After a straight shot drive down a highway whose number I now forget, I crested a hill around six in the morning, it still being completely dark outside, and saw for the first time the city skyline of Cleveland. I had the day off of work, and I was still exploring my immediate surroundings, since moving to what I call the chimney of Pennsylvania, so close to Buffalo and Cleveland and Pittsburgh. More than anything the prospect of Cleveland intrigued me, because I had never really considered that I might go there, or that it might be close enough, or what might even be there. So I set the early alarm, and drove straight in there with no plan. All I really wanted to do was park somewhere right in the city, find a newspaper from a newspaper
A self-timer self-portrait I did on a bench in Cleveland.
machine, and a local coffee shop, and read the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a newspaper whose name I already knew from years of attempting to be media savvy. Somehow I managed to find just the right exit off the highway, and, with my breath still showing in my car from the early-morning chill, found a parking lot that cost just a few dollars, right in the heart of the city. I hopped out of my car feeling extremely accomplished, walking across the early-morning parking lot, and I noticed many other people on foot, traveling the same way I was, heading into the city for that morning’s whatever. This was the first time I truly felt the call of the city, the desire to move in that hive, to be one of those lemmings. Wherever they were all going, it seemed like it must be interesting, different from what I knew and was accustomed to, and terribly important. Everyone made their way into their assigned nooks and crannies, disappearing down side streets and alleys and into revolving doors. In an almost astonishing short amount of time I found the newspaper machine I was looking for, and I even had the quarters ready, as I had anticipated this even before I left my apartment back Erie. I got myself a fresh-off-the presses copy of that mornings Cleveland Plain Dealer, and in an even shorter amount of time, I found myself in a local chain coffee shop called Phoenix Coffee, drinking a large caramel latte, reading about the Cleveland Browns that year, and the big high hopes everyone had for Colt McCoy.
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Shortly after moving in with my mother in South Jersey, a hurricane was on the way. I can’t remember what its name was anymore, because you know, they name these things, all of them. So it was on its way, and after the big news stories that the last few had been, this was supposed to be a big news story too. All the roads were going to be shut down, everything was going to flood, and we were all going to freak out. We all watched on the radar as the thing approached, and everyone from my work kept calling and texting around, wondering if we were going to have to go in the next day, and just how bad
Putzing around in the rain during our hurricane in South Jersey
everything was going to be. My mother and I were concerned about sleeping in our upstairs bedrooms, there being trees near the house, and that they might crash through the windows, like some goddamn nightmare. Eventually, it was decided no one had to go into work, and I was home with my mother as the danger approached. It started raining, and more than anything I was just intrigued. I’ve been through plenty of different storms in my life, and of course I’ve got the obligatory Pennsylvania drenchings from hurricanes that are almost out of steam by the time they get to us. But this looked like it might be an actual hurricane. Every hour or so I would put on all my rain gear and walk out to the development’s drainage ditch, to check the flooding progress. It’s one of those perfectly manicured little drainage ditches, it doesn’t look natural at all, obviously something that a few men with small bulldozer patted down on a Sunday afternoon twenty years ago. As the afternoon progressed the drainage ditch kept not filling up and not filling up, and the rain, although incessant and quite wet, kept being just that: rain. As Mom got bored from being cooped up inside and watching TV, and I got disappointed by the weather nonevent, the afternoon meandered into just another afternoon, one of those days wiled away looking at images on screens, or reading words in a book, the type of afternoon that you think of as a fine relaxing afternoon, but ultimately one with nothing very memorable. After it had been raining for about four hours I took my final walk out to the drainage ditch, saw that it was in fact actually less full than the previous time, and I took a short walk out to the small woods behind the development, and stood listening to the rain hit the leaves, and the small creek at the bottom of a low-grade hill behind my mother’s house. It was nice to be there, I thought. It was a nice place, and a nice time to be alive, and a very unique, circuitous path to be on. But it was also one of those moments when you think yourself, how in the world did I get here?
