flotation device 12

welcome to the new issue of flotation device. three years in the making. as always so much has happened since the last one. grad school. new job. new career. new relationship. learning to live life as a thirty year old. it’s hard not to feel like a new chapter. i’d been wanting to do an issue of flotation device that was all about trees for a while now. one that would capture what it was i felt when i looked up at trees at night in the summer with warm breeze blowing through leaves.

por

r o v a f

muchachos

mujeres

inscr

ibale

al

muchachas

hombres

¡ejercito muchacho bonito!

one that captured all the possibility i feel walking down the street with sunlight through the tree branches. but i never felt like i was ready to do that. i’m still not entirely sure i was ready, but i made an attempt anyways. i hope you like it. all the photos in this zine were taken by me. except for the one on this page. and those cute boy army propaganda pics. i don’t know those guys. this is flotation device 12 by keith helt c. 2008. flotationdevice@gmail.com. po box 257251 chicago, il 60625.

una vida mejor le espera andele lo merece

nada más escribe una carta y envíelo a flotationdevice@gmail.com o a keith helt po box 257251 chicago, il 60625. el mismo keith le responderé prontisimo. gracias.

top faves 2005 - 2008 The Boredoms. Super Roots 9. So amazing it actually made me cry a little.

Also the Boredoms live at the Congress Theater. 3/26/08. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C Mann. God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 by David Levering Lewis. David Lynch introducing Inland Empire at the Music Box and Twin Peaks (again).

Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain kind of live at the Music Box with Crispin Glover. Monologues for the Coming Plague by Anders Nilsen.

Scott Walker The Drift. Nels Cline Trio live at the side tent at Pitchfork 2006 covering Paul Bley’s Turning Point. Café Tacuba Sino. Rhys Chatham playing Guitar Trio at Empty Bottle. John Coletrane Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings. Joseph Jarman Song For and As if it Were the Seasons. OOIOO Gold and Green. Pharoah Sanders Karma and Black Unity. Yo La Tengo The Story of Yo La Tengo. Andi Watson and Simon Gane Paris. Ghost of Hoppers

by Jaime Hernandez. King Cat Classix by John Porcellino. Best of Bowie DVD. Roxy Music (with Eno) on Musikladen DVD. The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion. Putas Asesinas Roberto Bolaño. New Order Ceremony.

Allen Ginsberg Collected Poems 1947-1997. Lee Bontecou. Divisadero Michael Ondaatje. Alan Silva. Alice Coletrane Journey in Satchidananda. Marion Brown. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and Gentlemen of the Road both by Michael Chabon. Serge Gainsbourg Histoire de Melody Nelson and Percussions. Clare Rojas. Fishing with John. Popeye by E.C. Segar. Buddha by Osamu Tezuka. Archie Bell and the Drells Tighten Up. Margaret Kilgallen. Brigitte Fontaine Comme a la Radio. Gabriel García Márquez La Hojarasca and the General in his Labyrinth. Zoé Memo Rex. Betty Davis. Todd Haynes I’m not There. Fela Kuti. M.I.A. Mike Ladd. Mulatu Astatke. Pauline Oliveros.

Philip Glass soundtrack to Dracula. Terry Riley. Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band and Fly. Lo Borges. Seu Jorge. Playing shows with the Rories again and finishing up recordings. Seeing Marcel Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with Hathaway - a lifelong dream checked off. Working on zines again. Chicago’s snowiest winter in years.

Spring. Riding my bike to work. Learning the joys of good beer. Who knew?

Costa Rica in the fall of 2008 con Jata y mi familia tica (lástima lo del TLC).

Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade. Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler. Learning a little french. Vegetarian biscuits and gravy at Flying Saucer.

Thurston Moore Tribute to Sun Ra at the Hideout in November of 2006.

The Trees - Pulp I took an air-rifle, shot a magpie to the ground and it died without a sound.

Your skin so pale against the fallen autumn leaves and no-one saw us but the trees.

Yeah, the trees, those useless trees produce the air that I am breathing.

Yeah, the trees, those useless trees; they never said that you were leaving.

I carved your name with a heart just up above - now swollen, distorted, unrecognizable; like our love.

The smell of leaf mould and the sweetness of decay are the incense at the funeral procession here, today.

In the trees, those useless trees, produce the air that I am breathing.

Yeah, the trees, those useless trees; they never said that you were leaving.

You try to shape the world to what you want the world to be.

Carving your name a thousand times won’t bring you back to me.

Oh no, no I might as well go and tell it to the trees.

Go and tell it to the trees, yeah.

Sycamore Trees - Lynch/Badalamenti I got idea man. You take me for a walk under the sycamore trees. The dark trees that blow baby, in the dark trees that blow.

And I´ll see you. And you`ll see me. And I`ll see you in the branches that blow in the breeze. I`ll see you in the trees. Under the sycamore trees

Shed the World excerpt - Lungfish There’s nothing left to do but go and ask the trees about the shedding of the world.

Do you agree? Their leaves rustled in the breeze and they replied authoritatively don’t shun the world, shed it.

If anyone you meet does not believe it, you tell them to talk to trees they have decreed it.

window

thank you

to hathaway.

I was walking to the post office this afternoon. And then to Eric Smith’s to water his and Mireia’s plants. And this window opened. But it’s better during the day. When I’m outside. It’s easier to deal with when I’m outside. I feel more connected. I see the sky. The overcast gray sky. Those clouds. Cold wind. Feel.

Air. Walking. I feel connected to something. I’m grounded.

The trees. I saw them. I looked at them as that window opened. Hyper awareness.

Trees.

What is the most beautiful thing in the world?

I wanted someone to ask me that question right then so I could answer – trees.

They sum up so much. The universe. The infinite. The randomness. How everything connects. All the chances and confluences. Our lives.

The trees.

to anders nilsen. editorial help. friendship. righteousness.

to Lilli Carré. comics. artistic genius. check out more of her amazingness at www.lillicarre.com. to my pals who worked with me at papersource. to guadalajara. ignacio and rufina. dave and mandy roos. my teachers at CEPE. and the doctors and nurses at the ISSSTE hospital and at CEPE. to everyone who’s read flotation device over the years. and to all of you reading it now.

weekend

One weekend on the Jefferson Park Metra platform northwest to Harvard.

Sunny 80 degrees late summer day. Noon. A Sunday. Day trippers out in force. Weekenders – professional weekenders standing on the platform milling around looking down the tracks to see if they could see the train yet.

This kid, tall with baggy pants and puffy white tennis shoes an a-line t shirt, came skating towards me veered left to the other side of the platform.

I watched him. He of nervous energy. He dropped his board, stood there one foot on the deck one on the concrete ready to push off – but he watched contemplating. I followed his eyes to a large backpack sitting in his path.

He will ollie the bag. I thought.

He pushed off moving way too slow.

There’s no way.

He crouched, moving in slow motion, not much momentum, a foot away from the bag he slammed his back foot down pushing the tail against the ground and jumped up popping the board up under him. He lazily lifted a foot off the ground and straight into the bag. The board stayed and he hopped over the obstacle.

Failure. Aware of his audience – the professional weekenders.

Ahhh! He yelled in a show of frustration.

Nervous energy. Muttering to himself and smiling. He cruised back to his starting position and composed himself then repeated the attempt.

Too slow again. Lazily popping his board up and sleepwalking it into the bag as he floated over and back to the ground.

Ahhh! That showman’s frustration.

Rinse repeat.

This time faster, more speed. Now he’s got it. I thought, watching his white puffy tennis shoed feet.

Pop the deck into the air sail over the bag and he lands on his feet on the ground the deck next to him.

Ahhh!

Better. He cleared it. But he didn’t land it. The sun out no clouds noon warmth on my skin trees blowing in the warm breeze starting to dry out. I’m reading. Sitting at the edge of the platform, feet in the gravel at track level, watching this out of the corner of my eye. Not wanting to stare. The other people in clumps under the canopies that intermittently run the length of the platform.

Repeat.

He pushes off hard going fast gliding over the concrete wheels making that distinct visceral sound. Pop the deck lifts into the air the kid on top they float together over the bag then gently set down on the other side still together.

Yeah! The showman yells in triumph.

The fickle audience doesn’t respond. Not even me. I go back to reading my book. Sun. Feeling good. He skates back into start position.

Repeat. Ad nauseum.

He provides the background soundtrack. The wheels on concrete the tail of the deck slapping the concrete the sharp landing his shouts of defeat or triumph his nervous energy mumbling aware of his audience, the professional weekenders who try not to watch – the pros that are focused inward on their own clumps of like minded.

I see the lights of the train in the distance coming towards us.

sunday

Sitting on the porch. Reading Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha as the sun set.

Reading in the last minutes of light. Stopping as it got to be too dark.

Watching the trees above the houses behind the alley. The top branches and leaves swaying lightly in the evening breeze. The tree tops against the glowing dusk sky. Feeling content and happy. Calm. Things are going to be okay.

Things are amazing right now. And a quiet smile on my lips. Sinking into my chair. Breathing slow and deep. Sunday night. My life as it should be.

Eating ears of corn from the Kiwanis tent and a few ears of roasted corn that cost fifty cents more than the regular corn. A dollar fifty instead of a dollar.

Feeling so happy to be sitting there in the cooling air as evening falls sky darkening little by little.

A large cartoonish soldier character in a bizarre inflatable soldier costume walks awkwardly up and down the street with a handler guiding him. He poses with little kids who want their picture taken with him. We all try to think of creative ways to protest this offensive display of military imperialism. I just want to pop him, I say.

Christian right churches have booths as do both the Army and the National Guard. Giving out literature and recruiting for their respective (and similar) causes. We are disgusted. But we had to continue to eat our corn.

I want an elephant ear, Eric Smith says as he and Mireia go off in search of the mythical dessert leaving Decourcey and I drinking lemonade and picking our teeth with toothpicks. Night is rapidly falling around us enclosing us.

Lights from the booths and bars behind them.

I’m remembering this like a dream. Like a photograph. Eric and I sitting there our bodies silhouettes all black shadows with bright light behind us. We are back lit at a fair frozen in time each remembering living there.

Walking back to the car we are all eating italian ice or maybe just me. Maybe they got ice cream. There was no elephant ear to be found. What kind of place is this, Eric Smith says dejectedly, that they don’t have elephant ears. I’m disappointed with my lemon italian ice, regretting the decision. Before I got it I had pleasant corn tastes and lemonade flavors in my mouth. I could’ve lived with them for a while. But the italian ice was seductive and I fell for it. But it was too sweet, too tart, too creamy, not clean and crisp like it should be. A high school band playing jazz for a small audience.

Driving back to the city in nighttime darkness occasional words are spoken.

Streetlights stream by in rapid succession leaving trails of light. Quiet in the car. Wind still in our hair against our faces. Occasional trees amongst suburban sprawl and power lines.

papersource

The day I got a rejection letter from Borders I opened it. I read it. I crawled back into bed. It was just barely afternoon. I felt so disgusted. Fed up. Impotent.

Unable to think of anything good. The last straw. Gray outside. Gray building.

Gray Logan Square neighborhood filled with gray buildings that blend seamlessly into the gray sky creating a universe of gray. It invaded my mind. Set up shop and I was gray. In bed with my clothes on looking out gray windows at the gray building next door illuminated by gray light.

Gray.

I couldn’t find a fucking job. I came back from Mexico defeated. My plan blew up in my face and now here I was trying to reestablish myself. I applied at grocery stores and bookstores. I applied, interviewed and got hired at Marshall Fields downtown where I would be on a reclamation team – meaning I would go around and pick up clothes from the dressing rooms and put them back on the floor. 8 dollars an hour. Then they told me I’d have to dress up in pants and a shirt and tie and take a drug test and only enter through the employee entrance even if I wasn’t working. I quit before I started.

I tried temping. I went to a few different temp agencies but they never had any work for me – regardless of my new work clothes and my computer proficiency test scores. I’d call them every week but they never had anything for me.

I applied to be a substitute teacher at Chicago Public Schools. I applied to be a teacher’s assistant at Chicago Public Schools. I took a Spanish proficiency test to get a bilingual ed transitional teaching certificate so I could teach at Chicago Public Schools or in the surrounding suburbs. I passed and found out that CPS and the surrounding suburbs didn’t accept that certificate.

Borders sent me a rejection letter. I’d worked eight years of retail. Five of them at a bookstore. In the interview they only offered to pay me 7.25 an hour.

They rejected me with a letter. I couldn’t find a job anywhere. It was all too much. I was crushed. Decimated. Destroyed. Broken. Bed-ridden.

Fully clothed two in the afternoon in bed. Laying in silence. I couldn’t even listen to music. It didn’t sound good. Nothing did.

Gray.

Gray drama.

The blue line train. 8am. Gray and late fall out. Drizzle on the windows the streams of water flow diagonally from left to right as the train rolls through the neighborhoods. Logan Square. Wicker Park. The old buildings. The gray city.

The cars with wipers on headlights shine through raindrops. The train snakes through the buildings above the cars plunges down underground at Division

and show up for work and see off in the distance across 90 on a hill a whole line of infantry slowly advancing. It would be fucking awesome.

Totally, Decourcey is laughing hard. Awesome.

We laugh as clouds blow by wind in our hair heading out to DeKalb for Cornfest.

Decourcey and I both lived in DeKalb for a few years when we were little.

I was there from when I was two until I was five. He is five years older than me. We wouldn’t meet for another fifteen years or so. But going back to DeKalb was a pilgrimage to our childhood. We both made Eric drive to our houses and our old neighborhoods remembering what we could and everything looked smaller than we remembered it. The huge overgrown bushes in front of my old house were gone and my house that used to tower like a monolith above me was a small two story house. Like millions of others. Oh well. The slide on the playground of my first school where I got the scar under my nose that I still have today that’s only visible to me. It’s also so much smaller, not the behemoth giant that I plummeted from when I was five.

But we’re here for corn. Mythic Cornfest. A celebration of the Midwest.

We park the car and follow the throngs of people to the small downtown area that’s closed off. It’s Friday evening. It smells like the fair. Fried food and beer. Little kids running around high schoolers fronting and mugging trying to out cool each other. College kids just getting into town to start their school year at NIU. The last time I was at cornfest I was dating Jessica and she had just moved into her first apartment and we had gone out on Saturday night to check out Cornfest and eat something. We ended up in a fight because I was too wishy washy and unassertive. We were twenty and twenty one. She was older and punk rock. We walked on opposite sides of the street back to her house.

Eric, Eric, Mireia and I walking down the little main drag where there are booths and booths of food vendors and beer vendors and Thai food. I don’t remember there being Thai food here before.

Where’s the corn? Eric Smith asks.

Well there’s roasted corn I say pointing to a dark trailer that’s roasting tons of corn.

And there’s the regular corn, Decourcey points out. It’s a white tent run by the local Kiwanis.

It’s Cornfest and there’s only two places to get corn. Eric Smith says.

Yeah that’s weird, I say.

I think it must be on Saturday when they do the corn boil and boil corn in vats in the street and give it away, says Decourcey.

That’s what I remember.

Summer 2005. August. Going back to school shortly, but today I’m in the back seat of a little Honda flying down 90 out of the city heading northwest out towards where I grew up. Out towards the country and corn fields and soybeans and blue sky and memories and to DeKalb.

Eric Decourcey is sitting in the back with me. I’m on the left he’s on the right. I’m looking out the window at the clouds and the power lines the flat suburbs sprawling out warehouses and big long flat office complexes with strange names that mean nothing. Eric Decourcey is talking about history – a favorite topic – spieling about the history of corn or something. How it was genetically engineered by native americans so long ago. Talking about the city of Cahokia and how we should go. Eric smith is driving the car and he agrees. Another historian, they debate and discuss back and forth as wind blows through the car and clouds hover overhead and power lines zip by the car crackling with invisible energy. Potential. I think of Twin Peaks. Electricity! Hand clap! The eerie sound of electricity coursing through the wires, information and power jumping all over. Magical and terrifying. A year from now a broken down car pulled over on the side of the road in the quiet dark as rivers of rain roll down the windows and cars and trucks roar by shaking the car and with the windows down the electricity hisses and snaps along the lines directly above the car louder than I would’ve imagined. Electricity in the dark while waiting for a tow truck at one in the morning going back to the city.

Eric’s wife Mireia is in the front passenger seat listening to the history debates and occasionally adding to the conversation. Her short brown hair blowing in the wind and her Barcelona accented english making me happy every time she say ‘s’ sounds and the word fuck or fucking as in ‘this fucking thing.’

So emphatic and amazing. I wish I could say it like that as the car flies over I90 pavement. Hot August end of summer sun and I have to start school again in a week or so. My first real semester at library school. The first one where I’ll be taking archives classes and learning what I want to learn. Excitement and longing for beach boys endless summers.

We pass Medieval Times restaurant outside of Schaumburg, the bizarre campy castle construction that epitomizes the suburbs. Its useless turrets and parapets and pointless design alluring to ten year olds everywhere.

Y’know what I’ve always wanted to do. I say.

What’s that.

Here it is. If I could get thousands of people to pull this off. I’d love to assemble a medieval army and sack Medieval Times. Like with siege engines and catapults and marauding hordes.

The others laugh.

How awesome would it be to be someone that works at Medieval Times

more people get on the windows are dark can’t see anything.

Reading. Books. Escapist fantasies. Lovecraft. Herbert. Always reading and falling asleep. A fog around my head. The doors open. The doors close.

People shuffle in. Their bodies sway as the train sways.

The train burrows under the city, under the river, dark windows then bright stations, people file out. Suits. Dress shoes. Heels. Skirts. Make-up applied in transit. The sound of a thousand newspapers being read then folded stuffed under arms in briefcases.

Cell phone conversations. Music bleeding out from ipod ears. Cell phone jingles and vibrations. A million people calling each other to say they’ll be late. Under the loop all the suits file out.

It’s just us now. Students and people headed for more southerly jobs at the medical campus and the industrial jobs beyond. I bury my head. I dig inside try to avoid my impending el station but the train doesn’t stop. I feel it turn west away from the loop.

Clinton.

My stop. I rise as the train slows, the doors open and I’m out. I see some people I know and I let them get ahead of me. I know where they’re going. I don’t want to talk to them yet. I remain invisible.

Layers of soot on the white walls, the white arched ceiling where obscenely bright and clean fluorescent lights expose the dirt and grime accumulated over the years. Up the dirty stained cement stairs to the entry level.

Chrome turnstiles and the little freestanding phone booth style kiosk where the CTA employee sits for endless hours. Walk through the exit on the west side of the street. The gray daylight glowing down the stairs to the outside.

Up and up. Slick cement steps. I see those people I know. I watch to see which way they go and I go the other.

Slick pavement. Wind in my face. Winter on the edge of it. Make a right on Des Plaines. The lonely little trees that grow in symmetrical precision along the street. Leaves gone. Bare branches reaching towards whatever open sky they can find amongst such immense buildings. Turn my mind off. Brace myself for another day. The brick building on my left. Walk in. Pass the concession stand. Chili burgers office nastiness. Up two flights of dull faded off-white stairs, yellow brown feeling walls. Feel the age of the building – an old industrial building from the 1920’s. Warm in the stairway.

Work smell – stuffy, old, dust, machinery, electricity, lubrication and paper.

Paper and dead ends.

Papersource Warehouse.

My job and welcome to it.

It was my job to make sure that my ladies had all the supplies that they needed to package the kits. Paper, bone folders, plastic template pieces, samples, bags, book board, inserts, string, buttons, tape, scissors, you name it.

Mostly it was paper that they needed.

Keith necesitamos más de este papél.

De qué tamaño?

Así. Pointing at the scrap of paper.

Cuantas piezas?

Como 500.

Ok. And off I’d go. Calculator and ruler and scrap in hand to find the paper and to calculate how many large sheets of paper I’d need to cut down to the scrap’s size.

Upstairs for the standard paper colors – butter, chocolate, sage, opal, quartz, luxe frost, brockway, opal, mango. Fancy ways of saying yellow, brown, blue, orange, etc.

On the same floor for the fancy paper, the ones that were imported from Nepal, Japan, India, the ones that smelled like somewhere else and took six months to a year to arrive. The ones that had texture, flowers mixed in the pulp, patterns dyed in, names like Lokta, colors that were rich and nuanced and confused the hell out of a colorblind person like me.

Lost in the stacks of paper on the third floor moving my scrap of paper along the length and width of the sheet of paper counting how many pieces I could get out of it. Then dividing the total number of pieces I needed by the number of pieces I could get out of a sheet to find out how many sheets of paper I needed to take down to the cutter.

My calculator was gray, solar powered and had a heart and “Keith’s” written in permanent marker on the back. Supplies always disappeared.

I’d write how many sheets I took, load the stack onto a cart and wheel it over to the elevator. For a small load of paper on a light cart I’d walk past the industrial elevator with its operators who were surly and didn’t have the time to be bothered with opening the door and pulling the lever that raised or lowered the elevator. They’d rather be hanging out talking Bears to the other building staff. Or they were creepy and leered at the girls and women that worked in the building. Blue hats, blue coveralls, moustaches under noses and eyes that stared at the girls as they moved paper and supplies between floors.

They didn’t talk – they just used their eyes and made the less than a minute ride feel hours. We were technically supposed to use that industrial elevator, but instead I’d head out to the pedestrian elevator and go back down to the second

cornfest

I was there at the end of the treefort later that summer going back to school. The end was near. Blue blue sky. Possibility fading in the air. Goodbye to dreams dreamed. Goodbye to shared fantasies and to the sound of skateboard wheels on cement, on wood. Subdivision nihilists, we took it upon ourselves to make tangible the loss of summer. Make it a physical visceral reality. We destroyed the fort with hammers and a crowbar and our hands and our junior high bodyweight. If the summer had to end then so did the fort.

No time for sentimentality. We smashed and pried and jumped and kicked and we stood inside as the northern legs gave way and collapsed and the fort sunk towards the ground on the north side. We balanced at an angle the floor of the fort springing up and down. We paused. Looked around. And began to jump up and down on our treefort spring board. Wood cracking nails bending carpet tearing the walls falling apart wood scattering into tall grass.

floor where the paper cutter was. We had two cutters. Phil on the third floor who did most of the standard cutting of cards, note sets, etc. Benny on the second floor did the more random cutting and most of mine since it was irregular and I needed less cut.

Benny I need this stack cut down to this size.

When do you need it?

Soon as you can, today if possible.

No problem.

Thanks.

Phil was an older guy. Retired. He used to run his own press. Now he worked at Papersource and took many sick and personal days and was found napping in hidden nooks of his third floor station/hideout. The nooks were carved out of the mountainous stacks of paper that had been cut down to various sizes. Pallets of paper wrapped in plastic five or six feet high. Wooden pallets on their sides for storage. Ceiling high shelves that held boxes of surplus envelopes. The sound of the die cutting machine in the next room punching holes over and over. It was easy to hide and disappear for a while here. Sometimes you’d find his chair in an out of the way hiding spot with the day’s newspapers on it. Everyone knew about this but no one said anything. People complained but no one took action. Who were we to argue with age. I never complained, what did I care. I’d walk in on Phil asleep in a chair, newspaper on his lap, hidden by stacks of paper. Good for him.

T and her drama. Every morning there was something new for her to freak out about. She and her boyfriend, U, had just moved in together. She’d come to work with her dark hair pulled tight back over her head. Jeans and t shirts. Sometimes she’d knock us all out and wear a skirt and top revealing her curves. The boys in envelopes would have a hard time containing themselves as she walked by.

T would tell us her worries about U – all the manic intensity – every morning. Some days he was an angel doing the sweetest things. Other days he was the devil and she didn’t know what to do.

Her brown eyes behind glasses. She’d pour her guts out then a work crisis and she was off leaving Cori and I to decipher what was going on.

I walked up and down my aisles alone hundreds of times a day. Note sets, flower kits, butterfly kits, letter press letters, pumpkin kits, envelope templates, accordion kits. Up one aisle down another. Sometimes on my feet sometimes on a milk crate sometimes on my asspad – a little foot high seat that the boys in envelopes invented by stuffing boxes with other boxes and taping it all together, it looked something like a saddle. Sitting on it and pushing myself backwards scraping along the smooth cement floor. The shelves towered over me, fluorescent lights humming high above throwing bright clinical light onto the brown cement floor and brown cardboard boxes that filled the shelves.

