brooklyn – vagando

Flying the Coop

Some people call it New York; others call it The Great Satan. I called it The Empire of the Straight Line. Anyways, I knowingly went into the maw of a beast that I had previously contemplated and watched wearily from a distance. It is hard to resist anthropomorphizing the city into a slovenly, unhealthy, greedy blob that perpetually rumbles with indigestion as it greedily ingests and consumes ever increasing amounts of people, energy, and raw materials before belching, vomiting, and sweating out their waste forms in all directions. So I am not even going to bother trying. I am certain it would trade its grandmother into sex slavery for mid-level tickets to a Bruce Springsteen show at Madison Square Garden. It is an obsessive compulsive patient that strives to control everything around it and a self-admiring insomniac. It is left brain biased; possibly afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome that manifests itself in an uncompassionate and grinding obsession with logic, rules, and order that create a create an awkward social environment.

This spring I left on an Amtrak bound for Salt Lake City via Chicago. As the train exited the station I got an erection that lasted for hours and made walking around the train a challenge. I did not socialize during this entire period, but it wasn’t really an optioon as there was yet no observation car.

I found an audience after leaving Chicago with whom I could share some of the sentiments and ideas that I had refined in New York – a recent college graduate from Wesleyan named Anna on her way West for the first time. She asked what I did when I was in New York. I told her that I founded and ran a non-profit called the Anti-Alliteration Alliance. That we worked to rid the earth of the societal scourge that is rude redundancy and vain verbosity through selling voodoo dolls of Wall Street executives. That being said, I told her that I didn’t want to talk about work though as writing was my passion and I wanted to share some ideas that I had been honing over the past few months. I gently began by explaining that our conception of history and society revolves around the idea of progress measured through material production and technological complexity – more speed, more mobility, more choice. That this gives the illusion that humanity has been on one continuous march towards a better future – effectively justifying the extermination of other cultures, environmental degradation, poverty, and the liquidation of millions of minds. That the quantifying logic of our material society demands exchange for everything, that everything be accounted for, and owned. And I informed her that it is simply impossible to question this conception of history from a materialist perspective that is so deeply socialized into us, as by its very nature it cannot assimilate all of the other essential human functions unless they somehow can be fit into a scheme of material production and consumption. I wondered aloud how you place a value on love or community or peace? I asked of her: Is not a civilization that finds peace, establishes equality, harmony with its environment, takes care of its young and old, meets the spiritual and material needs of everyone, and offers a deep sense of community a superior and highly productive society?

I posed the question of what the hypothetical destination is for this run away train? Is the apotheosis of our society to unshackle ourselves from the limits imposed by the natural world and to live free in the ceaseless hum and glow of a technological cradle strung together with wires and tubes that meet all of our physical needs? It would be the triumph of efficiency, production, and control. We would be machines within this system and corporations would still be people.

I confided to her that this logic needs to be supplanted, that we need to return to our roots in the natural, primal, and animalistic. That we needed a way to demonstrate the true nature of existence. I told her – with a glance in either direction at the baby boomers taking pictures incessantly with their IPads – that we could break with many of the implicit assumptions through ritualized sacrifice. There would be no exchange. There would be no material progress in the act. We would ritualize the reality that death and change are the fundamental characteristics of life. I told her that my idea was to start an institution where we would all sacrifice something that we loved – we would pile it together and set it ablaze. I could see her nervously wringing her hands in her lap. I self-consciously added that people and animals were not within the scope of this idea. Although maybe we could simply eat the baby boomers? I grinned and raised my eyebrows. It would solve a lot of problems as the tribute paid to the top of our pyramid seems rather unsustainable. I added that there would definitely be drums and dancing.

I casually mentioned that New York is the embodiment of this hyperrational, homogeneous, sterilized ideology. The rationality is manifest in the straight lines, in the ceaseless hum, in the endless efficiency, in perpetual striving towards nothing. I informed her that I was not a robot and consequently during my time in New York I regularly had to repress urges to run amok, howling through the logical confines lewdly waving my genitals like a blueballed baboon. I delved deeply into myself and told her that this stemmed from my curiosity and my bewilderment at the nature of existence. That I can see that there is something unknowable and immeasurable coursing through the molecules of everything on this earth.