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I had been working out and dieting for about two months at this point, and had lost about three-quarters of the weight I wanted to lose. I had been living on my own in the city of Philadelphia for about six or seven months, and summer was in full swing. My new healthy lifestyle coupled with the season had invigorated me like I had never felt before. My typically high energy level was now bordering on manic, with me needing only a few hours of sleep a night, and typically reading thousands and thousands of words a day, in magazines, newspapers, books, and that was just the start of what I was able to accomplish. I would often be caught telling people that the world was actually bending to my very will. On this particular night, I had been out riding my bike all over the city, all day long. Starting out in the sweltering heat of noon, riding all the way from my Pennsport
Taken around the time I thought I could control the universe.
apartment to the Art Museum, then back again, then out again and down to the Schuylkill River Trail, making the entire loop, miles and miles and miles of riding. Every time I would come home I would just play Pandora radio, no television on this day, the universe and all its sounds and music coursing through me. At night I threw open the windows in my apartment and let the natural air flow through, stripping down naked and playing air guitar to serious and depressing Post-Rock music and laughing and crying, the music louder than my neighbors probably liked. I put my clothes back on and hopped on my bike, and went to a late night showing of a movie at the nearby multiplex. Afterwards I still couldn’t stop, hopped on my bike and rode down the side streets as fast as I could, the good paved streets, the ones you can really get going on. At that time of night, in that part of the city, you can really blow through the stop signs, when you’re really tuned into the world and the universe like that, you can pick out the headlights if a car is coming the opposite direction, at the intersection, and you can really get up a good head of steam blowing through all the streets, not stopping anywhere, feeling the ions and electrons buzzing, I felt like I couldn’t be stopped, like I could fly if I wanted to, like my tires could just lift off the ground and I could soar, maybe just a few inches off the ground but I could soar, like I could just tell the universe anything what I wanted to do. I still remember the exact smell of that night, of that bike ride down the side streets, the exact feel of that exact quality of air, the way that I knew I could not be that happy forever, the way that I knew in my heart that life is that good, but you just don’t always feel it. I rode faster and faster, my bike going thirty miles an hour through the streets of South Philadelphia, the warmth, the music back at my apartment, the echo of the movie from the movie theater, the lights all everywhere around, everything still swirling around in me, like some great puppetmaster. Just like every stop on the sojourn, the question must’ve popped into my mind, how did I get here? But it wasn’t very important at that moment, I was almost flying.
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Here’s a poem I wrote while living in Erie:
A Slowing of Pace
For at least ten years you have been preparing
to feel comfortable here in your life,
not a shutdown but a slowing of pace,
a grace of peace, of stopping on your way
through rooms of your dailiness to touch
the woven basket, the plastic vase, walking
through the evening park without voices
intoning from the trees, you must, you must—
these same dreams of solitude since you were very young,
and you feel, have felt for years,
that this is how you most would live,
deliberate, considered, easeful, slow,
if your life will only let you,
which it won’t, and this last decade
you have been yearning toward it, plotting,
longing for the book resting on your lap,
pages spread wide, this cup, the open door,
letting in late September air.
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It was a rainy, cold day in early March in Erie, and I found my wandering car pointed in the direction of the Erie Zoo. Although I hadn’t set out to go to the zoo, this new turn of events didn’t surprise me. I found himself there five or six times a year. Most people contented themselves with a few zoo visits in a lifetime, but the Erie Zoo was extremely affordable, and the even cheaper off-season price (seven dollars for a grown-up) seemed more than reasonable to spend some time communing with creatures that had no business being on this part of the globe. It was cheaper than a bad movie, and these animals were real.
As I pulled within sight of the zoo, I became a little worried that, for whatever reason, it might not be open. There wasn’t a single car in the lot. It was around 11am on a dreary, cold Thursday; I hadn’t expected it to be hopping, but I wasn’t expecting emptiness.
Optimistically cautious, I parked and got out into the barking wind, driving pellets of frigid rain onto my shaved scalp, and nearly trotted the 20 yards to the zoo entrance. Sure enough, there was a woman at the ticket window, grinning from ear to ear, presumably thrilled to see a customer. As I neared, I summoned my best “public smile”—my I’ll-
Having a moment with a giraffe at the Erie Zoo
pretend-I’m-one-of-you smile—and returned the woman’s “Hi!” with unrivaled enthusiasm. Then I said simply, “One, please.” She paused, then asked “Are you a member?” I kept his public smile on. “Nope,” I said. And then she got the look on her face. It was a look I had grown accustomed to in this version of my life. It was a look a clerk or ticket-taker or usher got on their face when they were fighting the desire to say “What, exactly, are you doing here?”