The sound of Rosy and her shrink-wrapping crew running the machine in the corner opposite, somewhere on the other side of my shelves. Slowly up one aisle then down the other then back to one then over to another one. Rubber stamps and holiday shapes templates. Three to Highland Park. Ten to San Francisco. Fifteen to Boston. Grab them off the shelves then dump them in the Rubbermaid tubs – one tub for each city. Then back to the aisles for more. My stacks. My lonely stacks. So quiet in that corner. Up one down another. Just me and my headphones. Music all day. The one time I approved of shuffle on my ipod. It gave me a slight sense of anticipation. What’s next? What’s it gonna play? Sometimes I’d play massive rock blocks. Every Beatles record Revolver to Abbey Road straight through. Six Don Cherry albums back to back. I went through albums without speaking. Up one aisle and down another. Light came through large windows along the north wall of the building. But the sun was on the opposite side of the building and my stacks blocked the view to the windows. Dark. Dark and quiet. Winter gray.

My boss Jake had a woodshop that he ran for years. He had people working for him. He loved building things – anything with wood. Shelves. Furniture.

Art. He loved working with wood. Then the building where he had his shop burned down. He couldn’t afford to start over so he started at Papersource.

He got there before anyone else and stayed later. He worked 11 hour days.

He’d build massive storage shelves – rows and rows. He was the warehouse carpenter although he was officially a manager. He just did everything. He helped everyone out – any department with any job. He was always going – always running around. We’d have to tell him to eat lunch. We’d have to tell him to go home.

He was giving his time away. Burning his energy away. Giving all this life to a company that didn’t care.

All of us packers and assistant manager types wouldn’t allow it to happen to us – we were disgruntled and jaded, always tried to avoid salary. Hourly wages

The closest thing to a full on full blown fully developed and realized treefort was the one that Jeremy and Jason built behind Jason’s house. This was something more like a fort on stilts that was built just on the other side of the fence in the field behind the subdivision. There was a clump of trees that hung over the fence behind Jason’s yard and they built the tree house on stilts there. It was a Frankenstein of a fort. 4x4s for support legs. Plywood and 2x4s scavenged from unfinished homes and construction sites throughout the subdivision. That’s where we always went for supplies for treeforts or bike ramps skate ramps or whatever we were building. Often the dumpster raids also included clandestine exploration of the skeletal frames of houses after hours when the workers had left for the day. Climbing in through the sunken basement windows. Climbing up the skeletal stairs. Walking through skeletal walls. Climbing on skeletal beams. And carefully walking over skeletal floors.

The fort was maybe four feet off the ground and had walls on all four sides and an opening on the north side to get in. Old carpet on the plywood floor. Old carpet padding when there wasn’t enough carpet. Tree branches overhead and magazines scattered around. Playboys porn skateboarding mags. A glorious fort. A hideaway with no ceiling exposed to the blinding summer daytime humid day and the moon and stars at night as well as warm rain throughout the summer.

Firecrackers and bottle rockets. But the most thrilling was to light a smoke bomb and wait for the fuse to burn down inside the bomb and for the smoke to start billowing out and then throw the bomb against a tree trunk or wall of the treefort. Smashing it exploding it into smoke pieces arching out in a massive smoke explosion like an airplane exploding. Smoking bits through the air landing on the floor of the fort disappearing into the tall green grass below. The grass up to our hips. Smoke bomb fights and smoke stained hands stinking of sulfur and being called in for dinner. Clouds of purple and blue and green and yellow and red smoke wafting through the yards shrouding the fence line and fort in mysterious haze. A smoke bomb unsmashed tossed into the grass and the smoke billowing out trapped in the grass only small wisps escaping but the smoke there flowing and traveling under the green grass forest until the grass disturbed released the smoke into the air.

A delayed slow motion bulbous cloud that disintegrated and disappeared drifted off into the twilight sky. Fireflies lightning bugs flashing in the tall grass and off in the subdivision back yards. Some kids catching them in their hands sometimes in a jar. Some kids batting them out of the sky with plastic wiffle bats watching them arc incandescent against the fading light.

were our only protection. They’d try to subvert us and give us nominal promotions and a few more cents to buy our loyalty – sometimes it worked.

Jake was a super nice guy and it was killing him. Month after month you could see it in his eyes.

treefort

Cori and I always talked about bringing rollerskates to work. It would make the job so much easier, especially hers. She could roll around from department to department pulling her special orders. Pushing or pulling her cart behind her. It would’ve been great – all that smooth perfect cement. You could really fly on skates in there.

I could’ve rolled my way around my stacks gliding effortlessly from order to order, pull to pull, tub to tub.

Cori and I wanted to build nooks into our stacks. Hiding places on top of the shelves. Make a flag for our anarcho-syndicalist union. Walk out during the day. Fuck everything and leave.

Aborted plans live on. The could’ves last a lifetime.

(slight return)

All of us in pain and falling apart. Rolling back into gray Logan Square and feeling like nothing would ever change. Every day. Angry to be in bed at 10.30 and up at 6. Fuck. Ragged and haggard. Paper. Stupid names for colors.

My swatch book that I carried around with me so that I could avoid telling people I was color blind.

My parents realized that I was color blind while we were playing Trivial Pursuit when I was seven. I kept saying the wrong colors on the game board.

I couldn’t get them right. In school I always got F’s on my color wheel art assignments. I colored the grass orange in pictures. I worked at a photo lab just out of high school and color corrected as best I could, tinting the sky purple and the grass orange.

I have a hard time distinguishing shades and colors. But I’m pretty good at working around it and hiding it when it’s a pain. I feel like my problem isn’t with taking color information in. I feel like I can see color fine. The problem comes when my brain tries to process the information and then say what color it is that I’m looking at. I feel like there’s just a poorly wired connection. Over the years I’ve taught my brain how to correctly identify colors.

I really have to think about it now, but I can get by and correctly identify colors if I work at it.

T was the only one at Papersource who knew about my issue. She made me the swatch book so that when someone asked for paper I could just use

the swatch book to figure out which they were talking about. It was our secret.

Moving equipment. Endlessly looking for A6 envelopes in starfire. Some sparkly purple. Always looking for materials we didn’t have. Always wondering what I would end up doing with my life. When would I get out? Always hiding from the guy from FTD.com who was hired to streamline all the departments.

Carrying a scowl on my face and hate and frustration on my shoulders. What the fuck. Paper. Always waiting until 4.30. Missing Guadalajara sun and all those beautiful girls and cute boys. Fashionable and young… and those trees.

The lemon trees that grew in front of the house in Guadalajara, the trees with waxy leaves, tall trees lining the streets in the afternoon sun. Trees seen from the window of a bus. Mexico is falling into the haze. It’s not up front in my mind anymore.

59

I went to X’s house a while ago and a while after the funeral maybe over the summer or in the spring. On top of his flat files he had artfully arranged some collections and some of Y’s things and amongst the stuff were her glasses. This pair of bent up and worn glasses sitting useless on the flat files in this display of items. It hit me hard and I had to work hard to not cry. Here was this person who had been loved deeply and alive and making things and creating and talking and loving and eating and sharing and breathing and laughing and living and she was reduced to this pair of glasses. This small item that was loaded with meaning and memory.

And today I was thinking someday my parents will be reduced to a pair of glasses. A wallet. A set of keys. All mundane. These boring items meaningless but abstracted. These pointless things that somehow mean so much more because they are the things that we always have on us. Unintentional representations of what was, of what we were. I never realized how personal glasses were. What an intimate thing they really are when they are removed from the person, from their function.

Someday I will be glasses and wallets and watches.

guadalajara

Up before the dawn Tuesday, 5am. 5:00 so as to avoid la hora pico. Rush hour. The buses are impossible to board after 6.30 and I need to get to school.

So 5:00 it is. Street light casts shadows of the iron door to my little balcony across my bed. I’m up before the rest of the house. Tonia still asleep in her room across from mine. Ignacio upstairs asleep dreaming of socialist revolution and his dogs, his chulas, Candy and Snoopy – highway orphans.

At the alarm fall out of bed and pull on pajama pants and slip on sandals – shuffle to the bathroom. The morning darkness quietly creeps through the little sky lit common area that my bedroom Tonia’s bedroom and the bathroom share. Slide the bathroom metal door behind me, careful not to bang it shut. Lone fluorescent bulb burns my eyes cuts the morning darkness. I brush my teeth – careful to not swallow any of the tap water. Eyes feel sleep puffy.

Cool morning air. Chilly. Nice against my skin.

Toilet. Shower head. Drain on the floor. Cloudy mirror. Cockroach bodies under the sink in the cabinet. Thick glass window so no one can see in. Bars of soap, shampoo bottles in the sill ready for showers.

Back to my room, cleaner and slightly more awake. I’ve been here for just over a month and I’ve got my routine established.

Turn on some music to get ready. What will it be today? Minutemen?

Donovan? Julieta Venegas? Do some push ups. I’m not riding my bike here so I should do some sort of exercise. Get dressed. Jeans. White t-shirt some socks, pull on shoes. Leave my bag packed and ready with a button down shirt next to it, ready to go. Turn off the lights, stealthily slip out to the kitchen turn on the light above the sink. Turn on the tv quiet, volume down – I don’t want to wake anyone. Pour some peach juice, grab a bowl and milk and my frosted flakes. Sit down at the glass table for breakfast.

Julieta Venegas on Telehit – music television for Mexico – so much better than Mexican MTV because they play Mexican bands which I’m desperate to learn about. Si quieres andar conmigo, ohhhhh dime si tú quisieras andar conmigo ohhhh cuentame... She’s blowing up. This song is all over the radio, over tv, over my cd player and forever burned into my brain, my memory of 5.30am in Guadalajara eating frosted flakes, drinking peach juice and listening to Julieta Venegas.

Wash my dishes put everything away put on my buttondown shirt grab my bag and the trash from the kitchen to take outside. Hesitate before turning off the tv cuz Zoé is playing. Their new song, Peace and Love, about to blow up as well – do do. do do do do do do.

Open the glass sliding door potted plants all over the balcony hanging sitting plants and flowers. The sky dark purple, not pitch black, not midnight black, 5.45am bruised purple black. Street lights. Lock the door hear the heavy click

x+y

Reading the Year of Magical Thinking. Everything I read lately has to do with dying. The Age of Iron. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Llona. As I read about the human body falling apart and breaking down I feel it physically in my chest. I feel kind of sick. Mild mild nausea and this ghost pain that doesn’t hurt at all but makes itself known. A sensation of the unknown, this mystery that spreads through my body as I read about the other people dying. On the train today I felt like I wanted to cry a few different times reading about Joan Didion losing her husband and partner. Overwhelming. Her thoughts. Her feelings.

I must be trying to come to grips with life. With death. With dying. I think about it a lot. Not in a depressive debilitating way. But in this trying to fathom and comprehend this massive event and concept that hangs over all of us over everything. I still think about X and Y a lot, but that’s not my story to tell. I can talk about going to her funeral and hugging X and crying a lot and trying not to lose it too much watching X in front of all of those people, about the sunshine on the last nice fall day in November or eating Subway and going to work at Chicago Comics and my boss saying how was the funeral in a smarmy ha ha way before he realized who it was for.

But that’s not my story to tell.

Something that struck me while reading today on the train was Joan writing about going through her husband’s clothes and things. The things she was supposed to get rid of. She’s doing okay going through his clothes and is able to pack a lot up but then she gets to his shoes and finds she can’t get rid of them. She just can’t.

important phrases in any language.

Tall blonde with glasses. T shirt and plain blue jeans and tennis shoes. Big hands counting hundreds of sheets of paper within seconds. Quietly up and down rows of shelves filled with paper.

Is this what you want to do?

No. but it’s a job. I don’t mind.

What do you want to do?

Go back to school and get a master’s degree.

Awesome.

He drowned swimming in the Mississippi one weekend over the summer.

The current took him. Pulled him out away from the shore. Away from his friends and down the river. The world passing by. Sky overhead.

I learned all this a few months after it had happened. I was at a zine art show at Columbia College and I ran into my friend Lisa and her friend Rhiannon – they both worked at the warehouse. Rhiannon asked if I had heard what happened to Damian. I said I hadn’t. She looked at Lisa and asked if she should tell me. Like she was checking to see if it was okay that I knew – to see if I was on the right team. Lisa said yes. Then Rhiannon told me about Damian drowning over Memorial Day weekend.

Oh my god. I said.

The funeral was rough. They said.

Oh man. I said.

Yeah. Lisa said.

What can you say? There are no words. There are never words. Never any words that are worth saying or make sense. I wished that someone had told me when it had happened. But I was gone. I wasn’t part of their lives or worlds anymore. I was out. But it still affected me. Time always stops when I learn that someone I know is dead.

That book is on my shelf. I said I would give it back before I quit. I meant to give it back. I meant to go back and bring it to him when I was done with it.

But I didn’t. I was lazy and now that book means something more. Some symbolic meaning – emotional weight has been infused. It’s on that shelf forever.

It’s now part of my collection. I have to do my part to preserve his memory. To pass on his existence to other people. The ephemeral passing of our lives. Fragile strands connecting us all. Damian walking up and down warehouse aisles.

Damian floating down the river.

of the lock. I climb over the locked gate that I’m too lazy to unlock. Down the stairs open the metal gate door at the bottom and leave the trash at the curb. Daily trash pick up. Amazing.

I’m walking the street. Here comes the guy that leaves at the same time as me. Older. We’ve never talked, never acknowledged each other. Cars starting in the distance. The pack of dogs that run together. Two little ones and one larger always keeping clear of people.

I make a left and walk past the mini mart when they’re delivering milk.

Should I buy eggs on the way home? Walk past the house where the lady sells bionicos in the afternoon. The fruit is so good – some kind of yogurty sweet cream. Amazing. 50 cents for a large one. Past the gym and the pharmacy and then make a left walking parallel to the highway that leads to the anillo periferico – the big highway that runs an enormous circle all the way around Guadalajara and its suburbs.

The house at the corner, yellow with an enclosed front yard. The dad gets the kids in the car to take to school – I secretly hope they’ll offer me a ride.

I’ve seen them often enough. Past the service shop still too early to be open.

At the next corner the paletería and across the street – the neighborhood school. Kids lying on benches, starting to congregate in their blue uniforms.

I make a right and climb up the small hill to where the highway is. A sea of headlights, cacophony of engines – trucks and cars. Motorbikes, with their buzzing falsetto, weave in and out. Wait for the light and cross six lanes of traffic all the while scanning to the right watching for my first bus, the 633 that I’ll take to Plaza Patria where I’ll get off and cross the parking lot of the KFC and get on the 622 that’ll take me to school.

6am. There’s a bus coming. It’s a little late for me. By six it’s hard to get on the bus. I don’t have to get to school until 8, but it’s easier to leave early and read than leave on time and fight the crowds. But there’s already a mass of people waiting.

I join the throng. Light steadily grows in the sky – less black and more purple. I can see the clouds – light gray wisps against the darkness. Stars starting to fade. Headlights shine in our eyes. People milling about, some making small talk. Kids going to school. Adults going to work. Suits with briefcases. The chill of the early morning. I’m wearing my blue sweatshirt.

Others wear jackets, some wear hats. Buses come, people get on. People get in taxis. The 633 pulls up. Lines form before the bus even stops. The main line forms towards the front of the bus. I try to get on in the front but there are too many people and if I wait the bus will leave. I move to the back. It’s technically not allowed, but everyone does it. The line is shorter and the people in front of me file in, climbing up. I’m last in line I step in and grab on

to a metal railing with my left hand so the bus doesn’t take off without me. It lurches into motion. I’m holding on and pushing my way up the stairs trying to pack in. The metal door, heavy archaic lethal, closes on me. I get my body out of the way and instinctively put my right hand out to protect my body as I swing fully into the bus with my left hand.

The door is shut. Something is wrong. The bus is driving. Something is wrong. I turn and look to see my thumb disappear in between the hinged part of the door. The bottom half of my thumb is exposed but the top is gone, lost in the solid metal immensity of the door. Metal surrounds my thumb. Do I even have a thumb? Is it gone? Cut off ? Flattened? No time passes.

Motherfucker! I yell.

No one bats an eye.

Oh right, I think, I’m in Mexico. ¡Hijoe Puta! I yell.

Everyone looks.

The business man in front of me one step up yells for the driver to ¡Abre la puerta! ¡Abre la puerta! It opens. No time passes.

I’m terrified to look. Will I still have my thumb? Is it totally flat? Is the nail gone? I have a phobia about nails. I’m terrified of them falling off or tearing off or bending back.

I pull my hand out. The thumb is there, flatter, but there. It looks not terrible but wrong. A little blood around the nail. I don’t feel anything.

I look at the guy in front of me. He’s in a suit. He has a mustache.

Tal vez debería ir al hospitál? I smile.

He doesn’t say anything.

My mind goes hazy. For a minute I don’t feel anything. Then comes the throb pulsing bass pains from my thumb that travel through my nervous system, my circulatory system. It’s nerve pain that hits first the pain that screams to my brain that something is wrong. It stings, it aches, it twists. Then the deep pain that travels through my blood. The low frequency intensity that makes me swoon that fills with panic that is entirely new to me. My mind reels my stomach fills with nausea. Can’t think. Keep it together. Maintain. If I can get to school there’s a doctor. He’ll know what to do. People push me out of the way at the stops. They need to go to work. Who cares about this crazy fucking gringo kid with his hands in his blue sweatshirt pockets.

If I can make it to school, I think.

Oh fuck I’m gonna puke, I think.

Oh fuck I’m hot.

Is this a fever? An infection? Smashed into my body, flying through my system, rust on jagged metal door edges eyes floating in my head. Bus stops,

damian I have this book on the bookshelf just sitting there piled up in a stack of other books that need to be returned to their owners. Various owners. It’s a few hundred pages. Black cover. It looks like a textbook. It’s older. Worn.

Pages have been read and read. It’s all about languages. A survey of world languages. One or two pages about the language. Vital statistics. How many speakers. Where it’s spoken, etc. And then one page with a sample of the language written out. It’s called something obvious like Languages of the World. It’s fascinating. It intrigues me. I love flipping through it. Trying to pronounce words that make no sense to me. Words that I have no clue as to what they mean. Words. Languages. That book has been on that shelf for quite a while now. That pile has risen and fallen and yet that book with Damian’s name written on the inside cover has remained. I can’t give that book back even if I wanted to. I meant to. I always meant to. But I can’t. Damian is dead. I found that out later.

Damian was this tall Polish kid who had a degree in sociology. He had lived in the U.S. for years and spoke English that was permeated with his Polish tongue and lips. He was big and quiet. Smart dry and funny. He worked in his own section of the warehouse, packing up 8.5 by 11 paper to be shipped out to the stores. All day long – just as I did – he’d walk up and down his stacks grabbing paper off the shelves and filling orders. He was close to the other boys that lived in the next rows over.

There was an older Polish woman who worked at a small desk at the end of one of Damian’s rows. I can’t remember what she did there. I was never quite sure. I think it involved counting paper. She and Damian would bicker in Polish and he would translate for her when she needed something. She always seemed sweet, but she got on his nerves.

Damian and I would talk about languages and sociology and school and literature. I’d go over there to get some specialty paper that my ladies needed for some kits and we’d end up talking for a while. Letting time slip by was a favorite pastime at the warehouse. Killing time I suppose would be more appropriate and it was our favorite sport. I’d try to learn as much Polish from him as I could. I’m a nerd for languages. In a notebook I still have a scrap of paper that says, nie mowie po polsku, which is my phonetic way of writing it. I don’t speak polish. It’s all I remember how to say. I remember the most

rain

Rain tonight. Rain pouring down out of the night sky blurring the street light that illuminates the parked cars in front of my apartment. Rain pounding on the roof on the air conditioner units in the windows on the street misting back up after splashing against the concrete. August night rain. Humid all day until the rain broke.

I was sitting on the chair in the front room looking out the window at all the rain pouring down on the trees the leaves glistening in the streetlight the sound of the rain hissing in the leaves. Drenched glass. Enjoying it all cuz fall will be here soon. Sweaters and sweatshirts and coats. It all comes on so fast in Chicago. One week it’s summer and the next week it’s cold.

people push me out of the way.

ISSSTE. There’s a hospital.

The thoughts.

Come.

In between.

Bass throbs.

Through my body.

ISSSTE. God bless the socialist tendencies of the rest of the world.

ISSSTE. Instituto de Seguridad y Servicios Sociales de los Trabajadores del Estado. The state hospital. And it’s only two stops from here. Just hang on.

Bus stops people push me out of the way. I’m standing wrapped around one of the metal support bars. Hands in pockets not wanting to look at my thumb. Brain starting to panic. It’s this bus.

This bus.

I’m connected to it and it’s killing me.

This bus and I are one. Later on whenever I take this bus, I’ll look at the numbers on the buses to see if I’m on the one that hurt me.

Connected. It’s filling me with terror and pain and panic and nausea.

My stop.

People push me out of the way. I climb down the stairs after them. Hands in sweatshirt pockets one foot in front of the other. Cross the parking lot of a restaurant. The air feels good on my face. Head towards the...

Oh fuck. Instantaneous overwhelming rising sensation in my stomach.

Puke. I don’t even have time to realize what’s happening. It’s over before I realize.

Walking and throwing up on the parking lot aware enough to get it away from me, not on my clothes – I’m too classy for that.

Puke in my sinuses. I need to blow my nose wipe off my mouth.

The lady walking in front of me looks back at me with disgust.

I feel much better. It hurts, but that panic is gone. I puked out the dread now it just.

Ow. Fuck.

Throb.

Make my way up the many many stairs to the hospital. Make my way to a security guard at a desk.

Afraid to look, I pull my hand out of my pocket the air grates on against it, the metal sting of the thumb moving through air. It feels frozen and massive. I show the guard my thumb. Donde puedo ir para ésto? I ask.

Down the hall to the left he tells me. He says it slow and uninterested, he’d rather be elsewhere. As soon as I go he’ll go back to reading his paper.

Gracias.

I stumble down the dark hallway to the next wing of the hospital. A line of people. Fifteen to twenty sitting on benches on the floor.

Shit. I hope I don’t have to wait too long.

I talk to the receptionist at the desk.

I show her my thumb. ¿Alguien puede ayudarme?

She tells me to wait a minute. She disappears for a while. I look around.

Gray dawn. The sun is coming up somewhere. I can’t see it from these windows. Gray light on the other waiters. Throb throb. Pulsing. My thumb. No panic now, just dull pain. The place is clean and looks like any other hospital.

I’m always surprised when public hospitals don’t turn out to be the drama hotbeds that tv has made them out to be.

She comes back.

Ellos te pueden ayudar por aca.

Gracias.

She leads me into the emergency room. New shift. The first shifters have just come on. The patients in the beds are still asleep. A doctor or two, a bunch of nurses.

They sit me down. ¿Qué te pasó? They ask.

Tenía un accidente en un bus. I say.

Esos pendejos. They say. All these lady nurses around me. Cursing the notorious bus drivers.

La puerta de atras me... I paused looking for the word.

Machucó. One nurse said.

Machucó? I asked and I gestured with my hands smashing them together like doors closing.

Sí.

Pues sí. Me machucó.

A ver, they said, and started to clean my thumb with some disinfectant.

A doctor in green came over. They were all young. She looked at me.

Por qué estás tan pálido?

I guess I was pale. I felt green. Vomité despues de bajar del bus. I explained.

Awwww. They all sighed smiling. Pobrecito. Did they really say pobrecito or did I just feel it.

De donde eres? They asked.

Chicago. I answered. I told them I was studying Spanish at the Universidad de Guadalajara.

No tengas miedo. The doctor said. Estás bien. She was looking at my thumb.

Está quebrado? I asked.

She surveyed it, squeezing it between her thumb and finger. Puedes moverlo?

I wiggled it at the joint. Sí.

No. No está quebrado.

Y la uña? Se va a caer? I asked paranoid about losing my thumbnail.

Scared, not wanting to deal with it.

Por qué? She asked.

Tengo una fobia.

Awww they all sighed and giggled.

No. No va a sufrir un caido. She said.

That made me feel better.

They wrapped it in gauze and a cloth bandage. The doctor brought me some pills for the pain.

Cuanto cuesta todo ésto. I asked, now afraid about the money.

Nada. Es un regalo. The doctor smiled.

Muchísimas gracias. I said.

No te preocupes.

I was still thinking of going to school when I left. Going to class. It wasn’t broken. What was the big deal? It hurt a little. The sun was shining. Yet another gorgeous Guadalajara day. Cool breeze on my face. A few clouds.

Beautiful blue sky. Rush hour waning. Still only 7.30am. Go to school?