I told her that the turmoil that we see around the world currently is a manifestation of the irreconcilable nature of our economic, religious, and political institutions and man’s evolving image of himself as an interconnected, monocrop set to overrun the earth. We now see our ability, from many different vantages, to shape our environment. We see the reality of the spaceship earth; interconnectedness and oneness is indisputable. A glimpse of the finite is seen in the confines of our spaceship. The only way to grapple with the problems that humanity faces is by turning inward, not towards technology, further division, and complexity, rather through finding a way as individuals to realize the inherent beauty, joy, and tranquility in simplicity. The perpetually striving and greedy individual mind needs to become a thing of the past. The future needs contentedness that stems from more creation, collaboration, sharing, learning, sex, music, dancing, movement of the physical body, family, and meaningful work.

Her face throughout the conversation seemed marred by an amalgamation of intrigue and terror. I assured her that I was unlikely to do anything in the immediate future.

I left for Colorado and slept outside for the first time in months; for six years I had slept outside for over a hundred days a year. I stared up at the night sky and saw innumerable stars. I realized that if my eyes were more sensitive the entire night sky would be white with light.

I left one morning from Hotchkiss to hitch towards New Mexico to visit my dad. I caught a ride with a lady named Brenda who had me ride the first hour in the back of her pickup bed, but then moved her arthritic husky to the back and invited me up. I reached for the seatbelt and she furrowed her brow before scornfully saying, “Oh you are one of those?” She was wearing her seatbelt though. She alternated pulls between Crown, Bud, and her pipe as she wove along the sinuous mountain roads and occasionally swerved off onto the gravel shoulder. The anonymity of hitching makes it a beautiful platform for storytelling. Brenda had two sons and lived for most of her life in Trinidad, Colorado. She ran businesses – a cleaning service, a thrift store, a small restaurant – and never made it clear if she had an old man. I glanced from her face to the road and felt a small pang of adrenaline each time she swerved outside the lines. Everything felt apart abruptly when her son was shot to death, her other son joined the Navy, and she went on the lam. I am generally a brick wall to sexual innuendo and subtlety, but there were enough overt references to her abysmal sex life to set off alarms. She shouted at an elderly lady hunched behind the wheel of a Volkswagen as she ran her off the road for driving too slow.

I got dropped off in Gunnison and began walking through town in flip flops. I chuckled with the realization that hitchhiking in flip flops had the benefit of being quite disarming as very few serial killers and rapists likely wear flip flops. So I was feeling pretty good about my prospects. I quickly caught a ride in a pickup with a guy named Brian who showed me the carcass of a deer that a snowplow had hit and launched high into the limbs of a tree. I ended up outside of Salida.

An old grey station wagon slowly passed and then stopped ahead. I jogged up and a gravelly voice billowing smoke said, “Take your time, no need to rush.” I tossed my pack in back and jumped into the passenger seat next to a grey haired woman in a peasant dress with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth.

“Joy.”

“Alex.”

She guided the car up the pass and into the barren and expansive San Luis Valley. She was from Vermont, but had lived out West for a few decades and currently lived in a strange community called Crestone that lay against the mountains near the Great Dunes National Park. It was an intentional community that had never fully developed – a still born hippy dream. Maybe it lacked intent. She at one pointed lived there for a year without any water or power. She had slowly converted a yurt into a permanent structure. She lit each cigarette with the fading ember of the last and carefully answered all of my questions.
“Here and there a few people come into the community and cause trouble. We drive them out ourselves – there are no police there, they never come out our way. Sometimes we have to organize posses, you know, without the horses and rifles, but still a posse, to run ‘em out.”

“What do you do for water and food?”
“Well there definitely isn’t an abundance of either. We get by. There are some wells. We aren’t too sustainable though; we can’t really grow much this high.”

I got dropped on a desolate stretch near the Crestone turn off. My next ride was with a young guy named Dirk who was red-eyed and giggling from the moment that he pulled up. He cracked up at anything that I said. I never could really ascertain why he was out in this area, but he rambled on about exploring some formerly productive mining claims.