I was sure I wasn’t imagining this look. Aside from being by myself at functions and attractions that normally attracted folks in twos or more, the willy-nilly nature of my work and sleep schedule allowed me to quite often be at attractions and functions on days that were marooned in the desolate middle of the week, when the sad rest of the world were eating sandwiches from vending machines on their half-hour breaks in cubicles and smoking cigarettes under concrete gazebos on the edges of company property. I had found myself alone or nearly alone in places ranging from early-season minor league baseball games to the Flight 93 National Memorial to the Cleveland Museum of Art. And almost always, the middle aged woman working the door was quite visibly wondering what me, in my yellow flannel shirt and black
The house I lived in in Erie–the very first day I saw it. The For Rent sign is still in the door. I had the top floor.
knit cap and imitation Converse , was doing there at 8am or 10pm or whatever the case may be. But they never quite did ask. They liked to leave a big pregnant pause where they thought I might offer some form of explanation for my daring to visit their job. “Just one?” they’d say, wanting me to reply Well, my father used to work here before he got struck by lightning or some other perfectly ridiculous but totally feasible explanation. But I stubbornly never gave any of them any kind of explanation. “Are you a member?” the woman at the zoo window asked. “Nope,” I replied, and still smiling I stared at her. She waiting a second or two, then said, somewhat stubbornly herself now, “Seven dollars.” I handed the woman a ten dollar bill, and while she made change, she said “Looks like you’ll have the place pretty much to yourself today”, confirming my suspicion that, in fact, I was the only customer here. Smiling as large as I could muster, I said “Yeah, I kinda figured that.” I took my three dollars in change and walked into the zoo.
No matter how many times I found himself alone in public spaces, it never ceased exhilarating me. It seemed to me like I’d won some kind of covert contest that nobody else knew they were playing, as though all of life were a silent jockeying for position in which, on this day, I’d triumphed. Everyone else was being funneled through the cattle chutes of their typical lives to the choke points of the weekend afternoons and I was outside the chutes, watching from the meadow. I knew this wasn’t true, I was being funneled by other forces, but my superiority seemed unquestionable in moments such as walking into a zoo I had to myself.
Of course, during the off-season, admittance was cheaper for a reason. Almost half of the animals weren’t on display. Too cold for them. Lord knows where the zoo keeps animals hiding during this time. Some sort of safe house or bunker, on imagines. A smelly bunker.
But I knew where I was going. I had been here enough times that I had “regular” stops. Ten minutes communing with the Red Panda (so cute!), five minutes making cooing sounds at the baby (teenager, really) giraffe, and on and on, until eventually I ended up in the orangutan building. The orangutans at the Erie Zoo were unique in that they were a bona fide family. A mother, a father, a daughter, and a son. In fact, the daughter was the older child, making the orangutans a mirror image of my own nuclear family. The son, Ollie, was still a baby. A toddler, let’s say. He had been an infant when I first arrived in Erie, and I’d been able to watch Ollie grow up in little spurts, every few months when I’d visit. It was when I visited the orangutans that I always got the weird and ecstatic feeling of really, this is right here in Erie.
Today was a little different, however. As soon as I walked into the orangutan building (which was completely empty of humans), Ollie and his mother were right against the glass, in the corner nearest the entryway, Ollie sitting atop his mother’s shoulders. They looked at me from inside deeply human eyes, and both smiled, as if to welcome me. “Oh my,” I heard myself say. I walked slowly to the glass, so as not to scare them away. But they showed no signed of going. As I reached the glass, Ollie (who, on his mother’s shoulders, was eye level with me) placed his hand flat on the glass. I, sensing a moment was occurring, put my hand where Ollie’s was—like we were visiting in a state prison in some sappy movie. But it wasn’t sappy. Ollie and I made eye contact and kept our hands overtop one another’s for what must have been a full minute, an odd communion between a man and a baby orangutan in northwestern Pennsylvania on a rainy March morning. When Ollie finally pulled his hand away, I turned to look behind me to see if any people had come in and maybe witnessed the sweet, unexpected moment. But there was only an empty walkway and the silly tape recorded sounds of an African forest. I thought the lack of a witness was both incredibly sad and completely amazing, to equal degrees.
And it was not sappy.
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A poem I wrote shortly after moving out of South Jersey and into Philadelphia:
Cage
headphones in, I walk Old City
as if in the presence of an intelligence,
concentrating. I imagine myself
scrutinized and measured closely
by the passers-by, the foreign tourists,
the horses with their carriages,
the sky and the earth.
my multiple reflections from shop fronts,
high windows, and bus glass stare back at me,
show my belly, my too-long hair, my crooked nose.
wind sweeps off the Delaware, bringing with it
Camden, Governor Christie, and further south,
my mother’s cooking. home swirls around
this new city, this birthplace city,
where I am so far from everything.
but I keep walking and walking
and it gets darker and darker
and there is a flicker of light or two
far above and beyond my cage.
