Black night I-10 with Charlie Feathers playing on the beat-up boom-box tethered to the dog house of a 1969 Dodge Sportsman van that cost $350.

I fill up as the sun rises among the date palm groves of Indio. Mauve flowers line the sides of the highway, brightening on a spring morning that becomes too bright as I push into Arizona, stopping in the town of Quartzite, which consists of dusty lots filled with RV dwellers and junk traders.

The day dips in that fated, freighted, familiar way. At midday, exhausted and estranged, I curl up on the bed in the back of the van at a rest stop.

I consume a burrito—at least those parts that respond to the pressure of cutlery—at a Mexican restaurant in Tonopah. Three nice girls from Connecticut occupy a neighboring table.

Through the late afternoon sun-glare of saguaro forests, and into Gila Bend, where I peer through the window of the Stout hotel: the lobby remains intact, furniture and murals within, but it’s closed for business.

Driving alone, swelling from emptiness to fullness, and back to emptiness. A tired maelstrom of gloomy thoughts whirl around my skull as I pull into the King’s Lodge Motel in Tucson. A carload of frat boys drives by, pointing and snickering at me as I walk up to a Mexican restaurant. The sudden loss of dull routine sinks in.

A rerun of The Odd Couple on late night TV is cheering—America in the sixties, many worlds removed, it seems, from the way the country is now projected on television, so crassly and witlessly, and therefore, presumably, analogous to the sweeter way it was back then.

“Thou blind man’s mark, thou fool’s self chosen snare...” From a book of sonnets laid open on the doghouse in front of me I commit Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Desire’ to memory as I drive.

The sun sinks as I enter Deming. Children cavort outside the abandoned Baker Hotel. I am stared at, jeered at and rudely gestured at as I wander around town at twilight.

I dine in an empty Chinese restaurant. The waitress belches as she walks by.

It’s a long dark drive into Texas. Occasionally a truck rumbles by. In order to stay awake I bite my tongue and force myself to sing along to Kris Kristofferson... just the other side of nowhere. At a truck stop in Van Horn the Letterman show blares out incongruously in the empty dining room. I sleep in the back of the van with tissue wadded in my ears to stifle the sound of the trucks shunting around all night, and the trucks here really are bigger than the dreams.

In a Furr’s grocery store in Fort Stockton, I read an article about Philip Larkin in the latest issue of Vanity Fair.

A truck in flames by the side of the highway billows smoke over the plains. The pale and vague desolation of West Texas, on this particular day, has a distinctly sinister atmosphere. Under the impression that it’s legal to drink and drive in the sovereign state of Texas, I consume a couple of beers at the wheel. I fumble with the book of sonnets and swerve off the road into a ditch… ‘Desire, desire, I have too dearly bought…’… and swerve back on again.

A statue of Davy Crockett presides over the square in Ozona. An eerie atmosphere permeates that town in the neighborhood of nowhere on a late Saturday afternoon. The trees are dead and the citizens, if there are any, hidden away somewhere. I walk around with the feeling that I am being watched.

In a drive-through liquor barn near the highway I ask a woman with a broken shoulder about drinking and driving laws. She informs me that the practice is in fact illegal. I throw the empties out of the van.

At a truck stop outside Segovia the face of a doomed beauty gazes out from a grainy abduction notice, cementing the tone of the evening. She disappeared in Ozona five years ago and has not been heard from since.

I carry that grim report into the van with me, and a few minutes later, driving down a hill to the strains of Jed Davenport’s ‘Beale Street Breakdown,’ the dreaded blue and red lights are flashing in the rear-view mirror.

I pull over and a police officer walks up to the window. My crime: the lack of a light illuminating the license plate. Presumably this hasn’t prevented him from noticing the California tags. I’m ordered to get out of the van. A burly civilian is standing with legs spread by the police car with a huge flashlight held threatfully by both of his meaty hands. I am invited to sit in the police car while the officer radioes in my ID, which makes for a few tense minutes.

Surprisingly, the report comes back clean. The suspended California license can’t be on record yet. I give the police officer permission to conduct a search of the van. He will notice the book of sonnets open on the dog-house. For what seems like an eternity I sit in the back of the police car with the burly civilian for company, my attempts at light conversation failing miserably.

“What’s it like living here?”

“It’s a good place to raise a family.”

Eventually the police officer returns and writes me out a warning. “Thank you for your courtesy,” he says.

As I walk back to the van the burly civilian orders me to pick up the cigarette butt I’d flicked on the ground when I got out of the van.

I thank my lucky stars, which on this occasion seem to be perfectly aligned, that they didn’t demand proof of insurance, of which I have none, and that I got rid of those empty bottles.

Exuding atrabilious fumes, rankled by the humiliation, I press on. Due to it being rodeo weekend there are no vacancies at the motels of Kerrville, once home to Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music, and Stacy Sutherland of the13^th Floor Elevators. I feast on a Whataburger, drive on, find myself approaching Boerne, Texas and remember that an acquaintance of mine is temporarily residing in this rural bedroom community of San Antonio while he teaches in the latter city. I hadn’t been planning on accepting his hospitality but since I’m in the neighborhood I look him up.

He’s living in an artist’s quarters at the top of a hill. He puts me up on a narrow folding bed and I am roused at nine in the morning. We breakfast on hearty Mexican fare. The sight of my host cleaning the beans off his plate—leaving it so clean that no smear remains—puts me off my already off-putting meal. But it isn’t wasted, he cleans my plate too.

The traffic thickens in east Texas, as does the mass of pretty insects crushed into the grille of the van. Passing up the charms of the notoriously racist community of Vidor, I enter Louisiana, and it feels welcoming: the dead cypresses standing in the swamps, moss hanging from webbed boughs, scratchings in a pale sky.

From a payphone outside a convenience store in Lake Charles, I call my friend in New Orleans in order to inform him of my imminent arrival. His girlfriend answers the phone. “I guess we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other in the future,” she says.

A quivering grid of afternoon sunlight shifts across the polished hardwood floor of a long narrow room. But for the drowsy hum of the air conditioner, all is silence and stillness, an ambience ideally conducive to the reception and refinement of clear thought. Immersed in scholarly retreat, an owlish old man with a malodorous rucksack occupies an armchair. Students stretch out on sofas; others sit at desks that border the room, pecking at laptops or scribbling in notebooks. A display of books by the greats—Milton, Herbert, Dickinson, Eliot—line the window ledges like poetic ramparts against the world outside, where crowds flock Battery Park and ferries traverse the glittering Hudson toward the skyline of Jersey City beyond.

It is unusual to find this many people (today, at least 10) gathered in silent contemplation of the written word. The Poets House is not a library—books can only be perused on-site —but it is laid out like one, and unlike most libraries nowadays, which often seem more like video arcades or children’s playgrounds, this one has only one public computer on the premises, for accessing the data base—strictly no Internet use, as I found out when rebuked by an intern for browsing a horse-racing site. The Poets House, naturally, houses only poetry, that most ignored and impractical of the arts: more than 50,000 volumes of it, and growing.

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
—William Carlos Williams

With weighty biographies and critical studies thrown in, Blake, Whitman, Stevens and other prolific heavy-hitters take up one or two shelves on their own. Less predictably—with Kleist above and Koch below—the works of Bill Knott occupy almost an entire row, the black lettering on many of the thick white spines shamelessly flaunting the Lulu imprint. The open-door policy results in a preponderance of self-published books. Aisles of obscurity, shelves of neglect, florilegiums of futility, all meticulously alphabetized: a repository of poets who thought their thoughts worth recording, their words worth sharing.

“So many had sacrificed themselves for art without even their names surviving. On the other hand, what mattered most was that all who had given themselves to their work had their real reward in having actualized themselves.” Easy enough for John Berryman to say, considering his place in the pantheon, but perhaps not particularly comforting to poets whose efforts at self-actualization have never advanced beyond open mic nights in empty coffee houses and years on end of polite rejection from little magazines that almost nobody reads.

I open the Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos at a random page: “Attacked by people I admire/as a poseur, or knave, or liar/perceived as dry, or shrill, or bored/or (worst of all) roundly ignored.” Which seems to sum up the poet’s lot. Resentment or indifference are the usual reward for crafting felicitous lines, and—it goes without saying—a complete lack of remuneration that is accepted as an essential and unavoidable element of the poetic occupation.

As any unknown poet will tell you, modern poetry is a nepotistic arena in which success is entirely dependent upon who you know. There is no “supply meets demand” dynamic such as exists with music and art, where middlemen are perpetually scurrying around in order to satisfy the appetites of an ever-increasing audience, hungry for whatever’s thrown at them. Because there isn’t much of an audience, it follows that there is no universally recognized criterion of quality, so it’s easy to perpetuate a closed-world incestuousness determined by critical and academic preciosity. Modern poetry, like modern art, is often prized according to its obscurity (to produce work that is direct and accessible is to render it inaccessible to critics: it leaves them with nothing to do and could put them out of business if allowed to flourish), and innocent readers sometimes wonder why it needs to be interpreted rather than experienced.

I, too, dislike it: Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.
—Marianne Moore

The musing silence is occasionally broken by a book cart wheeling along the floor or the tapping of footsteps as a librarian walks by, smiling graciously at the visitors. On a neighboring sofa, a woman with dark, soulful eyes smiles mysteriously to herself. I try to read the title of the book that has provoked such a seductive reaction but it’s concealed by the back of her luminously veined hand.

The spines of many of these volumes bespeak sad lives dedicated to a difficult and often masochistic pursuit. An original volume of Frank Stanford’s Crib Death published by Lost Roads and signed by C.D. Wright—with whom Stanford had an affair that precipitated his suicide—has a sacred, haunting quality. As does much of his work: the title of one poem, “Death on a Cool Evening,” is richly resonant in light of his chosen end.

Further along, the fecundity of the Ts is noticeable—more tragic poets—in particular, the Thomases: Dylan, Edward and R.S. Then there’s Francis Thompson, author of “The Hound of Heaven,” while strangely conspicuous by its absence is James Thomson’s “City of Dreadful Night.” Presumably it hasn’t been donated yet.