I ended up on the roadside in Alamosa. I quickly caught a ride from a guy named Carlos who was streaked with tattoos. I liked him the moment he opened his mouth though and we kept each other laughing. He talked freely and frankly about his time in prison for grand theft auto. He took hits off of his dugout pipe and waxed poetically about turning his life around, the history of the area, his family, and love. He went out of his way to show me the oldest church in Colorado.

I couldn’t find a ride in Conejos as darkness descended. I stood on the roadside next to an abandoned building as the desert wind buffeted and chilled me. My dad ended up picking me up. I lay on his floor and listened to his erratic breathing punctuated with gasps and coughing; he sounded like a dog chasing something in a dream. I wondered what was breathing? He got up at 4:45am in pitch darkness to head to work each day. He then came home late and drank wine with abandon. I wondered later on what it is that he is chasing in his waking dream?

I missed the tranquility, space, uncertainty, heterogeneity, and inherent joy of nature. I missed life’s adventure. I learned that a long distance relationship with the Milky Way doesn’t really work; you have to make eye contact at least occasionally. I had time to slow down for the first time in months. Suddenly I saw that the tempest raging in my mind was just cancerous thinking in which our society was mired metastasizing, a useless and ceaseless spinning of gears. I thought that I would never assimilate into New York, but it colonized my mind instead. If you don’t know who the maniac is on the Amtrak within the first few hours – it is you.

The Deus Ex Machina Chaos

At the end of November I had been out of work for a while and as much as I would like to use my outsized brain to trap or spear animals, to hew a home out of the forest, to break stallions, or to cultivate a field, I was forced to accept that this was not a realistic possibility at this juncture in my life. I got a call from a friend asking if I wanted to do some demolition work for a few weeks here in Brooklyn. I impulsively answered, ‘Yes.’

After moving to New York from Guatemala I had been doing a lot of thinking and I felt a little unstable, like I was on the verge of something. My mind did sommersalts and wove itself into knots; it vomited forth and then became constipated. It is just what my brain does sometimes. It isn’t always clear what has emerged from turmoil such as this, but I came up with something and wrote it down. Here is an account of breaking down both physical and theoretical walls and finding something beautiful in the space that was left.

The strangeness of New York and its complexity was reflected in the job itself: I worked with a Croatian who has been here five years named Mate (accent on the e) and a Muslim from Burkina Faso named Ibrahim who had been in the country for less than a year. Mate lived in Queens, had two kids and a wife who was an English teacher. Ibra, as I took to calling him, was younger and was working to make money for his family in Burkina Faso. He was a married man and was saving to bring his wife over someday. Ibra had no papers and Mate had just received his green card. I amused myself by thinking of myself as an indigenous immigrant.

Our task was to demolish a four story brownstone, meaning that we were to gut out the interior down to the structure. I initially walked into the house wanting to decry the waste of our modern obsession with continually reinventing ourselves, but the reality that I came to see, was that the house was a shithole.

On the first day, I grabbed a crowbar and a sledge hammer and set to work without much pomp or circumstance. I swung the sledge and softened the walls and then dismantled them with the crowbar. The drywall shattered, cracked, tore, pulverized. The wood cracked, splintered, screamed as it twisted and clattered dryly as it tumbled to the floor. It was not long before I was several feet deep in debris, panting, coughing in a cloud of dust with wires dangling in my face.

As I pulled down the first of many ceilings, huge chunks of drywall shattered on my head and tumbled to the ground. Construction refuse, newspapers, and panes of glass all rained down upon me. A strange black soot that had accumulated over the past hundred years billowed from the ground after cascading down on my face and through my hair. Some chunks flew out the open window as I swung, tore, ripped, mangled, and mashed. I poked my head out the window and feigned concern for any onlookers, but only once.

I ended the first day blackfaced. Ibra actually became whiter. We laughed at each other. The shower at home ran black and my eyes burned and my hands shook in exhaustion.

As the days passed, we worked our way down from the top floor, breaking everything and then hauling it down to the truck that we fought to park. We loaded buckets full of plaster, hauled them down the stairs, and loaded them into the truck. We worked six days a week. 8 to 4:30 for five weeks. I initially thought about how much I liked work like this as I didn’t have to think. I just had to use my body and whittle the hours away. For better or worse, this left plenty of time to think about other things.