I walked towards the bus and thought, fuck it, I’m going home. Crossed the highway and got on the 633 going back to Zapopan. Only a handful of people on the bus. I sat thinking. Feeling the sting and throb.

I got back home climbed the stairs, hopped over the gate, slid open the sliding door, went to my room, took off my pants, took my pills, got into bed, propped my thumb up and away from my body and went to sleep.

Sitting in the school doctor’s office. Yes. It’s broken, he tells me. He looks at my thumb, swollen and purple in the afternoon sun. He’s taken x-rays that cost twenty dollars and he’s showing me where my thumb is fractured in three places.

I can’t believe they didn’t do x-rays. He says in English. He’s wearing a white medical coat over his dress pants and shirt and tie. Dark hair and clean shaven. He’s probably in his late 30’s.

Yeah, I say. Now I’m feeling worse. I didn’t think it was broken.

A few minutes later and he’s lancing the nail to drain the fluid that’s building up underneath the nail. This I can’t watch. The wood paneling of his office.

Sitting on the edge of the examination bed. My eyes shut as he tells me not to move my thumb. Hold very still. He inserts a hot needle three times through my thumbnail. Through the throb of my thumb I don’t really notice any other pain, just a little pressure.

He tells me that I have to change the bandages every other day. That I have to keep my thumb in a splint. That I have to take an anti-inflamatory and an antibiotic. The nail will fall off at some point, but probably not until a new nail has started to grow underneath it. He tells me that when it falls off, I’ll be ready. I’m not happy about this news.

In Mexico in the neighborhood where I lived they had a procession every other week. Maybe every week. Some random procession at some random time of the day. Sometimes in the morning. Sometimes in the afternoon.

Sometimes at night. And sometimes early early in the morning when no one was around.

They’d all march in line for their saints. Neighborhood saints. Religious saints. Saint saints. The big one was a procession to the basilica that was a couple of miles from our house. That was once a year and the huge plaza was filled beyond capacity with people who came to see the virgin. Some had traveled the whole way from the mountains to the basilica walking behind in the procession.

The neighborhood ones were smaller affairs but still raucous. Hanging on things singing shooting off bottle rockets and fireworks intermittently and incessantly. Sometimes little pops and sometimes huge booms that shook the house.

Ignacio’s dogs, Snoopy and Candy, would run in terror and try to get under whatever they could. The couch the table my bed. And there they would stay shaking violently. These two big dogs with American names apparently found on the side of the road after their owners kicked them out of the car while on a trip. Whimpering and shaking they’d calm down and another boom would rattle the windows.

Ignacio founded a socialist party in Jalisco when he was younger – he was still a member of it. I don’t know if he still went to meetings or was active, I like to think he was. I like to think that when he was going downtown to

Years later I found out that Jeff thought I was a stoner.

Really? I asked.

Oh yeah. I thought you were a massive stoner.

Why? The way you talked on the phone. You just sounded so high. So mellow.

Like ‘hey you wanna come see the place?’ Jeff imitated the way I spoke. Slow and quiet with an apparent air of disconnectedness. I thought you were gonna offer me some pot or something.

And instead I offered you leftover pizza. Cold. Man that didn’t help the stereotype image I had going.

No. I had no idea I sounded like that. I just thought I talk normal.

Sanborn’s to drink coffee and read his newspaper – La Jornada – he was actually meeting up with his fellow party members. I imagine them plotting and planning and organizing while drinking coffee as the afternoon sun pours in through the windows covering their table with warmth. Ignacio in his dress pants and shoes and shirts with a suit coat. But no tie. His gray receded hair and his big smile and eyes behind glasses.

For about two weeks I went with him to Sanborn’s and drank té de manzanilla with milk and sugar and read La Jornada and an elementary school primer and he’d quiz me about what I had read. He’d bring photocopied worksheets from old Spanish grammar books. He’d have me do my work there – he wanted me to start from scratch. This is a verb, he’d explain to me.

What is an adverb? I’d get so frustrated drinking my tea in the afternoon sun wondering what was going on in this huge city – what cool things must surely be happening somewhere. But he was only doing what he knew – teaching elementary school. He wanted to start at the basics. There was a kind of logic to it, I just didn’t think it was the right way to be teaching someone who already knew what verbs were and had graduated from college. I’d talk about it to Rufina – who had also been a teacher – and they’d spar about it back and forth, but Ignacio believed in what he was doing. So my lessons continued until my classes at the university started. Then my visits to Sanborn’s fell by the wayside.

But I like to think that if I hadn’t been there at Sanborn’s he would’ve been talking socialism to his fellow party members. I like to think that these little old men that he introduced me to were old revolutionaries.

Keith you have to listen to this tape. These are songs from the revolution.

Chuladas. Everything was chulada to Ignacio – any good thing. His dogs – Candy and Snoopy, the communist manifesto. Chuladas!

He loaned me his copy of the communist manifesto and I really did want to read it. But it’s dense in English and even moreso in Spanish. I wanted to read it and to practice my Spanish, but I was so lonely at night that I just read all the books that I had brought with me. Reading in English to escape what I felt was my lack of a life in Mexico.

Dave Roos, my friend from the university, and I went to the tianguis a few miles from school. A bus or two. Electric that run in circles and weave and tangle and cross and intersect and weave and confuse if you follow only the electric power cables that they fasten themselves to with a long hinged arm.

The buses drive with the illusion of free will but the arms and electric cables overhead tell the true story.

Hot bright afternoon walking up and down the aisles. Open air stalls and vendors. Some with canopies some with tarps some with umbrellas. Products piled on tables on the ground in crates and on shelves. Food cd’s, records, stereos, dvd players, vcr’s, tape decks ,electronics, scrap metal, tv’s, tv screens, computer parts, monitors, clothes, shoes, fabric, furniture, car parts, cars, car seats, plates, silverware, glasses, hats, office supplies, pencils, pens, paper, erasers, printers, paperweights, rocks, toys, postcards, posters, art, religious icons, relics, pieces, candles, and bootlegs. We were here for bootlegs.

Dave was looking for some new movies to buy and take home for himself and his wife, Mandy. He eyed some new Hollywood movies. Pirates of the Caribbean which had just come out in theaters a few months previous. But here was the vcd of it. Three for five dollars. Minimal packaging at a stall at the tianguis under the afternoon Guadalajara sun. Two younger guys selling the bootlegs.

Y si no funciona? Dave troubled out, still learning Spanish.

Just bring it back and we can swap it. The kid answered in Spanish.

Cool.

Dave bought three and handed over his pesos. We walked on and found an ice cream vendor.

Have you had helado de garafones? Dave asked me.

No. I said.

Oh my god, you have to try this. Dave told me.

It’s good? I asked.

It’s amazing. He said.

What’s helado de garafones?

It’s like made in these keg like things.

Oh right. Garafones. I said. Garafones were like barrels or drums or what water cooler water comes in.

We were eyeing the flavors. Chocolate. Vanilla. Coconut. Mamey. Tequila.

What kind is good? I asked.

All of it is good. Dave said.

Quieres provar joven? The man at the stall asked. Under a canopy his face round and in the shade.

Sí. Un poco de coco. I said. He gave me a little taste. Holy shit. I said.

Has provado la tequila? He asked me.

No. Pero no tomo el alcohol. I said.

Pues hay que provar este helado. Es riquisimo.

No sé. I said hesitant.

Watching as the towers fell in New York City. Jeff and I in our pajamas sitting on the couch in silence. Sunlight through the trees in front of the house along the street. Silent. Silent as I rode my bike home after we closed early that same day. Nothing. Watching on tv as it’s announced that we’ve begun bombing Baghdad. Explosions and flashes and I tear up every time a building explodes. Every time the screen flashes. There were people in there. Every flash on screen and someone’s life ended. Someone’s life changed forever.

Every broadcaster and commentator recycling the phrase, shock and awe.

Alone that night feeling powerless and sad and angry.

the windows, our eyes just barely peaking out. We were immediately giddy, feeling dangerous.

Someone walked up and looked at the lampshade and kept going. We thought this was hilarious. A man in a sport coat walked up looked at the lampshade and stopped. He looked around. He picked up the lampshade and put it on top of one of the bushes in front of our building. Then he walked on.

We lost it. We couldn’t contain our laughter and were rolling on the floor. Jeff ran back downstairs to reset the lampshade. He came back up and we got back into position. A woman approached and looked at the lampshade and walked around it. We were shaking with suppressed laughter when a guy approached the lampshade, stopped, and looked right up into the window where we were spying from. We dropped to the floor. Holy shit! We laughed, peering out the window to make sure he walked on. How’d he know we were here! We were rolling on the floor again.

Jody thought it would be nice to carve pumpkins. Dark October early night. Clear air. Clean and chill against the skin. Warm yellow lamp light in the kitchen. Warmth from the wood paneling and the heat from the vents.

Pumpkins on the kitchen table. Newspaper spread out underneath. Pumpkin innards in a wet heap to the side of each of the three pumpkins. Mike reaching in, pulling more innards out of his pumpkin, wet stringy strands hanging from his hands. Jeff pulling the seeds aside and putting them onto a cookie sheet for roasting later.

Music on the radio. Open beers. Early fall without the pressure of returning to school. Such a refreshing feeling. Jody had her sleeves rolled up as she carved a face onto her pumpkin. Mike carved a dancing skeleton into his. A stencil?

Free hand? It danced.

Jeff carved a simple shape that looked like little more than an undefined blob. Amorphous.

Ooh, put candles in. Jody said when they were finished. Teeth get yr camera.

Take a picture.

I grabbed my camera and braced arms against the door frame so I could hold still and shoot with the shutter open for a long time so enough light could hit the film. I had no flash. I focused on the three pumpkins with candles in them. The lights went out.

Jody’s pumpkin’s face grinned with inner light. Mike’s skeleton danced as the candle’s little flame danced. Jeff ’s amorphous blob revealed itself to be a penis and a glob of semen. It too glowed radiant. Genius. Jeff and Mike laughing. Jody sighing. Beers in hand.

Pruevalo. He insisted and gave me a little scoop.

Wow. I said. Está bien rico.

Dave asked for his ice cream and I asked for some coconut ice cream – which I’m crazy about.

Hot afternoon Guadalajara sun eating ice cream. Walking back to the bus.

My right thumb still mildly pulsing swollen dull in its metal splint and bandages four weeks after getting smashed.

Walking with Dave in Guadalajara up the street from school. I’m learning my way around this town. Sun pouring down. Consistent weather, always sunny in the afternoon. The low building architecture and trees scattered on the sides of the street. A glorieta up in the distance.

Y’know what this town needs? Dave asks. His occasional stubble beard and closely shaved head.

What’s that? I ask feeling the sun through my button down shirt. Thumb in a splint, still wrapped in gauze.

Curry. There’s no curry here. At all. That’s the thing I miss the most is a good curry.

Really. I say thinking. Trying to imagine any place I might have seen curry.

They really don’t have curry?

No and I want to open a curry stand. Just get a little cart and make a batch of curry for the day and when I’m out I’m out. Like some beef or lamb or chicken. Whatever I’m feeling. Maybe some fish.

Man that’d go over like crazy here. I think people’d freak out for that. It would rule. You should make a vegetarian curry though for the ten of us who don’t eat meat. I say.

Yeah okay. He acquiesces. Then eventually I could open one of those weekend restaurants outta my house like where they sell birria, y’know.

Yeah. I nod.

And I could do the same. Just make a big batch for the day and when it’s gone it’s gone.

That’d rule, I say, happy to know this guy Dave here in Guadalajara.

Sitting in the park next to the university in downtown Guadalajara. Green everywhere. Green trees. Some of them look like trees you’d see in the midwest. But then there are the trees that I don’t recognize at all. Trees that initially remind me of palm trees, but are shaped like exploding fireworks at the top. Thick leaves and a trunk with angular pieces that point upwards one on top of the other. Other trees dark and mossy seem like thick vines hang-

ing from the air – few branches but twisting trunks. Some cypress trees. It’s dense and cool in the shade. The strange brilliantly colored flowers that I can never describe to anyone. Clumps of dense grass. Breeze. Here I am in another country. A broken thumb. Trying to figure out my life. Stay here, look for a job, go back home to my friends and family. Success. Failure. What do I want out of life. Looking at these trees and their branches and the blue sky that appears between them. Happy to be in another country feeling like I’m able to survive on my own. Confident, knowing my way around a new city. Feeling infinitely lonely but at the same time comforted by the trees.

Jody first lived in the tiny half bedroom when she was only staying with us temporarily. There was enough room for her mattress and some bags. I would sit in there and talk to her about the troubles of my early twenties love life and the woes of my then relationship. I was thankful to have a girl to be talking to. After Z moved out and Jody moved into his room, Jeff and I turned it into our little music room. A four track recorder. Our guitars and amps. A stereo. A snare drum. Keyboards. A desk. A chair. Lots of blank type II cassette tapes. A closet still filled with Jody’s clothes. Jeff hung ridiculous pinups from Playboy and in celebration of our triumph we hung a Jim Morrison banner on the side of the door that faced the living room. So everyone would know that that room was for musical genius. Genius covers of Cypress Hill and christmas carols, wanky guitar solos set to drum machine art beats, sensitive acoustic songs and garage guitar with noise art pieces. Jeff also worked on lots of audio assignments for his classes.

2 am. Jeff recording dialogue for an audio project where he had to add sound effects, redub voice and a soundtrack to a three minute scene. Essentially strip everything away and create his own version. He chose a scene from Dragon Ball Z. I think it was called The Tree of Life. I had to do the voice of the bad guy Turlis. I did it in my worst over dramatic dub voice.

Then after the confrontation, after a song from the Good the Bad and The Ugly, my character dies as he is consumed in a blinding energy blast released from the hands of our hero as portrayed by Jeff. 2am and we’re recording my death. My death screams. I’m holding back. Timid. Not wanting to wake the downstairs neighbors, the landlords, or their children. Louder, Jeff keeps telling me. Louder. More grit. Alright I finally say, but I’m hiding if they come knocking. 2 am. Scream after scream. Laughing in between takes until Jeff says, Alright, I got it.

It was Saturday night and Jody was having a party and the house was filled with people Jeff and I didn’t know very well. We were social but we ended up in the living room by ourselves for a bit. Hey, Jeff said, let’s put this lamp shade out on the sidewalk.

Okay, I said.

Jeff ran down the stairs with the lampshade while I watched from the window. He put it on the sidewalk right in front of our house where we could see best. He ran back upstairs and shut off the lights in the living room. The party continued in the other rooms without pause. We hid in the corners of

2 am. The apartment dark. Jeff and I had shut off all the lights after we had finished playing video games. Jody and Mike had gone to bed a couple of hours earlier. They had come home said, hey, and did their nighttime rituals in the bathroom while Jeff and I defended ourselves and captured the flag in the video game world.

Now we were sneaking through the dark hallway past Jeff ’s bedroom. We paused in the bathroom building up our courage, trying to hold ourselves together and not make any noise. We paused listening for any sound. We moved into the kitchen where Jody’s room was. We knew our way in the dark without any light. We knew where to step to avoid creaking the floor. We got into the kitchen in front of Jody’s room. We hesitated, listening. Nothing. Maybe the sound of them breathing. The sound of her computer in sleep mode, making the sound of an aquarium air filter or scuba oxygen release. A steady slow breath of bubbles.

We moved close to the door. Fear and excitement knotting our stomachs.

We couldn’t see each other in the dark. We raised our hands against our mouths. Jeff counted to three. We took a breath. We blew hard into our palms pressed tight to our mouths.

The sound was deafening. Simulated farts tore threw the early morning.

We heard no response and did it again. After this salvo we started giggling, trying not to make a sound. The silence that met us made it harder to contain ourselves. Then. From within Jody’s room. An answering imitation fart. Mike answering. We were on the floor laughing and giggling tears in our eyes. Then we made more fart sounds and Mike answered. Jody’s exhausted voice through the door, You guys. Jeff and I were fighting to breathe through our laughs and imitation flatulence. Then it was over. Laughing we said goodnight and went to our rooms feeling giddy and heroic.

One night when Jeff and I had been playing video games we heard Jody and Mike coming home thumping upstairs. We stopped looked at each other and said, hide! I quickly dove behind the love seat in front of the windows and left my legs sticking straight up in the air effectively hiding only my waist to my head. My legs left waving in the air. Jeff attempted to hide somewhere else equally ridiculous. As I was upside down and behind the love seat I had no idea where he went. Jody and Mike walked in and Jody laughed. You guys.

treefort

Five years old. Hickory Road. Hiding in the clump of pine trees in the front yard. Dark and closed in under the branches. A large nook to hide and play in and the branches were close enough to the ground and close enough together that the middle of the three tall trees made for the best climbing in the whole yard. Climbing up through the thin branches. Light enough at five that they could support me. Higher. Shorts and a shortsleeve t shirt and Kangaroo shoes with pockets on the sides. Gray. In my Star Wars obsessed mind, they bent in the right way when I stepped on a branch or a ledge that they looked how Luke’s feet bent over the metal bar as he inched away from his father in the inner belly of Bespin before falling in rejection. Hands sticky.

Fingers stuck together. Sap on my legs and hands. Smelling of pine. Always disgusted with the sap but always worth the sap to be up there. Always. I could see a little bit through the dense pine branches, but most important, I couldn’t be seen. I imagined myself a spy listening in on the world around me. People walking along the quiet street. Cars driving by. Birds. Speed bumps. Clouds in the sky. And there I was in the branches. Tanned dark from the summer sun and freedom from school.

My first treefort was a hole in the ground. It was in the backyard of the first house we lived in, in Woodstock. It was on Hickory Road which was just outside of the city limits which meant that we didn’t have city water, which meant well water, which meant we had water with a raw unfiltered, earthy, aromatic and sulfur taste. A few years later at my friend Blake’s house (also outside the city limits but closer to being in the country than us) I would learn the term pooh water to describe well water.

The house on Hickory Road was a sprawling split level ranch style house that felt huge as a kid and I still remember it that way. A huge old place where I could roam and ramble and explore in. It had lots of hiding places and an aquatic theme in the bathroom off of the master bedroom where my parents slept. The faucets were sea dragon heads and they felt like worn down brass or copper. Spiky, gaudy, mysterious.

The yard was filled with hickory trees. So many that we could pick up the nuts and smash them with rocks on the driveway and eat them. Our yard felt huge. Immense and in the woods. A large fire pit between our house and our neighbor to the south where both he and my dad would rake the leaves in the fall and then set them on fire. A huge pile of leaves burning and smoldering.

The smell of crisp fall air and smoke in the night with only the light from the fire to see by and the stars and the tree tops dark in silhouette against the dark dark blue black night sky, the house to our backs, lights in the windows. Part of me is still there on that lawn. A young six year old ghost haunting that spot watching a phantom pile of leaves burn in the night. In awe of the fire. Feeling safe and warm standing next to his dad who leans on a rake.

The back yard was long, stretching far back and at the end there was a fence that marked the city limits and the houses beyond. At that fence there was a clump of trees that were smaller in stature than the tall sky reaching trees that filled the rest of the yard. The small clump of trees was climbable and there were bushes and shrubs, so it was hidden from the direct view of most of the houses. This was where we built our tree fort. We. My friends and I. Kris Sigman who had light brown hair and a crooked smile. Matt Eby who had straight blonde hair and lived behind our house inside city limits. As we had no wood.

As we had no tools. As we were six years old. We didn’t build up. We built low.

We dug a hole. We had a shovel somehow, and dug a hole big enough for one of us to hide in. We had found an old piece of ply wood somewhere and we would cover the hole with that so we could hide in it.

The plan was to connect our hole with another hole in another clump of trees over by Kris’ house. We wanted to dig a tunnel so we could get from one spot to the other in total secrecy. As we had no tools. As we had no engineering

it came out every night I dreamed – usually in the form of chase dreams, but where I knew that if I was caught I would be taken over and not be myself anymore.

One night I was sleeping over at my then girlfriend’s parent’s house. She was in one room and I was in another. I had gone to bed after everyone else had. It was midnight or so. I drifted off to sleep. Dreamt.

Argument. Fighting with another person. A man. I didn’t know. Argument escalated. Heated shouts curses. An anger rising in me. Trying to fight it.

Pressure in me building. Panic rage fury terror. The fight continues a voice in my head. Do it! Do it! Do it! It screams. Burning words in my skull. I pick the man up. He’s terrified. Face full of fear. Contorted. He’s screaming. I drop him impaling him on a metal spike that rises from the ground.

I wake up heart pounding the man’s scream and terror still ringing loud in the air the voice in my head still echoing Do it Do it Do it. I lay in the bed breathing hard terror and dread in my stomach. It’s still dark outside. Dark in the room. Tight and dense and heavy pushing in. Me afraid to move afraid to turn my head to the side. I want to turn on the lamp that’s on a night stand just to my left. I hesitate convinced that when I do the light will reveal an unknown person entity sitting in the rocking chair that’s next to the bed. Calm down. Try to calm down. Breathe. Breathe slow. Calm. Minutes pass. Slow years grinding away in the night. I realize the dying man’s scream was the loud air conditioning pouring through the vent in the room. Breathe. Panic leave stomach. Breathe slow. Turn on the light shut eyes as I pull the switch.

Open. No one in the wooden rocking chair. A heavy presence for mental hauntings. Breathe. It’s two in the morning. I’ve hardly been asleep. A copy of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues on the nightstand. Who’s reading that? Why did the voice in my head stay with me after I woke up? That’s the fear in me.

2am. Trying to shut out the dream. Such terror and dread as I wait breathing calming myself down before drifting off to uneventful sleep.

Jody was in the kitchen grabbing something to drink. Jeff was in his room.

We were taking a break between episodes. As she walked down the hallway into the dining room, I crawled over the couch in the living room. Slow methodical forward gangly spider intense grimace grin on my face teeth exposed clenched together tight breathing hard hand over hand foot over foot arms and legs move and bend in exaggerated movements. I crawl over the couch towards Jody and she screams a girlish squeal. Eww Tooth! EEEEE! Stop! And she runs back into the kitchen. Bob strikes again.

Did you know about this?

No. Are you sure?

He was convinced I had done it. I had no idea who had done it. I just walked away.

Cooper’s totally gonna get with Audrey. Slow mildly slurry out of the corner of his mouth, but with gusto.

There’s no way. She’s in high school.

She’s eighteen. She’s legal. It’s fine. Animated, holding his beer in his hand.

There’s no way they’ll do that. It’s against his character and the network wouldn’t allow it.

They’re totally gonna get together. Z says unconvinced. A frozen pizza on the floor. Warm yellow lamplight against north woods paneling. The nightly debate rages back and forth. Will Cooper hook up with Audrey? I had borrowed the Twin Peaks complete series on video from Decourcey at Chicago Comics. We were plowing through it. Night after night. Z Jeff Jody and I. This was when Jody was living in the small half bedroom. Before Z had decided to move out. We were hooked and couldn’t stop watching. Waiting til everyone was home from work or their days or social events or whatever everybody did.

Two to three episodes a night. Once we started we couldn’t stop. Transfixed in the dark midnight apartment on our couches in the glow of the tv. Late spring night – air blowing through the front windows down the hallway into the kitchen out to the porch and out through the screens on the windows in the back porch out into the spring night out of the back yard and out into the city.

Z wanted Cooper and Audrey to get together so bad. He was adamant in his belief of this outcome. For him it was inevitable. He was mad for Audrey and living vicariously through Agent Cooper. Of course who wasn’t in love with Audrey? Sherilyn Fenn and her short brown hair cut and saddle shoes, pencil skirts and sweaters. Her large eyes and lips, trapped in a bordello and lingerie for a few episodes. Who could resist her cheesecake charms? But she wasn’t gonna get with Cooper no matter how much Z wanted it to happen. No matter how much he argued for it. It wasn’t gonna happen.

When we were watching Twin Peaks I had dreams bordering on nightmares. Dreams. I called them Bob dreams. I was terrified of Bob – conceptually speaking. Sure he was creepy as a character on the show. But the concept of him – possession and the badness that’s in us – terrified my subconscious. And

know-how. As we were six years old. We eventually contented ourselves with having a hole to jump in. The clump of trees provided a decent enough fort from which to set off on expeditions through other people’s yards, to explore the woods or play hide and seek. The woods that we knew were all yards, but we knew how to get through unnoticed following tree lines and shrubs.

Always hanging back, skirting the property lines. Hiding behind stacks of firewood.