Poetry is language. And nowadays language isn’t greatly valued as a form of communication. In which respect the Poets House is a last redoubt, closed off from the city’s tumult: a place where the old verities are upheld, where poetry feels important and words can breathe.

Language is free. Take generously.

Artillery magazine, 2012

After dinner, Grace walked around the table, pulled up the chair next to mine, rested her feet on the rung of my chair, and sat there, a few inches away, staring at me, or at least I assumed that she was staring at me, as I remained with my face in profile, looking straight ahead, motionless but wriggling inside like a cornered creature: ensnared, appraised, and apprehensive.

She probably expected me to turn around, gaze deeply into her eyes, and reignite the flame that had burned so brightly between us twelve years earlier. That was a long time ago, and we had hardly spoken since then. But in recent weeks she had been texting me with a peculiar persistence, culminating in an invitation to join her for tea.

I had been attempting to look forward to the occasion. These plague days were hard on single people and Grace was one of the more stable women I’d ever been romantically involved with, although, admittedly, that bar was very low.

We sat on her porch, drinking wine. Since we had barely spoken to each other in fourteen years there was a lot of ‘catching up’ to do, but it was quickly exhausted, and we moved on to discussing the fate of various mutual friends.

“Do you still see Sam... V-v-v-v.... what was his name?” she asked.

“Vaddeshse. I saw him last week. He lives a few blocks away, with his wife and daughter.”

Grace smiled. “Ah, so he grew up.”

“If that’s what you want to call it, yes. It’s a shame that growing up is always defined in exactly the same way. If there was a dictionary entry for it, I suppose it would read: getting married and having kids. Yes, he made a choice and he’s sticking to it, or he’s resigned himself to it. I suppose that’s the grown up way of doing things. In that regard, I’ve never evolved.”

“You have in other ways, Edward,” she said, with a look of challenge in her eyes.

“Any word from Keith?” I asked.

“I had dinner with Keith and Calandra at their new house the other night,” she said.

“New house?” My ears pricked up in consternation.

“Yes, they bought...” said Grace.

“You mean she bought it?” I said, assuming this to have been the case, since, as far as I knew, my old friend was supported by his girlfriend or wife or whatever she was.

“No,” said Grace. “They bought it. Keith came into some money.”

“That’s nice,” I said with irrepressible disgust. “I’m happy for them.”

I decided not to let it bother me. If I got upset every time a friend suddenly bought a
house, seemingly out of thin air, I’d be in a constant state of torment. It was fairly easy to predict this over-familiar scenario by now, although it could still come as a shock when some people abruptly turned their lives around: when the time arrived to show their hand and reveal what they had been holding, or withholding, all along - when people who had been playing broke for years finally exhibited the wealth they had always known they were going to come into, which served as the secret wellspring of their confident and carefree natures: a state of mind that was often entirely attributable to freedom from financial worry, otherwise known as freedom.

One often wonders how people with no visible income get by. The answer is always
the same: they subsist on the kindness of relatives, or they are supported by their partners. And here I was with Grace: a woman of sound mind, independent means and mature beauty. If I made the right moves, I could throw my lot in with her and sponge off a spouse, as so many of my other male friends did.

I sometimes regretted that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to make such a potentially emasculating compromise with complacency. Time was marching on and the long-resisted notion of an honest partnership between a man and a woman no longer seemed like such a bad idea. Perhaps it was a fundamental aspect of life that was worth working on. The problem—one of the problems—was that by the time you were ready to give yourself over to somebody else, nobody wanted you anymore... other than people you didn’t want.

The information about Keith’s acquisition of property had sent me plummeting straight down a black hole that I couldn’t dig myself out of owing to the demands of making polite conversation. I didn’t feel like talking. I wanted to leave so that I could gather my thoughts and brood morbidly in peace.

“What are you doing for dinner?” asked Grace, her cool, clear voice cutting into my abstraction.

“I don’t know,” I said, unprepared for any further demands upon my company, and with no plan in place for wriggling out of such an invitation.

“I could send out for some Indian food,” she said. “I know you like that.”

“Sounds good,” I said, concerned about how to keep the conversation going for another two hours or so.

The cat clawed its way onto my lap and began making herself comfortable.

“Billie knows a nice spot when she sees it,” said Grace, as shamelessly flirtatious as ever.

“I’m sure she’ll sit in anyone’s lap,” I said, as I tentatively stroked the cat. When I looked up again, Grace was glowing tenderly at me. She seemed to take a keen pleasure in watching me connect with her cat.

“Billie’s very selective about whose lap she sits in,” she said with an insinuating smile. “You’ve got nice hands, they haven’t changed.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said, looking down at them.

“You still have your freckles,” she said, caressing the stem of her wine glass as she spoke.

“Those aren’t freckles,” I freely conceded. “They’re liver spots.”

The more she flattered me the more uneasy the silences became. I dimly remembered how easy it used to be for us to be silent together. But that was back when we were having sex. She could get away with that heavy-lidded routine back then, but if I had ever carried a torch for her, the flames had been doused fourteen years ago. Ours had been a whirlwind romance and a whirlwind breakup, and she was soon married to the man she had lined up as my replacement—a marriage that she now cheerfully described as “failed.” Whether there had been any overlap between our passionate affair and the uninspired union that succeeded it was a question that had tormented me at the time, but I had long ago ceased to think or care about such matters, and now it embarrassed me to remember that it had once bothered me so much.

I reached for the cat and quickly withdrew my hand

The silences broadened and intensified. I reached for the cat and quickly withdrew my hand, realizing that my stroking style was going to be scrutinized and perhaps misconstrued as a precursor of other strokes to come.

“Would you like some nuts?” offered Grace.

“Unfortunately not. My teeth can’t handle them.”

“Your teeth look fine from here,” she said, narrowing her eyes.

“I’m lucky that the best ones are in the front,” I said, squinting back at her. “It’s a
rotting graveyard back there, jagged islands in a sea of pain. If I lose one more molar I won’t be able to mast... ” I stopped myself, concerned that if I said the word ‘masticate’ the conversation might spiral into a sludge of excruciating innuendo: “... chew at all. I’ve been using this special toothpaste, and it seems to be helping.”

“You probably brush too hard,” she said with a fescennine smile. “I know how you are.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said.

“You only need to do it three times a day,” she added, with widening eyes and an even more ghastly smile.

This time I had to laugh, if only to break the tension. We grinned at each other helplessly, but I kept the conversation going for fear of further derailment: “Yes, I started using this special toothpaste, it’s quite expensive...”

The food arrived and we moved inside. We ate our curries at her dining table, off floral plates, on vintage floral place mats, surrounded by fresh-cut flowers carefully arranged in vases, and we talked safely about music.

After dinner, Grace reached her hand across the table until it touched mine, which was resting beside my wine glass. My first instinct—and my second instinct, and my third—was to withdraw my hand, but although inwardly flinching, I maintained my composure and attempted to allow a certain pliancy to my movements in order to accommodate her now discomfortingly brazen intentions. Her fingers were weaving in and out of mine with delicate avidity. I shuddered and attempted to return some of her feeling, but my hesitant stabs at warmth only encouraged her to intensify her stroking, which was becoming increasingly less subtle. It was difficult to feign feeling when it came to hand-holding. I looked down at the table, checking my facial expression, stopping myself from sneering or frowning, and avoiding her eyes for fear of her loaded gaze.

“‘Sweet drops of calm blackness.’ What d’you think of that, Edward? Can it be improved upon?” said Grace, breaking the tension by picking up an anthology of poetry from the table and reading from it.

“I’d have to see the original,” I said, welcoming the opportunity to release my hand and reaching eagerly for the book. Grace didn’t read Spanish, but I did. Back in the day we had spent many post-prandial and pre-coital hours working on translations together, with her helping to refine my preliminary renderings.

The Spanish original was on the other side of the page: “Sweet drops of leisurely blackness” would be truer to the original, but still not quite right,” I said, restoring the tension.

“How about ‘darkness’?” said Grace with a knowingly suggestive smile. “‘Sweet drops of leisurely darkness.’ That sounds just right, and it sounds like you.”

Her hand had found mine again. It was irritating and slightly flattering that she was making her needs so palpable, and considering how it had shaken out between us, it seemed... wrong. She was thirteen years too late. I had passed through all the phases of getting over her long ago, and on this stage, at this late stage, the femme fatale act was getting a little tired and silly. Now I was expected to be responsive to these touchings - either that or inflict rejection upon her, which introduced another element of awkwardness that I had no desire to negotiate. I didn’t want to shame her by throwing the useless teasing of a stonewalled vamp into cold relief.

It was saddening that the memory of a special time was being tarnished by this slight return. Waves of melancholy washed in, behind a weak grin, and called forth gloomy reflections on fate and the passing of years. The fleetingly entertained notion of an honest partnership had dried up quickly once again.

The record came to an end and when Grace got up to change it I took advantage of the opportunity to make an unneeded visit to the bathroom, where I heaved out a long sigh of pent-up despair.

On the way back, rather than sitting down and subjecting myself to more heavy- handed tenderness, I stopped at the bookshelves. I pulled out a copy of Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince. “Whenever Iris Murdoch writes from the perspective of an embittered middle-aged man with frustrated artistic aspirations, she nails it,” I remarked. “I don’t understand how she does it.”

“Men do it too,” said Grace, joining me in front of the shelves. “Lawrence, Henry James, Tolstoy, of course.”

“It’s hard enough to create a female character, but to write from the perspective of one seems impossible. I’ve never tried it,” I said.

“Maybe you should,” she said.

“It lies beyond the limited range of my capabilities,” I said.

“I’ll bet you could do it,” she said.

“It might be a good idea, under the circumstances,” I said. I sat back down, and Edward pulled up the chair next to mine. His fingers were soon creeping across the edge of the table until they were touching mine, just enough to make an impression but not enough to justify resistance. I didn’t want to hold hands with him but he was doing it in such a subtle way that it was difficult to repel. It seemed that he had been leading up to this all evening, and it made me uneasy.

“I love your new work,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“It really pleases me that you’re doing so well,” he added.