Here are some things that I remember:

Ibra constantly waved his cigarette in the air, using his hands to gesture, while indiscriminately intermingling French and English. On a seemingly hourly basis he stopped to chain smoke and lecture me on the perils of working too hard. We eventually warmed up to one another and I found myself intentionally prolonging lunch each day by asking questions so that I could sit in the warmth of the sun that streamed in through the window for a few minutes longer. Mate frequently recounted stories of atrocities from the wars the ravaged the Balkans in the 1990’s. The deaths of his friends at the hands of snipers, his sister nearly dying from a missle strike, ethnic cleansing, the massacre at Srebrenica.

‘Are you going to bring your wife over here?’ I ask Ibra in slow, patronizing English.

‘If I get papers.’

‘How do you get papers?’

‘I don’t know. There are ways.’

Mate spoke up, ‘Most of my friends, immigrants from Croatia and Poland, got their papers through marriage. It is incredibly expensive now though. When I arrived five years ago you could pay a woman 4100 dollars, but now it is up to 12,000 dollars.’

‘So this is common?’

‘Oh yeah. It is good business. One person makes money and the other one gets papers.’

‘You have to find the right girl. I know one girl that my friend married. Always calling for money. Always want money. She is no good to this man,’ Ibra countered.

‘Some people are better than others. My friend has married three different girls for money. He went back to visit Serbia and fell in love with a girl. He was already married though and had to stay with that girl. So he paid his friend to fly to Serbia, marry the girl, and then come back with her.’

‘He paid his friend to marry a girl he was in love with?’

‘Yeah! And bought him a ticket home!’

Another day Irba and I were looking out the window and I saw a man feeding his chickens food scraps.

‘Look….chickens.’ I pointed at them.

‘You know…Those are the first ones I have seen here in America. The first chickens.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. You only see dead ones. The meat, never the chickens.’

‘There are some here. My girlfriend has 28 of them.’

‘Now that is a good girl.’ He said this earnestly, but we both laughed.

One day I sat in a patio chair in the half demolished living room of the first floor, transfixed by water cascading out of the ceiling and spattering upon the dusty floor as Mate disconnected radiators.

Sometimes, for fun, I used the sledge like a battering ram or swung the crowbar like a baseball bat.

One time I stuck my head through a hole that I punched in the wall and twisted it like Jack Torrence.

A dog pooped directly behind the gate of the truck. I stepped in it, Ibra stepped in it, I smeared the bottom of a trashcan through it and then Mate touched it with his gloved hands, I rolled the handcart through it. I dumped a small amount of drywall dust on it with the hopes that it would work like cat litter. I then giggled as Ibra saw me do this, thought it was a good idea and got carried away; he dumped his buckets all over the pavement making a massive mess.

Most days our banter faded as we got into a taxing rhythm of work. In these moments I got unadulterated solitude to focus pointedly on my existence.

One day I leaned over and tilted my face to look in the mirror of the truck and was greeted by two red embers staring back at me from a bearded and lined black face. It precipitated a strange reaction, the reagents of which were being stockpiled over previous weeks: Who am I? What are you doing? Are you crazy? What is all of this about? Am I a meth head and I don’t even know it? What am I going to do with the rest of my life?

Each day I looked on as well-heeled couples leisurely strolled by and young people sat on stoops smoking cigarettes. Often they glanced at me and then averted their eyes. Who are these people? Are they smarter than me? Do they earn a fortune staring at computer screens? Manipulating numbers? Selling more products that no one actually needs by pandering to their innermost dreams and hopes?

Pangs of bitterness coursed through me often. My thoughts whirled around myself: I have many talents and skills, yet this is how I was spending my days at age 29: demolishing the interior of a house on an illegal jobsite in unregulated conditions, sucking in my air through a mask tinged gray with dust as I hauled buckets of trash all day? Look at you now. Did I actually have any talents or skills? Am I just an idiot who cannot recognize his station in life? Like a goose that thinks it is a swan? Everyone else seemed so relaxed, moneyed, and secure.