I remember we came across what we thought was a haunted house. An empty house filled with menace. Some sort of structure that creeped us out and fascinated us. But we were too young to venture inside. It was off to the north, towards Queen Anne Road, on the other side of which opened up into farm fields. Corn and open skies.

Kris lived in the house next door with his mom and grandparents and little sister. I slept over there a lot. They had a big screen tv that might have weighed three tons and was so huge that the house probably had to be built around it. The tv was wood paneled. I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag under blankets in his room or in the living room where we both sometimes slept camp out style for adventure listening to a little clock radio on the floor.

To this day I still remember the song that was playing. I lay there awake, Kris asleep close to the wall. Boys will be boys, bad boys bad boys. Boys will be boys bad boys bad boys. Miami Sound Machine. 1985 dreams.

A pool table in their basement. A slot machine with a cup of quarters next to it. An unfinished back basement dark and perfect for hiding.

Matt Bean lived up the street from me on Melody Lane. He was tall and skinny with a mop of straight light brown hair. He wore collared polo style shirts and gray or brown pants. He was in the gifted program at school.

When I slept over at his house I slept on the pull out trundle of his trundle bed. We played with gi joes and listened to rem – who he liked. We watched Dune and drank grape juice and played video games on his computer. We rode bikes. We created a sludge concoction of hand soap, detergents and other thick slow liquids. We then spent the afternoon in the summer sun dropping boxelder bugs into the goo – watching them slowly sink below the surface. We were scientists. He froze his. I microwaved mine. He got in less trouble than me.

He had the best treefort of any of us. It was a full on platform built around the tree branches ten or twelve feet up into the tree. It had a trapdoor and a rope ladder and carpet attached to the platform for comfort. Amazing. Not very fancy in reality, but for us at age ten, it was truly amazing.

Our sanctuary and hideout in the summer. Cicadas. Breeze. Sunlight through the green leaves. Lawn mowers mowing. Birds. The sound of the water in the creek behind his house.

His backyard stopped at a steep dirt bank. All the houses on the west side of Melody Lane did. Silver Creek ran behind this bunch of houses and trees followed the creek as it flowed through Woodstock. Most houses fenced off their property - picket fences, metal fencing. Anything to clearly mark where their property ended. Matt had access to the creek. They left theirs open. There was some old chicken wire fencing that ran along one half of their backyard but it was open at the northeast corner. This was glory. A dirt bank lined with trees that ran down quickly to a shallow creek. Trees bushes undergrowth hiding places. Exploration.

Not only did Matt have a treefort, he also had a rope swing attached to a tree branch on the bank. We would grab hold at the top of the bank where the grass from the back yard stopped and run down the bank a few feet fast and swing out over the lower half of the bank as it fell away underneath us. We’d try to get as far out as we could. Swinging straight out and back or running towards one side or the other and swinging in wide circles. Amazing fun in the shade. In the coolness of the creek hidden away from the hot summer sun.

Humid and sticky but hidden from the direct oven heat.

The bank behind his house was torn up from us climbing up and down grabbing on to plants and roots and vines to get up and down. Foot holds gouged out of the earth worn down with use and gouged out again.

Hot summer inevitably led us into the creek. Shallow in most parts – no more than a foot deep. In the parts of the creek that were most accessible to us it was usually half that. Not more than six inches. A few hundred meters south towards the bridge where Melody Lane crossed over where the banks were concrete on one side smooth and sheer with a ledge and a thick metal city provided railing. Steep and intimidating – to the inexperienced. The other side had rough cement banks. Cement with rocks and chunks – a gray lava flow. It was lower and more gradual and easier to climb down and only a hundred or so meters from the school field. It was where most of us regularly approached the creek. Here was where our friend and cub scout comrade David Brady ghost rid his bike down the bank into the creek. Brilliance. He rode his bike, pedaling fast towards the creek. Then ten feet before the cement bank he slid his right leg over the center bar of the bike and coolly hopped off letting the bike speed towards the edge. The bike bucked and jumped spastic through the air contorting crippled into the water. Brilliance. Cheers and laughs. Our hero. Here also was the culvert that we would stoop and low walk into for fifty meters until

Garbage piling up. Puke in the sink. Food hidden away with signs. Dust and dirt piles swept into his room off of the kitchen. Dishes placed on his bed.

Our revenge was ill-tempered. Annoying. Ineffective. And it felt amazing.

My room. Somehow I managed to fit my entire life in there. A futon.

Boxes of magazines to cut up underneath the futon. All of my cds and records. My desk where I wrote. A stereo on a milk crate. Speakers on top of it.

A turntable. A light from the ceiling with a pull string switch that I extended with string and action figures and chotchkes so that I could pull the string while under the covers in bed. The window sill was my nightstand. A dresser in the closet with a bookshelf on it and shelves higher up with more magazines to cut up, boxes of zines and pictures. My computer on a table also in the closet. I sat in there, my back on a pillow against the side of the dresser.

Clothes hung above the monitor. Typing up my homework, my stories for fiction writing, my papers, my finals, my zines. White walls with a few posters up – sleater kinney, star wars; some paintings that some friends of mine had made; photos on the wall above my desk.

My room felt magical sometimes. Like when I would be up late at night listening to Sun Ra or some other recently discovered jazz record. Sitting at my desk with just the soft yellow light from my table lamp. Writing stories for my fiction writing classes or working on a zine. Feeling independent and secure on my own and happy with life. Living on my own in the city and having a life, going to shows and movies and art events and hanging out with friends and coming home to work on my writing and listening to amazing music.

It was my responsibility to keep the bathroom clean. I didn’t mind cuz I didn’t trust anyone else to do it as well as I could. I would spend an hour every week cleaning it. Listening to music loud. An old bathtub. A monochromatic tile pattern on the floor – the tiny tiles formed geometric floral shapes.

Larger tiles ran halfway up the wall continuing the monochromatic scheme.

A glass and wicker coffee table in the corner with a stereo on it and magazines on the shelf below. Tape Op. Playboy. Rolling Stone. Perfect 10. Punk Planet. Eventually there was a box of make up and other feminine products next to the stereo. The bathtub that I plunged every few months to keep it draining properly. The sink that twice was mysteriously clogged and twice needed a plumber to come and fix it. Once a toothpaste cap was the culprit.

He glared at me as he held it between his fingers.

dirty yard. Dry leaves blowing back and forth across the yard.

This guy walked up and asked for me. Tall skinny, loose jeans, skate shoes, a baseball cap – wavy brown hair sticking out underneath.

Jeff ?

Yeah.

Nice to meet you. Were you ready to go? Did you wanna look around at all while yr here?

I’ve got a train to catch back to Wisconsin in a bit. He had a backpack on.

We took the train up to Lincoln Square. Brown line to the Western stop.

Small talk along the way. The trees through Ravenswood up into my neighborhood. Sun shining. Out of the Western stop walking underneath the tracks heading East to Lincoln and then a right, pointing places out to Jeff saying, It’s pretty quiet up here. It’s nice cuz it seems really European, lots of euro languages. Some Laundromats on Lincoln, the Davis Theatre which has dollar fifty movies still, which is nice. And this empty lot right here at Lincoln and Wilson, I said pointing to the Southeast corner that was fenced off and filled with cement blocks ruined and torn up walls and foundation. This used to be a laundromat that had free wash one day a week, I guess so that homeless people could do their laundry. I don’t know what it’s gonna be now. We walked east on Wilson to 2216. Brick wood blinds in the window.

I showed him the apartment. The room we had available. We had hardly moved in still. We had only been there a few weeks and hardly anything was set up yet. A tv on the floor with a playstation. That was Z’s.

Are you clean? I asked.

Yeah. He said.

Cool. I’m trying to keep this place cleaner. I was feeling him out, trying to see if he would be an ally in my passive aggressive clean war against Z’s anticlean habits. I was tired of living in a mess. Z and I had been friends in high school but we were finding that we didn’t live well together.

We stood and chatted in the kitchen. I pulled out a box of leftover pizza and offered him some. He declined. I told him I had to eat cuz this was my lunch break. I was self conscious. Sun in the back yard and alley.

He seemed to like the place. Told me he’d let me know soon. We took the train back towards Lakeview. I got off and he went back downtown to catch his train. I went back to work. Rats, I thought, he didn’t seem Hispanic at all. Oh well, I hope he takes it.

The kitchen was generally ground zero for the passive aggressive warfare that raged for the last few months of Z’s stay with us. Cat litter on the floor.

we reached a bend. A shaft of light from the manhole and unknown dangers, experiences beyond. Here was where, years later, walking home from junior high an eighth grader threw my new pair of silver and blue nike high-tops into the creek.

This part of the creek was shallow and stony bottomed. Clear and not threatening. More psychologically accessible. If kids went in it was most often here.

But back up the creek by Matt’s house was another story. Trees covered both banks in a dense canopy. Shrubs bushes reeds tall grass vines roots snaking out of the banks writhing back in again. It was nature in full. Outdoors.

Amazing possibilities of exploration. Matt and I would set out on his side of the bank through the chicken wire fence opening past the tall trunk tree with the rope swing. We would head west following small slight trails we had left before. Inadvertently marking our passage. It felt like going up the Amazon, up into the inland unknowns. There were two types of surroundings – covered by tree canopy or open with grass along the banks. But coming out from the canopy into the open grass was like clouds parting veils lifting life altering and going back in was plunging into mystery.

Mostly we would stick to the banks up high or down barely avoiding the water climbing from branch to branch to get through a thick spot.

There were rumors that the creek was filled with shit from the sewage treatment plant that it passed by a bit farther west. We never knew the truth but it generally kept us out of the water the closer we got to that area. The plant was downstream from where we explored so we never felt in too much danger.

Shorts on. Shoes on the bank. Feet submerged beneath the water. Sunlight through trees. Appreciating the cooler temperature down here in the water.

Fearing the feel of underwater life and plant growth. Rocks and bottom slick with water plants. Green. Cautiously feeling with feet, if we slipped, if we fell in entirely we’d get in trouble. This was forbidden. All these thoughts unvoiced. Nothing consciously appreciated. Just passively recording everything for recall twenty years later. Just having fun. Just existing.

A fence, tall and spanning the creek from high on one bank to high on the other, coming down to just a foot or so above the water. This marked the boundary of the sewage treatment property. Signs on the fence. Keep out.

No trespassing. Stop. The end of the line. The way blocked on the banks on either side. We tried. We searched for a way in. we wanted to see what was on the other side. But the fence cut through the plants and bushes all the vegetation, the water. No way through.

Standing on the ice in the middle of creek. Christmas vacation. Snow on the banks. Gray overcast winter afternoon. Cold on our cheeks. Snowpants, snowboots, winter coats, gloves, hats, scarves. Standing on the ice in the middle of the creek in front of the fence. Keep out. Stop. No trespassing. We approached.

Looked around. Slipped under. We were through. On the other side of the fence.

Did this actually happen. Did we go under the fence? I truly don’t remember. I know we walked down the creek on the ice. Sometimes we walked on the banks where the creek flowed faster where the ice was thinner. Water flowing under the ice. Dark cold water visible in the holes in clear ice gurgling.

Snow on the trees. I know we stood in front of the fence. I can remember approaching it. Scouting around. Kneeling down, maybe preparing to lie down.

Did we chicken out? Did we do it fast and come back. Did only one of us do it while the other hung back scared. Or did we just discuss possibilities. Talk it all out and decide not to. Standing on the ice under gray winter sky. Unending freedom of unending time of unending Christmas vacation.

Five years later my friend Elon and I explored Silver Creek further south where it flowed past his house. Near his house. We had to go through the tall bushes that acted as property boundaries to get to a huge empty field that stretched far east and west and was broken by a line of trees to the south. Cross the open field to the line of trees. Through the trees a small woods. We knew older kids hung out there in the middle of nowhere. Cans of beer. A fire pit.

Mystery. The thrill of mythical bad kid debauchery. Silver Creek ran north through these woods.

Summer explorations through these microcosmic environments through the prairie, the forest. To the lush tropics where the creek fed thick green vegetation and the water was darker. It flowed slower down here too. One summer day looking for something to do to fill the endless hours, we decided a trip down the creek was in order.

We set out with an innertube sled that was in his basement. Through the field under the hot sun through the woods with trees with branches too high up to climb. To the creek humid with water bugs.

Excitement was high. Shoes off socks off shorts. Gross mud between toes on the bank. The innertube in the water. Elon sat down in it and immediately sank down. His legs his shorts wet up to his waist. The creek was too shallow and the innertube too big. It just sat in the mud. Elon getting wet but going nowhere. So much for that. But we laughed and left the basement for a bit.

The apartment was wrapped in dark wood paneling that ran from the matching hardwood floors to a foot from the ceiling. The wood paneling ran from the living room and dining room through the hallway into the kitchen and out into the back porch. We all felt like we lived in a warm cabin up in the north woods of Wisconsin. It felt like that. It felt warm and safe and like permanent vacation surrounded by tall old dark trees. I lived there for four years which was the longest I had ever stayed in one place in my entire life.

It was very comfortable and I felt safe there. You walked up a staircase that wound to the right at the top. The stairway always smelled like my grandpa’s house in Wheaton. You opened the door at the landing at the top of the stairs where we kept our bikes and you were in the dining room that we used as an extra room with bookshelves and a couch and the telephone. To the right was the living room that was always filled with sunlight during the day or street light at night. We spent a lot of time in there watching movies or reading or listening to music or playing video games. Off of this room was a little half bedroom that was once a temporary bedroom and then a recording studio. To the left of the door to the stairs was my bedroom and a hallway with Jeff ’s bedroom on the right and the bathroom on the left. The hallway ended in the kitchen and what would eventually be Jody’s bedroom was off the kitchen. It was painted orange like sherbet. It had no closets but was immense. There was a back porch where Jeff and his girlfriend played cribbage while looking out onto the backyard and alley.

I like to party, have people over. Drink and shoot the shit. Y’know brah?

It was the brah that did that kid in. And the fact that he sounded seventeen.

And the fact that he didn’t have a car right now cuz he had a DUI and then drove and got caught with a suspended license. Living at home with his parents. Why would he volunteer all that? What did that serve? Would it impress me? It impressed me so much that I never called him back.

Jeff on the other hand sounded normal and calm and quiet and clean. He sounded orderly. Which was nice. Jeff Lopez. We made plans to meet at the comic store and I would show him the place on my lunch break.

Waiting. Looking for Jeff Lopez. Excited that I might get to live with someone who might be able to teach me Spanish. I don’t think he had an accent I told Z, but he seemed cool.

Sunny and warm. Light through the windows that faced Clark Street. The door open, the trees in the back yard blowing in the wind. Leaves from the trees in the back yard blowing in the wind. Leaves from the trees just starting to fall on top of all the leaves from twenty years of Falls piled up covering the

2216

Our junior high fort. Behind Fox Meadows, the subdivision where we all lived, was a large empty field of tall thick grass that was waist high in most places and shoulder high in others. We burrowed paths through this to the other side where the field was cut down and maintained so that the retired old man who owned it could practice his golf technique. On the north side of this maintained golf green was more tall grass and buried there was a clump of trees. The fort that we built was ambitiously planned high up between two sturdy trees. Due to our lack of carpentry skills and resources and our generally short attention span, the fort we built began and ended with two 2x4s wedged and nailed in a triangle high up between the two trees. You had to climb up one tree or the other to get to it. No ladder. No steps. No rope. Just climbing.

It was amazing to sit up there and watch the field below. The grass and butterflies and bees. Wind through the grass. The subdivision houses far away. The tree line that separated the houses from the tall grass field. Watching the sun set in summer dusk as we stayed out til what seemed like forever before retreating to someone’s house to tell ghost stories in the dark or listen to Metallica or Van Halen or Megadeth or Weird Al and lay on water beds, hide in basements, play Nintendo, pillow fight in the pitch black dark night of closed off bedrooms. The force of the pillow in the face jarring. A white flash in the dark. Terror and suspense in the dark anticipating the pillow in the face. Laughter on contact then shh shhs, shut ups, and enraged parents yelling at us to go to bed. Comics in the morning light and baseball card deals gone awry.

In front of our fort on the ground was a pit that we dug a few feet deep, two feet wide and four feet long. We could stand in it, cover it with brush and hide in it. But mostly we filled it with dead dry plant material and twigs and branches. Then we’d set it on fire and watch the flames leap out from the depths. A foot or so out of the pit. High flames concealed by the pit. Our genius. We jumped across the pit over the flames. Back and forth. What else would we do on a summer day? Sometimes I went to the fort alone with lighter fluid or gasoline and gi joe figures and some matches. Those plastic little men didn’t stand a chance.

One day we found out our fort was going to be attacked. All day long the rumors were flying. Don and his friends were going to make an attempt on our fort. Spring was all around us. Bright sunny warm May. As soon as school was out for the day we burst out of the doors heading as fast as we could to our fort with all of our friends that we had recruited during the school day.

On our way to the fort we discussed tactics. Planned our attack. Surprise, we decided was best. We would split into groups and approach from all sides.

Some would come head on from the route we always took from Fox Meadows.

Some would enter the small dried cornfield and cross the wilderness and come up behind the fort. Another group would follow the tree line that straddled our field and the dried corn field and come from the north. I was coming from the front.

We talked of weapons and supplies and what we would need. Of bb guns and switchblades and butterfly knives, of smoke bombs and bottle rockets and black cats and m80s, of our typical summertime arsenal – half of which was stuff that some “cool older cousins” supposedly had, but neither the cousins nor the stuff ever materialized. We did actually have bottle rockets which were generally used to launch gi joe figures out over the subdivision ponds. Those plastic little men didn’t stand a chance. We wanted to be prepared for our battle. I picked up some throwing rocks – the most common weapon.

I approached from the front with a few others. We approached with caution moving from shrub to shrub, tree to tree. Through the grass up to our hips.

Walking along our trampled paths. We could hear shouts a few other groups had already gotten to the fort. We hurried our pace when we saw Don sitting confident up in our fort.

The battle was over fast. I only remember brief flashes. Us encircling the fort. Rocks being exchanged from ground up and they rained on us to no effect on either side. Some of us scaled the trees. I was one of the first to reach the fort but was met with the flash of a knife. I balked and returned to the ground.

I saw Andy on the other tree, still climbing. I got to the ground fairly sure that the knife was fake. But glad I had an excuse to leave the immediate confrontation.

The battle ended shortly and there was no resolution. It just stopped. We all ended up talking at the base of the trees before disappearing into the field and trees in small groups, already exploding our heroic stories and ready for dinner.

Twilight clouds long in the sky.

Don Gatuso. Spiky, messy, blonde hair. Tall. Athletic. A chipped front tooth.

A grade behind my friends and me, but probably older than me. I was always the young one. Because I have an October birthday my parents had the choice of starting me in school so that I’d be towards the young end of the class or wait a year and have me be towards the old end of the class. They didn’t want to wait.

Don lived up the street on the north end of Wicker Street in Fox Meadows.

physical presence in the hallway by the bathroom. The hum of the refrigerator keeping the food cold. The porch with my bike and a chair and a bookshelf. The broken window frame and the window held together with packing tape. Light from the neighbor’s porch keeps it lit. Trees in the back yard and lining the alley. The leaves and branches moving slowly and softly against the night sky. Power lines and electricity. Traveling up and out above Chicago at night and into the clouds and the grid of streets lit up in perfect geometrical rules and up into the sky above the clouds and the stars are clear and distant and everywhere. Silence and everything.

Reading on the couch or in bed music on the stereo some jazz some rock a single light. One light bulb glowing in the apartment illuminating wherever I happen to be at the moment. 1am deep night out shadows and dark. Light on by my bed or behind my head by the couch where I’m laying reading. Glasses off face pressed close so I can read the words. There are shadows, but my eyes are used to the dark, my ears to the quiet, my body to the empty house and the dark hallway where I imagine more is going on than really is. Slowly move through the hallway to the kitchen to the refrigerator for a glass of water. The light from the refrigerator is bright and shines and the hallway is lit for a few seconds.

The hallway, dark like trees at night. Something there just past the shadows.

The walls could be there or not be there in the dark, it’s hard to tell. Street light through the windows in the front room and the tree branches and leaves moving in the slow night breeze. The window is open. Fresh air green smells cool night breath.

I’m lying in bed or on the couch reading stories. Words move past my eyes.

I’m engrossed and then a snag. A jarring half of a second and I’m hyper aware.

Painfully awake to the world and the grand scheme and my place. Death. I will die. I imagine myself being old and ultimately alone somewhere. Dying.

Imagining my final moments. My last breaths. Will I be awake? Will there be people there? We all face this. What will it be like? Old hands over old covers in an old bed. My hands my body old falling apart my face aged with deep lines in my skin. Old. At the end. Breathing slow with effort. Tired. Knowing that the next time I close my eyes I won’t open them again. Will it be like sleep? Will I be afraid? Will I feel okay with it? Calm and content like I did okay with my life.

Lived it the best I could. Will I be nervous? Will I have butterflies one last time?

Will I be leaving people I love behind? Will someone I love be with me at the end for the last minute? The last second. Will they hold my hand? Will they be asleep? Will I know what’s going on? That it’s over?

Is it a word that triggers this thought? A word in the book that I’m reading?

A note in the song that’s playing? A random firing in my brain that sends me on this Kurt Vonnegut time traveling imagining my old body dying? Sometimes it’s just the book on my chest as I’m reading – the slight weight of it – that makes the beating of my heart more pronounced. I can feel my heart beating and that always reduces my body and existence to the mechanical. My body is just a machine and one day it won’t work. The weight of a book makes this clear. And I’m off time traveling for hours in my head while my eyes are only stuck on a word in the book for a few seconds.

And then I’m reading again. Jazz on the radio. Shadows in the front room from the street light. Breeze through the windows over my head. Dark like a

It was a few doors down from one of the lawns that I cut. It was on my paper route. Every morning at six I would pass by his house walking north loaded down with my bag of papers. On the way back south I laid a paper on his door step. Every morning.

He dressed the same as all of us. Tennis shoes. Jeans. T shirt. He rode a bike, played basketball, or hockey, or baseball, or tag, or hide and seek – anything we played. He was always tagging along or trying to tag along with the group of kids who lived in Fox Meadows. There were ten to fifteen of us all around the same age.

He should’ve been one of us. He was no worse than any of us for getting in trouble or being a smartass or being clueless or anything. He was a kid. He was our age. He should’ve been in our crew.

But he wasn’t.

We always tried to avoid him. We ostracized him, made fun of him. Some of us, like Luke who seemed to have some sort of blood feud with him, would fight him. Walking home from school one day Luke saved up spit and hocked up snot and phlegm for the duration of the mile or so walk. When he tried to talk to me at one point his mouth was filled with liquid green yellow pus-like ooze and his words were wet and choked and I almost gagged and looked away. He was saving this up for Don. Don had offended him somehow and this was how Luke chose to express his total disgust and rage.

When we reached Wicker Street Don rode up on his bike, Luke ran after him and spit. He missed and the gob left a splattered mess on the street.

We demonized him. I had no idea why I shouldn’t like him. He never gave me any reason to think he was an asshole. But I didn’t want anyone to turn on me so I went along with hating him without ever really thinking about it. Our junior high propaganda department was so effective that we all just believed whatever we heard about him. They said his family was trashy, they were trashy. They said he smelled like shit, clearly he smelled like shit. They said he was a fascist cannibal who shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

Fine. He did that too.

Maybe we just needed an enemy, an arch nemesis, and as we didn’t have one we just nominated him for the job without telling him.

He probably just wanted to be accepted. To be friends. To have a crew to roll with. To wake up early in the summer and go off and explore the fields all day or build ramps or blow up gi joe figures or light things on fire. We didn’t let him because for some reason we had decided he was different. And different when you are ten or eleven or twelve or thirteen is the worst thing you can be.

Junior high is such a volatile and intense time. I think people forget how intense it is and how cruel kids can be. Friends from elementary school turn on each other. Alliances and cliques shift from day to day. Friends that you grew up with turn on you in a second, betray you, call you pindick in the locker room, make fun of you in order to get in with more popular kids. We all hurt feelings. We all hurt each other. Even if it was just by ignoring or not sticking up for a supposed friend or just being cluelessly insensitive.