I opened my mouth to remove some broccoli from between my teeth

“Am I?” I said, deflecting the insincere compliment and opening my mouth to remove some broccoli from between my teeth. The wine had loosened me up. I resented Edward for getting me drunk, among other things.

His fingers were pressing into mine as if previewing pressures and pleasures to come, while probably turning over some salacious details from the good old days in his mind. The sex had been good, I’d give him that. He was ten years older than me, and he knew what he was doing. But it would be impossible to recapture that potent old dynamic. You couldn’t lust after somebody you got over sixteen years ago. It would fizzle out like a fat candle with too thin a wick. Edward must have known this but he continued to act as if the old magic would just snap back into place despite all the muddy water that had flowed under the long-ago collapsed bridge.

“When I consider the amount of time I’ve spent searching for le mot juste over the years,” said Edward, with a smug leer.

“Maybe you were looking in the wrong places,” I said.

When I consider how you kicked me to the kerb all those years ago, I said to myself. An epistolary dumping was quaint but it hardly compensated for the coldness of the act, and two months later, perhaps less—I still sometimes wondered about that—he was joined at the hip to a woman whose surprisingly unappealing surface appearance, talentlessness, and overall less-ness, didn’t ease the sting of the break up. To add insult to injury, whenever I had the misfortune of encountering them in public together, which occurred with annoying frequency, they were always touching each other, making a sickeningly insensitive and self-congratulatory display of their newfound happiness, which didn’t last long.

And now, as if seventeen years hadn’t passed, he expected me to be at the ready when he called, willing to drive over to his squalid bachelor abode and submit to being sensitively groped. He had probably ransacked his mind for exes who might be amenable to his overtures, and knowing that I was currently single—having recently extricated myself from yet another disastrous entanglement—lighted on me as a likely prospect.

There were a lot of lonely men, and women, out there—those of us who had endured the lockdown alone. Social opportunities were rare and were usually taken when they were offered. Edward had finally worn me down, and out of curiosity, loneliness, and a misguided sense of obligation, on this the third occasion he had reached out, I accepted the invitation. Maybe I shouldn’t have, if it meant giving him hope.

Apart from even more stacks of books piled around the room in a manner that might appear haphazard to somebody unaware of Edward’s compulsive nature, more torn furniture, and several additional layers of dust, time had stood still in that apartment.

He moved a finger around the palm of my hand in supposedly soothing circles and began squeezing my wrist with determined intent, while with his free hand he picked an anthology of poetry from a nearby chair, upon which a pile of books reached to the top of the backrest, and began declaiming Verlaine in mangled French: “‘Et les yeux, les pauvres yeux si beaux ou point, La douleur de voir encore du fini.’”

I corrected his pronunciation, laughingly replacing “yo” with “yer.”

“Doesn’t it always sound absurd when Anglos attempt to carry off a French accent with all its native sensuality?” he said.

“No, only when you do it.” I said, flirting against my will. Well, we were just two lonely people sitting together in a room, in a time of strife. What did it matter?

Edward was one of those precious types who imagined that learning other languages would diminish his apparent mastery of his mother tongue. He had confided this to me once, and I had had to remind him that Nabokov, Joyce and Beckett were all polyglots.

“And the eyes, the poor beautiful eyes, the sadness seen more in the end,” he said, putting some feeling into it and staring deeply into my own poor eyes with a calculatedly vulnerable charm.

Without freeing my hand, he showed me the page. “Those poor beautiful eyes that have seen the sorrow of always looking towards the end,” I said, translating as I went along. “No, that’s still not right.”

“It’s good enough,” said Edward, tightening his grip around my wrist with an affectionate hint of threat and the intimation of a power he no longer possessed. Much as I loathed to resort to such a hackneyed term, it was... inappropriate, and just plain sad. There had been a time when he held sway over me, when, in fact, he had it all, or could have had it all, including me, if he’d done anything with his natural talent and charm. But he hadn’t done much with it, and now he seemed to be running out of road.

“‘That word Grace in an ungracious mouth is but profane,’” he said, and fixed me with a questioning, penetrating gaze, as if this oft-quoted line from Richard II provided a note of finality to all his meandering flirtation. Not that old line again, I groaned. The poor man had turned into a dried-up font of recycled flattery and exhausted quotations: he had bombarded me with that one back in the day, and perhaps this was his way of attempting to revive the spirit of those more passionate times.

I looked down at his wrinkled, blue-veined and liver-spotted hand as it slithered around mine in shameless simulation, and I was reminded of my father. If love was a combination of lust and pity, then the latter, after all these years, was all that remained. It wasn’t an age thing... Yes, it was an age thing. I had always been attracted to older men, but there were limits: Edward was really old now, and his station in life was stationary. I didn’t like looking at him, especially into his eyes, especially when he looked back into mine, shakily imploring me behind a steady gaze. It induced that old fragile feeling, refined with age to a caustic melancholy. Mostly it made me sad about other things and other people, and I wanted to leave so that I could give myself over to thinking those other things through. I didn’t feel like talking. I wondered if Edward could even get it up anymore.

“I mean,” she was saying, her words infringing softly on my reverie, “... at least you would be trying. A writer should be able to write from the perspective of the opposite sex. You can’t go through your entire writing life without at least trying it.”

“It seems presumptuous,” I said. “It requires an insight and audacity I don’t possess.”

“Why don’t you just take a woman from real life,” said Grace.

“I don’t want to risk hurting anybody’s feelings,” I said, weakly.

“Then what’s the point of writing?” she said.

“Good point,” I said.

Was this how it was going to be from now on, with those of us who had failed or not even made an honest attempt (at love) resignedly pairing off with each other now that the game was almost over? That seemed to be the case, and it gave me a deeper appreciation of the alternative: that of a simple, solitary life. I got up to say goodbye and we hugged, for a long time. It was the first physical contact I’d had in months and it felt good. She steered me towards the bedroom. I got into bed with him. What the hell. Why not? One last hate-fuck, for old time’s sake.

Santa Monica Review, 2022

I wore myself out to the tune of a $27 profit at Turfway Park and returned to my reeking room at the Newport, Kentucky Travel Lodge. Dexter Romweber, once half of the Flat Duo Jets, was performing a block away at the Southgate House. I took a shower, made myself more presentable than was necessary for such an occasion, and left.

As I was walking across the parking lot the night clerk rapped on the window and waved at me. He remembered me from my previous visit. This gesture of friendly recognition lifted my spirits.

The Southgate House was a Victorian brick mansion. There were three floors and on each of them a separate musical entertainment was in session. A rockabilly band was playing in a narrow smoky room on the top floor. In the basement, which was the main room, a support act was warming up the sparse crowd for Romweber’s appearance. In the ground floor bar, a ‘cajun’ band were desecrating ‘Jole Blon’ and other standards. I sat at the bar, invisible as ever. For whatever reason, I passed through these parts unknown.

Romweber wasn’t due to take the stage for another hour. I walked across the street to the Newport On The Levee complex, a sprawling structure featuring the usual chain stores and fast-food restaurants, swarming with Friday night revelers. A neon sign on a side street made the interior look inviting, but once within it was the usual generic youth zone. I stood at the counter and ordered a bourbon on the rocks, which was poured stingily by a blonde-by-numbers bartender.

“Everybody likes that.” A rollicking old timer nudged me and gestured at the bartender’s ass. He was the only old timer in the place. He had been coming there for thirty years and lamented that the neighborhood clientele had been shunted out. When he left he shook my hand and introduced himself by name, Dennis. He had a family to go home to, grandchildren even. Throughout our brief conversation, much of it concerning the year he served in Vietnam, I had taken it for granted that he was single. When I see old men drinking or eating out alone, I always assume that they are single. It’s just wishful thinking.

Back at the Southgate house, Romweber had taken the stage. Accompanied only by a drummer he alternated between heartfelt rockabilly ballads and lengthy berserk guitar solos that soared on the verge of collapse. He was in a heroically possessed world of his own up there, playing his eyeballs out to an audience of twenty people, whom he didn’t acknowledge. If he had he would have seen a group of boys and girls cavorting in a semi-comical manner on a spacious dance floor. I sat at the bar, getting pleasantly drunk, enjoying watching other people enjoy themselves. I hadn’t taken any pleasure in this trip because it had all been uninspired retread. I resolved to drive out of town the following day and open myself up to the possibilities.

Romweber finally stopped playing. The room was immediately drained of energy. The cajun band were serenading what remained of their audience in the upstairs bar. “Shit, is that Bob Dylan?” A drunk brushed past me. His lady companion followed close behind. “He looks like Bob,” she said, “that’s to his credit.” It was gratifying to find that I wasn’t invisible.

Through the front door a couple groped against a wall in the mist. I strolled back to the Travel Lodge, purchased a Snickers bar from the vending machine and retired to my malodorous room.

I woke up with a headache and left town.

A mean drizzle spattered the streets. I found my way onto the highway that winds northeast alongside the Ohio river. Gray skies, gray highway, trailer camps submerged in muddy water. One dreary little impoverished community after another, punctuated by refineries. Instead of the music enhancing the surroundings, the surroundings sullied the beautiful music on the car stereo.

Maysville Kentucky looked tantalizingly pretty from the opposite side of the river. Up close it was another spent and closefisted small town. I parked outside an old theater. The crooked letters on the marquee advertised a bygone tribute show to local heroine Rosemary Clooney. The only open business was a Christian bookstore, and I was the one pedestrian. I get my hopes up, and it wouldn’t take much to keep them up: an old downtown hotel, a stretch of untarnished anomie. But even that is too much to ask for nowadays.

I couldn’t face any more of the river road. I took out the maps again. If I drove north I could be in Detroit by tomorrow afternoon, for what that was worth. Or I could drive south and repeat myself some more. I wondered about how open I really was to new experiences. I drove west, zigzagging rural routes for a long time before hitting a major highway. It continued to rain. I had assumed that I hadn’t enjoyed this trip because I hadn’t done anything adventurous, but once I attempted to do something new it got even worse. I tried to enter the modern world with a non-judgmental attitude. But it seldom lasted long.