I found myself despising New York for all its glaring inequity and crassness. I cursed myself for coming here, for deliberately throwing myself into what is the antithesis of my values in many ways. I felt stupid.

My rational brain frequently structured thoughts like this: If I was more _______, I would __________.

I wrote this down: ‘This building is a bombed out hell.’

Still, I tried to lose myself in my work. I used phrases that angry old men used to describe what I was doing like ‘putting my nose to the grindstone’ or ‘keeping my head down and working through the winter.’ I would also try to release the inner turmoil physically: I would I run at a wall and kick my boot through, trying my best to relish the explosion of wood and brittle plaster that resounds on the floor. I eviscerated the snaking conduit arteries within the walls. If you can imagine, the joy even evaporated from these antics.

On cold days, I had to work even harder just to stay warm. I mused that maybe this was a forced labor scheme learned from my boss’s previous life in the former Yugoslavia.

The plaster covered brick walls were the worst. I broke them apart by starting a small necrotic ulcer in the center and assiduously expanding it outward with rhythmic hammer swings.

I found a slip of paper in my shirt pocket that I wrote one night while I was drunk that said the following:

‘Mate worked with several Natives in Canada in forestry. Many of them had spent time in prison and would unabashedly tell him about murders that they had committed or other strange stories. One day in prison, one of the men recounted, another inmate returned from a visit with friends or family. He sat down in a communal area, but quickly got up and began vomiting. One of the other inmates noticed that the vomit was littered with pills and immediately ran over and started picking them out of the vomit and swallowing them. In no time at all, a crowd of inmates swarmed and ate all of the pills out of the vomit.’

One day Mate and I went to the scrap metal yards. I listened to the radio as we drove around in the truck with the heat as high as it would go. It was the coldest day of the year so far, the kind the radio described in sinister, ominous tones: the cripplingly cold Canadian air mass descended upon New York threatening the transportation system, our elderly, our children, our jobs. It was always there, the Canadian air mass, looming over us, waiting to descend. I hopped out of the truck to unlock the bed at the first yard, which was crawling with a bewildering diversity of mechanical beasts that roamed piles of steel that glimmered in the dim winter sun. I experienced a new sensation of being insignificant, of being too organic. The yard was frantic; it is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We were hurried through by men dressed indistinguishably from astronauts; even the people seemed mechanical.

I was genuinely giddy when we returned to the house to pick up the cream of the crap: copper, brass, and aluminum. The allure of money for producing nothing draws hundreds of people living on the margins of society to scour the city in search of metal each day. They intruded and cajoled us at our job site regularly. They are like blue collar carnies. Before we arrived, we discussed strategy as Mate had done this a few times; we needed to give the impression that we were in the business. If you don’t do this, they will apparently take the chainmail right off of your back.

We took the money load to what I would describe as a quaint community scrap yard, as if there were such a thing. The garage door opened to a few men huddled around a 55 gallon drum with flames licking out of the top. One man had a spider web, the center of which was on his nose, tattooed across his face. A pitbull sat in a reclining chair wearing a down vest, looking the most comfortable of all. The manager approached and helped us to sort the metal into piles. Spidey communicated in grunts and lurched around like a black frankenstein, staring me down if I look at him. We pretended that we knew how much everything was worth and that we wouldn’t settle for anything less than top dollar. The manager pretended that we had an insignificant amount of cheap metal that he was indifferent towards.

‘Where does all of this go?’ I venture to ask.

‘China. All we do here is bundle it and ship it out,’ he answers.

$842. Raw materials from all over the world, manufactured in China, used in America, shipped to China, recycled in China, remanufactured in China by foreign owned businesses, shipped to America.

Increasingly my mind churned about the limitations of growth, climate change, materialism, globalization, energy, the environment, inequality, the cognitive dissonance displayed by my countrymen, how maybe we should just commit to destroying the earth and ourselves, maybe we should blot out the sun with coal fire power plants operating at maximum capacity to power nothing but televisions playing pornography and Die Hard movies twenty four hours a day, dildos, and meth factories; start fighting human beings against one another with antiquated carpentry tools for sport; cut down every last tree; torpedo the whales; shit in our wells; have a Superbowl everyday; fire nuclear weapons at the moon; light the surface of the ocean on fire; rape everyone except for the elderly who we will leave to rot in the acid rain that falls from the sky; eat the vitamin D deficient children; and napalm the polar ice caps.

