trying to go back to his old name, Joseph, but none of his current friends have ever known him as anyone other than Haruki. And my driver’s license, he says, my tax returns, all of it.

I should have listened to the judge, he adds. Dude warned me when I changed my name. He goes on to tell me basically the same story that Fortune and Kalomar did. I imagine the same judge presiding over all three cases, sitting wearily on his bench. A formerly avuncular type grown cross over the years, hardened by the bullshit coming before him day after day, bitter that the years he spent in law school amounted to this: If one more punk comes before me wanting to change his name. . . . .

On top of all this, Haruki has more troubles. He tells me one day he has a new girlfriend he desperately wants to have sex with, but she is a health fanatic, someone who takes her body very seriously, considers it a temple, etc. The problem here is that he has an STD. So if he tells her he has herpes, she won’t sleep with him, she won’t let him into her temple, even if he takes his shoes off and washes his feet and puts on protective slippers, if I know what he means.

I almost never give anyone advice, never quite knowing what to do, myself, but here I blurt out: You have to tell her.

Yeah, he says, and looks off. You’re right. In a way that leaves no doubt – he is never going to tell her.

I have to be careful. Judgment is the thing, the most fatal thing here. If anything could be said to unite my coworkers, it would be a mantra along the lines of: Don’t tread on me. I know very little of their lives before they became their own men, under the banner of their new names, but I think I can make a rough sketch. So this is what happened, I often think, to the kids I never knew in high school. The kids who didn’t go to college because they had already figured out the system was rigged against them, or that the system was just plain bullshit and they didn’t want one of its certificates of completion. All the kids who spent their electives in the electronics lab disassembling stereos and computers, the kids in the Star Wars t-shirts, the kids who dropped out, or who graduated but skipped the ceremony, or who went to the ceremony just so they could raise their middle fingers to their classmates and teachers as they walked across the stage. All they ever wanted was to get out and live. To get the first job they could land and an apartment of their own, so they could start living. Here they are ten years later, I think, hardened with living.

By contrast I have done everything I was supposed to do – I went to college and even graduate school – but here I am in the same place. Which sort of proves their point – that none of that bullshit matters. And to make matters worse, all that time I was in school, I wasn’t really living. I didn’t go out in college like other people did. Partly because I had two jobs, and needed my free time for schoolwork, but mostly because I didn’t want to. I just wanted to be alone.

And still do. I have very few friends and even at that, can’t seem to keep up with them – their letters arrive and I don’t even open them, I just set them on top of my dresser. I have a rule about not opening new letters until I answer the last, but the days go by, and weeks, and still I don’t reply. Something is wrong with me, some kind of muteness that descends on me for months at a time. The only way I can manage to communicate with the world is by writing stories, then publishing them in obscure academic journals, where maybe three people read them. I am intensely interested in this thing called life, and yet a complete failure at it.

* * *

You haven’t lived, Fortune tells me one day, until you’ve seen a WWF match in my basement. What comes to mind first is the World Wildlife Federation, its cute panda logo. My face contorts as I try to figure out what kind of match Fortune is talking about. Proboscis monkeys vs. Tasmanian devils, in a vicious fight to the death. . . .

I’m talking wrestling, he says. I’m talking about a Smackdown, Bitch!

I tell Fortune I don’t really go out. Like, ever. I tell him I’m trying to write, trying to finish a book, working against a deadline. But he keeps asking. And when that fails, telling. You’re coming, he says. Everyone’s gonna be there. Call it a work retreat. Call it mandatory.

On the night of the Smackdown I walk to Fortune’s house and see that he lives in a surprisingly nice neighborhood, each house and lawn carefully tended, with window boxes full of flowers, tire swings suspended from tall trees, children’s bicycles lying sideways in driveways. I ring the bell and someone, one of Fortune’s roommates who is almost indistinguishable from Fortune, answers the door and ushers me down into the dark, cool basement. I work at Circuit City, the roommate explains on the way down the stairs. So you might say buying electronics is a bit of an occupational hazard. Then I see what he means. The basement has been converted into a theater, with a projector mounted on the ceiling, aimed at a wall-sized screen. Four giant speakers surround the viewing area. Each, the roommate explains, calibrated to produce different effects, so when you sit in the center of them, on one of the couches or puffy recliners arranged in a horseshoe in front of the screen, you get a full audio immersion. I can hardly hear what he’s saying, because the Smackdown experience is so bright, and cranked so loud, it’s sort of all-consuming.

Have a seat, he says, and when I do, on a couch between Fortune and yet another roommate nearly indistinguishable from Fortune, I find that yes, I am fully immersed. Someone hands me a beer, a Red Stripe, and I sit turning it in my hands in a hypnotic state. No one is wrestling when I first arrive but there’s a lot of pageantry, wrestlers coming into the ring making speeches to the giant screaming crowd surrounding them. Now and then the camera veers off behind the scenes, down hallways into dressing rooms, where wrestlers, supposedly caught off guard, look into the camera and offer up perfectly-crafted, growling threats. Everyone tries to fill me in on the identity and history of the major players – Mankind, Triple H, Stone Cold Steve Austin. They hand me back issues of WWF magazine to inspect, so I can school myself on the shifting feuds and alliances that serve as the backdrop to this particular Smackdown. The only wrestler who catches my eye is The Undertaker, a gothic giant fond of black leather whose signature expression involves rolling his eyes so far back in his head you could only see the whites, a classic playground move. His character is a supernatural one, I’m told, a conduit between our world and the underworld, the kind of guy whose other car is a boat, circling the underworld’s river of pain.