I stopped in at a ‘family restaurant’ on the highway. The waitress regarded me with wariness and took her time. I wondered if I was being deliberately ignored. It wasn’t her fault. A morbid effluvia was surging through my veins, from which everybody I came into contact recoiled. Not that I often came into contact with anybody.

I forced myself to consume a plate of slop and got back into the car, not knowing what direction I was driving in. After about an hour I was in a fast-food landscape typical of big city outskirts. I had been spat back into the Cincinnati region and was spinning around the beltway. When it hit the 75 cut-off I made a quick decision and took the northern route, headed up the highway for about twenty miles until it felt entirely wrong, and turned around again. Driving back into the city didn’t feel right either but I lacked the energy or inclination to do anything else.

What was I doing there anyway? Driving in circles around Cincinnati on a Saturday afternoon in January. Mornings were non-existent, afternoons spent killing time around town in an uninspired manner, nights out at Turfway Park. I’d done it before, too many times. I was a lucky man.

I walked into the trees, pissed on a pile of dead leaves and watched the steam rising

I exited at Eden park and parked in a muddy lot near the art museum. I barely had the energy to get out of the car. After a while the need to pass water necessitated movement. I walked into the trees, pissed on a pile of dead leaves and watched the steam rising from them. The sun, such as it was, went down. I walked down the hill to Mirror Lake and circled it four times. Other than a group of camera-wielding Koreans who briefly surveyed the view, there was nobody else present. The yellow trees of autumn were now bare.

The fresh air and exercise were somewhat restorative. I drove down to the Clifton neighborhood and took tea at a cozy coffee house near the university. A short-haired, bespectacled woman sat at a nearby table. With head on elbow and pen in hand, she was bent studiously and gracefully over some papers. She wore a low-cut pink blouse and gray slacks; a few inches of flesh were visible above the sock. She kept a saucer placed upon her glass of tea and replaced it after every sip she took. I gazed at her with hopeless furtive longing. She stood up and donned a hooded sweater. I began to feel more alive and optimistic.

“Doctor,” said a man in the supermarket, tipping his cap at me as he walked by. “What?” “You look like Tom Baker,” he explained. I was reminded of the hazy erotic surge that accompanied the Dr Who theme when I watched it as a child. It was one of the first intimations of sexual awakening and had something to do with the dangers that threatened the doctor’s attractive assistant.

None of the local eateries were inviting to the solitary diner. They were all crowded with groups of people attempting to enjoy themselves... and couples. I found a plain Chinese restaurant. The only other customer was a willowy blonde. It was unusual to see a woman of such desirable surface appearance dining alone in an empty Chinese restaurant on a Saturday night. Moreover, her manner with the waiter indicated an equally attractive disposition. I stole glances at her from across the room but she never looked up from her food and left while I was in the middle of an unappetizing plate of mixed vegetables.

It was ten o’clock on a Saturday night, a fine time to check into a cheap motel and lie low. I put up at the Days Inn on Dixie Highway in Fort Wright, Kentucky. The rooms cost $39 a night and were refreshingly clean. I lay in the bath for several hours, reading George Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee, and felt more at ease than I had been since arriving in that region, where the bluegrass meets the rust belt.

On Sunday night, at the end of a day like the other days—Pepper Pod for breakfast, Turfway Park for wallet-airing, Sitwell’s for tea—I went to the Comet Bar for a nightcap. It wasn’t a particularly thrilling prospect. Everybody seemed to know each other in there.

I walked in like an intruder. There were no seats at the bar. A bluegrass band were picking and grinning in the other room. There was nowhere to sit in there either. I stood at the back of the room, against the wall. Looking around, I took solace in the sight of the one other solitary man in the joint. The distinct lack of pretension in the air made me uneasy.

The musicians served up a rendition of ‘Molly And Tenbrooks’. In the middle of one song the mandolin player took a call on his cell phone, and kept the conversation going for several minutes while continuing to play. Through the hatch in the wall I could see that several barstools had become available. I took one of them, and sat with my back to the bar.

When I turned around, the stool on my right was now occupied by a slender young woman. Her hair was long and silky dark. It looked as if she had spent a long time combing it. Her eyes were a deep dark brown and her lips seemed almost unnaturally full, appallingly sensuous. She rummaged in her bag, took two video cassettes out of it and placed them on the counter in front of her: ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ and ‘The Age of Innocence’. It occurred to me that I hadn’t spoken to anybody in four days.

“Are you on a Henry James adaptation jag?” I asked.

“I don’t think they were both written by him,” she answered.

This was the response I had hoped for. It provided a way of keeping the conversation going.

“I saw The Age of Innocence,” I said. “Michelle Pfeiffer’s in it, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “Are you a fan?”

“Not exactly.” To find myself conversing with somebody attractive after days on end of lonely meltdown sent me dissolving into giddy relief. Strangely enough, she seemed to be in the same state, with much smiling and laughter being released, accompanying even the most mundane utterances.

“Where are you from?”

I told her. Next, she wanted to know what I was doing in Cincinnati. I didn’t think it would go down too smoothly if I told her the truth: that I was an itinerant horseplayer drifting aimlessly and anonymously around her city, vaguely hoping to reconnect with a prostitute I met there a few months earlier.

“I’m working at the university,” I said, coming up with a story on the spot. “I’m studying advertisements for old blues records in back issues of the Chicago Defender, of which there exists a unique stash in the university library... mostly on microfilm. Somebody I know in California is putting a book of them together. It’s a labor of love really.”

As I had hoped, the esoteric nature of this explanation silenced any further inquiries. We sat there at the bar, each pretending to mind our own business, occasionally venturing into conversational territory. She was, without doubt, the most beautiful woman I’d seen since hitting town.

She fiddled with an ice cube on the counter, attempting to lift it, chopstick-style, with the aid of two cocktail straws. I tried it myself, likewise with futile results.

“It’ll melt before it moves,” I said.

We doodled on napkins. I drew a woman’s face and a flower. “A good Sunday drawing,” she called it.

“Funny you should mention that place,” she said after I eulogized the charms of Newport and the Pepper Pod cuisine. “I used to go there a lot, it’s owned by an ex-boyfriend-of-mine’s uncle.” This wasn’t to be her last reference to an ex-boyfriend. Another one, naturally, was in a band. They had worked together. She was now an assistant director at a nonprofit arts foundation. Her name was Louise. She was twenty-nine years old, Cincinnati born and raised.

“There’s another diner you should visit over there,” she said: “The Anchor... the waitresses are really mean to you, and when you play the jukebox this curtain opens up just below the ceiling and there’s a stage with dancing barbie dolls and their mechanical puppet band.”

“I have to go there.”

The night before, on the motel room TV, I had watched part of an Elvis movie. At one point he was sitting at a nightclub bar with the potential love interest on a stool beside him. He asked if he could buy her a drink in such a charmingly casual and ingenuous manner that I thought it worth replicating, and it came out almost like an afterthought:

“Would you like to do something tomorrow night?”

“Yes,” she responded, straight and sweet. “We should go to the Anchor,” she said as she scribbled her number on a napkin.

I left that bar with a keen sense of accomplishment and anticipation. Cincinnati was still a charmed place. I checked back into the Days Inn.

At 7 a.m. on a rainy Wednesday in January I rented a car and drove slowly into the city. Glancing across at the drab and obese occupants of other vehicles on the snarled highway it was clear that I was back in the heart of the country. I put up at the Vernon Towers, a large hotel in Clifton, took a xanax and fell asleep.

I rose in the middle of the afternoon and looked out across the soaked skies. The city was submerged in a wintry gloom that wasn’t nearly as seductive as I’d anticipated.

I felt dead. I felt like driving. I didn’t get very far. Lured by the irresistible inducement of inclement nocturnal racing, I made it out to Turfway Park in time for the third race of the evening. The seductive sounds of Sinatra singing ‘You Can’t Take That Away From Me’ blasted from the track sound system as I entered the rundown facility to engage in some frankly sinful horseplay.

At ten o’clock the races were over, and Sinatra’s ‘Witchcraft’ drifted mockingly across the empty parking lot. They had taken it away from me, and it had taken a lot out of me.

In a familiar post-track frazzled haze, I sat at the bar in Kaldi’s. Under the graffiti I had left on the restroom wall a few months earlier some wag had scrawled ‘Maybe you should try fucking with their minds instead.’

A woman with guitar warbled inoffensively in one corner, alone and unappreciated. As I perused the following night’s racing program, a girl clinked bottles with me, and I pondered the unfortunate fact that the cooling arms of a woman would be most remedial at this time. The night before I left town I had done something unprecedented: I corresponded with a stranger over the internet, on a Cincinnati-based website. The unknown woman described herself as ‘a red-headed chick who’s really not like anyone else you’ve met before... and not too hard on the eyes either.’ The use of gratuitous intensifiers in this context was somehow troubling, but I decided to contact her the next morning.

As I walked out the girl singer looked up and smiled at me in mid-song.

I drove up and down Vine and its adjoining vice-ridden arteries. There weren’t many whores on the streets. It was too cold for them or anyone else. I hadn’t really expected or wanted to find Sylvia. A woman like that doesn’t stand on the street corner for long before being picked up. I hoped that she was back in Lexington with her daughter. Sheer chance had brought about that one charmed encounter three months ago. She was beyond me now, had always been beyond me. The corner of Fourteenth and Vine was enshrined. But she wasn’t there now. Her spot was occupied by an obese hag in an anorak.

I moved on to another bar, the Northside Tavern on Hamilton. Another girl singer was warbling, but not so inoffensively, and she was backed by a band. The guitar player looked like Dick Cheney with long hair. The patrons were an ugly lot too. I downed a beer and left. I didn’t have the heart to make another stop on the way back to the hotel.

I lay on the bed and pained myself. Cincinnati... what was I thinking? The city seemed bleak and prosaic, stripped of the magic apparent on the last-go-round. I had longed to return and savor again the mysteries of this place that had taken a strange hold over me, and had specifically wanted to return in the bleak midwinter, preferably when it was snowing. But there was no snow predicted on the weather channel, just more and more rain. If I had learned one thing in my life it was the folly of attempting to repeat a memorable experience. Yet here I was, doing it again. I wondered if this idiotic trait lay in attempting to recapture the magic of youth, those moments of new live emotion, the pure driven now that can never be repeated.