I wished the anxieties and the stresses of each day would wash off just like the filthy mask that I wore each night in the shower, but they didn’t. I felt beaten, my levity lost.

I read compulsively in every spare second. I tried to think my way out of the misery in which I was mired.

My rational brain also liked to use these thoughtforms:

Everything will be better when _____________.

‘All of those years that you spent laughing and enjoying yourself to the fullest were all for naught since they didn’t prepare you for the real serious world.’

‘You should go to grad school so that you can be a productive member of society.’

I was walking to work one day and I saw a discarded tin can, that someone only bothered to half crush. I empathized with that can.

One day, I rode the train home and several people saw the open seat near me, approached, and then shied away at the last second. It was alright though since they were merely crude automatons. I was enlightened because of my ability to perceive the absolutely purposeless cagelike void in which we found ourselves.

Sometimes I held back tears as I hauled buckets up and down the floors of the brownstone.

My mind can be a whirring maw that consumes everything and turns it all into shit as its gyre tightens around my own little miserable existence.

I walked around overstimulated, feeling constantly abraded. I didn’t laugh at the rats in the subway anymore. I walked with my head down. I thought rationally about sex.

I descended down into the doldrums of purposelessness, stagnation, and confusion. I wallowed in a dark, deep pit. It was apparent that my mind was broken, completely dysfunctional. Day after day it went in loops about my life, about relationships, about work, about this world. I was stuck in some literal, rational mode, constantly analyzing, critiquing, and reacting. I lived in an algorithm where N goes to infinity. I found myself living in abstraction, all experience filtered through an artificial conceptualization of the world. Recognizing this is not the same as understanding it.

I thought about how canaries that are put in mines might just die because they don’t want to live in a fucking dark and lifeless hole.

It seemed like I would labor in a cold filthy brownstone forever, that was until my boss unexpectedly ran out of money and laid me off to wander the splendorous dog shit strewn streets of New York once more.

One day as I sat on the couch, in the simplest terms possible, everything exploded into a dizzying particolored lollapalooza. There was suddenly infinite subtlety in the myriad of intertwined flavors of the chai tea that I sipped, in the plants that shimmered in the afternoon light and gently swayed in the heat rising off of the baseboard radiators, and in the multilayered music vibrating through the air redolent with all of the telltale smells of life in my apartment. I sat transfixed by my resplendent world. I saw it.

I saw that the world is not the map that I created of it. A Euclidian, linear, limited variable perspective is a vast oversimplification that ignores the inherently complex and chaotic order of nature and the interaction of limitless interconnected variables. It is a theoretical world assuming smooth planes, rational actors, continuity, and limited physical constraints.

We will be forever unable to model or build a perfect facsimile, we will always be left with an approximation or an incomplete construction. Reality is nowhere but in the infinite recursive complexity of my bodily systems and in the vortexes of steam that twist and dissolve above my mug.

The compulsion to make projections and see finality is just a failure of imagination. It is an abstracted way of viewing the world that ignores the infinite beautiful uncertain complexity that abounds.

The unpredictability of existence means that our lives are a series of choices and actions, thousands each day. In doing this we create ourselves, our conception of humanity, and our world. There are many areas of life where we are unable to exercise choice, but we are wholly responsible for the realms in which we can.

Life is no different than a work of creation or art. Each one of us stands in front of a canvas in the same stupefying confusion of having no idea how we got there or what is expected of us. There is a limited set of supplies that similarly has no provenance. The background of the canvas has already been filled in before our eyes snap open. A work is created through an accumulation of choices and actions applied over time. There is no ideal work in the same way that there is no ideal life, there is only the one that exists. The bewildering beauty of life lies in the incomprehensible task of creating the completely subjective work that is ourselves.

I am tumbling across a lightless undulating plain.

I am swept onwards by forces that I cannot know.

The terrain is nothing more than that which passes.

Up, down, to and fro.

There is no beginning or end.