At one point a loud frenzy of adulation goes through the room because Dwayne Johnson’s The Rock is making his entrance. Dressed in skin-tight black wrestling shorts and black-lensed sunglasses, he is tan and glistening, waxed and buffed to a high sheen. The Rock is the main attraction for Fortune and his friends. They love his bravado, his showmanship, his catch phrases, his sculpted sideburns. They love the music that plays when he enters the ring, the way the crowd goes wild, the way he holds the microphone high and talks about himself in the third person: Finally The Rock has returned. . . . .

I, too, like him instantly. I like how he manages to put on the best performance of all the wrestlers – the most dramatic and intense – yet somehow also, in some way I can’t name, conveys that it’s all an act, a bit of fun. And perhaps I like him because, on the spectrum of ego, he’s about as far away from me as a person could possibly get. I try for a second to imagine talking about myself in The Rock’s language, as if I mattered. I try to imagine feeling good, strong, powerful, and the effect is that I burst out laughing.

Then, right in the middle of The Rock’s moment, things take a sour turn.

Apparently the purpose of this particular Smackdown is to introduce a new wrestler to the WWF family, one who has been billing himself as not Y2K but Y2J. The J standing for Jericho. The cameras turn to this Jericho, who strikes me as absurd even in this context. Jericho is on stage all of ten seconds and it’s already clear he’s no good. He’s just another punk with long blond hair, half of which is pulled into a ponytail at the top of his head, a hairstyle I’ve only seen before on little girls. To make matters worse someone has decided to outfit him in a jacket that looks like it was made out of a disco ball.

Jericho prattles on about how he is here to save us. But even as he’s touting his credentials, I’m wondering how he got this far. How he had the audacity to name himself after an ancient holy city. And so is The Rock. When the camera cuts back to him – right after Jericho declares himself to be the most charismatic hero in all of wrestling – he raises a single eyebrow, a gesture of skepticism that crests over the rims of his sunglasses.

It’s ON, people keep saying. Bitch, it’s ON.

So this is our Colosseum, I think, these are our gladiatorial contests, where we determine and crown our heroes. I don’t get the direction the WWF seems to be taking with Jericho, don’t understand their target audience. Maybe America needs to see itself in simple terms again, I think, blond and blue-eyed, in glittering armor. Maybe it’s getting tired of antiheroes. Maybe it’s trying to renew itself with a new savior for the new century. Even wrestling, I suppose, is entitled to an apocalyptic crisis.

Already I’m making a theory out of professional wrestling, something that bothers me about myself. The thing that bothers me the most, actually. In my brain is a petty critic bent over a typewriter, firing off little missives, analyzing every piece of stimulus it takes in, spinning it through some kind of socio-political centrifuge. It seems like other people are capable of simply spending time with friends, of drinking beer and watching wrestling. But I can’t seem to. I can’t shut off this monologue, this voice that comes between me and experience, that insists on translating experience, even as I’m living it, into prose. Sometimes it even seems to me that the voice I hear isn’t my own, but someone else’s. It’s like the scene from Annie Hall, where Woody Allen is standing in line for a movie ticket, forced to endure the chatter of the academic blowhard in line behind him, deriding Fellini as technical and indulgent. I’m gonna have a stroke, Allen complains. And Annie says: Well, stop listening to him. To which Allen replies: He’s screaming his opinions in my ear. It’s a real circus in my head. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

The thrill of the Smackdown vanishes as quickly as it appeared, and suddenly I want to go home. I wait a while, knowing that the earlier I leave the more I will drop in Fortune’s estimation. I wait until I can’t stand it anymore.

Sit down, Motherfucker! Fortune says, when I stand up and stretch.

I have to be at work early, I say. I have this terrible job I have to show up for at six, and this crazy boss who would kill me if I overslept. He has to give me that one.

I walk home in the dark, past the coffee shop, over the tracks to my apartment. The landlady of my building has covered its small lawn with little plastic animals, smiling deer and rabbits and squirrels, and in the place of flowers, little plastic pinwheels. The whole lawn is covered with fake things standing where real things should be, and it embarrasses me. Whenever someone asks me where I live, I say the building with the godawful plastic menagerie out front, and everyone knows just where I mean. Living here has amounted to a slow, steady assault on my sensibilities, my very dignity, and now something violent inside me bubbles up, some lingering effect of the Smackdown, and on my way across the lawn I kick over one of the deer. Though a few minutes later I come back outside and set it right again.

Then I lie down in the dark. I am always tired these days but can’t sleep. Something about what’s wrong with me – now clear to me as a textbook case of anxiety and depression, but a mystery to me at the time, to my mind just a defect in my nature, a seemingly irremediable failure to thrive – keeps me awake. Lying in the dark is when I tend to get into trouble. My chest aches, as if constrained by a heavy weight, and the voice runs in my head unchecked, going over every bit of the day, lingering on the moments I said or did something awkward. Spinning everything into a narrative. I can’t stand it. Sometimes it’s so bad I have to get up and walk around the block several times. I have done this at two, three, four in the morning, more times than I can count. Often as I walk I am short of breath.

To make matters worse there’s the problem with the phone. When I first hooked up the line in this apartment I started receiving all kinds of calls and messages intended for a service named Executive Escorts, whose old number, now my number, was still listed in Yellow Pages in motel rooms all over the city. Men called at all hours wanting blondes, redheads, Asian girls, fat girls. They left long, desperate messages. I always let the calls go to the machine and listened as these voices filled up the room: I’m at the Airport Motel, I’m looking for somebody, I don’t really care who. All of the men sounded the same, as if they were trying to disguise their voices by making them deeper. And there was always a tremble in their voices, as if they were scared.