We hurt each other and stayed friends for some reason. Cuz what other choice was there. When they spit on me for five minutes in front of his house in a circle as I tried to avoid it in horror before walking home in tears and getting stuck in the mud of the vacant lot next door. My shoes left behind under a foot of black mud. What else could I do but be friends with them. What other choice did we have? They were my friends. Junior high kids are cruel.

awake

Junior high is such a volatile and intense time. I think people forget how intense it is and how cruel kids can be. Friends from elementary school turn on each other. Alliances and cliques shift from day to day. Friends that you grew up with turn on you in a second, betray you, call you pindick in the locker room, make fun of you in order to get in with more popular kids. We all hurt feelings. We all hurt each other. Even if it was just by ignoring or not sticking up for a supposed friend or just being cluelessly insensitive.

We hurt each other and stayed friends for some reason. Cuz what other choice was there. When they spit on me for five minutes in front of his house in a circle as I tried to avoid it in horror before walking home in tears and getting stuck in the mud of the vacant lot next door. My shoes left behind under a foot of black mud. What else could I do but be friends with them. What other choice did we have? They were my friends. Junior high kids are cruel.

awake

Reading on the couch or in bed music on the stereo some jazz some rock a single light. One light bulb glowing in the apartment illuminating wherever I happen to be at the moment. 1am deep night out shadows and dark. Light on by my bed or behind my head by the couch where I’m laying reading. Glasses off face pressed close so I can read the words. There are shadows, but my eyes are used to the dark, my ears to the quiet, my body to the empty house and the dark hallway where I imagine more is going on than really is. Slowly move through the hallway to the kitchen to the refrigerator for a glass of water. The light from the refrigerator is bright and shines and the hallway is lit for a few seconds.

The hallway, dark like trees at night. Something there just past the shadows.

The walls could be there or not be there in the dark, it’s hard to tell. Street light through the windows in the front room and the tree branches and leaves moving in the slow night breeze. The window is open. Fresh air green smells cool night breath.

I’m lying in bed or on the couch reading stories. Words move past my eyes.

I’m engrossed and then a snag. A jarring half of a second and I’m hyper aware.

Painfully awake to the world and the grand scheme and my place. Death. I will die. I imagine myself being old and ultimately alone somewhere. Dying.

Imagining my final moments. My last breaths. Will I be awake? Will there be people there? We all face this. What will it be like? Old hands over old covers in an old bed. My hands my body old falling apart my face aged with deep lines in my skin. Old. At the end. Breathing slow with effort. Tired. Knowing that the next time I close my eyes I won’t open them again. Will it be like sleep? Will I be afraid? Will I feel okay with it? Calm and content like I did okay with my life.

Lived it the best I could. Will I be nervous? Will I have butterflies one last time?

Will I be leaving people I love behind? Will someone I love be with me at the end for the last minute? The last second. Will they hold my hand? Will they be asleep? Will I know what’s going on? That it’s over?

Is it a word that triggers this thought? A word in the book that I’m reading?

A note in the song that’s playing? A random firing in my brain that sends me on this Kurt Vonnegut time traveling imagining my old body dying? Sometimes it’s just the book on my chest as I’m reading – the slight weight of it – that makes the beating of my heart more pronounced. I can feel my heart beating and that always reduces my body and existence to the mechanical. My body is just a machine and one day it won’t work. The weight of a book makes this clear. And I’m off time traveling for hours in my head while my eyes are only stuck on a word in the book for a few seconds.

And then I’m reading again. Jazz on the radio. Shadows in the front room from the street light. Breeze through the windows over my head. Dark like a

It was a few doors down from one of the lawns that I cut. It was on my paper route. Every morning at six I would pass by his house walking north loaded down with my bag of papers. On the way back south I laid a paper on his door step. Every morning.

He dressed the same as all of us. Tennis shoes. Jeans. T shirt. He rode a bike, played basketball, or hockey, or baseball, or tag, or hide and seek – anything we played. He was always tagging along or trying to tag along with the group of kids who lived in Fox Meadows. There were ten to fifteen of us all around the same age.

He should’ve been one of us. He was no worse than any of us for getting in trouble or being a smartass or being clueless or anything. He was a kid. He was our age. He should’ve been in our crew.

But he wasn’t.

We always tried to avoid him. We ostracized him, made fun of him. Some of us, like Luke who seemed to have some sort of blood feud with him, would fight him. Walking home from school one day Luke saved up spit and hocked up snot and phlegm for the duration of the mile or so walk. When he tried to talk to me at one point his mouth was filled with liquid green yellow pus-like ooze and his words were wet and choked and I almost gagged and looked away. He was saving this up for Don. Don had offended him somehow and this was how Luke chose to express his total disgust and rage.

When we reached Wicker Street Don rode up on his bike, Luke ran after him and spit. He missed and the gob left a splattered mess on the street.

We demonized him. I had no idea why I shouldn’t like him. He never gave me any reason to think he was an asshole. But I didn’t want anyone to turn on me so I went along with hating him without ever really thinking about it. Our junior high propaganda department was so effective that we all just believed whatever we heard about him. They said his family was trashy, they were trashy. They said he smelled like shit, clearly he smelled like shit. They said he was a fascist cannibal who shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

Fine. He did that too.

Maybe we just needed an enemy, an arch nemesis, and as we didn’t have one we just nominated him for the job without telling him.

He probably just wanted to be accepted. To be friends. To have a crew to roll with. To wake up early in the summer and go off and explore the fields all day or build ramps or blow up gi joe figures or light things on fire. We didn’t let him because for some reason we had decided he was different. And different when you are ten or eleven or twelve or thirteen is the worst thing you can be.

On our way to the fort we discussed tactics. Planned our attack. Surprise, we decided was best. We would split into groups and approach from all sides.

Some would come head on from the route we always took from Fox Meadows.

Some would enter the small dried cornfield and cross the wilderness and come up behind the fort. Another group would follow the tree line that straddled our field and the dried corn field and come from the north. I was coming from the front.

We talked of weapons and supplies and what we would need. Of bb guns and switchblades and butterfly knives, of smoke bombs and bottle rockets and black cats and m80s, of our typical summertime arsenal – half of which was stuff that some “cool older cousins” supposedly had, but neither the cousins nor the stuff ever materialized. We did actually have bottle rockets which were generally used to launch gi joe figures out over the subdivision ponds. Those plastic little men didn’t stand a chance. We wanted to be prepared for our battle. I picked up some throwing rocks – the most common weapon.

I approached from the front with a few others. We approached with caution moving from shrub to shrub, tree to tree. Through the grass up to our hips.

Walking along our trampled paths. We could hear shouts a few other groups had already gotten to the fort. We hurried our pace when we saw Don sitting confident up in our fort.

The battle was over fast. I only remember brief flashes. Us encircling the fort. Rocks being exchanged from ground up and they rained on us to no effect on either side. Some of us scaled the trees. I was one of the first to reach the fort but was met with the flash of a knife. I balked and returned to the ground.

I saw Andy on the other tree, still climbing. I got to the ground fairly sure that the knife was fake. But glad I had an excuse to leave the immediate confrontation.

The battle ended shortly and there was no resolution. It just stopped. We all ended up talking at the base of the trees before disappearing into the field and trees in small groups, already exploding our heroic stories and ready for dinner.

Twilight clouds long in the sky.

Don Gatuso. Spiky, messy, blonde hair. Tall. Athletic. A chipped front tooth.

A grade behind my friends and me, but probably older than me. I was always the young one. Because I have an October birthday my parents had the choice of starting me in school so that I’d be towards the young end of the class or wait a year and have me be towards the old end of the class. They didn’t want to wait.

Don lived up the street on the north end of Wicker Street in Fox Meadows.

physical presence in the hallway by the bathroom. The hum of the refrigerator keeping the food cold. The porch with my bike and a chair and a bookshelf. The broken window frame and the window held together with packing tape. Light from the neighbor’s porch keeps it lit. Trees in the back yard and lining the alley. The leaves and branches moving slowly and softly against the night sky. Power lines and electricity. Traveling up and out above Chicago at night and into the clouds and the grid of streets lit up in perfect geometrical rules and up into the sky above the clouds and the stars are clear and distant and everywhere. Silence and everything.

2216

Our junior high fort. Behind Fox Meadows, the subdivision where we all lived, was a large empty field of tall thick grass that was waist high in most places and shoulder high in others. We burrowed paths through this to the other side where the field was cut down and maintained so that the retired old man who owned it could practice his golf technique. On the north side of this maintained golf green was more tall grass and buried there was a clump of trees. The fort that we built was ambitiously planned high up between two sturdy trees. Due to our lack of carpentry skills and resources and our generally short attention span, the fort we built began and ended with two 2x4s wedged and nailed in a triangle high up between the two trees. You had to climb up one tree or the other to get to it. No ladder. No steps. No rope. Just climbing.

It was amazing to sit up there and watch the field below. The grass and butterflies and bees. Wind through the grass. The subdivision houses far away. The tree line that separated the houses from the tall grass field. Watching the sun set in summer dusk as we stayed out til what seemed like forever before retreating to someone’s house to tell ghost stories in the dark or listen to Metallica or Van Halen or Megadeth or Weird Al and lay on water beds, hide in basements, play Nintendo, pillow fight in the pitch black dark night of closed off bedrooms. The force of the pillow in the face jarring. A white flash in the dark. Terror and suspense in the dark anticipating the pillow in the face. Laughter on contact then shh shhs, shut ups, and enraged parents yelling at us to go to bed. Comics in the morning light and baseball card deals gone awry.

In front of our fort on the ground was a pit that we dug a few feet deep, two feet wide and four feet long. We could stand in it, cover it with brush and hide in it. But mostly we filled it with dead dry plant material and twigs and branches. Then we’d set it on fire and watch the flames leap out from the depths. A foot or so out of the pit. High flames concealed by the pit. Our genius. We jumped across the pit over the flames. Back and forth. What else would we do on a summer day? Sometimes I went to the fort alone with lighter fluid or gasoline and gi joe figures and some matches. Those plastic little men didn’t stand a chance.

One day we found out our fort was going to be attacked. All day long the rumors were flying. Don and his friends were going to make an attempt on our fort. Spring was all around us. Bright sunny warm May. As soon as school was out for the day we burst out of the doors heading as fast as we could to our fort with all of our friends that we had recruited during the school day.

Standing on the ice in the middle of creek. Christmas vacation. Snow on the banks. Gray overcast winter afternoon. Cold on our cheeks. Snowpants, snowboots, winter coats, gloves, hats, scarves. Standing on the ice in the middle of the creek in front of the fence. Keep out. Stop. No trespassing. We approached.

Looked around. Slipped under. We were through. On the other side of the fence.

Did this actually happen. Did we go under the fence? I truly don’t remember. I know we walked down the creek on the ice. Sometimes we walked on the banks where the creek flowed faster where the ice was thinner. Water flowing under the ice. Dark cold water visible in the holes in clear ice gurgling.

Snow on the trees. I know we stood in front of the fence. I can remember approaching it. Scouting around. Kneeling down, maybe preparing to lie down.

Did we chicken out? Did we do it fast and come back. Did only one of us do it while the other hung back scared. Or did we just discuss possibilities. Talk it all out and decide not to. Standing on the ice under gray winter sky. Unending freedom of unending time of unending Christmas vacation.

Five years later my friend Elon and I explored Silver Creek further south where it flowed past his house. Near his house. We had to go through the tall bushes that acted as property boundaries to get to a huge empty field that stretched far east and west and was broken by a line of trees to the south. Cross the open field to the line of trees. Through the trees a small woods. We knew older kids hung out there in the middle of nowhere. Cans of beer. A fire pit.

Mystery. The thrill of mythical bad kid debauchery. Silver Creek ran north through these woods.

Summer explorations through these microcosmic environments through the prairie, the forest. To the lush tropics where the creek fed thick green vegetation and the water was darker. It flowed slower down here too. One summer day looking for something to do to fill the endless hours, we decided a trip down the creek was in order.

We set out with an innertube sled that was in his basement. Through the field under the hot sun through the woods with trees with branches too high up to climb. To the creek humid with water bugs.

Excitement was high. Shoes off socks off shorts. Gross mud between toes on the bank. The innertube in the water. Elon sat down in it and immediately sank down. His legs his shorts wet up to his waist. The creek was too shallow and the innertube too big. It just sat in the mud. Elon getting wet but going nowhere. So much for that. But we laughed and left the basement for a bit.

The apartment was wrapped in dark wood paneling that ran from the matching hardwood floors to a foot from the ceiling. The wood paneling ran from the living room and dining room through the hallway into the kitchen and out into the back porch. We all felt like we lived in a warm cabin up in the north woods of Wisconsin. It felt like that. It felt warm and safe and like permanent vacation surrounded by tall old dark trees. I lived there for four years which was the longest I had ever stayed in one place in my entire life.

It was very comfortable and I felt safe there. You walked up a staircase that wound to the right at the top. The stairway always smelled like my grandpa’s house in Wheaton. You opened the door at the landing at the top of the stairs where we kept our bikes and you were in the dining room that we used as an extra room with bookshelves and a couch and the telephone. To the right was the living room that was always filled with sunlight during the day or street light at night. We spent a lot of time in there watching movies or reading or listening to music or playing video games. Off of this room was a little half bedroom that was once a temporary bedroom and then a recording studio. To the left of the door to the stairs was my bedroom and a hallway with Jeff ’s bedroom on the right and the bathroom on the left. The hallway ended in the kitchen and what would eventually be Jody’s bedroom was off the kitchen. It was painted orange like sherbet. It had no closets but was immense. There was a back porch where Jeff and his girlfriend played cribbage while looking out onto the backyard and alley.

I like to party, have people over. Drink and shoot the shit. Y’know brah?

It was the brah that did that kid in. And the fact that he sounded seventeen.

And the fact that he didn’t have a car right now cuz he had a DUI and then drove and got caught with a suspended license. Living at home with his parents. Why would he volunteer all that? What did that serve? Would it impress me? It impressed me so much that I never called him back.

Jeff on the other hand sounded normal and calm and quiet and clean. He sounded orderly. Which was nice. Jeff Lopez. We made plans to meet at the comic store and I would show him the place on my lunch break.

Waiting. Looking for Jeff Lopez. Excited that I might get to live with someone who might be able to teach me Spanish. I don’t think he had an accent I told Z, but he seemed cool.

Sunny and warm. Light through the windows that faced Clark Street. The door open, the trees in the back yard blowing in the wind. Leaves from the trees in the back yard blowing in the wind. Leaves from the trees just starting to fall on top of all the leaves from twenty years of Falls piled up covering the

dirty yard. Dry leaves blowing back and forth across the yard.

This guy walked up and asked for me. Tall skinny, loose jeans, skate shoes, a baseball cap – wavy brown hair sticking out underneath.

Jeff ?

Yeah.

Nice to meet you. Were you ready to go? Did you wanna look around at all while yr here?

I’ve got a train to catch back to Wisconsin in a bit. He had a backpack on.

We took the train up to Lincoln Square. Brown line to the Western stop.

Small talk along the way. The trees through Ravenswood up into my neighborhood. Sun shining. Out of the Western stop walking underneath the tracks heading East to Lincoln and then a right, pointing places out to Jeff saying, It’s pretty quiet up here. It’s nice cuz it seems really European, lots of euro languages. Some Laundromats on Lincoln, the Davis Theatre which has dollar fifty movies still, which is nice. And this empty lot right here at Lincoln and Wilson, I said pointing to the Southeast corner that was fenced off and filled with cement blocks ruined and torn up walls and foundation. This used to be a laundromat that had free wash one day a week, I guess so that homeless people could do their laundry. I don’t know what it’s gonna be now. We walked east on Wilson to 2216. Brick wood blinds in the window.

I showed him the apartment. The room we had available. We had hardly moved in still. We had only been there a few weeks and hardly anything was set up yet. A tv on the floor with a playstation. That was Z’s.

Are you clean? I asked.

Yeah. He said.

Cool. I’m trying to keep this place cleaner. I was feeling him out, trying to see if he would be an ally in my passive aggressive clean war against Z’s anticlean habits. I was tired of living in a mess. Z and I had been friends in high school but we were finding that we didn’t live well together.

We stood and chatted in the kitchen. I pulled out a box of leftover pizza and offered him some. He declined. I told him I had to eat cuz this was my lunch break. I was self conscious. Sun in the back yard and alley.

He seemed to like the place. Told me he’d let me know soon. We took the train back towards Lakeview. I got off and he went back downtown to catch his train. I went back to work. Rats, I thought, he didn’t seem Hispanic at all. Oh well, I hope he takes it.

The kitchen was generally ground zero for the passive aggressive warfare that raged for the last few months of Z’s stay with us. Cat litter on the floor.

we reached a bend. A shaft of light from the manhole and unknown dangers, experiences beyond. Here was where, years later, walking home from junior high an eighth grader threw my new pair of silver and blue nike high-tops into the creek.

This part of the creek was shallow and stony bottomed. Clear and not threatening. More psychologically accessible. If kids went in it was most often here.

But back up the creek by Matt’s house was another story. Trees covered both banks in a dense canopy. Shrubs bushes reeds tall grass vines roots snaking out of the banks writhing back in again. It was nature in full. Outdoors.

Amazing possibilities of exploration. Matt and I would set out on his side of the bank through the chicken wire fence opening past the tall trunk tree with the rope swing. We would head west following small slight trails we had left before. Inadvertently marking our passage. It felt like going up the Amazon, up into the inland unknowns. There were two types of surroundings – covered by tree canopy or open with grass along the banks. But coming out from the canopy into the open grass was like clouds parting veils lifting life altering and going back in was plunging into mystery.

Mostly we would stick to the banks up high or down barely avoiding the water climbing from branch to branch to get through a thick spot.

There were rumors that the creek was filled with shit from the sewage treatment plant that it passed by a bit farther west. We never knew the truth but it generally kept us out of the water the closer we got to that area. The plant was downstream from where we explored so we never felt in too much danger.

Shorts on. Shoes on the bank. Feet submerged beneath the water. Sunlight through trees. Appreciating the cooler temperature down here in the water.

Fearing the feel of underwater life and plant growth. Rocks and bottom slick with water plants. Green. Cautiously feeling with feet, if we slipped, if we fell in entirely we’d get in trouble. This was forbidden. All these thoughts unvoiced. Nothing consciously appreciated. Just passively recording everything for recall twenty years later. Just having fun. Just existing.

A fence, tall and spanning the creek from high on one bank to high on the other, coming down to just a foot or so above the water. This marked the boundary of the sewage treatment property. Signs on the fence. Keep out.

No trespassing. Stop. The end of the line. The way blocked on the banks on either side. We tried. We searched for a way in. we wanted to see what was on the other side. But the fence cut through the plants and bushes all the vegetation, the water. No way through.

Our sanctuary and hideout in the summer. Cicadas. Breeze. Sunlight through the green leaves. Lawn mowers mowing. Birds. The sound of the water in the creek behind his house.

His backyard stopped at a steep dirt bank. All the houses on the west side of Melody Lane did. Silver Creek ran behind this bunch of houses and trees followed the creek as it flowed through Woodstock. Most houses fenced off their property - picket fences, metal fencing. Anything to clearly mark where their property ended. Matt had access to the creek. They left theirs open. There was some old chicken wire fencing that ran along one half of their backyard but it was open at the northeast corner. This was glory. A dirt bank lined with trees that ran down quickly to a shallow creek. Trees bushes undergrowth hiding places. Exploration.

Not only did Matt have a treefort, he also had a rope swing attached to a tree branch on the bank. We would grab hold at the top of the bank where the grass from the back yard stopped and run down the bank a few feet fast and swing out over the lower half of the bank as it fell away underneath us. We’d try to get as far out as we could. Swinging straight out and back or running towards one side or the other and swinging in wide circles. Amazing fun in the shade. In the coolness of the creek hidden away from the hot summer sun.

Humid and sticky but hidden from the direct oven heat.

The bank behind his house was torn up from us climbing up and down grabbing on to plants and roots and vines to get up and down. Foot holds gouged out of the earth worn down with use and gouged out again.

Hot summer inevitably led us into the creek. Shallow in most parts – no more than a foot deep. In the parts of the creek that were most accessible to us it was usually half that. Not more than six inches. A few hundred meters south towards the bridge where Melody Lane crossed over where the banks were concrete on one side smooth and sheer with a ledge and a thick metal city provided railing. Steep and intimidating – to the inexperienced. The other side had rough cement banks. Cement with rocks and chunks – a gray lava flow. It was lower and more gradual and easier to climb down and only a hundred or so meters from the school field. It was where most of us regularly approached the creek. Here was where our friend and cub scout comrade David Brady ghost rid his bike down the bank into the creek. Brilliance. He rode his bike, pedaling fast towards the creek. Then ten feet before the cement bank he slid his right leg over the center bar of the bike and coolly hopped off letting the bike speed towards the edge. The bike bucked and jumped spastic through the air contorting crippled into the water. Brilliance. Cheers and laughs. Our hero. Here also was the culvert that we would stoop and low walk into for fifty meters until

Garbage piling up. Puke in the sink. Food hidden away with signs. Dust and dirt piles swept into his room off of the kitchen. Dishes placed on his bed.

Our revenge was ill-tempered. Annoying. Ineffective. And it felt amazing.

My room. Somehow I managed to fit my entire life in there. A futon.

Boxes of magazines to cut up underneath the futon. All of my cds and records. My desk where I wrote. A stereo on a milk crate. Speakers on top of it.

A turntable. A light from the ceiling with a pull string switch that I extended with string and action figures and chotchkes so that I could pull the string while under the covers in bed. The window sill was my nightstand. A dresser in the closet with a bookshelf on it and shelves higher up with more magazines to cut up, boxes of zines and pictures. My computer on a table also in the closet. I sat in there, my back on a pillow against the side of the dresser.

Clothes hung above the monitor. Typing up my homework, my stories for fiction writing, my papers, my finals, my zines. White walls with a few posters up – sleater kinney, star wars; some paintings that some friends of mine had made; photos on the wall above my desk.

My room felt magical sometimes. Like when I would be up late at night listening to Sun Ra or some other recently discovered jazz record. Sitting at my desk with just the soft yellow light from my table lamp. Writing stories for my fiction writing classes or working on a zine. Feeling independent and secure on my own and happy with life. Living on my own in the city and having a life, going to shows and movies and art events and hanging out with friends and coming home to work on my writing and listening to amazing music.

It was my responsibility to keep the bathroom clean. I didn’t mind cuz I didn’t trust anyone else to do it as well as I could. I would spend an hour every week cleaning it. Listening to music loud. An old bathtub. A monochromatic tile pattern on the floor – the tiny tiles formed geometric floral shapes.

Larger tiles ran halfway up the wall continuing the monochromatic scheme.

A glass and wicker coffee table in the corner with a stereo on it and magazines on the shelf below. Tape Op. Playboy. Rolling Stone. Perfect 10. Punk Planet. Eventually there was a box of make up and other feminine products next to the stereo. The bathtub that I plunged every few months to keep it draining properly. The sink that twice was mysteriously clogged and twice needed a plumber to come and fix it. Once a toothpaste cap was the culprit.

He glared at me as he held it between his fingers.

Did you know about this?

No. Are you sure?

He was convinced I had done it. I had no idea who had done it. I just walked away.

Cooper’s totally gonna get with Audrey. Slow mildly slurry out of the corner of his mouth, but with gusto.

There’s no way. She’s in high school.

She’s eighteen. She’s legal. It’s fine. Animated, holding his beer in his hand.

There’s no way they’ll do that. It’s against his character and the network wouldn’t allow it.

They’re totally gonna get together. Z says unconvinced. A frozen pizza on the floor. Warm yellow lamplight against north woods paneling. The nightly debate rages back and forth. Will Cooper hook up with Audrey? I had borrowed the Twin Peaks complete series on video from Decourcey at Chicago Comics. We were plowing through it. Night after night. Z Jeff Jody and I. This was when Jody was living in the small half bedroom. Before Z had decided to move out. We were hooked and couldn’t stop watching. Waiting til everyone was home from work or their days or social events or whatever everybody did.

Two to three episodes a night. Once we started we couldn’t stop. Transfixed in the dark midnight apartment on our couches in the glow of the tv. Late spring night – air blowing through the front windows down the hallway into the kitchen out to the porch and out through the screens on the windows in the back porch out into the spring night out of the back yard and out into the city.

Z wanted Cooper and Audrey to get together so bad. He was adamant in his belief of this outcome. For him it was inevitable. He was mad for Audrey and living vicariously through Agent Cooper. Of course who wasn’t in love with Audrey? Sherilyn Fenn and her short brown hair cut and saddle shoes, pencil skirts and sweaters. Her large eyes and lips, trapped in a bordello and lingerie for a few episodes. Who could resist her cheesecake charms? But she wasn’t gonna get with Cooper no matter how much Z wanted it to happen. No matter how much he argued for it. It wasn’t gonna happen.