The darkness is vertiginous and lonely.

A rational tempest swirls inside of me.

I try to give sense to the senseless.

I strain to discern form in the void.

I conceive and am inevitably confounded.

Then, I am startled from my reverie by faint music in my head.

I suddenly feel the plain, although it passes no differently than it ever has,

the hillocks and declivities of birth, death, love, joy, and sadness.

I sit in quiet contemplation, admiring the melodic progression.

The song is entitled: ‘I am a preposterous half rational half animal chimera stumbling through an abysmal eden hurtling agonizingly fast towards.’

Fishing in Lesotho

I arrive in the early morning, after driving all night from Terre Haute in the wood paneled AMC Eagle that serves as both transport and my residence currently. I haven’t been to the city in fifteen years, not since I had been drawn to a place that even its denizens described as the ‘armpit of Indiana.’ It appeared during my years of exile there that there was no shortage of competition for this degrading title and that Hoosiers had contentious debates regarding this matter. The university where I worked had to put up signs around the dormitories exhorting students not to defecate in the shower and try to stomp it down. This helped maintain Terre Haute as the forerunner in my mind. I pull off of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway onto McGuiness Boulevard and stop to get gas. I try to quiet my mind as I watch the numbers climb on the pump. Didn’t we start a war to deal with this?

The car won’t start as I try to pull away. I am chastised in broken English before several other strange foreigners materialize to push the car while I guide it into an empty parking space. I feel like it would be pointless to ask them where to get another starter. I debate asking them to help me push start it, but I am deterred by thoughts of the barrage of irritated protests that would emerge. I crawl under the car and bang the starter with a tire iron, but it dawns on me that someone else needs to be trying to turn over the engine as I do this. I grunt and worm out and set out on foot towards an area that I remember from many years before as having a preponderance of mechanics shops and warehouses that seemed to deal in nothing but piles of disorganized metal trash. I walk West towards Williamsburg. I skid my boot through yellow dog poo on the sidewalk. I look for some leaves of grass where I can wipe it off, but everything is fenced or paved. I walk to Bedford Avenue.

The prostitutes and drug addicts are gone, but what remains? The poverty still seems palpable in the cacophony of competing buskers that occupy each block. There appears to be little work as men and women alike lean against buildings exhaling smoke. Young men listlessly shamble through the streets wearing pubic beards and tattered clothes. Several women pass me with a radiant pallidity and muscle tone that leaves me thinking of color inverted National Geographic photos from the fringes of the Sahara. Many enter and exit blighted industrial buildings that do not appear fit for human habitation.

I overhear two striplings speaking a barely intelligible language.

‘We went to this new space that just arrived in Gpoint. It has no name and they aren’t even on yelp yet. It is called 455 Noname. It is an orgogastropub with walls decorated in flea market fare and artisanal art. Standard, right? But every night there is a different band playing Tuscan Noisegrass.’

I see piles of cars in varying degrees of disassembly – most of them similarly from the late seventies and early eighties – inside a rollup garage door in an old warehouse. My Eagle is an ’84 and I figure this bodes well. There are rusted parts littered everywhere and an overwhelming smell of gasoline.

I approach a counter and am greeted with a glare from a man with the hair shaved off of one side of his head and a veritable suit of black leather. He drums immaculately clean nails on the counter top. I am strangely obsessed with hands. Bitten nails, dirty finger nails, calloused hands, scars, knuckles shaved by a slipped wrench…soft supple office hands.

‘Uhm… I am trying to find a starter for my AMC Eagle.’

‘We have Americanos, macchiatos, breves and lattes. It is all microroasted.’ I struggle to hear him over the grating electronic music.

‘Yeah… I just need a rebuilt one from an AMC, a pulled one, anything to get it out of the gas station on McGuiness before someone steals the fake wood panels for firewood.’ I am confused, so I just repeat myself and hope that will smooth things over.

‘You can get a tall, venti, or grande.’ He rolls his eyes.

‘Do you know where I can just get a normal starter for a 1984 AMC Eagle?’

‘No, look you are holding up the line.’ He moves his tapping fingers from the countertop to a small handheld computer. There is nobody behind me.