I could have just unplugged the phone, of course, or gotten a new number, but however much I hated the calls I was also drawn to them. I felt like I was learning something important about life. I kept telling myself: This is real life. Not the bullshit you see on TV. Instead it is this darkness. It is this.

For a while I kept a log of the calls, wanting some sort of tally of loneliness and desperation, but they came so often I eventually stopped. So I don’t have a record for that night – my only notes are about the Smackdown, and kicking the deer over, and the sad but not surprising sense of regret I feel about flunking out of another social encounter. But the calls came almost every night, so it’s more than likely that as I lay on my mattress, with the weight of this most recent failure heavy on my chest, like a lead apron at the dentist’s, the calls would have come rolling in. More often than not, someone was lonely, unbearably lonely.

* * *

I suppose I should mention here that I was married at the time, to the only person I had ever loved, or even known, someone I had met during my first semester of college. After I met him I decided I didn’t need to meet anyone else. Ever. And for several years, I was right. We were happy. Just two people who wanted to be artists, scraping together a living. But then, inexplicably, he decided to go to medical school, and things started to shift. By this time we were keeping opposite hours – he often spent his nights at the hospital. If we did happen to be home at the same time, he was asleep. I knew almost nothing of his life in medical school and he knew almost nothing of my life, neither at the shop, nor the problems and ideas I was working out in my notebook. And there were other clouds gathering above us. I don’t want to say too much about it, wanting to protect his privacy – and also because the whole thing still makes me too sad, too sad to write clearly – but in the briefest, easiest phrasing I’ll just say that he had his own demons. I’ll say that the seeds of what would split us apart were being sown at that time. A big part of what was troubling me that year – the biggest part – had to do with this. I didn’t know what was coming, how exactly it would end, but I knew I was standing in its shadow. I could feel its breath on my neck. The failure of this marriage seemed to me at the time unendurable. My thinking that year went something along the lines of: The world is ending and so are we. I couldn’t imagine living past the marriage, into the new century. I just couldn’t see past it.

* * *

The summer blazes to an end and when the weather cools, a yearning comes over me. It’s late September and, as Rod Stewart said, I really should be back at school. But I’m not. I just keep getting up every morning and crossing the tracks, nodding to the dwarf, beholding the figures bent over their plates at White Castle, listening to the men at the car wash, making decaf cappuccinos for Papa John. All of this robotically and sort of hopelessly. To make matters worse, my favorite coworker – which is Jim, because he is so quiet, so private, so dignified, because we work together in silence but in choreographed, balletic perfection – keeps taking extended leaves of absence. First to cut and then edit an album at a studio in Chicago. And then to go on tour with his band in Amsterdam. I still haven’t heard Jim’s music and am skeptical that he’s actually recording and touring. It’s more likely, I think, that touring Amsterdam is a euphemism for going on an elaborate bender. When regulars ask where Jim is these days, I tell them he’s touring Amsterdam, using air quotes. A beat skips, and then they break out smiling. Oh, I get it, they say. I catch your drift.

Then one day something good happens. I show up at work and am introduced to a new hire named Jared. Charmed, I’m sure, he says, and offers up his hand like Scarlett O’Hara. He is tall and rail-thin and has clean-cut hair, almost a buzz cut, the top stiff with gel and sticking straight up. He wears silver wire-rimmed glasses with tiny oval lenses, just barely larger than his eyes. When we shake hands it’s like a circuit has come together and closed – a rush of energy goes through me. It must be the same for him, because within the hour we’ve decided we’re soul mates.

Maybe it’s because of our bodies, which are perfectly matched. We’re both tall and thin, with long, narrow faces, and when we stand facing each other it’s somewhat like looking in a mirror. Maybe it’s because we both studied English in college, because he’s currently reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s and I’ve read everything Truman Capote ever wrote, twice. Maybe it’s because we both think the world is ending. But probably it’s because we both hold ourselves apart from other people, and yet desperately want their approval – and we recognize this quality in one another.

I start working every shift I can with Jared. We talk about books, movies, celebrities. He has a sharp, cunning sense of humor and works it against the regulars like a foil. He has a shockingly loud, braying laugh, which he employs often, usually after saying something devastating about a departing customer. Like: Hope you get in your fancy little car and fall asleep at the wheel because I gave you decaf, bitch.

Around Jared I can talk and laugh freely. I don’t really know why – all I know is that I’ve only ever found a handful of people I’ve been able to connect with in this way. Our relationship is oddly physical. Sometimes when the morning rush gets to be too much, we just stop and press our bodies together and hug each other tightly for thirty seconds. He caresses my hair, I hold his head in my hands. Tears sometimes escape my eyes, I am so overwhelmed with this feeling, this closeness. People in line are startled by us. Most of them amused. It made my day to see two people do something like that, they say. But others are pissed off. Like: Hello? I’m just standing here! There’s nothing sexual between us, nothing at all, which is why it works.

We start spending time together outside of work. I go to his house, a tiny brick bungalow on a crowded street of bungalows. I meet his mother and his brother, who have the exact same face as Jared, but are accessorized differently, in the same way that Barbie comes in different versions of herself. Whereas Jared is Gay Urban Sophisticate, his mother is Middle-Aged Corporate Sally, and his brother is Rastafarian Fuckup, complete with long dreadlocks and shell necklaces. I feel like I could join the family, become its newest member. Depressed Aspiring Writer. Black-Clad Social Failure.