Sleep came with difficulty and didn’t last long, disturbed as it was by the continual clatter of rain on the exposed radiator outside the window. I wriggled around uncomfortably in the overheated room and turned the air conditioner on to no avail. Eventually I took a xanax and passed out.

Almost as soon as I awoke, around midday, I called the internet woman from the phone on the bedside table. She was in the process of parking outside a hair salon. Her sunny manner jarred on my delicate sensibilities. I decided that no further contact would be necessary and told her I would check in later.

Borne on a current of stifled agitation and grinding myself down with a constant whining soliloquy, I drove down to Kaldi’s. The cute waitress that called me ‘honey’ three months earlier now addressed me as ‘sir’. I sat there blearily, wondering how I could kill the day... the next six days, and tried to take solace in the knowledge that many other trips had begun just as inauspiciously.

The coffee jangled my nerves. Police cars, which were numerous, instilled irrational fear, as did the sight of most people. I drove in murky drizzle to the Oakley neighborhood, because somebody I vaguely knew had mentioned it in passing. It turned out to be an unendurably dismal suburb with some obscurely hovering element of threat.

What a way to live. Most people took trips in order to relax and enjoy themselves, whereas I subjected myself to some sort of endurance test, an ideal ordeal, placing myself in alienating surroundings and watching myself squirm.

At the end of a mercifully short afternoon I stopped in Newport for a late breakfast. The twin communities of Covington and Newport held considerable charm. There was a time when they were notorious as vice-ridden burgs on the wrong side of the river, and since their heyday, fifty years ago, they seemed to have been left to fade away undisturbed.

The waitress at the Pepper Pod—a restaurant on Monmouth street, Newport’s main stem—served me with hostile politeness. While clearing the dishes she spilled jelly on my coat. “I’ll get you a rag,” she said, and never returned. It was another one of those days. I found a highway entrance and headed south towards Northern Kentucky and the sanctuary of horseplay; I needed to get out to Turfway in a hurry.

A calm descended as I approached the dependable comfort zone of the track. Once I passed those gates, nothing could touch me beyond the action. The pursuit, at times, seemed so honest and refreshing. For four or five hours, nothing would enter my mind beyond the immediate concern of handicapping horse races, one after another, and I would gladly keep going were the races to last all night. And thus, predictably, another night was spent, yielding a slim profit.

A loud jazz band, heavy on the vibes, were playing in Kaldi’s. I sat in a booth, on the other side of which a group of young girls kept erupting in giggles like a nest of newly hatched chicks. How to offset this awriness? To apprehend it with grace and kindness? I fled into the night and stopped at a Walgreen’s for pomade and water. The lady at the checkout counter seemed to spring out of her fluorescent torpor when she saw me. “How are you doing tonight?” she asked in an emphatic manner. I held her gaze lest she think I was avoiding the sight of her unusually dappled skin but this thoughtful move had the opposite effect, and she shrank away.

I returned to the hotel and lay in the bathtub, studying maps. There were some racetracks in West Virginia that I would have driven to had they been open at this time of year. Although I liked to think of myself as a connoisseur of industrial decay, I had, shamefully, never visited Detroit. Or I could retrace the route I took in the fall, up to Cleveland and along the shores of Lake Erie. These prospects held little appeal. I stared at my reflection in the circular drain cover at the end of the tub, distorted by the nut in the middle. I listened to the hum of the heating system. I realized that there was nowhere I wanted to go.

In the morning, after a few hours of clammy sleep, I rose slowly, packed my bags and left. I was sleeping badly, eating badly and running my nerves ragged. It was a familiar exercise in self-mortification, my idea of fun.

I checked into the Newport Travel Lodge, at the other end of the bridge, where I had stayed several times the previous year. The first room I took possessed such a suffocating reek that I demanded a new one from the surly blonde at the front desk. The new one wasn’t much better, permeated by the sour smell of worn-out air-conditioner filter. Fresh air was a rare and precious commodity in these parts. I pulled back the curtains and opened the sliding window. Frigid air poured in. I lay on the bed and stared out at some bare trees in a grey sky: an intolerably bleak prospect, entirely lacking in promise or forgiveness. I didn’t want to go out to Turfway Park for the third night in a row, but what else could I do? At least it would distract me for a while.

The streets became grimier and more visibly vice-ridden as they unwound into Over The Rhine. At the corner of 14th I stopped at a red light. This was the eaten-out heart of that blighted neighborhood. Veiled transactions took place in dilapidated doorways and on empty lots. Standing on the corner, to my right, was a woman who would have grabbed my attention anywhere, and she was looking straight at me. I wondered what a beautiful white woman was doing in that neighborhood at one o’clock in the morning. As I turned away it finally dawned on me that she was a prostitute. I looked over again. She was smiling and nodding her head in an inviting manner. Time slowed down. Her eyes sparkled. The light turned green. I leaned over and flipped the lock to the passenger door.

“Hi honey.” She climbed in, and any concerns that she might have been a transvestite were instantly dispelled. I could scarcely believe my eyes... my nerve... my luck. She was slender but potentially voluptuous. Her dark hair was piled up. She wore faded jeans and a colorful horizontally striped blouse that was cut low, exposing part of a tattoo above her right breast. Around her neck hung a large cross. Face powder covered the rougher parts of her complexion. I stared into her eyes. She wanted to know what I was looking at.

She seemed to expect me to open the negotiating. I asked her how much she wanted.

“Seventy-five bucks,” she said without much conviction, seemingly expecting me to talk her down. But I wasn’t feeling too talkative. I said that would be fine. It was unsettling to consider how much less she might have settled for.

“What are you into?” she asked.

“My tastes are very simple,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I had never been with a hooker before. Such was the shakiness of my stunted utterances that I was afraid she might think me a dangerously repressed deviant. But she didn’t appear to make anything of it.

She said she had a place that we could go to. I suggested we head back to my motel room. That was fine with her. We were already headed that way, although I was plunged into such a state of distraction that I lost all sense of direction. She didn’t have much of a clue either.

I told her I didn’t have any prophylactics.

“We should get some,” she said in a rusty whine, which sounded both tired and alert, jaded and innocent.

Five minutes ago I had been driving back to the motel in a disenchanted mood, a moment later a beautiful woman was sitting beside me. Suddenly we were thrust together in the night. There was a conspiratorial aspect and an element of trust was involved. An arrangement had been made. Her name was Sylvia. She hailed from Lexington Kentucky. She was twenty-four.

“That’s right,” she said, “a single mom.”

Once over the bridge and in Kentucky again the lights of a White Castle stand could be seen shining from a few blocks away, and after driving the wrong way down several one-way streets we made it into the drive-through lane. She tried to order a Number One meal but the employee on the other end of the intercom couldn’t decipher our requests. We drove up to the window where the order was taken in person by an ashen-faced old woman.

“So what do you do?” said Sylvia. “What’s your profession?”

Thankfully we were interrupted by the server’s muddled instructions.

“Shit, I’m wore out now,” said Sylvia at the end of a complicated exchange during which the word “coke” had to be repeated four times.

While we were waiting for the order I stared at her.

“Hello,” she said, apprehending my gaze and smiling sweetly.

“You have a great smile,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. “It helps.”

She started singing as she delved into the bag. “Best White Castle I’ve ever eaten,” she said after a couple of bites. “It’s wonderful right now... I probably won’t think that tomorrow.”

“Prophylactics,” she sang out as we drove off. “Now where the fuck is the store?”

There was a drive-through liquor store a few blocks away, Big Daddy’s.

“You’ve got it babe.”

“Uh-oh, another one way street,” I said, backing out.

“That didn’t stop us before,” she said, and I erupted in tension-releasing laughter.

“Can I get a little half-pint?” she said. “Something dark, not clear.”

“Whiskey?”

“Yes... Kessler. Just get something that’s cheap,” she said, requesting the smallest bottle of rotgut. It was beginning to distress me that someone of such singular charm and beauty had to scuffle when so many led graceless complacent existences.

“Do liquor stores stay open this late here? In Lexington at 12.01 it’s over.”

“Lexington seems kind of repressed,” I remarked. “There isn’t much going on there.”

She groaned in assent: “Nothing... absolutely nothing.”

I ordered a half-pint of Kessler’s and a pack of condoms.

“Alrighty,’ she said as we drove away, “let’s do it.”

“Is Travel Lodge pretty nice?”

“Not particularly.”

The motel was a few blocks away. I took care to enter through a side door, avoiding the night clerk. I opened doors for her. I had seldom known graciousness to flow out of me with such ease. As soon as we entered the room she wanted to get the distasteful matter of payment out of the way so that we could relax and enjoy ourselves. Money changed hands. I had the exact sum of $75.00 in my wallet.

“You’ve cleaned me out,” I said as I lay down on the bed.

“Aren’t you going to take your shoes off?” she said.

I turned on the television. Some election coverage was screening. She couldn’t be bothered to vote; she was fed up with the government. She lay down beside me and I reached out to touch her prematurely sagging breasts.

“How often are you with a woman who’ll let you do anything you like to her?” she said.

“Actually,” I said, “quite often.”

She stood at the end of the bed and encouraged me to breathe deeply. She made the appropriate gestures with her arms... breathe in, breathe out... and excused herself to brush the White Castle taste from her teeth.

As she emerged from the bathroom she was singing: “An old R&B song... by Shirley Murdock.” I had never heard of it.

She wanted to take a shower. She said it would “make it nicer,” and suggested, with a mixture of kindness and mockery, that while she was gone I should “create a mood.”

I could hear her singing in the shower and it gladdened me that she could relax in my presence even if I couldn’t do the same thing.

She emerged with her hair down and a towel around her. “I probably won’t be able to get it up,” I said as she lay down beside me and and pulled out my prick.

She began lazily sucking on it and I relaxed at once. Then she picked up the tempo and started making a lot of unnecessary noise.

“Do it slowly,” I said, “soothe me.”