I walk back out onto the street and find myself stopping in front of a strange piece of graffiti that hooligans have made advertising Rayban sunglasses.

‘Where did you get those patches?!’ I turn around to see a guy and his girlfriend staring at me.

‘Uhm… at an outdoor store. I slept next to a fire and some embers burned holes in the jacket.’

‘Amazing. It is beautiful. I don’t do any camping, but I love outdoor fashion. I shoot men for a living.’

‘Oh…..Hah…Yep.’

‘Can I take your picture?’ Some light is shined on the previous sentence at this moment.

“Can you stand with your arms crossed? So I can see the patches better. Oh amazing!’

I walk on. I realize that I haven’t eaten anything in hours and look around. I had seen half a dozen natural, organic, whole food type markets in the past two blocks and I find myself serendipitously standing across the street from a leafy green neon sign that reads ‘Natural Organic Land.’ I cross the street and enter through the chrome doors.

The isles seethe with shoppers, eyes roaming and scanning for edibility. I feel self-conscious as ravenous eyes greedily survey me. I am not sure where the checkout line begins and the shopping ends, nor what I would like to buy. I wonder if there a natural disaster looming? I grab a few items swaddled in plastic and stare at labels proclaiming pastoral simplicity, wholesomeness, and naturalness. Boutique Brazillian coffee syndicates, Belgian chocolatiers, pink seasalt evaporating schemes, black pepper merchants of Malabar. While stuck in my reverie, a few shoppers repeatedly elbow and ram into me, ostensibly on purpose, while muttering apologies. I begin walking in a rapid frenzy to simulate what the other shoppers are doing; I am trying to exude purpose and importance. Mindlessly I grab a box of Monkey O’s and get in line. The box informs me that 10% of the proceeds from each sale are actually directly handed, in cash, to Marmoset Monkeys in Madagascar to recompensate them for habitat destruction.

I breathe deeply as I exit the frenzy and quickly ram my hand into the box of cereal. I absentmindedly stuff fistfuls into my mouth and walk until a massive pile of junk catches my eye. I enter through the gate of a boarded up, rusted out rat den. There is a sure to be a starter that would work amongst the scrap heaps that loom on either side of the path as I walk towards the entrance. A cheap one. I see a man welding a gas lamp onto a 35 foot tall penny-farthing while wearing a vintage brass scuba helmet. He looks up as I approach and opens to door of the mask to greet me.

‘Hey. Osiris. What do you need?’

‘Uh.. yeah… I am Alex…. I am looking for a starter for my 1984 AMC Eagle? I thought maybe you could help me since it looks like you have a pretty good junkyard.’

The curls of his mustache burst forth as he raises the helmet over his head. I think of the circus.

‘Wait is it a real AMC Eagle? Or is it a replica?’

‘It is definitely real and really not starting right now.’

‘It has the original PlastoPine panels?’

‘Yep. Hopefully they are still there when I get back.’

‘I need to make a call real quick. Gimme a sec.’ He walks around behind a what appears to be a small zeppelin that is connected to a tank of hydrogen. I can barely hear his conversation as it bounces off the bricks and iron.

‘…Yeah… Yeah…A real Eagle… He looks like a vintage dealer. He has some pretty nice threads and definitely knows what he is sitting on.’ I am wearing my dad’s jacket that I found in his apartment after he passed away, and an old pair of corduroys.

‘Look…I’ll give you ten.’

‘I just need one.’ Repetition seems to be the key with these difficult people.

‘Ah… Oh… Nobody has one of those anymore. It is a such a time piece. It is moving art.’

‘I do and I don’t even want to imagine myself in it.’

‘Alright. Twenty thou.’

We went back and forth, me wanting a starter and him wanting the car. Eventually we came to an understanding and I sold the AMC Eagle that had served as my home for the past few months. I used the money to buy a house outright in Detroit where the Eagle was produced thirty years ago. Osiris wrote me a letter thanking me for my generous support and letting me know what became of the car. He installed the car in a gallery in Soho, without even cleaning the cigarette butts out of the ashtray, before selling it for $200,000 to an investment banker who made a fortune betting heavily against the Lesotho deep sea fishing industry.