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My mother and I did so many things together when I was staying with her in New Jersey, it would be difficult to boil those myriad lovely experiences down to a moment indicative of them all. We would typically do one thing together a week—from something as small as going to a movie together to an all-out road trip. We unabashedly (ok, maybe a little abashedly) called these Momma Days. I think we both knew these were numbered days of a grown form of childhood for both
Mom and I at a Camden (NJ) Riversharks game (minor league baseball)
of us, but they were golden days unlike the first childhood (when nobody knows how great things really are). I remember every moment of the Momma Days, but the best memory is my ritual: every time we were going to spend a day together, I’d wake up, roll out of bed, and promptly run down the stairs, clapping my hands like a happy toddler, chanting rhythmically Momma-Day-Momma-Day-Momma-Day in a little kid voice. It seemed, at the time, like something just between the two of us, that we could never tell anybody, because I was 36 and she was older than that even, but here it is, in my blog, because you just don’t get a whole lot of golden days.
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Just a few short months after moving into Philadelphia, I was riding my bike home from work on the night of New Year’s Day. About halfway between where I work and my home, one encounters Washington Avenue, one of the last large arterial streets that cuts through Philadelphia, before you get into what I called the Deep South. When I got there, about 10 o’clock at night, there was a police barricade, preventing me from going further down 2nd St., past Washington, which would’ve taken me directly home in about a mile. But it wasn’t an accident or a crime scene, and I quickly remembered what was going on. There wasn’t a whole lot that was notable about the neighborhood I lived in in Philadelphia, except the fact that it is the Mummer capital of the world. And the Mummers are basically men who dress up in very opulent costumes and dance around and ride interesting floats on a New Year’s Parade, as well as play in old world-style string and brass bands. It is a tradition that only occurs in Philadelphia, and at that, only South Philadelphia, and at that, almost only my neighborhood. But it also turns out, that the whole city loves this tradition one day a year, that being New Year’s Day. And then on the night of New Year’s Day – not New Year’s Eve, mind you but New Year’s Day night – my neighborhood and just my neighborhood
Mummers in the 2014 Philadelphia 4th of July parade
becomes the largest party in the city all year. I hopped off my bicycle, very interested in what this would look like. I was a bit unprepared. I’ve never been to Mardi Gras, but I am told it is much like this, and people who have been to both say that the Mummers party in Pennsport almost outdoes Mardi Gras in some ways. The crowd down Second Street was so thick, I had to quickly chain my bike to a mailbox, as there was no getting through the crowd. Huge, almost one-story high speakers dotted every-other block, where sometimes electronic, dance or house music played, and other times old world Mummer bands played corny but danceable string music. Enormous floats, gaudy and opulent, set in the middle some blocks, some of them decorated in modern ways, with heads of what looked like aliens or monsters, while other floats simply looked like a gilded golden things, big Faberge eggs on wheels, and all about everywhere strode Mummers, men and the occasional women wearing long flowing robes of shiny satin fabrics, embroidered gold and silver tassels, enormous red buttons, masks that looked sometimes scary, like out of a dream masquerade, or sometimes comical, or sometimes indecipherable. It was loud everywhere, chants got taken up out of nowhere that I couldn’t understand, songs were being sung like pirates about to board a weaker vessel. Everyone was drinking, the whole world was there, not just Mummers but teenagers and people in their twenties, kids with funnels of beer going to their stomachs, people on drugs screaming about things, people wearing beads as though it were Mardi Gras but it wasn’t, and nobody was taking their shirts off, weed smoke was an ever-present cloud. There were food stands on corners, big sliced-open mangoes on sticks that you could buy, heads of pigs roasting over spits. I kept taking pictures and videos with my smartphone and sending them to people who weren’t there, people I wished were with me, people I hadn’t seen in years. Somewhere around Dickinson Street I hung a left, popped out onto the relative calm of Front Street, walked six more blocks down to my street, stuffed the key in the lock, went inside in time for Anderson Cooper.