When we were watching Twin Peaks I had dreams bordering on nightmares. Dreams. I called them Bob dreams. I was terrified of Bob – conceptually speaking. Sure he was creepy as a character on the show. But the concept of him – possession and the badness that’s in us – terrified my subconscious. And

know-how. As we were six years old. We eventually contented ourselves with having a hole to jump in. The clump of trees provided a decent enough fort from which to set off on expeditions through other people’s yards, to explore the woods or play hide and seek. The woods that we knew were all yards, but we knew how to get through unnoticed following tree lines and shrubs.

Always hanging back, skirting the property lines. Hiding behind stacks of firewood.

I remember we came across what we thought was a haunted house. An empty house filled with menace. Some sort of structure that creeped us out and fascinated us. But we were too young to venture inside. It was off to the north, towards Queen Anne Road, on the other side of which opened up into farm fields. Corn and open skies.

Kris lived in the house next door with his mom and grandparents and little sister. I slept over there a lot. They had a big screen tv that might have weighed three tons and was so huge that the house probably had to be built around it. The tv was wood paneled. I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag under blankets in his room or in the living room where we both sometimes slept camp out style for adventure listening to a little clock radio on the floor.

To this day I still remember the song that was playing. I lay there awake, Kris asleep close to the wall. Boys will be boys, bad boys bad boys. Boys will be boys bad boys bad boys. Miami Sound Machine. 1985 dreams.

A pool table in their basement. A slot machine with a cup of quarters next to it. An unfinished back basement dark and perfect for hiding.

Matt Bean lived up the street from me on Melody Lane. He was tall and skinny with a mop of straight light brown hair. He wore collared polo style shirts and gray or brown pants. He was in the gifted program at school.

When I slept over at his house I slept on the pull out trundle of his trundle bed. We played with gi joes and listened to rem – who he liked. We watched Dune and drank grape juice and played video games on his computer. We rode bikes. We created a sludge concoction of hand soap, detergents and other thick slow liquids. We then spent the afternoon in the summer sun dropping boxelder bugs into the goo – watching them slowly sink below the surface. We were scientists. He froze his. I microwaved mine. He got in less trouble than me.

He had the best treefort of any of us. It was a full on platform built around the tree branches ten or twelve feet up into the tree. It had a trapdoor and a rope ladder and carpet attached to the platform for comfort. Amazing. Not very fancy in reality, but for us at age ten, it was truly amazing.

My first treefort was a hole in the ground. It was in the backyard of the first house we lived in, in Woodstock. It was on Hickory Road which was just outside of the city limits which meant that we didn’t have city water, which meant well water, which meant we had water with a raw unfiltered, earthy, aromatic and sulfur taste. A few years later at my friend Blake’s house (also outside the city limits but closer to being in the country than us) I would learn the term pooh water to describe well water.

The house on Hickory Road was a sprawling split level ranch style house that felt huge as a kid and I still remember it that way. A huge old place where I could roam and ramble and explore in. It had lots of hiding places and an aquatic theme in the bathroom off of the master bedroom where my parents slept. The faucets were sea dragon heads and they felt like worn down brass or copper. Spiky, gaudy, mysterious.

The yard was filled with hickory trees. So many that we could pick up the nuts and smash them with rocks on the driveway and eat them. Our yard felt huge. Immense and in the woods. A large fire pit between our house and our neighbor to the south where both he and my dad would rake the leaves in the fall and then set them on fire. A huge pile of leaves burning and smoldering.

The smell of crisp fall air and smoke in the night with only the light from the fire to see by and the stars and the tree tops dark in silhouette against the dark dark blue black night sky, the house to our backs, lights in the windows. Part of me is still there on that lawn. A young six year old ghost haunting that spot watching a phantom pile of leaves burn in the night. In awe of the fire. Feeling safe and warm standing next to his dad who leans on a rake.

The back yard was long, stretching far back and at the end there was a fence that marked the city limits and the houses beyond. At that fence there was a clump of trees that were smaller in stature than the tall sky reaching trees that filled the rest of the yard. The small clump of trees was climbable and there were bushes and shrubs, so it was hidden from the direct view of most of the houses. This was where we built our tree fort. We. My friends and I. Kris Sigman who had light brown hair and a crooked smile. Matt Eby who had straight blonde hair and lived behind our house inside city limits. As we had no wood.

As we had no tools. As we were six years old. We didn’t build up. We built low.

We dug a hole. We had a shovel somehow, and dug a hole big enough for one of us to hide in. We had found an old piece of ply wood somewhere and we would cover the hole with that so we could hide in it.

The plan was to connect our hole with another hole in another clump of trees over by Kris’ house. We wanted to dig a tunnel so we could get from one spot to the other in total secrecy. As we had no tools. As we had no engineering

it came out every night I dreamed – usually in the form of chase dreams, but where I knew that if I was caught I would be taken over and not be myself anymore.

One night I was sleeping over at my then girlfriend’s parent’s house. She was in one room and I was in another. I had gone to bed after everyone else had. It was midnight or so. I drifted off to sleep. Dreamt.

Argument. Fighting with another person. A man. I didn’t know. Argument escalated. Heated shouts curses. An anger rising in me. Trying to fight it.

Pressure in me building. Panic rage fury terror. The fight continues a voice in my head. Do it! Do it! Do it! It screams. Burning words in my skull. I pick the man up. He’s terrified. Face full of fear. Contorted. He’s screaming. I drop him impaling him on a metal spike that rises from the ground.

I wake up heart pounding the man’s scream and terror still ringing loud in the air the voice in my head still echoing Do it Do it Do it. I lay in the bed breathing hard terror and dread in my stomach. It’s still dark outside. Dark in the room. Tight and dense and heavy pushing in. Me afraid to move afraid to turn my head to the side. I want to turn on the lamp that’s on a night stand just to my left. I hesitate convinced that when I do the light will reveal an unknown person entity sitting in the rocking chair that’s next to the bed. Calm down. Try to calm down. Breathe. Breathe slow. Calm. Minutes pass. Slow years grinding away in the night. I realize the dying man’s scream was the loud air conditioning pouring through the vent in the room. Breathe. Panic leave stomach. Breathe slow. Turn on the light shut eyes as I pull the switch.

Open. No one in the wooden rocking chair. A heavy presence for mental hauntings. Breathe. It’s two in the morning. I’ve hardly been asleep. A copy of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues on the nightstand. Who’s reading that? Why did the voice in my head stay with me after I woke up? That’s the fear in me.

2am. Trying to shut out the dream. Such terror and dread as I wait breathing calming myself down before drifting off to uneventful sleep.

Jody was in the kitchen grabbing something to drink. Jeff was in his room.

We were taking a break between episodes. As she walked down the hallway into the dining room, I crawled over the couch in the living room. Slow methodical forward gangly spider intense grimace grin on my face teeth exposed clenched together tight breathing hard hand over hand foot over foot arms and legs move and bend in exaggerated movements. I crawl over the couch towards Jody and she screams a girlish squeal. Eww Tooth! EEEEE! Stop! And she runs back into the kitchen. Bob strikes again.

2 am. The apartment dark. Jeff and I had shut off all the lights after we had finished playing video games. Jody and Mike had gone to bed a couple of hours earlier. They had come home said, hey, and did their nighttime rituals in the bathroom while Jeff and I defended ourselves and captured the flag in the video game world.

Now we were sneaking through the dark hallway past Jeff ’s bedroom. We paused in the bathroom building up our courage, trying to hold ourselves together and not make any noise. We paused listening for any sound. We moved into the kitchen where Jody’s room was. We knew our way in the dark without any light. We knew where to step to avoid creaking the floor. We got into the kitchen in front of Jody’s room. We hesitated, listening. Nothing. Maybe the sound of them breathing. The sound of her computer in sleep mode, making the sound of an aquarium air filter or scuba oxygen release. A steady slow breath of bubbles.

We moved close to the door. Fear and excitement knotting our stomachs.

We couldn’t see each other in the dark. We raised our hands against our mouths. Jeff counted to three. We took a breath. We blew hard into our palms pressed tight to our mouths.

The sound was deafening. Simulated farts tore threw the early morning.

We heard no response and did it again. After this salvo we started giggling, trying not to make a sound. The silence that met us made it harder to contain ourselves. Then. From within Jody’s room. An answering imitation fart. Mike answering. We were on the floor laughing and giggling tears in our eyes. Then we made more fart sounds and Mike answered. Jody’s exhausted voice through the door, You guys. Jeff and I were fighting to breathe through our laughs and imitation flatulence. Then it was over. Laughing we said goodnight and went to our rooms feeling giddy and heroic.

One night when Jeff and I had been playing video games we heard Jody and Mike coming home thumping upstairs. We stopped looked at each other and said, hide! I quickly dove behind the love seat in front of the windows and left my legs sticking straight up in the air effectively hiding only my waist to my head. My legs left waving in the air. Jeff attempted to hide somewhere else equally ridiculous. As I was upside down and behind the love seat I had no idea where he went. Jody and Mike walked in and Jody laughed. You guys.

treefort

Five years old. Hickory Road. Hiding in the clump of pine trees in the front yard. Dark and closed in under the branches. A large nook to hide and play in and the branches were close enough to the ground and close enough together that the middle of the three tall trees made for the best climbing in the whole yard. Climbing up through the thin branches. Light enough at five that they could support me. Higher. Shorts and a shortsleeve t shirt and Kangaroo shoes with pockets on the sides. Gray. In my Star Wars obsessed mind, they bent in the right way when I stepped on a branch or a ledge that they looked how Luke’s feet bent over the metal bar as he inched away from his father in the inner belly of Bespin before falling in rejection. Hands sticky.

Fingers stuck together. Sap on my legs and hands. Smelling of pine. Always disgusted with the sap but always worth the sap to be up there. Always. I could see a little bit through the dense pine branches, but most important, I couldn’t be seen. I imagined myself a spy listening in on the world around me. People walking along the quiet street. Cars driving by. Birds. Speed bumps. Clouds in the sky. And there I was in the branches. Tanned dark from the summer sun and freedom from school.

ing from the air – few branches but twisting trunks. Some cypress trees. It’s dense and cool in the shade. The strange brilliantly colored flowers that I can never describe to anyone. Clumps of dense grass. Breeze. Here I am in another country. A broken thumb. Trying to figure out my life. Stay here, look for a job, go back home to my friends and family. Success. Failure. What do I want out of life. Looking at these trees and their branches and the blue sky that appears between them. Happy to be in another country feeling like I’m able to survive on my own. Confident, knowing my way around a new city. Feeling infinitely lonely but at the same time comforted by the trees.

Jody first lived in the tiny half bedroom when she was only staying with us temporarily. There was enough room for her mattress and some bags. I would sit in there and talk to her about the troubles of my early twenties love life and the woes of my then relationship. I was thankful to have a girl to be talking to. After Z moved out and Jody moved into his room, Jeff and I turned it into our little music room. A four track recorder. Our guitars and amps. A stereo. A snare drum. Keyboards. A desk. A chair. Lots of blank type II cassette tapes. A closet still filled with Jody’s clothes. Jeff hung ridiculous pinups from Playboy and in celebration of our triumph we hung a Jim Morrison banner on the side of the door that faced the living room. So everyone would know that that room was for musical genius. Genius covers of Cypress Hill and christmas carols, wanky guitar solos set to drum machine art beats, sensitive acoustic songs and garage guitar with noise art pieces. Jeff also worked on lots of audio assignments for his classes.

2 am. Jeff recording dialogue for an audio project where he had to add sound effects, redub voice and a soundtrack to a three minute scene. Essentially strip everything away and create his own version. He chose a scene from Dragon Ball Z. I think it was called The Tree of Life. I had to do the voice of the bad guy Turlis. I did it in my worst over dramatic dub voice.

Then after the confrontation, after a song from the Good the Bad and The Ugly, my character dies as he is consumed in a blinding energy blast released from the hands of our hero as portrayed by Jeff. 2am and we’re recording my death. My death screams. I’m holding back. Timid. Not wanting to wake the downstairs neighbors, the landlords, or their children. Louder, Jeff keeps telling me. Louder. More grit. Alright I finally say, but I’m hiding if they come knocking. 2 am. Scream after scream. Laughing in between takes until Jeff says, Alright, I got it.

It was Saturday night and Jody was having a party and the house was filled with people Jeff and I didn’t know very well. We were social but we ended up in the living room by ourselves for a bit. Hey, Jeff said, let’s put this lamp shade out on the sidewalk.

Okay, I said.

Jeff ran down the stairs with the lampshade while I watched from the window. He put it on the sidewalk right in front of our house where we could see best. He ran back upstairs and shut off the lights in the living room. The party continued in the other rooms without pause. We hid in the corners of

the windows, our eyes just barely peaking out. We were immediately giddy, feeling dangerous.

Someone walked up and looked at the lampshade and kept going. We thought this was hilarious. A man in a sport coat walked up looked at the lampshade and stopped. He looked around. He picked up the lampshade and put it on top of one of the bushes in front of our building. Then he walked on.

We lost it. We couldn’t contain our laughter and were rolling on the floor. Jeff ran back downstairs to reset the lampshade. He came back up and we got back into position. A woman approached and looked at the lampshade and walked around it. We were shaking with suppressed laughter when a guy approached the lampshade, stopped, and looked right up into the window where we were spying from. We dropped to the floor. Holy shit! We laughed, peering out the window to make sure he walked on. How’d he know we were here! We were rolling on the floor again.

Jody thought it would be nice to carve pumpkins. Dark October early night. Clear air. Clean and chill against the skin. Warm yellow lamp light in the kitchen. Warmth from the wood paneling and the heat from the vents.

Pumpkins on the kitchen table. Newspaper spread out underneath. Pumpkin innards in a wet heap to the side of each of the three pumpkins. Mike reaching in, pulling more innards out of his pumpkin, wet stringy strands hanging from his hands. Jeff pulling the seeds aside and putting them onto a cookie sheet for roasting later.

Music on the radio. Open beers. Early fall without the pressure of returning to school. Such a refreshing feeling. Jody had her sleeves rolled up as she carved a face onto her pumpkin. Mike carved a dancing skeleton into his. A stencil?

Free hand? It danced.

Jeff carved a simple shape that looked like little more than an undefined blob. Amorphous.

Ooh, put candles in. Jody said when they were finished. Teeth get yr camera.

Take a picture.

I grabbed my camera and braced arms against the door frame so I could hold still and shoot with the shutter open for a long time so enough light could hit the film. I had no flash. I focused on the three pumpkins with candles in them. The lights went out.

Jody’s pumpkin’s face grinned with inner light. Mike’s skeleton danced as the candle’s little flame danced. Jeff ’s amorphous blob revealed itself to be a penis and a glob of semen. It too glowed radiant. Genius. Jeff and Mike laughing. Jody sighing. Beers in hand.

Pruevalo. He insisted and gave me a little scoop.

Wow. I said. Está bien rico.

Dave asked for his ice cream and I asked for some coconut ice cream – which I’m crazy about.

Hot afternoon Guadalajara sun eating ice cream. Walking back to the bus.

My right thumb still mildly pulsing swollen dull in its metal splint and bandages four weeks after getting smashed.

Walking with Dave in Guadalajara up the street from school. I’m learning my way around this town. Sun pouring down. Consistent weather, always sunny in the afternoon. The low building architecture and trees scattered on the sides of the street. A glorieta up in the distance.

Y’know what this town needs? Dave asks. His occasional stubble beard and closely shaved head.

What’s that? I ask feeling the sun through my button down shirt. Thumb in a splint, still wrapped in gauze.

Curry. There’s no curry here. At all. That’s the thing I miss the most is a good curry.

Really. I say thinking. Trying to imagine any place I might have seen curry.

They really don’t have curry?

No and I want to open a curry stand. Just get a little cart and make a batch of curry for the day and when I’m out I’m out. Like some beef or lamb or chicken. Whatever I’m feeling. Maybe some fish.

Man that’d go over like crazy here. I think people’d freak out for that. It would rule. You should make a vegetarian curry though for the ten of us who don’t eat meat. I say.

Yeah okay. He acquiesces. Then eventually I could open one of those weekend restaurants outta my house like where they sell birria, y’know.

Yeah. I nod.

And I could do the same. Just make a big batch for the day and when it’s gone it’s gone.

That’d rule, I say, happy to know this guy Dave here in Guadalajara.

Sitting in the park next to the university in downtown Guadalajara. Green everywhere. Green trees. Some of them look like trees you’d see in the midwest. But then there are the trees that I don’t recognize at all. Trees that initially remind me of palm trees, but are shaped like exploding fireworks at the top. Thick leaves and a trunk with angular pieces that point upwards one on top of the other. Other trees dark and mossy seem like thick vines hang-

The buses drive with the illusion of free will but the arms and electric cables overhead tell the true story.

Hot bright afternoon walking up and down the aisles. Open air stalls and vendors. Some with canopies some with tarps some with umbrellas. Products piled on tables on the ground in crates and on shelves. Food cd’s, records, stereos, dvd players, vcr’s, tape decks ,electronics, scrap metal, tv’s, tv screens, computer parts, monitors, clothes, shoes, fabric, furniture, car parts, cars, car seats, plates, silverware, glasses, hats, office supplies, pencils, pens, paper, erasers, printers, paperweights, rocks, toys, postcards, posters, art, religious icons, relics, pieces, candles, and bootlegs. We were here for bootlegs.

Dave was looking for some new movies to buy and take home for himself and his wife, Mandy. He eyed some new Hollywood movies. Pirates of the Caribbean which had just come out in theaters a few months previous. But here was the vcd of it. Three for five dollars. Minimal packaging at a stall at the tianguis under the afternoon Guadalajara sun. Two younger guys selling the bootlegs.

Y si no funciona? Dave troubled out, still learning Spanish.

Just bring it back and we can swap it. The kid answered in Spanish.

Cool.

Dave bought three and handed over his pesos. We walked on and found an ice cream vendor.

Have you had helado de garafones? Dave asked me.

No. I said.

Oh my god, you have to try this. Dave told me.

It’s good? I asked.

It’s amazing. He said.

What’s helado de garafones?

It’s like made in these keg like things.

Oh right. Garafones. I said. Garafones were like barrels or drums or what water cooler water comes in.

We were eyeing the flavors. Chocolate. Vanilla. Coconut. Mamey. Tequila.

What kind is good? I asked.

All of it is good. Dave said.

Quieres provar joven? The man at the stall asked. Under a canopy his face round and in the shade.

Sí. Un poco de coco. I said. He gave me a little taste. Holy shit. I said.

Has provado la tequila? He asked me.

No. Pero no tomo el alcohol. I said.

Pues hay que provar este helado. Es riquisimo.

No sé. I said hesitant.

Watching as the towers fell in New York City. Jeff and I in our pajamas sitting on the couch in silence. Sunlight through the trees in front of the house along the street. Silent. Silent as I rode my bike home after we closed early that same day. Nothing. Watching on tv as it’s announced that we’ve begun bombing Baghdad. Explosions and flashes and I tear up every time a building explodes. Every time the screen flashes. There were people in there. Every flash on screen and someone’s life ended. Someone’s life changed forever.

Every broadcaster and commentator recycling the phrase, shock and awe.

Alone that night feeling powerless and sad and angry.

Years later I found out that Jeff thought I was a stoner.

Really? I asked.

Oh yeah. I thought you were a massive stoner.

Why? The way you talked on the phone. You just sounded so high. So mellow.

Like ‘hey you wanna come see the place?’ Jeff imitated the way I spoke. Slow and quiet with an apparent air of disconnectedness. I thought you were gonna offer me some pot or something.

And instead I offered you leftover pizza. Cold. Man that didn’t help the stereotype image I had going.

No. I had no idea I sounded like that. I just thought I talk normal.

Sanborn’s to drink coffee and read his newspaper – La Jornada – he was actually meeting up with his fellow party members. I imagine them plotting and planning and organizing while drinking coffee as the afternoon sun pours in through the windows covering their table with warmth. Ignacio in his dress pants and shoes and shirts with a suit coat. But no tie. His gray receded hair and his big smile and eyes behind glasses.

For about two weeks I went with him to Sanborn’s and drank té de manzanilla with milk and sugar and read La Jornada and an elementary school primer and he’d quiz me about what I had read. He’d bring photocopied worksheets from old Spanish grammar books. He’d have me do my work there – he wanted me to start from scratch. This is a verb, he’d explain to me.

What is an adverb? I’d get so frustrated drinking my tea in the afternoon sun wondering what was going on in this huge city – what cool things must surely be happening somewhere. But he was only doing what he knew – teaching elementary school. He wanted to start at the basics. There was a kind of logic to it, I just didn’t think it was the right way to be teaching someone who already knew what verbs were and had graduated from college. I’d talk about it to Rufina – who had also been a teacher – and they’d spar about it back and forth, but Ignacio believed in what he was doing. So my lessons continued until my classes at the university started. Then my visits to Sanborn’s fell by the wayside.

But I like to think that if I hadn’t been there at Sanborn’s he would’ve been talking socialism to his fellow party members. I like to think that these little old men that he introduced me to were old revolutionaries.

Keith you have to listen to this tape. These are songs from the revolution.

Chuladas. Everything was chulada to Ignacio – any good thing. His dogs – Candy and Snoopy, the communist manifesto. Chuladas!

He loaned me his copy of the communist manifesto and I really did want to read it. But it’s dense in English and even moreso in Spanish. I wanted to read it and to practice my Spanish, but I was so lonely at night that I just read all the books that I had brought with me. Reading in English to escape what I felt was my lack of a life in Mexico.

Dave Roos, my friend from the university, and I went to the tianguis a few miles from school. A bus or two. Electric that run in circles and weave and tangle and cross and intersect and weave and confuse if you follow only the electric power cables that they fasten themselves to with a long hinged arm.

Yeah, I say. Now I’m feeling worse. I didn’t think it was broken.

A few minutes later and he’s lancing the nail to drain the fluid that’s building up underneath the nail. This I can’t watch. The wood paneling of his office.

Sitting on the edge of the examination bed. My eyes shut as he tells me not to move my thumb. Hold very still. He inserts a hot needle three times through my thumbnail. Through the throb of my thumb I don’t really notice any other pain, just a little pressure.

He tells me that I have to change the bandages every other day. That I have to keep my thumb in a splint. That I have to take an anti-inflamatory and an antibiotic. The nail will fall off at some point, but probably not until a new nail has started to grow underneath it. He tells me that when it falls off, I’ll be ready. I’m not happy about this news.

In Mexico in the neighborhood where I lived they had a procession every other week. Maybe every week. Some random procession at some random time of the day. Sometimes in the morning. Sometimes in the afternoon.

Sometimes at night. And sometimes early early in the morning when no one was around.

They’d all march in line for their saints. Neighborhood saints. Religious saints. Saint saints. The big one was a procession to the basilica that was a couple of miles from our house. That was once a year and the huge plaza was filled beyond capacity with people who came to see the virgin. Some had traveled the whole way from the mountains to the basilica walking behind in the procession.

The neighborhood ones were smaller affairs but still raucous. Hanging on things singing shooting off bottle rockets and fireworks intermittently and incessantly. Sometimes little pops and sometimes huge booms that shook the house.

Ignacio’s dogs, Snoopy and Candy, would run in terror and try to get under whatever they could. The couch the table my bed. And there they would stay shaking violently. These two big dogs with American names apparently found on the side of the road after their owners kicked them out of the car while on a trip. Whimpering and shaking they’d calm down and another boom would rattle the windows.

Ignacio founded a socialist party in Jalisco when he was younger – he was still a member of it. I don’t know if he still went to meetings or was active, I like to think he was. I like to think that when he was going downtown to

No tengas miedo. The doctor said. Estás bien. She was looking at my thumb.

Está quebrado? I asked.

She surveyed it, squeezing it between her thumb and finger. Puedes moverlo?

I wiggled it at the joint. Sí.

No. No está quebrado.

Y la uña? Se va a caer? I asked paranoid about losing my thumbnail.

Scared, not wanting to deal with it.

Por qué? She asked.

Tengo una fobia.

Awww they all sighed and giggled.

No. No va a sufrir un caido. She said.

That made me feel better.

They wrapped it in gauze and a cloth bandage. The doctor brought me some pills for the pain.

Cuanto cuesta todo ésto. I asked, now afraid about the money.

Nada. Es un regalo. The doctor smiled.

Muchísimas gracias. I said.