One of our favorite things to do is watch NBC’s new sitcom, Will & Grace, about a handsome gay man and his beautiful straight female best friend. We fancy ourselves versions of the title characters, though admittedly falling short in looks and accomplishment. In truth we prefer the minor characters – the shallow and hypercritical Jack, whose snide and cutting remarks double us over with laughter, and Karen, wealthy and cruel and oblivious, with a voice like Minnie Mouse and dialogue like Marie Antoinette. We watch in my apartment, and we laugh so hard, and so often, I imagine it angers my neighbors, who are elderly and skeptical of the young. They seem, up to now, to have decided I’m okay. But surely not anymore: All year not a peep from this girl, and now this!

One night Jared takes me to a drag show. There’s a gay bar in Louisville called Connections, which hosts what it advertises as the #1 drag show in the country. I’m skeptical of their claim – what about New York? San Francisco? – though when I see the show for myself I am astonished. The quality of these women! I keep exclaiming. They are so beautiful. One black woman in particular mesmerizes me. She wears nothing but a G-string and a long green feather boa, which she runs tantalizingly between her breasts and legs. I am in awe of her. I have never seen beauty like this in my life. I tell Jared that he has opened my eyes to vast worlds, far beyond my previous imagining. He tells me this is just the beginning. Stick with me, he says. Like I’d ever leave, I think. I wonder if he knows. How desperate I was before I met him. How strange it all is for me, to have someone.

* * *

Finally the millennium is upon us, and even reputable publications start advising certain precautions – to keep a copy of your bank statement with your balance on it, to back up all of your files, to have enough food and water on hand for three days in case the grid collapses. I do none of these things. Nor do I make plans to celebrate the new year. Other people want to be somewhere memorable when the clock strikes midnight – Times Square, nightclubs – and all around me I hear them making their plans. But at the dawn of the new millennium I’m alone at home, uncertain whether the power fails or the world ends, because I don’t care, I’m asleep.

Then the world wakes up on January 1st and looks itself in the mirror and determines it is just a pile of neuroses that’s been running around thinking it has a brain tumor, when it doesn’t, in fact, have a brain tumor. Suddenly the world is Woody Allen, sort of clearing its throat, straightening its tie, holding up its index finger, saying: To quote Mark Twain, reports of my death have been greatly, you know, exaggerated.

I conclude that morning I’m going to have to figure out how to live. I’m going to have to make some plans.

* * *

One winter morning Jared and I discover we share a dream, which is to ride the rails all the way to the west coast. We’ve both spent long hours daydreaming, imagining ourselves crossing the country in open freight cars. Neither one of us has ever met another person with this particular ambition, and the fact that we share it solidifies our friendship all the more. We start to make plans. Jokingly at first, but then with increasing seriousness. As soon as the weather gets better, Jared says. We’re going. We’re fucking going. One day at work he shows me a manual he has procured through some sort of hobo underground – a stack of mimeographs held together with a binder clip, so battered it looks to have been passed through ten thousand pairs of hands. The manual is full of hand-written charts and notes, tips for which trains to catch and where to catch them.

We decide to practice hopping on and off. One afternoon when the shop is practically empty, and we hear the traffic bells and see the arms coming down to stop cars for the passing train, we sprint out of the shop and onto the tracks. We run alongside the train, which is much bigger up close, and moving much faster than it appeared from a distance. Jared jumps on and for a bit, he is standing on the car with one hand on the handle, leaning down, extending his arm to help me up, just like every clichéd train-jumping scene ever recorded on film. And from these films I know what to do, run and then jump toward the open bed, and somehow simultaneously catch his hand. I do it. I leap and I make it. We stand on the open car, gleeful, holding each other in a tight hug. We pass another crossing, with cars lined up waiting, and we wave at them, they wave back. We are exuberant.

We have left the shop unattended and have to jump off. We watch the ground beneath us, the white and gray rocks going by in a blur. The train is picking up speed and the longer we wait, the worse it gets. I know I will injure myself, but I need to jump so I do it anyway. That’s what being twenty-five is like: you do it anyway. I land hard and turn my ankle, and so does Jared. We limp back to the shop.

After that first time, we catch the train again and again. Just run out of the shop and jump it. Then we jump right off and go back to work. We develop a bit of a reputation amongst regulars and coworkers. Those two, people say. Jesus Christ, those two.

Jared spends untold hours bent over his sewing machine, fashioning a pair of patchwork bellbottoms for himself, and for me, a full-length patchwork skirt that cinches with a ribbon. He comes to work one morning wearing the pants, and presents the skirt to me, which I immediately put on over my pants. The patches are absurdly bright – there are squares of yellow and purple paisley, pink and red checks, green and orange stripes. If we are hobos, which the pants and skirt are meant to suggest, we are whimsical ones. Ones who haven’t gotten very dirty yet. We wear the skirt and pants every time we are on shift together and just about everyone who comes into the shop makes some sort of comment. Well look at you two. Is this a joke? Are you in some kind of a band?

Wouldn’t you like to know, is more or less the answer we give to everyone. What people are looking for most in their lives, some part of us understands, is a bond like this, and since we are the ones who have it, and little else, we are standoffish, even cruel. No one else is welcome in our club. Everyone else can, as the saying goes, fuck off and die.

We’re going to do it, Jared keeps saying. In the spring, when the weather breaks, we’re doing it. We pore over the manual and make plans. We want to stay for a while in Colorado, then California. I’m a little bit afraid – I’ve never really done anything like this, anything at all – but then again, fuck it, what do I have to lose? This place? Where do I get in line?