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In the winter, Erie is a cold, desolate, sometimes dangerous place. It’s not the ideal place to live alone with no friends or relatives within a five-mile drive of you. It snows almost all the damn time, and it’s so cold, and the wind just races across the lake, whether it’s the summer or the winter. Wether the lake is frozen or open, it is 7 miles wide, and there is nothing to stop the wind. On one particular winter morning, I rose to an early alarm clock, to work the morning shift at the restaurant I was a manager at. Our day start pretty early, and it’s always hard to get up, but especially when it’s dark outside, and the wind howls like a coyote, and you know there’s snow out there, and maybe more on the way, and maybe more falling even right then. I crawled out of bed, put on my work outfit, poked my head through the
Snow tubing at a work function in Erie–essentially the ONLY perk of the brutal winters.
blinds, and started my car with my remote start, one of the best features that car had. Five minutes later I was down there to hop in, excited about the warm inside of my car. It had snowed the night before, but not a whole lot, maybe four or five inches, which isn’t very much when you’re living in Erie. But it was just one of those things, one of those moments where your car and the tires are sitting just right, or just wrong, and despite the fact that you see no perfect reason why, your car is stuck. I had not left myself a whole lot of time with extra to get to work, and I was in quite a bind here. Being late is sometimes easier than others in that line of work, and I can’t remember the circumstances now, but I do know that I absolutely had to be there on time that day, and my car being stuck put me in a moment of desperation. With nobody to call – not even any small friends or acquaintances, really nobody that I knew – I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I was out of my car, looking all around it, shoveling the snow out from the tires as best I could, trying to rock it a little bit. All the small things one can do by yourself to get your car unstuck, but there’s only so much of that. Then, in the predawn darkness I saw approaching a young man walking down the center of the street that I lived on. I recognized the speed with which he walked and the
Lake Erie and the Presque Isle beaches are actually an incredible hidden gem (during the summers!) in Pennsylvania.
direction he was going as a man heading to catch a bus. Yes, there were buses, but I had never even looked into that. As he came to pass me I walked onto the street, and sent to him, “Hey man! Hi! Hey man, excuse me! I’m in a real bind here, my car is stuck and I really need to get to work. I’m really screwed here. Can you help me push it out?”
He stood still and wooden, looking at me through my pleading screed. After a pause, he said, “But, see, I’m on the way to catch my bus to go to work myself. What if this makes me late?”
This was one of those very touchy moments in life for me. I absolutely, 100% needed this guy to help me. But he had a point and I knew it. Why should he be late to work simply so I could be on time? I was sure if he helped me, the car could come out quickly and we’d both be on time, but time was crunched so badly, there wasn’t even the moment needed to explain this. I analyzed my chances, as well as the look of the kid, and rolled the dice. I said this:
“That’s a chance you’ll just have to take.”
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A poem I wrote in Philly:
Just Past St. Augustine’s
where the elevated train slows
just past St. Augustine’s church
off the Delaware river
a row of busted windows
only a single one still whole
open and darkly curtained
that’s where I once saw this arm
slip out between the frames,
the hand open to feel for drops of rain,
another time there were two arms
raising a small naked baby
for a breath of evening air
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I took a trip to Niagara Falls by myself once, while I was living in Erie. It was only a little over an hour away from there, and I figured I might as well take a look at it. It was a beautiful day, and I was much more moved by the wonder there than I expected to be. I did the whole shebang, the whole big tourist thing, the boats, the ponchos, everything. But the thing that I remember most, the thing that resonated most with me, was Goat Island. It’s a small island in the middle of the Niagara River. You can take a little pedestrian bridge over to it, and walk around. When I was there, I was mostly alone, and the bulk of the island is very unassuming. It’s got a big green lawn, some pasture. You can walk around and not really know that you are
Selfie from my solo trip to Niagara Falls
so close to those enormous rushing waters, and the touristy sites, and the boats and helicopters. I walked over to the shore of the river, all alone in the little clearing, looking out at the rushing Niagara just a hundred yards or so from where drops into oblivion. I couldn’t believe it. There I was, so close to the river, so close to those falls, and nobody around me. I was happy as a clam but I thought to myself, I can jump right in there. I could just end it. Death has always felt like a very close spectre to me, I’ve always sensed the razors edge that I am on, that we are all on. In that moment, I don’t think I’ve ever sensed that more, I saw it like an actual looming knife: just a few feet away, just one slip or one jump, and there it is. I went to Goat Island by myself and for a split second I saw through the door.
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A few months ago I met the most wonderful woman I’ve ever known. Her name is Karla and I’ve been gifted with the good fortune of her loving me as much as I love her. She’s from “back home”, so now, that is where I will go. Not only to spend time with my love and her marvelous son, but to now spend more time with my father and other relatives and long lost friends. My sojourn ends—and an incredible new one will begin. I don’t believe “everything happens for a reason”—in fact, I believe quite the opposite. But I do believe that my lengthy field trip away from home has fulfilled its purpose in the finding of the love of my life. I think my mom will be happy that, in fact, I am going to get even more golden days now.
The love of my life, Karla, our golden days stretching out ahead of us.
Notes From the Fire 