No te preocupes.

I was still thinking of going to school when I left. Going to class. It wasn’t broken. What was the big deal? It hurt a little. The sun was shining. Yet another gorgeous Guadalajara day. Cool breeze on my face. A few clouds.

Beautiful blue sky. Rush hour waning. Still only 7.30am. Go to school?

I walked towards the bus and thought, fuck it, I’m going home. Crossed the highway and got on the 633 going back to Zapopan. Only a handful of people on the bus. I sat thinking. Feeling the sting and throb.

I got back home climbed the stairs, hopped over the gate, slid open the sliding door, went to my room, took off my pants, took my pills, got into bed, propped my thumb up and away from my body and went to sleep.

Sitting in the school doctor’s office. Yes. It’s broken, he tells me. He looks at my thumb, swollen and purple in the afternoon sun. He’s taken x-rays that cost twenty dollars and he’s showing me where my thumb is fractured in three places.

I can’t believe they didn’t do x-rays. He says in English. He’s wearing a white medical coat over his dress pants and shirt and tie. Dark hair and clean shaven. He’s probably in his late 30’s.

Down the hall to the left he tells me. He says it slow and uninterested, he’d rather be elsewhere. As soon as I go he’ll go back to reading his paper.

Gracias.

I stumble down the dark hallway to the next wing of the hospital. A line of people. Fifteen to twenty sitting on benches on the floor.

Shit. I hope I don’t have to wait too long.

I talk to the receptionist at the desk.

I show her my thumb. ¿Alguien puede ayudarme?

She tells me to wait a minute. She disappears for a while. I look around.

Gray dawn. The sun is coming up somewhere. I can’t see it from these windows. Gray light on the other waiters. Throb throb. Pulsing. My thumb. No panic now, just dull pain. The place is clean and looks like any other hospital.

I’m always surprised when public hospitals don’t turn out to be the drama hotbeds that tv has made them out to be.

She comes back.

Ellos te pueden ayudar por aca.

Gracias.

She leads me into the emergency room. New shift. The first shifters have just come on. The patients in the beds are still asleep. A doctor or two, a bunch of nurses.

They sit me down. ¿Qué te pasó? They ask.

Tenía un accidente en un bus. I say.

Esos pendejos. They say. All these lady nurses around me. Cursing the notorious bus drivers.

La puerta de atras me... I paused looking for the word.

Machucó. One nurse said.

Machucó? I asked and I gestured with my hands smashing them together like doors closing.

Sí.

Pues sí. Me machucó.

A ver, they said, and started to clean my thumb with some disinfectant.

A doctor in green came over. They were all young. She looked at me.

Por qué estás tan pálido?

I guess I was pale. I felt green. Vomité despues de bajar del bus. I explained.

Awwww. They all sighed smiling. Pobrecito. Did they really say pobrecito or did I just feel it.

De donde eres? They asked.

Chicago. I answered. I told them I was studying Spanish at the Universidad de Guadalajara.

rain

Rain tonight. Rain pouring down out of the night sky blurring the street light that illuminates the parked cars in front of my apartment. Rain pounding on the roof on the air conditioner units in the windows on the street misting back up after splashing against the concrete. August night rain. Humid all day until the rain broke.

I was sitting on the chair in the front room looking out the window at all the rain pouring down on the trees the leaves glistening in the streetlight the sound of the rain hissing in the leaves. Drenched glass. Enjoying it all cuz fall will be here soon. Sweaters and sweatshirts and coats. It all comes on so fast in Chicago. One week it’s summer and the next week it’s cold.

people push me out of the way.

ISSSTE. There’s a hospital.

The thoughts.

Come.

In between.

Bass throbs.

Through my body.

ISSSTE. God bless the socialist tendencies of the rest of the world.

ISSSTE. Instituto de Seguridad y Servicios Sociales de los Trabajadores del Estado. The state hospital. And it’s only two stops from here. Just hang on.

Bus stops people push me out of the way. I’m standing wrapped around one of the metal support bars. Hands in pockets not wanting to look at my thumb. Brain starting to panic. It’s this bus.

This bus.

I’m connected to it and it’s killing me.

This bus and I are one. Later on whenever I take this bus, I’ll look at the numbers on the buses to see if I’m on the one that hurt me.

Connected. It’s filling me with terror and pain and panic and nausea.

My stop.

People push me out of the way. I climb down the stairs after them. Hands in sweatshirt pockets one foot in front of the other. Cross the parking lot of a restaurant. The air feels good on my face. Head towards the...

Oh fuck. Instantaneous overwhelming rising sensation in my stomach.

Puke. I don’t even have time to realize what’s happening. It’s over before I realize.

Walking and throwing up on the parking lot aware enough to get it away from me, not on my clothes – I’m too classy for that.

Puke in my sinuses. I need to blow my nose wipe off my mouth.

The lady walking in front of me looks back at me with disgust.

I feel much better. It hurts, but that panic is gone. I puked out the dread now it just.

Ow. Fuck.

Throb.

Make my way up the many many stairs to the hospital. Make my way to a security guard at a desk.

Afraid to look, I pull my hand out of my pocket the air grates on against it, the metal sting of the thumb moving through air. It feels frozen and massive. I show the guard my thumb. Donde puedo ir para ésto? I ask.

to a metal railing with my left hand so the bus doesn’t take off without me. It lurches into motion. I’m holding on and pushing my way up the stairs trying to pack in. The metal door, heavy archaic lethal, closes on me. I get my body out of the way and instinctively put my right hand out to protect my body as I swing fully into the bus with my left hand.

The door is shut. Something is wrong. The bus is driving. Something is wrong. I turn and look to see my thumb disappear in between the hinged part of the door. The bottom half of my thumb is exposed but the top is gone, lost in the solid metal immensity of the door. Metal surrounds my thumb. Do I even have a thumb? Is it gone? Cut off ? Flattened? No time passes.

Motherfucker! I yell.

No one bats an eye.

Oh right, I think, I’m in Mexico. ¡Hijoe Puta! I yell.

Everyone looks.

The business man in front of me one step up yells for the driver to ¡Abre la puerta! ¡Abre la puerta! It opens. No time passes.

I’m terrified to look. Will I still have my thumb? Is it totally flat? Is the nail gone? I have a phobia about nails. I’m terrified of them falling off or tearing off or bending back.

I pull my hand out. The thumb is there, flatter, but there. It looks not terrible but wrong. A little blood around the nail. I don’t feel anything.

I look at the guy in front of me. He’s in a suit. He has a mustache.

Tal vez debería ir al hospitál? I smile.

He doesn’t say anything.

My mind goes hazy. For a minute I don’t feel anything. Then comes the throb pulsing bass pains from my thumb that travel through my nervous system, my circulatory system. It’s nerve pain that hits first the pain that screams to my brain that something is wrong. It stings, it aches, it twists. Then the deep pain that travels through my blood. The low frequency intensity that makes me swoon that fills with panic that is entirely new to me. My mind reels my stomach fills with nausea. Can’t think. Keep it together. Maintain. If I can get to school there’s a doctor. He’ll know what to do. People push me out of the way at the stops. They need to go to work. Who cares about this crazy fucking gringo kid with his hands in his blue sweatshirt pockets.

If I can make it to school, I think.

Oh fuck I’m gonna puke, I think.

Oh fuck I’m hot.

Is this a fever? An infection? Smashed into my body, flying through my system, rust on jagged metal door edges eyes floating in my head. Bus stops,

damian I have this book on the bookshelf just sitting there piled up in a stack of other books that need to be returned to their owners. Various owners. It’s a few hundred pages. Black cover. It looks like a textbook. It’s older. Worn.

Pages have been read and read. It’s all about languages. A survey of world languages. One or two pages about the language. Vital statistics. How many speakers. Where it’s spoken, etc. And then one page with a sample of the language written out. It’s called something obvious like Languages of the World. It’s fascinating. It intrigues me. I love flipping through it. Trying to pronounce words that make no sense to me. Words that I have no clue as to what they mean. Words. Languages. That book has been on that shelf for quite a while now. That pile has risen and fallen and yet that book with Damian’s name written on the inside cover has remained. I can’t give that book back even if I wanted to. I meant to. I always meant to. But I can’t. Damian is dead. I found that out later.

Damian was this tall Polish kid who had a degree in sociology. He had lived in the U.S. for years and spoke English that was permeated with his Polish tongue and lips. He was big and quiet. Smart dry and funny. He worked in his own section of the warehouse, packing up 8.5 by 11 paper to be shipped out to the stores. All day long – just as I did – he’d walk up and down his stacks grabbing paper off the shelves and filling orders. He was close to the other boys that lived in the next rows over.

There was an older Polish woman who worked at a small desk at the end of one of Damian’s rows. I can’t remember what she did there. I was never quite sure. I think it involved counting paper. She and Damian would bicker in Polish and he would translate for her when she needed something. She always seemed sweet, but she got on his nerves.

Damian and I would talk about languages and sociology and school and literature. I’d go over there to get some specialty paper that my ladies needed for some kits and we’d end up talking for a while. Letting time slip by was a favorite pastime at the warehouse. Killing time I suppose would be more appropriate and it was our favorite sport. I’d try to learn as much Polish from him as I could. I’m a nerd for languages. In a notebook I still have a scrap of paper that says, nie mowie po polsku, which is my phonetic way of writing it. I don’t speak polish. It’s all I remember how to say. I remember the most

important phrases in any language.

Tall blonde with glasses. T shirt and plain blue jeans and tennis shoes. Big hands counting hundreds of sheets of paper within seconds. Quietly up and down rows of shelves filled with paper.

Is this what you want to do?

No. but it’s a job. I don’t mind.

What do you want to do?

Go back to school and get a master’s degree.

Awesome.

He drowned swimming in the Mississippi one weekend over the summer.

The current took him. Pulled him out away from the shore. Away from his friends and down the river. The world passing by. Sky overhead.

I learned all this a few months after it had happened. I was at a zine art show at Columbia College and I ran into my friend Lisa and her friend Rhiannon – they both worked at the warehouse. Rhiannon asked if I had heard what happened to Damian. I said I hadn’t. She looked at Lisa and asked if she should tell me. Like she was checking to see if it was okay that I knew – to see if I was on the right team. Lisa said yes. Then Rhiannon told me about Damian drowning over Memorial Day weekend.

Oh my god. I said.

The funeral was rough. They said.

Oh man. I said.

Yeah. Lisa said.

What can you say? There are no words. There are never words. Never any words that are worth saying or make sense. I wished that someone had told me when it had happened. But I was gone. I wasn’t part of their lives or worlds anymore. I was out. But it still affected me. Time always stops when I learn that someone I know is dead.

That book is on my shelf. I said I would give it back before I quit. I meant to give it back. I meant to go back and bring it to him when I was done with it.

But I didn’t. I was lazy and now that book means something more. Some symbolic meaning – emotional weight has been infused. It’s on that shelf forever.

It’s now part of my collection. I have to do my part to preserve his memory. To pass on his existence to other people. The ephemeral passing of our lives. Fragile strands connecting us all. Damian walking up and down warehouse aisles.

Damian floating down the river.

of the lock. I climb over the locked gate that I’m too lazy to unlock. Down the stairs open the metal gate door at the bottom and leave the trash at the curb. Daily trash pick up. Amazing.

I’m walking the street. Here comes the guy that leaves at the same time as me. Older. We’ve never talked, never acknowledged each other. Cars starting in the distance. The pack of dogs that run together. Two little ones and one larger always keeping clear of people.

I make a left and walk past the mini mart when they’re delivering milk.

Should I buy eggs on the way home? Walk past the house where the lady sells bionicos in the afternoon. The fruit is so good – some kind of yogurty sweet cream. Amazing. 50 cents for a large one. Past the gym and the pharmacy and then make a left walking parallel to the highway that leads to the anillo periferico – the big highway that runs an enormous circle all the way around Guadalajara and its suburbs.

The house at the corner, yellow with an enclosed front yard. The dad gets the kids in the car to take to school – I secretly hope they’ll offer me a ride.

I’ve seen them often enough. Past the service shop still too early to be open.

At the next corner the paletería and across the street – the neighborhood school. Kids lying on benches, starting to congregate in their blue uniforms.

I make a right and climb up the small hill to where the highway is. A sea of headlights, cacophony of engines – trucks and cars. Motorbikes, with their buzzing falsetto, weave in and out. Wait for the light and cross six lanes of traffic all the while scanning to the right watching for my first bus, the 633 that I’ll take to Plaza Patria where I’ll get off and cross the parking lot of the KFC and get on the 622 that’ll take me to school.

6am. There’s a bus coming. It’s a little late for me. By six it’s hard to get on the bus. I don’t have to get to school until 8, but it’s easier to leave early and read than leave on time and fight the crowds. But there’s already a mass of people waiting.

I join the throng. Light steadily grows in the sky – less black and more purple. I can see the clouds – light gray wisps against the darkness. Stars starting to fade. Headlights shine in our eyes. People milling about, some making small talk. Kids going to school. Adults going to work. Suits with briefcases. The chill of the early morning. I’m wearing my blue sweatshirt.

Others wear jackets, some wear hats. Buses come, people get on. People get in taxis. The 633 pulls up. Lines form before the bus even stops. The main line forms towards the front of the bus. I try to get on in the front but there are too many people and if I wait the bus will leave. I move to the back. It’s technically not allowed, but everyone does it. The line is shorter and the people in front of me file in, climbing up. I’m last in line I step in and grab on

Up before the dawn Tuesday, 5am. 5:00 so as to avoid la hora pico. Rush hour. The buses are impossible to board after 6.30 and I need to get to school.

So 5:00 it is. Street light casts shadows of the iron door to my little balcony across my bed. I’m up before the rest of the house. Tonia still asleep in her room across from mine. Ignacio upstairs asleep dreaming of socialist revolution and his dogs, his chulas, Candy and Snoopy – highway orphans.

At the alarm fall out of bed and pull on pajama pants and slip on sandals – shuffle to the bathroom. The morning darkness quietly creeps through the little sky lit common area that my bedroom Tonia’s bedroom and the bathroom share. Slide the bathroom metal door behind me, careful not to bang it shut. Lone fluorescent bulb burns my eyes cuts the morning darkness. I brush my teeth – careful to not swallow any of the tap water. Eyes feel sleep puffy.

Cool morning air. Chilly. Nice against my skin.

Toilet. Shower head. Drain on the floor. Cloudy mirror. Cockroach bodies under the sink in the cabinet. Thick glass window so no one can see in. Bars of soap, shampoo bottles in the sill ready for showers.

Back to my room, cleaner and slightly more awake. I’ve been here for just over a month and I’ve got my routine established.

Turn on some music to get ready. What will it be today? Minutemen?

Donovan? Julieta Venegas? Do some push ups. I’m not riding my bike here so I should do some sort of exercise. Get dressed. Jeans. White t-shirt some socks, pull on shoes. Leave my bag packed and ready with a button down shirt next to it, ready to go. Turn off the lights, stealthily slip out to the kitchen turn on the light above the sink. Turn on the tv quiet, volume down – I don’t want to wake anyone. Pour some peach juice, grab a bowl and milk and my frosted flakes. Sit down at the glass table for breakfast.

Julieta Venegas on Telehit – music television for Mexico – so much better than Mexican MTV because they play Mexican bands which I’m desperate to learn about. Si quieres andar conmigo, ohhhhh dime si tú quisieras andar conmigo ohhhh cuentame... She’s blowing up. This song is all over the radio, over tv, over my cd player and forever burned into my brain, my memory of 5.30am in Guadalajara eating frosted flakes, drinking peach juice and listening to Julieta Venegas.

Wash my dishes put everything away put on my buttondown shirt grab my bag and the trash from the kitchen to take outside. Hesitate before turning off the tv cuz Zoé is playing. Their new song, Peace and Love, about to blow up as well – do do. do do do do do do.

Open the glass sliding door potted plants all over the balcony hanging sitting plants and flowers. The sky dark purple, not pitch black, not midnight black, 5.45am bruised purple black. Street lights. Lock the door hear the heavy click

x+y

Reading the Year of Magical Thinking. Everything I read lately has to do with dying. The Age of Iron. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Llona. As I read about the human body falling apart and breaking down I feel it physically in my chest. I feel kind of sick. Mild mild nausea and this ghost pain that doesn’t hurt at all but makes itself known. A sensation of the unknown, this mystery that spreads through my body as I read about the other people dying. On the train today I felt like I wanted to cry a few different times reading about Joan Didion losing her husband and partner. Overwhelming. Her thoughts. Her feelings.

I must be trying to come to grips with life. With death. With dying. I think about it a lot. Not in a depressive debilitating way. But in this trying to fathom and comprehend this massive event and concept that hangs over all of us over everything. I still think about X and Y a lot, but that’s not my story to tell. I can talk about going to her funeral and hugging X and crying a lot and trying not to lose it too much watching X in front of all of those people, about the sunshine on the last nice fall day in November or eating Subway and going to work at Chicago Comics and my boss saying how was the funeral in a smarmy ha ha way before he realized who it was for.

But that’s not my story to tell.

Something that struck me while reading today on the train was Joan writing about going through her husband’s clothes and things. The things she was supposed to get rid of. She’s doing okay going through his clothes and is able to pack a lot up but then she gets to his shoes and finds she can’t get rid of them. She just can’t.

I went to X’s house a while ago and a while after the funeral maybe over the summer or in the spring. On top of his flat files he had artfully arranged some collections and some of Y’s things and amongst the stuff were her glasses. This pair of bent up and worn glasses sitting useless on the flat files in this display of items. It hit me hard and I had to work hard to not cry. Here was this person who had been loved deeply and alive and making things and creating and talking and loving and eating and sharing and breathing and laughing and living and she was reduced to this pair of glasses. This small item that was loaded with meaning and memory.

And today I was thinking someday my parents will be reduced to a pair of glasses. A wallet. A set of keys. All mundane. These boring items meaningless but abstracted. These pointless things that somehow mean so much more because they are the things that we always have on us. Unintentional representations of what was, of what we were. I never realized how personal glasses were. What an intimate thing they really are when they are removed from the person, from their function.

Someday I will be glasses and wallets and watches.

guadalajara

the swatch book to figure out which they were talking about. It was our secret.

Moving equipment. Endlessly looking for A6 envelopes in starfire. Some sparkly purple. Always looking for materials we didn’t have. Always wondering what I would end up doing with my life. When would I get out? Always hiding from the guy from FTD.com who was hired to streamline all the departments.

Carrying a scowl on my face and hate and frustration on my shoulders. What the fuck. Paper. Always waiting until 4.30. Missing Guadalajara sun and all those beautiful girls and cute boys. Fashionable and young… and those trees.

The lemon trees that grew in front of the house in Guadalajara, the trees with waxy leaves, tall trees lining the streets in the afternoon sun. Trees seen from the window of a bus. Mexico is falling into the haze. It’s not up front in my mind anymore.

59

were our only protection. They’d try to subvert us and give us nominal promotions and a few more cents to buy our loyalty – sometimes it worked.

Jake was a super nice guy and it was killing him. Month after month you could see it in his eyes.

treefort

Cori and I always talked about bringing rollerskates to work. It would make the job so much easier, especially hers. She could roll around from department to department pulling her special orders. Pushing or pulling her cart behind her. It would’ve been great – all that smooth perfect cement. You could really fly on skates in there.

I could’ve rolled my way around my stacks gliding effortlessly from order to order, pull to pull, tub to tub.

Cori and I wanted to build nooks into our stacks. Hiding places on top of the shelves. Make a flag for our anarcho-syndicalist union. Walk out during the day. Fuck everything and leave.

Aborted plans live on. The could’ves last a lifetime.

(slight return)

All of us in pain and falling apart. Rolling back into gray Logan Square and feeling like nothing would ever change. Every day. Angry to be in bed at 10.30 and up at 6. Fuck. Ragged and haggard. Paper. Stupid names for colors.

My swatch book that I carried around with me so that I could avoid telling people I was color blind.

My parents realized that I was color blind while we were playing Trivial Pursuit when I was seven. I kept saying the wrong colors on the game board.

I couldn’t get them right. In school I always got F’s on my color wheel art assignments. I colored the grass orange in pictures. I worked at a photo lab just out of high school and color corrected as best I could, tinting the sky purple and the grass orange.

I have a hard time distinguishing shades and colors. But I’m pretty good at working around it and hiding it when it’s a pain. I feel like my problem isn’t with taking color information in. I feel like I can see color fine. The problem comes when my brain tries to process the information and then say what color it is that I’m looking at. I feel like there’s just a poorly wired connection. Over the years I’ve taught my brain how to correctly identify colors.

I really have to think about it now, but I can get by and correctly identify colors if I work at it.

T was the only one at Papersource who knew about my issue. She made me the swatch book so that when someone asked for paper I could just use

I walked up and down my aisles alone hundreds of times a day. Note sets, flower kits, butterfly kits, letter press letters, pumpkin kits, envelope templates, accordion kits. Up one aisle down another. Sometimes on my feet sometimes on a milk crate sometimes on my asspad – a little foot high seat that the boys in envelopes invented by stuffing boxes with other boxes and taping it all together, it looked something like a saddle. Sitting on it and pushing myself backwards scraping along the smooth cement floor. The shelves towered over me, fluorescent lights humming high above throwing bright clinical light onto the brown cement floor and brown cardboard boxes that filled the shelves.

The sound of Rosy and her shrink-wrapping crew running the machine in the corner opposite, somewhere on the other side of my shelves. Slowly up one aisle then down the other then back to one then over to another one. Rubber stamps and holiday shapes templates. Three to Highland Park. Ten to San Francisco. Fifteen to Boston. Grab them off the shelves then dump them in the Rubbermaid tubs – one tub for each city. Then back to the aisles for more. My stacks. My lonely stacks. So quiet in that corner. Up one down another. Just me and my headphones. Music all day. The one time I approved of shuffle on my ipod. It gave me a slight sense of anticipation. What’s next? What’s it gonna play? Sometimes I’d play massive rock blocks. Every Beatles record Revolver to Abbey Road straight through. Six Don Cherry albums back to back. I went through albums without speaking. Up one aisle and down another. Light came through large windows along the north wall of the building. But the sun was on the opposite side of the building and my stacks blocked the view to the windows. Dark. Dark and quiet. Winter gray.

My boss Jake had a woodshop that he ran for years. He had people working for him. He loved building things – anything with wood. Shelves. Furniture.

Art. He loved working with wood. Then the building where he had his shop burned down. He couldn’t afford to start over so he started at Papersource.

He got there before anyone else and stayed later. He worked 11 hour days.

He’d build massive storage shelves – rows and rows. He was the warehouse carpenter although he was officially a manager. He just did everything. He helped everyone out – any department with any job. He was always going – always running around. We’d have to tell him to eat lunch. We’d have to tell him to go home.

He was giving his time away. Burning his energy away. Giving all this life to a company that didn’t care.

All of us packers and assistant manager types wouldn’t allow it to happen to us – we were disgruntled and jaded, always tried to avoid salary. Hourly wages

The closest thing to a full on full blown fully developed and realized treefort was the one that Jeremy and Jason built behind Jason’s house. This was something more like a fort on stilts that was built just on the other side of the fence in the field behind the subdivision. There was a clump of trees that hung over the fence behind Jason’s yard and they built the tree house on stilts there. It was a Frankenstein of a fort. 4x4s for support legs. Plywood and 2x4s scavenged from unfinished homes and construction sites throughout the subdivision. That’s where we always went for supplies for treeforts or bike ramps skate ramps or whatever we were building. Often the dumpster raids also included clandestine exploration of the skeletal frames of houses after hours when the workers had left for the day. Climbing in through the sunken basement windows. Climbing up the skeletal stairs. Walking through skeletal walls. Climbing on skeletal beams. And carefully walking over skeletal floors.

The fort was maybe four feet off the ground and had walls on all four sides and an opening on the north side to get in. Old carpet on the plywood floor. Old carpet padding when there wasn’t enough carpet. Tree branches overhead and magazines scattered around. Playboys porn skateboarding mags. A glorious fort. A hideaway with no ceiling exposed to the blinding summer daytime humid day and the moon and stars at night as well as warm rain throughout the summer.