* * *

All that winter and into spring I’m feeling buoyant. Hopping trains with Jared and hopping off. Working on a couple of stories, which are starting to come together – soon I will have a book. I don’t feel the heaviness on my chest so much anymore. I’m sleeping better. I no longer lie awake wondering when and how it will end. But as has proven to be the case my entire life, just when I think something is going okay, a hammer comes down.

I show up at work one day and Jared tells me he’s leaving. His fuck-up little brother, the one with the same face but the dreadlocks and tie-dyed shirts, has gotten into some trouble in Portland. He was there visiting friends, Jared says. And got pulled over by the cops. With drugs in the car. Enough to put him in jail. His little brother is in jail. Currently, right now.

Oh, my God, I say.

Jared talks continuously for the next two hours, during which the details of his brother’s predicament evolve. Details suggesting that maybe his brother wasn’t just visiting friends, maybe had more drugs on him than would be practical for personal use – it looks like his brother might have been working as a dealer, Jared admits, a trafficker. Oh, and the car was stolen. His brother didn’t steal it – a friend had let him borrow it. But the friend’s car was stolen. Which is how the brother got pulled over in the first place. So we’re not talking about a slap on the wrist, here. We’re talking about felony counts. We’re talking about federal prison.

Jesus Christ, I say.

At some point it occurs to me that Jared’s brother is in so much trouble, Jared couldn’t possibly help him. What are you supposed to do about it? I say. You don’t have a law degree! You don’t have any money! I mean, what can you possibly do out there?

I have to go, he says. Which I understand. I do.Well, I ask him, are you at least coming back? He says he doesn’t know. He says he’s always wanted to do seasonal work, like at one of those ski lodges in Colorado where you board for free and make money on top of that working as a bellhop or waiter or whatever. That’s not a very good life, I tell him. On college breaks I’d worked in a restaurant in the resort town of Ogunquit, Maine, and I knew the nature of seasonal work and its employees to be desperate and dark. I paint for Jared the grimmest picture I can. All your coworkers are addicts and part-time prostitutes, I tell him. People who do anything for money. Desperate things. Cruel things. Anything at all.

Well, he says, that doesn’t sound so bad. I want to give it a try. Come with me. Come with me.

I keep forgetting: Jared wants to live, just like I do, but the difference between us is, he’s willing to do it.

The whole shift I keep trying to talk him out of it. Can’t you just help your brother from here? Can’t your mom go? Do you have to disrupt your own life in order to save your brother? Jared shrugs in a way that indicates his life here isn’t so much. Which I suppose it isn’t. It’s just me, basically. And I’m not so much.

Then that’s it. Even before the shift ends he’s on his way. We stand hugging for a long moment. Come with me, he says. Come with me.

Just come back, I tell him. Straighten everything out and come back.

* * *

I try again. We have to hire someone to replace Jared and who we hire is Myron. Like Jared he is gay and catty, so there is real potential here, I think. But unlike Jared, whose bad behavior was buoyed by humor and an underlying decency as a human being – if he backed into your car in a parking lot he would leave a note, is the way I think of these things – Myron seems to be coming from a darker place. You can tell just by looking at him. He is short and thin and pale, sickly looking. His hair, longish and kinky, is parted down the center, and is somehow perpetually wet, limp against his skull – he has the bedraggled look of a person who just washed up on shore. By far Myron’s most salient characteristic is a mouth full of ruined teeth. Not only are they brown, but they are flaking off at the tips. Occasionally I have dreams where my teeth are crumbling and falling out, nightmares I suppose you’d say, and Myron’s teeth look like this, a living nightmare.

Myron wears wire-rimmed glasses, the lenses so small they barely encircle his eyes, and he is fond of adjusting them when he talks, a gesture which lends him a thoughtful air. And indeed he is wading in a deeper intellectual pool than anyone else in the shop, certainly more so than Jared, who loved to gossip about television and pop stars, drag queens, who liked to keep everything pretty and shiny and light. In the first shifts I work with Myron I learn he is finishing a master’s in music theory – or rather, he is taking a semester off before finishing a master’s in music theory. He got into some trouble with money, he says, which I assume means he got into some trouble with drugs.

Because of money problems, too, he lives with his mother, about a half-mile up the road in a pale blue duplex. He tells me his mother is old, and a nurse, and an absolutely intolerable roommate. When she gets off her shift she is practically dead. She walks through the door and plops herself in a recliner in front of the television and falls asleep, snoring for long hours with her mouth open. The sound, in fact the entire scene, is unbearable. When Myron speaks of his mother, which he does often, I sense a bit of a “Tell-Tale Heart” quality to his monologue. As if I am listening to the confession of an obsessive grudge that will one day end in her death.

One day as our shift is ending Myron invites me back to his house. “Do you want to come home with me?” he says, a bit shy. Not looking at me. Scouring an espresso filter with a little brush. I understand that this is a bit of a risk, something of a tender moment. People here know each other to a certain extent – all we do all day is talk – but it’s rare to get an invitation home, where all of one’s stories and characterizations about one’s life will be witnessed and verified.

So, do I want to?

This is where the stories are.

Between the coffee shop and Myron’s house is a little Italian grocery, and we stop in to get something to eat. It’s the kind of specialty import shop with fancy meats and cheeses in a deli case, as well as prepared foods – various meats suspended in mayonnaise, chicken and tuna and lobster salads, as well as oil-based salads, tortellini and seafood. We are both grotesquely fixated on the seafood salad because there are tiny squid lounging in the bin, their heads collapsed, their tentacles raised as if to defend themselves from the net that ensnared them. I have always had a recoiling and yet also, paradoxically, magnetic reaction to perfectly symmetrical arrangements – any pattern that is too orderly or precise – and so the perfect, perfect suction cups lined on the underside of the tentacles make me queasy. I can’t look at them yet can’t stop looking at them, drawn and repulsed in an alternating current.