I formed the impression that she was probably mentally reliving some pleasant event from her past that had nothing to do with sex. But at least she was making the effort. That, in its way, was affecting and deserving of reciprocation. To my surprise, I found myself with something resembling an erection: enough of one that she was able to slip a rubber over it.

“I’ll do you from behind,” I said.

She bent over the edge of the bed, exposing a skinny white ass. I positioned my knob at the portal and, with her help, stuffed it in. I got a few good thrusts in before her exaggerated moaning deadened any incipient ardor. It felt as if I were thrusting at nothing. Her absence was almost palpable. Her body felt weightless, as if the substance had fled elsewhere. I told her not to bother faking it.

“I’m not,” she said unconvincingly, “it’s erotic.”

“How many other men have you been with tonight?” I asked, giving it another weak thrust.

“One other guy... a chiropractor... in his fifties... fifty dollars... straight sex.” Her hair fanned out wildly across the synthetic bedspread.

“When was the last time you had an orgasm?” I wondered aloud.

“A month ago,” she said. “Just because you have sex doesn’t mean you come.”

“I know,” I said, wilting in earnest.

She reached down and offered some halfhearted encouragement and I lost it to a degree that rendered any further squirming futile. We collapsed into laughter. I removed the condom from my limp knob, stretched it several feet and launched it across the room.

“I doubt I’ll come,” I said.

“You said you wouldn’t be able to get it up,” she said, suggesting that maybe I’d already achieved enough for one night.

I was pleased that she felt comfortable enough around me to exhibit the full range of her apathy. I asked about the proclivities of other men. “You’d be amazed by how many men are into being dominated,” she said. “Then there are the other kind, the ones who like to dominate... I don’t like that.”

“I’ll bet that’s the easiest seventy-five dollars you ever made,” I said as she got up..

She agreed that it probably had been. “It’s been a pleasure,” she said, “it really has.” She claimed that she had to be somewhere at two-thirty. She had an appointment to watch another girl being fucked by a man who was so fastidious that he wore condoms on his fingers.

She couldn’t find her cigarette lighter and became more distracted about it than a missing 25-cent lighter seemed to warrant. After combing the room for about a minute she gave up the search. I was glad that it couldn’t be found. It would make a good souvenir. As we walked out I peered into the bathroom. My pomade jar was open.

“Did you use my pomade?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she answered with guilty sweetness, “just a little bit.”

As we walked down the corridor she defiantly waved her half-pint of whisky at the ceiling surveillance camera.

We got into the car and drove off. I remembered my camera and asked if she would mind if I took her photograph. She didn’t mind at all. I wanted to get a shot of her standing as she was when I first laid eyes on her. I stopped the car and we got out. She stood in front of a wall on a quiet street. A police car cruised up behind us. “Don’t worry about them,” she said as they drove by slowly. Once again she flashed that winsome smile.

“Are you going to show them to your friends back home?” she kidded me: “This is the whore I fucked in Cincinnati.”

“D’you live downtown?”

“Right down there, close by where you saw me.”

We drove along fourth street to Covington and from there across the bridge into downtown Cincinnati. I told her where I had come from that day, that I had driven from the northeast to southwest corners of Ohio.

“Ohio’s a big state,” she said. “There’s really no way around Ohio. You have to go through it. You came a long way, baby.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s L.A. like?” she asked. “I’m curious.”

“Well,” I said, “the city is a place unto itself.”

“That’s what I hear,’ she said. “What are the people like, are they fucking assholes?”

“Yes,” I said, “but there are many different kinds, it’s quite diverse.”

“Cincinnati’s got a little of everything,” she said.

“It’s all black and white,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s true... that’s true... that’s very true... it’s either black or its white.” She pondered this. It seemed to contain fresh significance for her: “That’s very true... it’s either this or that. It’s either shit or crap. There’s not too many in-betweens.”

She complained about the company she was forced into on the street and lamented the toothlessness of other hookers. A police car loomed in the rear view mirror. “How long have you two known each other?” she said, imitating their likely overtures. She was in a hurry to make her appointment and expressed impatience with traffic, yelling at a lingering vehicle to make haste. We found Vine street. Clusters of dubious sidewalk activity were still in evidence at this late hour. Yet another police car drove behind us.

I pulled over on the corner of Fourteenth and Vine. Sylvia stuck the half-pint into the top of her pants and got out of the car.

“Thanks babe... have a good evening, baby.”

That was it. The lack of ceremony was somewhat disheartening.

Alone again. I drove back to the hotel in a state of rapt wonderment and went to bed, pressing my face into the pillow where she lay.

Cincinnati, like Rome and San Francisco, is a city of seven hills. I stood on one of them, beside Mirror Lake. It dropped onto another verdant ridge and afforded a pleasing view of far-flung rooftops and red brick below. There weren’t many other people around. I was tired but suspended in the lingering glow from the night before. The experience had brought me into contact with life, opened me up.

I had never sought out a whore or romanticized the condition of one. Once or twice I had admired one on the street but I never considered doing anything about it. I imagined it was something I might be obliged to resort to as an older man.

I stared at a tree. Its leaves were beginning to fall. Whatever blossomed in the autumn of its years? Not much, but if one had never blossomed at all, a certain moldering efflorescence might be possible, even at this belated stage.

A familiar melancholy was seeping in, one that rose up in the wake of memorable chance encounters. A fresh potency and poignancy altered my surroundings. I recognized once again that it was only when traveling, plunging into and rising out of these states of transient alienation and transcendence, that I experienced with clarity the true beauty of life.

I couldn’t picture her clearly anymore. All that remained was a beguiling blur, an insinuating essence in danger of becoming over-idealized. The features would resurface, only becoming clear again when the memory faded. Many faces had been lost forever in the void of fixation. A photograph, however, would eliminate such concerns.

I drove down Vine one last time and took a seat at the bar in Kaldi’s. A motley assortment of solitaries were gathered there. “I met Syd Barrett somewhere east of Cincinnati,” said a young fellow on the other side of the bar. Nobody picked up this thread of conversation. The girl who had accidentally set fire to her hair a few nights earlier passed by on the sidewalk.

In the light of my imminent departure the city became elegiacally serene. Workers poured out of office buildings into the soft autumn evening. Everybody appeared helpless, blameless and incorruptible. Some other whores were milling around the vacant lots on Vine and the surrounding streets. Sylvia was probably sleeping. Or maybe she was back in Lexington, picking her daughter up from the day-care center. Did she divide her time between the two cities? Who looked after the kid when she was in Cincinnati? I was beginning to ask myself a lot of stupid questions. Doubtless she had already forgotten me. I was just passing through, with a hunger for experiences that she regarded as ordinary. I couldn’t touch her life as she had touched mine. And it would all inevitably recede into dull memory.

Paintings by Louis Eilshemius

The bald and paunchy night clerk at the Newport Travel Lodge asked if I was in town on business. I mumbled affirmatively and handed over sixty dollars. Upon entering the room I yanked the cord of the loudly humming refrigerator from the wall socket, lay down on the bed and masturbated languidly, letting all the anxieties of a long day on the road ooze out.

I drove over the bridge into Cincinnati and headed straight to Kaldi’s. The rail-thin waitress who winked at me six months earlier wasn’t present. I took an ancient paperback copy of Hugh Walpole’s Portrait of a Man with Red Hair from one of the bookshelves and began reading it: A gothic romance concerning an American man who journeys to a remote and idyllic English town, seeking peace and beauty; upon arriving he encounters a distressed girl and is drawn into a web of intrigue...

Something in my peripheral vision flared up. Further down the bar sat a woman with a doomed look in her eyes. While she was lighting a cigarette her hair had caught fire. She put it out as if nothing had happened and kept smoking and drinking in a nervously dedicated manner. I should have sat down next to her. Instead, I drove back to the motel and watched World Series poker on TV until three a.m..

The leaves were not falling and it was too warm. Beulah Park racetrack, outside Columbus, looked simple enough to locate on the map but there wasn’t any signage, and eventually a kindly soccer mom, from whom I sought directions, led me to the gates in her van.

Attendance at this decrepit racetrack was sparse even for a weekday afternoon. A hulking Black groom with a saddle slung over one huge shoulder nonchalantly flipped through a thick wad of bills, seemingly oblivious to the prospect of being rolled, as he leaned against a rusting pillar in the gloomy interior—doubtless the beneficiary of inside information. Nobody else out there looked as if they were making any money.

This was the end of the line for slow or infirm thoroughbreds that couldn’t win anywhere else, before they were dispatched to the glue factory. The air of irreversible decline that permeated the facility was relieved only by the presence of the Beulah Twins, two generously proportioned young blondes who served as novelty handicappers and broadcast their picks from the secluded Paddock Grill between races. They had no contact with the track riffraff and appeared to operate the cameras themselves. They could be seen slouching and sprawling like exotic caged animals in a room filled with tables and chairs but no other person, and they laughed at me as I peered through the window.

The jockeys lounged in the shade by the paddock stalls, a timeless scene, timelessly serene. One in particular was striking to observe, ‘a raddled and emaciated specimen’, like something out of an 18th century Hogarth print. He sat there bootless, leg-wrappings exposed, wizened, smoking, grinning. He must have been pushing sixty. He rode one horse all afternoon, in the last race, a bottom-level claimer, and it trailed the field throughout, coming in last by about fifty lengths.

I parked on 4th and Main and took a walk around downtown Columbus. I asked a security guard where the cobblestone streets were but he didn’t know what I was talking about. A notice in a coffee-house window requested information regarding a recently murdered gay man, the victim’s fated features staring forth sadly from badly xeroxed paper. At a restaurant called Haiku: Poetic Food I dined on a vegetable stir fry and imagined how a serial killer might work himself into a lather of misogynistic hate while listening to a couple of secretarial types at the next table squawking loudly, bitterly and incessantly about their colleagues and men in general.