Firecrackers and bottle rockets. But the most thrilling was to light a smoke bomb and wait for the fuse to burn down inside the bomb and for the smoke to start billowing out and then throw the bomb against a tree trunk or wall of the treefort. Smashing it exploding it into smoke pieces arching out in a massive smoke explosion like an airplane exploding. Smoking bits through the air landing on the floor of the fort disappearing into the tall green grass below. The grass up to our hips. Smoke bomb fights and smoke stained hands stinking of sulfur and being called in for dinner. Clouds of purple and blue and green and yellow and red smoke wafting through the yards shrouding the fence line and fort in mysterious haze. A smoke bomb unsmashed tossed into the grass and the smoke billowing out trapped in the grass only small wisps escaping but the smoke there flowing and traveling under the green grass forest until the grass disturbed released the smoke into the air.

A delayed slow motion bulbous cloud that disintegrated and disappeared drifted off into the twilight sky. Fireflies lightning bugs flashing in the tall grass and off in the subdivision back yards. Some kids catching them in their hands sometimes in a jar. Some kids batting them out of the sky with plastic wiffle bats watching them arc incandescent against the fading light.

I was there at the end of the treefort later that summer going back to school. The end was near. Blue blue sky. Possibility fading in the air. Goodbye to dreams dreamed. Goodbye to shared fantasies and to the sound of skateboard wheels on cement, on wood. Subdivision nihilists, we took it upon ourselves to make tangible the loss of summer. Make it a physical visceral reality. We destroyed the fort with hammers and a crowbar and our hands and our junior high bodyweight. If the summer had to end then so did the fort.

No time for sentimentality. We smashed and pried and jumped and kicked and we stood inside as the northern legs gave way and collapsed and the fort sunk towards the ground on the north side. We balanced at an angle the floor of the fort springing up and down. We paused. Looked around. And began to jump up and down on our treefort spring board. Wood cracking nails bending carpet tearing the walls falling apart wood scattering into tall grass.

floor where the paper cutter was. We had two cutters. Phil on the third floor who did most of the standard cutting of cards, note sets, etc. Benny on the second floor did the more random cutting and most of mine since it was irregular and I needed less cut.

Benny I need this stack cut down to this size.

When do you need it?

Soon as you can, today if possible.

No problem.

Thanks.

Phil was an older guy. Retired. He used to run his own press. Now he worked at Papersource and took many sick and personal days and was found napping in hidden nooks of his third floor station/hideout. The nooks were carved out of the mountainous stacks of paper that had been cut down to various sizes. Pallets of paper wrapped in plastic five or six feet high. Wooden pallets on their sides for storage. Ceiling high shelves that held boxes of surplus envelopes. The sound of the die cutting machine in the next room punching holes over and over. It was easy to hide and disappear for a while here. Sometimes you’d find his chair in an out of the way hiding spot with the day’s newspapers on it. Everyone knew about this but no one said anything. People complained but no one took action. Who were we to argue with age. I never complained, what did I care. I’d walk in on Phil asleep in a chair, newspaper on his lap, hidden by stacks of paper. Good for him.

T and her drama. Every morning there was something new for her to freak out about. She and her boyfriend, U, had just moved in together. She’d come to work with her dark hair pulled tight back over her head. Jeans and t shirts. Sometimes she’d knock us all out and wear a skirt and top revealing her curves. The boys in envelopes would have a hard time containing themselves as she walked by.

T would tell us her worries about U – all the manic intensity – every morning. Some days he was an angel doing the sweetest things. Other days he was the devil and she didn’t know what to do.

Her brown eyes behind glasses. She’d pour her guts out then a work crisis and she was off leaving Cori and I to decipher what was going on.

It was my job to make sure that my ladies had all the supplies that they needed to package the kits. Paper, bone folders, plastic template pieces, samples, bags, book board, inserts, string, buttons, tape, scissors, you name it.

Mostly it was paper that they needed.

Keith necesitamos más de este papél.

De qué tamaño?

Así. Pointing at the scrap of paper.

Cuantas piezas?

Como 500.

Ok. And off I’d go. Calculator and ruler and scrap in hand to find the paper and to calculate how many large sheets of paper I’d need to cut down to the scrap’s size.

Upstairs for the standard paper colors – butter, chocolate, sage, opal, quartz, luxe frost, brockway, opal, mango. Fancy ways of saying yellow, brown, blue, orange, etc.

On the same floor for the fancy paper, the ones that were imported from Nepal, Japan, India, the ones that smelled like somewhere else and took six months to a year to arrive. The ones that had texture, flowers mixed in the pulp, patterns dyed in, names like Lokta, colors that were rich and nuanced and confused the hell out of a colorblind person like me.

Lost in the stacks of paper on the third floor moving my scrap of paper along the length and width of the sheet of paper counting how many pieces I could get out of it. Then dividing the total number of pieces I needed by the number of pieces I could get out of a sheet to find out how many sheets of paper I needed to take down to the cutter.

My calculator was gray, solar powered and had a heart and “Keith’s” written in permanent marker on the back. Supplies always disappeared.

I’d write how many sheets I took, load the stack onto a cart and wheel it over to the elevator. For a small load of paper on a light cart I’d walk past the industrial elevator with its operators who were surly and didn’t have the time to be bothered with opening the door and pulling the lever that raised or lowered the elevator. They’d rather be hanging out talking Bears to the other building staff. Or they were creepy and leered at the girls and women that worked in the building. Blue hats, blue coveralls, moustaches under noses and eyes that stared at the girls as they moved paper and supplies between floors.

They didn’t talk – they just used their eyes and made the less than a minute ride feel hours. We were technically supposed to use that industrial elevator, but instead I’d head out to the pedestrian elevator and go back down to the second

cornfest

Summer 2005. August. Going back to school shortly, but today I’m in the back seat of a little Honda flying down 90 out of the city heading northwest out towards where I grew up. Out towards the country and corn fields and soybeans and blue sky and memories and to DeKalb.

Eric Decourcey is sitting in the back with me. I’m on the left he’s on the right. I’m looking out the window at the clouds and the power lines the flat suburbs sprawling out warehouses and big long flat office complexes with strange names that mean nothing. Eric Decourcey is talking about history – a favorite topic – spieling about the history of corn or something. How it was genetically engineered by native americans so long ago. Talking about the city of Cahokia and how we should go. Eric smith is driving the car and he agrees. Another historian, they debate and discuss back and forth as wind blows through the car and clouds hover overhead and power lines zip by the car crackling with invisible energy. Potential. I think of Twin Peaks. Electricity! Hand clap! The eerie sound of electricity coursing through the wires, information and power jumping all over. Magical and terrifying. A year from now a broken down car pulled over on the side of the road in the quiet dark as rivers of rain roll down the windows and cars and trucks roar by shaking the car and with the windows down the electricity hisses and snaps along the lines directly above the car louder than I would’ve imagined. Electricity in the dark while waiting for a tow truck at one in the morning going back to the city.

Eric’s wife Mireia is in the front passenger seat listening to the history debates and occasionally adding to the conversation. Her short brown hair blowing in the wind and her Barcelona accented english making me happy every time she say ‘s’ sounds and the word fuck or fucking as in ‘this fucking thing.’

So emphatic and amazing. I wish I could say it like that as the car flies over I90 pavement. Hot August end of summer sun and I have to start school again in a week or so. My first real semester at library school. The first one where I’ll be taking archives classes and learning what I want to learn. Excitement and longing for beach boys endless summers.

We pass Medieval Times restaurant outside of Schaumburg, the bizarre campy castle construction that epitomizes the suburbs. Its useless turrets and parapets and pointless design alluring to ten year olds everywhere.

Y’know what I’ve always wanted to do. I say.

What’s that.

Here it is. If I could get thousands of people to pull this off. I’d love to assemble a medieval army and sack Medieval Times. Like with siege engines and catapults and marauding hordes.

The others laugh.

How awesome would it be to be someone that works at Medieval Times

more people get on the windows are dark can’t see anything.

Reading. Books. Escapist fantasies. Lovecraft. Herbert. Always reading and falling asleep. A fog around my head. The doors open. The doors close.

People shuffle in. Their bodies sway as the train sways.

The train burrows under the city, under the river, dark windows then bright stations, people file out. Suits. Dress shoes. Heels. Skirts. Make-up applied in transit. The sound of a thousand newspapers being read then folded stuffed under arms in briefcases.

Cell phone conversations. Music bleeding out from ipod ears. Cell phone jingles and vibrations. A million people calling each other to say they’ll be late. Under the loop all the suits file out.

It’s just us now. Students and people headed for more southerly jobs at the medical campus and the industrial jobs beyond. I bury my head. I dig inside try to avoid my impending el station but the train doesn’t stop. I feel it turn west away from the loop.

Clinton.

My stop. I rise as the train slows, the doors open and I’m out. I see some people I know and I let them get ahead of me. I know where they’re going. I don’t want to talk to them yet. I remain invisible.

Layers of soot on the white walls, the white arched ceiling where obscenely bright and clean fluorescent lights expose the dirt and grime accumulated over the years. Up the dirty stained cement stairs to the entry level.

Chrome turnstiles and the little freestanding phone booth style kiosk where the CTA employee sits for endless hours. Walk through the exit on the west side of the street. The gray daylight glowing down the stairs to the outside.

Up and up. Slick cement steps. I see those people I know. I watch to see which way they go and I go the other.

Slick pavement. Wind in my face. Winter on the edge of it. Make a right on Des Plaines. The lonely little trees that grow in symmetrical precision along the street. Leaves gone. Bare branches reaching towards whatever open sky they can find amongst such immense buildings. Turn my mind off. Brace myself for another day. The brick building on my left. Walk in. Pass the concession stand. Chili burgers office nastiness. Up two flights of dull faded off-white stairs, yellow brown feeling walls. Feel the age of the building – an old industrial building from the 1920’s. Warm in the stairway.

Work smell – stuffy, old, dust, machinery, electricity, lubrication and paper.

Paper and dead ends.

Papersource Warehouse.

My job and welcome to it.

The day I got a rejection letter from Borders I opened it. I read it. I crawled back into bed. It was just barely afternoon. I felt so disgusted. Fed up. Impotent.

Unable to think of anything good. The last straw. Gray outside. Gray building.

Gray Logan Square neighborhood filled with gray buildings that blend seamlessly into the gray sky creating a universe of gray. It invaded my mind. Set up shop and I was gray. In bed with my clothes on looking out gray windows at the gray building next door illuminated by gray light.

Gray.

I couldn’t find a fucking job. I came back from Mexico defeated. My plan blew up in my face and now here I was trying to reestablish myself. I applied at grocery stores and bookstores. I applied, interviewed and got hired at Marshall Fields downtown where I would be on a reclamation team – meaning I would go around and pick up clothes from the dressing rooms and put them back on the floor. 8 dollars an hour. Then they told me I’d have to dress up in pants and a shirt and tie and take a drug test and only enter through the employee entrance even if I wasn’t working. I quit before I started.

I tried temping. I went to a few different temp agencies but they never had any work for me – regardless of my new work clothes and my computer proficiency test scores. I’d call them every week but they never had anything for me.

I applied to be a substitute teacher at Chicago Public Schools. I applied to be a teacher’s assistant at Chicago Public Schools. I took a Spanish proficiency test to get a bilingual ed transitional teaching certificate so I could teach at Chicago Public Schools or in the surrounding suburbs. I passed and found out that CPS and the surrounding suburbs didn’t accept that certificate.

Borders sent me a rejection letter. I’d worked eight years of retail. Five of them at a bookstore. In the interview they only offered to pay me 7.25 an hour.

They rejected me with a letter. I couldn’t find a job anywhere. It was all too much. I was crushed. Decimated. Destroyed. Broken. Bed-ridden.

Fully clothed two in the afternoon in bed. Laying in silence. I couldn’t even listen to music. It didn’t sound good. Nothing did.

Gray.

Gray drama.

The blue line train. 8am. Gray and late fall out. Drizzle on the windows the streams of water flow diagonally from left to right as the train rolls through the neighborhoods. Logan Square. Wicker Park. The old buildings. The gray city.

The cars with wipers on headlights shine through raindrops. The train snakes through the buildings above the cars plunges down underground at Division

and show up for work and see off in the distance across 90 on a hill a whole line of infantry slowly advancing. It would be fucking awesome.

Totally, Decourcey is laughing hard. Awesome.

We laugh as clouds blow by wind in our hair heading out to DeKalb for Cornfest.

Decourcey and I both lived in DeKalb for a few years when we were little.

I was there from when I was two until I was five. He is five years older than me. We wouldn’t meet for another fifteen years or so. But going back to DeKalb was a pilgrimage to our childhood. We both made Eric drive to our houses and our old neighborhoods remembering what we could and everything looked smaller than we remembered it. The huge overgrown bushes in front of my old house were gone and my house that used to tower like a monolith above me was a small two story house. Like millions of others. Oh well. The slide on the playground of my first school where I got the scar under my nose that I still have today that’s only visible to me. It’s also so much smaller, not the behemoth giant that I plummeted from when I was five.

But we’re here for corn. Mythic Cornfest. A celebration of the Midwest.

We park the car and follow the throngs of people to the small downtown area that’s closed off. It’s Friday evening. It smells like the fair. Fried food and beer. Little kids running around high schoolers fronting and mugging trying to out cool each other. College kids just getting into town to start their school year at NIU. The last time I was at cornfest I was dating Jessica and she had just moved into her first apartment and we had gone out on Saturday night to check out Cornfest and eat something. We ended up in a fight because I was too wishy washy and unassertive. We were twenty and twenty one. She was older and punk rock. We walked on opposite sides of the street back to her house.

Eric, Eric, Mireia and I walking down the little main drag where there are booths and booths of food vendors and beer vendors and Thai food. I don’t remember there being Thai food here before.

Where’s the corn? Eric Smith asks.

Well there’s roasted corn I say pointing to a dark trailer that’s roasting tons of corn.

And there’s the regular corn, Decourcey points out. It’s a white tent run by the local Kiwanis.

It’s Cornfest and there’s only two places to get corn. Eric Smith says.

Yeah that’s weird, I say.

I think it must be on Saturday when they do the corn boil and boil corn in vats in the street and give it away, says Decourcey.

That’s what I remember.

Eating ears of corn from the Kiwanis tent and a few ears of roasted corn that cost fifty cents more than the regular corn. A dollar fifty instead of a dollar.

Feeling so happy to be sitting there in the cooling air as evening falls sky darkening little by little.

A large cartoonish soldier character in a bizarre inflatable soldier costume walks awkwardly up and down the street with a handler guiding him. He poses with little kids who want their picture taken with him. We all try to think of creative ways to protest this offensive display of military imperialism. I just want to pop him, I say.

Christian right churches have booths as do both the Army and the National Guard. Giving out literature and recruiting for their respective (and similar) causes. We are disgusted. But we had to continue to eat our corn.

I want an elephant ear, Eric Smith says as he and Mireia go off in search of the mythical dessert leaving Decourcey and I drinking lemonade and picking our teeth with toothpicks. Night is rapidly falling around us enclosing us.

Lights from the booths and bars behind them.

I’m remembering this like a dream. Like a photograph. Eric and I sitting there our bodies silhouettes all black shadows with bright light behind us. We are back lit at a fair frozen in time each remembering living there.

Walking back to the car we are all eating italian ice or maybe just me. Maybe they got ice cream. There was no elephant ear to be found. What kind of place is this, Eric Smith says dejectedly, that they don’t have elephant ears. I’m disappointed with my lemon italian ice, regretting the decision. Before I got it I had pleasant corn tastes and lemonade flavors in my mouth. I could’ve lived with them for a while. But the italian ice was seductive and I fell for it. But it was too sweet, too tart, too creamy, not clean and crisp like it should be. A high school band playing jazz for a small audience.

Driving back to the city in nighttime darkness occasional words are spoken.

Streetlights stream by in rapid succession leaving trails of light. Quiet in the car. Wind still in our hair against our faces. Occasional trees amongst suburban sprawl and power lines.

papersource

Pop the deck into the air sail over the bag and he lands on his feet on the ground the deck next to him.

Ahhh!

Better. He cleared it. But he didn’t land it. The sun out no clouds noon warmth on my skin trees blowing in the warm breeze starting to dry out. I’m reading. Sitting at the edge of the platform, feet in the gravel at track level, watching this out of the corner of my eye. Not wanting to stare. The other people in clumps under the canopies that intermittently run the length of the platform.

Repeat.

He pushes off hard going fast gliding over the concrete wheels making that distinct visceral sound. Pop the deck lifts into the air the kid on top they float together over the bag then gently set down on the other side still together.

Yeah! The showman yells in triumph.

The fickle audience doesn’t respond. Not even me. I go back to reading my book. Sun. Feeling good. He skates back into start position.

Repeat. Ad nauseum.

He provides the background soundtrack. The wheels on concrete the tail of the deck slapping the concrete the sharp landing his shouts of defeat or triumph his nervous energy mumbling aware of his audience, the professional weekenders who try not to watch – the pros that are focused inward on their own clumps of like minded.

I see the lights of the train in the distance coming towards us.

sunday

Sitting on the porch. Reading Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha as the sun set.

Reading in the last minutes of light. Stopping as it got to be too dark.

Watching the trees above the houses behind the alley. The top branches and leaves swaying lightly in the evening breeze. The tree tops against the glowing dusk sky. Feeling content and happy. Calm. Things are going to be okay.

Things are amazing right now. And a quiet smile on my lips. Sinking into my chair. Breathing slow and deep. Sunday night. My life as it should be.

weekend

One weekend on the Jefferson Park Metra platform northwest to Harvard.

Sunny 80 degrees late summer day. Noon. A Sunday. Day trippers out in force. Weekenders – professional weekenders standing on the platform milling around looking down the tracks to see if they could see the train yet.

This kid, tall with baggy pants and puffy white tennis shoes an a-line t shirt, came skating towards me veered left to the other side of the platform.

I watched him. He of nervous energy. He dropped his board, stood there one foot on the deck one on the concrete ready to push off – but he watched contemplating. I followed his eyes to a large backpack sitting in his path.

He will ollie the bag. I thought.

He pushed off moving way too slow.

There’s no way.

He crouched, moving in slow motion, not much momentum, a foot away from the bag he slammed his back foot down pushing the tail against the ground and jumped up popping the board up under him. He lazily lifted a foot off the ground and straight into the bag. The board stayed and he hopped over the obstacle.

Failure. Aware of his audience – the professional weekenders.

Ahhh! He yelled in a show of frustration.

Nervous energy. Muttering to himself and smiling. He cruised back to his starting position and composed himself then repeated the attempt.

Too slow again. Lazily popping his board up and sleepwalking it into the bag as he floated over and back to the ground.

Ahhh! That showman’s frustration.

Rinse repeat.

This time faster, more speed. Now he’s got it. I thought, watching his white puffy tennis shoed feet.

window

thank you

to hathaway.

I was walking to the post office this afternoon. And then to Eric Smith’s to water his and Mireia’s plants. And this window opened. But it’s better during the day. When I’m outside. It’s easier to deal with when I’m outside. I feel more connected. I see the sky. The overcast gray sky. Those clouds. Cold wind. Feel.

Air. Walking. I feel connected to something. I’m grounded.

The trees. I saw them. I looked at them as that window opened. Hyper awareness.

Trees.

What is the most beautiful thing in the world?

I wanted someone to ask me that question right then so I could answer – trees.

They sum up so much. The universe. The infinite. The randomness. How everything connects. All the chances and confluences. Our lives.

The trees.

to anders nilsen. editorial help. friendship. righteousness.

to Lilli Carré. comics. artistic genius. check out more of her amazingness at www.lillicarre.com. to my pals who worked with me at papersource. to guadalajara. ignacio and rufina. dave and mandy roos. my teachers at CEPE. and the doctors and nurses at the ISSSTE hospital and at CEPE. to everyone who’s read flotation device over the years. and to all of you reading it now.

top faves 2005 - 2008 The Boredoms. Super Roots 9. So amazing it actually made me cry a little.

Also the Boredoms live at the Congress Theater. 3/26/08. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C Mann. God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 by David Levering Lewis. David Lynch introducing Inland Empire at the Music Box and Twin Peaks (again).

Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain kind of live at the Music Box with Crispin Glover. Monologues for the Coming Plague by Anders Nilsen.

Scott Walker The Drift. Nels Cline Trio live at the side tent at Pitchfork 2006 covering Paul Bley’s Turning Point. Café Tacuba Sino. Rhys Chatham playing Guitar Trio at Empty Bottle. John Coletrane Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings. Joseph Jarman Song For and As if it Were the Seasons. OOIOO Gold and Green. Pharoah Sanders Karma and Black Unity. Yo La Tengo The Story of Yo La Tengo. Andi Watson and Simon Gane Paris. Ghost of Hoppers

by Jaime Hernandez. King Cat Classix by John Porcellino. Best of Bowie DVD. Roxy Music (with Eno) on Musikladen DVD. The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion. Putas Asesinas Roberto Bolaño. New Order Ceremony.

Allen Ginsberg Collected Poems 1947-1997. Lee Bontecou. Divisadero Michael Ondaatje. Alan Silva. Alice Coletrane Journey in Satchidananda. Marion Brown. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and Gentlemen of the Road both by Michael Chabon. Serge Gainsbourg Histoire de Melody Nelson and Percussions. Clare Rojas. Fishing with John. Popeye by E.C. Segar. Buddha by Osamu Tezuka. Archie Bell and the Drells Tighten Up. Margaret Kilgallen. Brigitte Fontaine Comme a la Radio. Gabriel García Márquez La Hojarasca and the General in his Labyrinth. Zoé Memo Rex. Betty Davis. Todd Haynes I’m not There. Fela Kuti. M.I.A. Mike Ladd. Mulatu Astatke. Pauline Oliveros.

Philip Glass soundtrack to Dracula. Terry Riley. Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band and Fly. Lo Borges. Seu Jorge. Playing shows with the Rories again and finishing up recordings. Seeing Marcel Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with Hathaway - a lifelong dream checked off. Working on zines again. Chicago’s snowiest winter in years.

Spring. Riding my bike to work. Learning the joys of good beer. Who knew?

Costa Rica in the fall of 2008 con Jata y mi familia tica (lástima lo del TLC).

Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade. Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler. Learning a little french. Vegetarian biscuits and gravy at Flying Saucer.

Thurston Moore Tribute to Sun Ra at the Hideout in November of 2006.

The Trees - Pulp I took an air-rifle, shot a magpie to the ground and it died without a sound.

Your skin so pale against the fallen autumn leaves and no-one saw us but the trees.

Yeah, the trees, those useless trees produce the air that I am breathing.

Yeah, the trees, those useless trees; they never said that you were leaving.

I carved your name with a heart just up above - now swollen, distorted, unrecognizable; like our love.

The smell of leaf mould and the sweetness of decay are the incense at the funeral procession here, today.

In the trees, those useless trees, produce the air that I am breathing.

Yeah, the trees, those useless trees; they never said that you were leaving.

You try to shape the world to what you want the world to be.

Carving your name a thousand times won’t bring you back to me.

Oh no, no I might as well go and tell it to the trees.

Go and tell it to the trees, yeah.

Sycamore Trees - Lynch/Badalamenti I got idea man. You take me for a walk under the sycamore trees. The dark trees that blow baby, in the dark trees that blow.

And I´ll see you. And you`ll see me. And I`ll see you in the branches that blow in the breeze. I`ll see you in the trees. Under the sycamore trees

Shed the World excerpt - Lungfish There’s nothing left to do but go and ask the trees about the shedding of the world.

Do you agree? Their leaves rustled in the breeze and they replied authoritatively don’t shun the world, shed it.

If anyone you meet does not believe it, you tell them to talk to trees they have decreed it.

welcome to the new issue of flotation device. three years in the making. as always so much has happened since the last one. grad school. new job. new career. new relationship. learning to live life as a thirty year old. it’s hard not to feel like a new chapter. i’d been wanting to do an issue of flotation device that was all about trees for a while now. one that would capture what it was i felt when i looked up at trees at night in the summer with warm breeze blowing through leaves.

por

r o v a f

muchachos

mujeres

inscr

ibale

al

muchachas

hombres

¡ejercito muchacho bonito!

one that captured all the possibility i feel walking down the street with sunlight through the tree branches. but i never felt like i was ready to do that. i’m still not entirely sure i was ready, but i made an attempt anyways. i hope you like it. all the photos in this zine were taken by me. except for the one on this page. and those cute boy army propaganda pics. i don’t know those guys. this is flotation device 12 by keith helt c. 2008. flotationdevice@gmail.com. po box 257251 chicago, il 60625.

una vida mejor le espera andele lo merece

nada más escribe una carta y envíelo a flotationdevice@gmail.com o a keith helt po box 257251 chicago, il 60625. el mismo keith le responderé prontisimo. gracias.