Myron and I start doing voiceover for the squids, naming what we assume to be their innermost desires: Get me out of here, bitches! Give me liberty or give me death! We are giggling and pressing our faces to the deli case like hungry children. An old Italian woman comes to the counter and asks us what we want. I’m worried Myron will suggest we buy them and eat them, but he doesn’t. We just start laughing, and run out of the shop.

Then we arrive at the house where indeed, as advertised, a white-haired woman is collapsed on a recliner in front of the blaring television, snoring. The house is dark – all the curtains are drawn – and musty. The rooms are small and the ceilings are low and I’m almost immediately overcome by a low-grade panic. Claustrophobia, I guess. I see something moving from the corner of my eye, then another moving thing, and another, and realize there are cats in the house, many of them. They are putting one leg in front of the other, of the other, of the other, in a kind of stalking manner that unsettles me.

Myron motions for me to follow him and moves off down the hallway toward his room. Which is small to begin with, then hemmed in further by piles of junk of various sizes. Taking up nearly the entire room is a music station – a giant electronic keyboard attached by multiple wires to a desktop iMac. Myron shows me the computer program he uses to compose his music. He strikes a chord on the keys and they translate onto a staff stretching across the computer screen. He plays a little melody and the screen populates with eighth and quarter and half notes, with rests and trills. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Myron lights a cigarette, then plays me a few of his compositions. Which sound to me like the musical equivalent of walking through a funhouse, or carrying a bunch of boxes and then falling down a set of stairs. By which I mean, things are surprising and distorted; you can’t see what’s coming; furthermore, what you think is coming isn’t coming, and in its place is either nothing, or something weird. There are a few lone, tentative, dissonant notes, then a stretch of silence, then a clattering of notes. Later in my life I will know how to describe this – as music influenced by John Cage, Philip Glass, Steve Reich. But at the time it just sort of blows my mind.

There is no place to sit in Myron’s room, so I’m lying on his bed, a twin mattress on the floor – his childhood bed, I suppose. In the dark, listening to this strange music, I cross my arms over my chest like a corpse and let it wash over me in slow waves, until I am hypnotized, almost paralyzed with it.

Then, what can I say – I am so tired from the day’s work, and my brain is so taxed from listening to these unfamiliar musical patterns – I fall asleep. And not just lightly – I drop way down into it. The kind of sleep that makes you snore.

When I wake up it’s all at once, the way you’d snap to attention if you’d fallen asleep at the wheel of a car. “Oh God, I’m sorry,” I say.

Myron is still fucking around on his keyboard. Deep, reverberating sounds fill the room, like the organ music playing in the background of a funeral, only louder, as if we’re seated inside the organ itself. “Something about this house,” he says, “puts people to sleep.” He’s not looking at me, his face pressed close up to the computer screen. I can’t tell if he’s offended and think he might be – you reveal your innermost compositions for someone and they fall asleep.

I am suddenly in a great hurry to get out of there, scramble up and out. Past his mother, still asleep with her mouth open. When I escape into the bright afternoon I feel like Persephone.

Myron and I are still friends, but I never go back to his house. It was more grim there than I imagined. Beyond the darkness and must and cats and snoring mother, there was a heaviness there that felt like dread, like lying in a dentist’s chair as he approaches you with a drill.

Christ, is basically the way I feel about it. I have my own problems.

* * *

All this time I’ve been looking for stories. But now I’m wondering: what if the only story here is that you just keep getting up and going to work, making barely enough money to keep yourself alive, day after day, and that’s it. Or you keep getting up and going to work, making barely enough money to keep yourself alive, day after day, until some impulse, boredom or desire, causes you to do something desperate, or stupid, something irremediable, like holding up a 7-Eleven and then getting caught, or overdosing, or fucking a stranger and getting pregnant, or getting AIDS, and then what you wanted, for something to happen, relief from the sameness, has happened, but not in the way you would like, and that’s the story? What if that’s the story?

* * *

Something dreadful starts happening at work. One morning, right in the middle of the rush, someone locks herself in the women’s bathroom and smears shit all over the toilet, stall, and sink. The first time it happens, everyone is horrified to what we consider the fullest extent, but we later find out, when it happens again, that our previous horror did not include the possibility it would happen again, and so later, when we realize we are amidst an ongoing problem, our horror is redoubled.

It happens again and again. Someone is targeting us. We try to figure out who. We talk and think of little else. Managing the morning rush is no longer a thing done for itself, but a pretext for catching the person we now call The Shitter. The journal we keep behind the register, to communicate between the morning and afternoon shifts, is filled with dramatic entries. An employee who knows something about psychology writes a note telling us that the medical term for this behavior is scatolia, and that it is a common practice. The shit we’re cleaning is the product of a mental disorder that mostly affects highly successful people in stressful professions. This isn’t the shit of the masses, she writes, it is the shit of the bourgeoisie. People leave all kinds of notes in reply. If these fucking Jabronis keep shitting all over our bathroom, someone writes, I’m gonna drop a load of it in their coffee and serve it right back. It occurs to me this would maybe be a bad time for the health department to pay a visit.

I clean it up a few times. When you’re twenty-five, and have done everything you’re supposed to have done in life, stayed out of trouble, not messed with drugs, gone to college, then graduate school, and you find yourself wearing rubber gloves and a mask, sponging a stranger’s shit from every surface of a bathroom, well, you start to feel like you’ve taken a wrong turn.