Sleepy La Beef was in town, and he was playing at the Hey Hey Bar. Sleepy La Beef, the human jukebox, who recorded immortal rockabilly sides for Starday, among other labels, was performing at a corner tavern in the quaint old German Village neighborhood. As I arrived he was beginning his second set in front of a small but raucous blue collar crowd. I stood against a pillar with my precious pint of beer, watching other people enjoy themselves. The dancers in front of the stage were led by an attractive dark-haired girl who kept trying to get her moody and unobliging boyfriend to dance with her. It looked like there would be trouble between them later.

The Walpole novel was propped open on my lap while driving north and I read snatches of the early chapters in which a sensitive young man, caught between two worlds, recounts his itinerant interactions as a series of romantic and potentially sinister events begin to unfold around him.

“Are you that guy who used to be in the Partridge Family?” asked a tramp as he rose from a prone position on a grassy patch in Cleveland. I replied in the affirmative, walked on, and found the Flats, the once desolated section known from Pere Ubu lore, unrecognizable from my fanciful imaginings and sadly fallen out of neglect.

At the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame I found the administration office and inquired after an old friend who was employed there as a member of the education department. On this particular afternoon he was away from his desk: he happened to be at the hospital where his wife was in the process of giving birth to their second child. The education department: what a joke, a sad attempt to tame that which is famed for being untamed. Some interesting artifacts were probably housed therein, but I wasn’t going to find out.

“May I have a banana?” I asked one of the women that were loading up boxes of bananas to hand out to runners in a charity marathon on the lakefront. “Can he have a banana?” she asked one her fat colleagues. “Are you in the race?” she asked me. I replied in the affirmative. “Give him a banana,” she said.

As I checked into the Edge-O-Town motel outside Ashtabula, the night clerk voiced some concern regarding the whereabouts of a retarded young man who had also just checked in, apparently without entirely understanding the logistics of paying for a room, after he had been kicked out of the house by his mother. Ashtabula: a town with a beautiful name, and the birthplace of Charles Burchfield, although no indication could be found of the great artist being honored there.

The clouds drifted over Erie on a perfect sunny autumn afternoon, a tough town fallen on hard times. Sad-eyed ex-steelworkers panhandled outside the few open businesses. The short, plump, bespectacled Starbucks barista was almost unbearably sweet. At the city limits a sign plaintively read ‘Thank You For Visiting - Please Come Back’. I resolved to return.

There wasn’t a single open restaurant and little sign of activity of any kind in downtown Youngstown, a once-thriving steel town plunged into hopeless and ominous stagnation. I began to consider the potential benefits of setting forth with a destination in mind. Out there, stranded in other people’s reality, one’s usual sense of priorities evaporates. Traveling, unraveling... one can get into some strange states in some strange states out on the road alone. I drove on, sinking, spiraling, pinning my hopes on a redemptive evening walk in Akron.

A bright sterility encumbered the city of Akron. I walked around aimlessly in the hope of getting lost but there was nothing to get lost in, nothing in the air, or maybe it was just me. Once again, I had over-idealized a place in advance, and the eagerly anticipated evening walk was curtailed after an hour due to lack of transcendence.

Everybody in the one open bar downtown was toothless, even the young people. The doddering old bartender bestowed a hard candy upon each customer when they ordered a drink at the counter. I stood on a bridge and gazed down at the water trickling along a concrete riverbed, idly contemplating the fate of John Berryman. Upon the approach of a stranger I moved along guiltily.

The further I drove the more I realized that I didn’t want to stop anywhere else, that I was intent on winding up in Cincinnati. The city held a strange allure. It was one of those cities whose rough exterior harbored a certain warmth, and this was a quality I hadn’t encountered anywhere else I had stopped along the way. I drove straight there, regaining energy as that destination neared.

A light rain fell on the streets of Cincinnati’s Over The Rhine district, a crowded neighborhood of decaying architectural splendor bordering downtown. Attempts to revitalize this designated historic district were interrupted three and a half years earlier by the last major ‘race riots’ to occur in this country. Prostitution and dope-peddling are openly engaged in on the streets. I lunched in a booth at Kaldi’s, an establishment that contained two long rooms: one served as a bar, the other as a coffee-house. Each side was stacked floor-to-ceiling with overflowing bookshelves, crammed with dusty and unwanted old tomes. The rail-thin waitress called me ‘darling.’

At a newsstand I picked up the next day’s Racing Form and drove across the river, where the presence of numerous bars on the crumbling ramshackle hillside row-house streets attested to the erstwhile notoriety of Covington and Newport Kentucky as wide-open towns. I studied the Form over a couple of pints in John’s bar. Then I checked into the Newport Travel Lodge.

The Southgate House, a Victorian mansion turned concert venue, was situated one block away from the motel. Upon entering I was immediately approached by a fellow called Rick who recognized me from photographs that a mutual friend had posted online. He had driven down from Columbus with some other Fallnetters, members of an online Fall fan site. We sat on the porch outside the venue, talking about the Fall and death and other things. His roommate had recently died of an alcohol-exacerbated heart attack. A skinny short-haired girl in a short dress was almost irrationally appreciative of the gesture when I opened a door for her.

The Fall took the stage with Mark E.Smith, following a recent accident, confined to a chair, from which he rose on occasion to fiddle around with the amps. At one point he kicked over table, and during White Lightning, he left the stage to have a smoke. The sound was dreadful. It was probably the worst Fall performance I’ve ever seen, and it was great. The road manager, Roy, with whom I was acquainted, informed me that M.E.S. had been “acting up” all day, getting drunk on tequila in the van and running everybody’s nerves ragged. They were only ten days into the tour and they were already worn out.

“D’you want to have a shot with me?” I was standing around on the balcony when a generously proportioned woman named Julia engaged me in conversation. We repaired to the bar and it wasn’t long before she was placing my hand on her ample thigh. She regaled me with a story concerning her recent visit to California where she rendezvoused by the Salton Sea with a man that she met on the internet. When she got there, following a heated online affair, he wasn’t having any of it, and this was still greatly troubling her. A friend of hers showed up and took some of the pressure off. Julia kept batting her eyes at me. “I think you’re hot,” she said. “I want to dig my tongue into your dimples.”

I was rescued by the appearance of Roy, the road manager, who marched me downstairs to meet M.E.S., who was slumped on a sofa in the grimy subterranean backstage area. When I ask him how he’s doing he struggles to his feet and starts singing the chorus to “Southern boy, you’ve got your feet in L.A.,” which he’s been tormenting Roy with throughout the tour. After some further perfectly charming but incoherent conversation, his wife and keyboard player escorts him out of the venue. The night winds down in the upstairs bar, shooting pool with the other band members, all affable lads, and various Fallnet stragglers.

I couldn’t face another afternoon at Keeneland racecourse in such a hungover state. Instead, I drove north and somehow found myself in Dayton, Ohio. I parked downtown and went to the library, where I checked the phone book for old hotels. There were none. I drank two cans of beer in a crowded and somewhat menacing bar called Binger’s and wandered around the industrial section, savoring the wide, empty, windy streets, the flat white deadness engraved upon my mind by early Pere Ubu records. Walking towards me came the most beautiful woman in Dayton, judging by the way she carried herself. As she was about to pass, the wind blew her long black hair across her face, obscuring her features, and she crossed the street.

Some old and broken people sat outside the old Biltmore Hotel, now a retirement home of sorts. I walked in and a superintendent kicked me out. I continued to walk around downtown and the surrounding residential district of tree-lined streets and gracious dwellings. “You had Thai food before?” asked the Caucasian waiter in an upscale Thai restaurant. I played pinball in another bar and left town, driving south again.

The night clerk grunted in a vaguely compliant way as I checked back in to the Newport Travel Lodge. I lay on the bed for a while, then I drove into downtown Cincinnati. The rail-thin waitress in Kaldi’s coffee bar winked at me.

There was a diverse crowd and lively atmosphere at a coffee house called Sitwell’s in the Clifton neighborhood, where it was refreshing to eavesdrop upon a spirited discussion about philosophy between an earnest longhaired kid and a fascinating older gentleman at the next table, upon which rested a dog-eared volume of Kant. The musical selections of Memphis Minnie and Hank Williams were also refreshing. A blonde at the counter turned around and stared at me. She was wearing shorts and knee socks. I noticed her talking to the waitress, in reference to me, judging by the body language. She cast me another look, a warmly favorable appraisal it seemed, from the other side of the window as she was leaving. I sat at a table reading newspapers. Then I walked down the street and passed the Skyline Chili parlor. The blonde was in there, with a large man, and they were motioning at me. I backed away, out of their sight, and walked up and down the street, considering the situation. Then I returned to the motel.

Sitwell’s was not as vibrant during the day. I sat at the same table as the night before. The blonde walked in, still wearing shorts and knee socks, saw me, and walked out again. The longhaired kid was sitting on a stoop outside, still reading Kant. I took a final downtown stroll and had a last beer at Kaldi’s, where the frisson-triggering rail-thin waitress ignored me.

I checked into the first motel I saw. It was on Versailles road, the main artery leading into town from the airport. From the street it looked appealing. But an old neon sign doesn’t always signal a cozy respite for the road-weary traveler.

I should have heeded the warning in the night clerk’s shaky voice and viewed the room in advance. The eroded air-conditioner, burnt carpet, broken table, overpowering scent of poverty and death. This was familiar territory. Most disturbing was the absence of a bedside lamp. I had been looking forward to relaxing in bed with a copy of the following day’s Racing Form.

I walked back out to the car. Shadowy forms lingered outside their rooms and on the lawns. A bare-chested septuagenarian groaned at me from a doorway. The motel appeared to chiefly function as a welfare-level apartment complex, with a couple of rooms set aside for the unsuspecting tourist.

I got in the car and drove around aimlessly. Nothing beckoned. The few open bars were the exclusive domain of the college crowd. Upon my return a police car was exiting the motel driveway. Despite emerging from a spotless rental car I attempted to convey an impression of indigent swagger as I made my way, suitcase in hand, across the lawn, returning to the morbid reek.

No warm water issued from the shower. I left it running and washed my face and hands in the sink. As I did this, the sink quickly clogged up. The shower continued running cold. I grabbed a towel. It looked as if somebody had wiped themselves with it. In a fury, gingerly clutching the filthy towel as evidence, I strode across to the office and rang the bell to no avail. The television drone could be heard but the night clerk did not appear.