Eventually the employees tell the owners of the coffee shop that we’re done. We’re not cleaning up any more shit. The owners agree, so the next time it happens they call a cleaning company, an industrial one that remedies carpets in the wake of murders and suicides. The owners call and describe the situation, but the cleaners decline. We don’t do that, they say. Blood, yes. Shit, no.

We devote ourselves to identifying suspects, finding the perp. Start checking the bathroom every few minutes. One day when I’m not on shift, one of the employees watches a woman – a high-powered lawyer who wears high-powered suits, double-breasted, with shoulder pads and everything – go into the bathroom, then come out some minutes later. He races in the bathroom to find it covered in shit, then races out to the parking lot just as she’s pulling out of the lot in her BMW. He chases after her car, screaming, his arms in the air. She never comes back.

* * *

By now things are back to the way they were. The bit of brightness I had with Jared is gone and in its place, not just the darkness that was there before but also a new shame – the shame of having believed in the light. I keep working, wanting to finish my book, to put an end to it. At last I finish the story about the high school girl and the suicidal outcast. There’s a scene at the end where the outcast, having joined the Navy and shipped out on the Pacific, calls the girl and tries to tell her something, but the connection is ship-to-shore, and they can’t get the hang of it – they end up talking over each other, and wading through awkward silences, until they are cut off. Not long after, the boy kills himself. What the story is about, ultimately, is getting there a minute too late. Just missing something. This is what I want to say about life. That it could be beautiful, that everything broken could be made whole again. But instead, we fuck it up.

* * *

What if this is the whole story?

* * *

One afternoon I sit out on the patio after my shift, scribbling in my notebook, getting down the day’s thoughts. I work for a while and then decide to head home. But first I’ll clear off all the tables, I think, even though I’m off the clock and it’s not my problem. So I’m gathering up all the dishes people have left behind and have them sort of pressed against me. Though it is impossible to imagine this now, some day I will have three kids, and every night after they’re in bed I will be doing this same thing again, touring the house and gathering dishes. It will be my favorite part of the day, this ritual of setting things right again, pulling together all of their discarded clothes, their little socks and t-shirts and jackets, all of the crockery they have left in every room, the cups and plates and dishes and silverware they have toddled off with and abandoned, every night I will pull everything into my chest and hunch over it, trying to contain it all. Someday someone will ask me what having three kids is like and I will say: Your arms are always full. This will turn out to be the defining posture of my life, this curvature, this delicate balance.

So that’s what I’m doing when the traffic bells start clanging and I become aware, vaguely, of a line of cars stretching toward the shop, stopped to wait for the coming train. A car stops in front of the shop and it is blaring some kind of mariachi music, which I don’t hear very often and which always strikes me as unduly cheerful. I look up to see who’s listening to this music – some guy in a shitty little car, hunched in on itself, maybe a Chevy Citation. I’m watching this car when I hear the revving of an engine. And then so fast, so fast, this even shittier car – a red Geo Metro, I think – comes blazing past the row of cars, racing down the wrong lane. The car is going so fast. Something is wrong, I think. I turn and watch as the car pulls aside of the boom gate and lurches onto the tracks. He’s trying to beat the train, I think to myself, but then no. The car stops right in the middle of the tracks. He’s stuck, I think, that shitty little car has failed him at just the wrong moment. But then no, no. There’s still time to get out, there’s still time to get out and run, there’s still time, still time. But he doesn’t. He just sits there and waits. The men at the car wash start shouting: Oh shit, oh shit, oh no! Suddenly there’s the horn and the screeching of the wheels on the track and then at the absolute last second, the car lurches off. I stand there for the longest time. Various ideas present themselves – that the car stalled, that a teenager was trying to have himself some fun – but there’s a heavy feeling in my stomach. Something’s wrong, I keep thinking. Something’s wrong. I stand there staring until I realize I can’t anymore – I’m about to drop all of the dishes I’m holding.

Two days later I work my shift, then walk home and do whatever it is I do after work – take a nap, watch television, listen to music. But it isn’t long before hunger drives me out of the house – those years, my cupboards are always bare, and I eat almost exclusively food from work, or from the little deli next to the coffee shop. I’m walking to this deli, approaching the tracks, when I see a cluster of fire trucks and police cars, their lights spinning, and then behind them, on the bank that slopes between the car wash and the tracks, I see the red car again, balled up like a napkin. And I confirm the truth of what I saw two days before, that awful feeling. What the driver intended is now absolutely certain, and done with.

I am queasy, no longer hungry, and instead of the deli head for the nearest bar. I order a beer and sit with my head in my hands. The path I am on has been made clear to me now. What it really looks like when you stay on this track, how it really ends. It is so close to me I can practically reach out and touch it. I can feel it in my body.

I feel a terrible sorrow for the driver. That no one stopped him. That he felt he had nothing to live for. Didn’t he know, I think, that even perfect strangers were filled with terror at the sight of him sitting on the tracks, that we were willing him to live? And I suppose, as I sit turning this thought about this stranger around in my mind, I begin to think it about myself, too. I believe this idea – that it is still possible for me to switch tracks, to make good – starts here, in this bar, on this day.

The other track is lost to me for a long time, shrouded in fog. It is precarious and shifting. Some primal instinct drives me forward. I don’t really know how it happens, what changes. I just keep getting up in the morning until things get better. Or I just keep getting up in the morning until I can put things – my health and freedom, my relatively good fortune – in a better perspective. Or I just keep getting up in the morning until the feeling – that heavy feeling – goes away, something to do with getting older, I suppose – you don’t feel things the way you used to. Or I just keep getting up in the morning until I have someone else to care for, until I’m responsible for someone other than myself. In any event I keep walking through those days. It is as if my future children have made a trail for me, have scattered bits of bread through the dark forest, leading me to them, the place we will one day call home.

* * *

I know what happened to Jim – I continue to be impressed by his talent and good fortune. And I know perfectly well what happened to Papa John. Over the last twenty years he has amassed a fortune, making him the big winner here by just about any standard, or perhaps I should say any standard that seems to matter in the world we live in now. Still, there are things he can’t buy, things just out of his reach. I note he is having trouble buying his company outright, after its board removed him from his post as CEO in the wake of a scandal over his repeated use of a racial slur. He is having trouble taking things private, regaining his seat at the helm of his company, restoring his power, his reputation, his name.

I know, too, what happened to the world, which didn’t end as we thought it might, in some kind of computer-generated glitch that set off the second coming. But which ended in other ways, or at least the world as we knew it. I don’t think life has been the same since 9/11. Now and then I find myself listening sympathetically to certain prophecies and conspiracy theories – thinking that perhaps this really is the great war that will end the world.

Computers, in the past twenty years, have come a long way. If there was any sense that, frightened by the devastation our reliance on them might have caused in 2000, we should try to find our way around them, that sense is long gone. So much of what I’ve written here is not only hard to recall but hard to imagine. Life before the average person carried around a cell phone, before we had the internet in our houses and even our pockets. Life before we had the answers at our fingertips. When we walked around not knowing. When we only had available to us, at any given moment, what we already knew and remembered.

Muhammad Ali has since died, but the internet tells me the medal he threw in the river was found by a volunteer cleaning up the banks. Most of it was submerged in mud, but a section of it rose up, shining, announcing itself. So the legend proved to be true – he really had thrown it all away. But now that legend was revised to include the fact that something lost can occasionally be found again, and redeemed.

Somewhere near the outset of this project, as everything I have collected here is first coming together in my mind, Prince dies. As many artists do, from an overdose of painkillers. For several days I hear his songs, most notably 1999, on the radio and on television. I also hear someone on the radio, a friend of Prince’s, talking about all those years he spent, in the eighties and nineties, dancing and performing in heels. It ruined his hips, says the friend, and he’s been in pain ever since, with terrible arthritis. I talk with several people about it, and no one can believe it. We don’t want to hear that someone so talented, who took hold of the popular imagination for so long, paid for it this way. This shouldn’t be the story, we think. But it is.

I have no idea what happened to Fortune and Kalomar and Haruki. Not even the internet, which now offers up the answer to nearly every question I can think of, has anything to say about them. I have typed in both the names they gave themselves, and the names they were born with – all of which I changed for this piece – and have found nothing. I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Perhaps they are living off the grid, or conducting all of their business on the dark web. Perhaps all of their holdings are in Bitcoin.

I don’t know what happened to Myron, whose last name I can’t even remember. Maybe he’s a celebrated composer. I certainly hope so.

I am ashamed to say I don’t know where Jared is or what became of him. I am especially ashamed to confess that he wrote for a while but then, unanswered for such a long time, because for many years I continued in stifled muteness and couldn’t communicate with anyone, he gave up. I have never really been able to explain what came over me those years – both the compulsion I had to write those stories, and the way I drifted into solitude. I try to do better now.

* * *

Now I am forty-three, and I teach twenty-five-year-olds. Most of them are lively and happy. Though occasionally, once a year or so, one of them will appear at my office door, eyes brimming with tears, wanting to talk about those stories I wrote back in 1999. Those suicides. Was it real? they want to know. Those characters, those deaths.

I try to make a joke. You found my book, I say. Well, you doubled my audience.

I’m working on something similar, they say. Which is code for: I’m having a hard time.

I listen to the troubles they’re having with their writing. They describe their troubles in technical terms – I can’t make the scenes work, can’t find my way to the end. But there’s something more there – troubles beyond the page. The world is ending for them in much the way it seemed to be ending for me. Though in this case, perhaps worse. The environment, the wars and famines, epidemics, the politics – it really does seem like the end of days. They feel all of this so intensely. They are drowning in it.

Hang in there, I say. See it through. Keep working, keep going. I am talking about the work but I am also talking about the world, about life. They understand, I think. I hope.

I suppose I am writing this now to say it more clearly. Hang in there. See it through. Writing this for them, and also for myself, to remind myself what being young was like. Because once we are past it, how quickly we forget. The feeling dulls for us, and we forget. So much of this I had to cobble together from cryptic, undated notes, from memories shimmering around the edges.

We lose many of the details but the feeling is still there, just below the surface, and if we want to be of use to young people – if we want to be the person on solid ground, throwing out a rope – we must go back sometimes and remember. In the course of writing this piece – trying to remember which came first, the tracks or the White Castle – I used Google Earth to fly over that old territory. When it came up on screen my chest was clenched with that old tightness and the weight fell back on me, heavy as it ever was. I was filled with trembling. And I knew just what it was like again, to be walking around in the last days of a falling empire, to be alive, and twenty-five, back in 1999.

---

Christie Hodgen is the author of two novels, Elegies for the Brokenhearted (W.W. Norton & Co., 2010), and Hello, I Must Be Going (W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), and a collection of short stories A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003). She has published short works of fiction and non-fiction in over a dozen literary journals and anthologies including The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 2003.