It was one in the morning but I wasn’t tired. I toyed with the notion of checking into a different motel or sleeping in the car but found myself somehow sworn to a night in this sty, almost relishing the humiliation. I pulled back the bedspread: the sheet was a huge heart-shaped bloodstain. I charged out to the office again and rapped on the window but there was still no response from the other side of the glass.

It seemed unlikely that I would be getting any sleep, and the following day would be gutted. I barricaded the door with the broken table, lay down on the bed and opened the Racing Form, but lacked the heart to read it. I just lay there, getting up every once in a while to peer through the blinds onto the courtyard. Nothing stirred. That was my first night in Lexington, capital of horse country.

At 7.30 on a Sunday morning, having snatched about two hours sleep, I tried the shower again, letting the water run for about twenty minutes without its warming in the least. I brushed my teeth: the sink clogged up. I tried the telephone: the line crackled so much, due to the ancient frayed cord that it was useless. I stepped out into the spring morning. In the daylight it was possible to discern that the lawn was mostly composed of cigarette butts. Again I attempted to rouse the clerk, and again no response was forthcoming.

Downtown was dull, grey and empty. A sabbath stillness prevailed, the sleepless death of Sunday morning in a small Southern city. It seemed pointless to be there, even more pointless than being anywhere else. It took a long time to find so much as a Starbucks, outside of which a long orderly line of locals stretched onto the street. It was still five hours to first post at Keeneland, and it was back to the old routine of driving around in a state of hateful nausea.

The windows were broken and a dumpster blocked the driveway of the Kimball House, the charming old hotel I had stayed at seven years earlier. In the absence of more appealing options, I dined at a chain restaurant where I ordered eggs scrambled soft. “We can’t do that,” said the waiter. “Why?”—“Because they’re already made, in a big catering bag.”

The motel I had the misfortune of spending the night at was situated on the way to the racetrack. I collared the manager, a large Middle Eastern gentleman, who was finally available in his office, and railed at him. He calmly assured me that the water was running hot. He led me back to the room I stayed in and turned on the faucets. The water was indeed hot. I pulled back the bedspread: the sheets were clean, no bloodstains. It was as if I’d returned to a crime scene to find all the incriminating evidence removed.

“It’s a beautiful afternoon,” said Rafael Bejarano to a punter as he stood outside the jockeys’ room, the sun casting a visor-like shadow across his aquiline features as he gently whacked his thigh with the same whip he’d be thrashing a horse with twenty minutes later in the upcoming race. On a serene afternoon at an unfamiliar racetrack, the jockeys seemed like angelic beings. I played carefully, knowing how down on myself and everything else I’d be if I lost, and stayed ahead all afternoon, sticking around for the West Coast simulcast racing, and leaving up sixty dollars.

My rental car was parked on an empty hillside that had been packed with vehicles six hours earlier. I drove back downtown and walked around, enjoying the Sunday evening calm. A blonde in a convertible screeched around a narrow corner, yelling “I hate this fucking town!”

Too tired to leave this fucking town, I rented a room in a thirty-dollar motel and immediately regretted it. On the other side of the wall, a woman screamed and shouted as if in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Fat bass beats thumped out of a car parked outside the window, and TV racket blasted through the ceiling. I stuffed in the earplugs and eventually fell asleep, to be awoken in the middle of the night when the woman in the next room returned with a paramour, and they proceeded to carry on like a pair of barnyard animals.

The first person I see upon getting out of the car in Minneapolis is a man with a black eye and a badly bruised face. It seems to bode ill. I liked the look of the guy.

The usual obligatory maddening few hours are spent driving around, emitting gross fumes, becoming increasingly more unhinged as nothing appealing or affordable offers itself in the way of lodgings. There are no cheap old hotels in downtown Minneapolis. This I glean from a night clerk at a residential hotel which does not cater to overnight guests. I comb the Twin Cities to no avail, eventually putting up at an Econolodge, where I almost destroy the broken snack machine in a fit of frustration.

As I drive around impatiently on one-way streets among timid drivers, I search for Peter’s Grill, an old-fashioned cafeteria I’d noticed last time around, and eventually find it... closed.

On a bitterly cold morning, I take a walk around the warehouse district, before driving out to the nearest racetrack, Canterbury Park, with off-track betting on my mind—live racing only takes place there during the summer months.

I pick all the bits of shredded hard-boiled egg out of the salad

It’s just another horseplayer’s paradise, with room after room filled with banks of television monitors broadcasting races from all over the country, in front of which an almost exclusively older male clientele pore over various forms and sheets. I arrive in time for the first Hollywood Park race and proceed to lose one race after another before retreating to the restaurant to regroup and struggle with a Cobb salad—I forgot to tell them to hold the egg and have to pick all the shredded hard-boiled bits out of it.

The spacious lounges begin to thin out. It looks cold, dark and lonely out there beyond the glass facade. I’m one of the few remaining horseplayers, betting the last races in California. In the Hollywood Park nightcap I pair two horses on top in the trifecta, each of them going off at 5/1. One wins by daylight, and the other rallies for second. There are a few tense minutes while Julie Krone, the rider of the horse that got up for third, at 12/1, claims foul against the runner-up, but the stewards let the order stand and the trifecta pays $527. This seems to bode well for Hibbing.

I lean out of the car window in order to seek directions from one of the many fat blonde women who inhabit these parts, but she refuses to acknowledge me, just keeps walking. Seeking directions, receiving direct shuns. Aggrieved by her needless fear, I shout and honk the horn at her, and I’m reminded of what a Midwestern friend once said about Minnesotans being ‘scared’.

Nevertheless—always the less—a young man yells at me because, apparently, I’m staring at him. I park outside a Sex Shoppe on Hennepin, fortify myself on a pastry and a cup of tea, and walk back to the car with my hand nearly freezing off. After much misdirection, I drive out of town on the wrong way highway.

I pull over to use the rest room at a Home Depot in the middle of nowhere, consume a couple of stomach-turning White Castle hamburgers, and proceed to whip myself into a frantic state of irritation and horror at the inconveniences of modern life. Eventually I find my way onto the right highway. At midnight I check into the Pines motel in Hinckley.

Now that the return is verging upon reality, my mission has lost all sense of urgency and grace. But that never stopped me before. The beauty of the original experience was in the spontaneity, and nothing could be more calculating than this return visit, driving into town like a contract killer on a mission I don’t believe in anymore. Such experiences as I enjoyed three nights ago in Hibbing cannot be recaptured or resumed. But that won’t stop me from repeating myself. There isn’t a force on earth that can stop me from repeating myself.

How should I present myself when I ‘pass through’ Hibbing? I can’t let Stacey know that I came all the way back in order to take a walk with her through the fallen leaves. Just walk into the bar and do what I didn’t do last time, I tell myself.

She was still preoccupied with that soured five-year relationship. She found blonde hairs in the bed: belonging to the woman that her boyfriend knocked up, with twins. That’s when she left him, got into her black truck and headed to Hibbing, lured there by the Dylan connection.

A willowy brunette, accompanied by a little boy, is getting into her car outside the health food store on the hill in Duluth. “Hi,” she says, and holds my gaze. It’s hard to tell if it’s a come-hither or a get-lost look. It doesn’t matter. I grab a sandwich and keep driving, nerves quavering. The further north I drive the milder the weather becomes. It doesn’t feel right, none of it feels right.

The locals, on the whole, were not particularly friendly towards me. Far from it, some were blatantly hostile. Two men voiced a desire to assault me during my one night in Hibbing. My return might incur further aggravation: the entire town could descend upon me, wanting blood. I’m somewhat wary of that individual in the Sportsmen’s who wanted to “deck the limey,” and of Kevin, who prevented the attack, but who, by the end of the evening, also wanted to deck me. It’s possible that these men have subsequently expressed regret at not having assaulted me at the time and will delight in getting another opportunity. I might experience a change more violent than cathartic: a thug-on-aesthete attack.

There’s snow on the ground in Hibbing, but none, sadly, falling through the air. I arrive at a dull, potentially deadly time of day, driving down 1^st Avenue in the middle of the afternoon. I still haven’t decided how to present myself, and spontaneity is out of the question.

My first stop is the Hong Kong Café, where Stacey works part-time. I take a deep breath and stride in like an assassin, through the beaded curtain in the doorway. The place is empty but for one table occupied by a pair of old women. “Are you looking for someone?” asks an old Chinese woman, probably the owner, in a tone of voice that she probably wouldn’t use with a potential customer. I reply in the negative and continue walking through the long, narrow, cozy room with curtained booths and tasteful lamp-lighting. The Chinese woman repeats the question in a tone that suggests she would prefer it if I left. At the other end, near the kitchen, another waitress sits at a little table, counting money. She looks up at me as if I were deranged, which I must have appeared, and certainly felt.

I retreat to the car and drive off. The waitress watches from the window. Not taking down my license plate number, I hope.

I park outside the Sunrise Bakery and sit there for a long time, trying to recover my wits. In this I fail, and after a while I drive down Howard and park a block away from the Sportsmen’s, on the opposite side of the street.

Eventually, as if on autopilot, I get out of the car, and enter the Sportsmen’s. I walk in, readjust my vision to the darkness and cast my eyes around the bar. “Hi,” says the alveolate-complexioned character behind the bar, known as Toad or Raskolnikov. I hadn’t realized he worked there and wonder if he recognizes me or if he is greeting me as he would any stranger who stumbled in.

As all the signs suggest on such an intractably unpropitious day, Stacey isn’t there. In order not to appear lost, I walk out through the restaurant and back onto the street, where the good citizens of Hibbing are going about their business, oblivious to my demented quest, and across the road to the library.

She isn’t there either.

I take a walk along the peaceful bare-treed, snow-covered streets, past the high school, Dylan’s alma mater, and past his boyhood home. I get back in the car and drive around aimlessly. I park on a cross street by Zimmy’s, a block down from the Sportsmen’s. Now that I have actually returned, I have to ask myself, what the fuck am I doing here? I remain in the car, waiting for my mood to change, for the overall atmosphere to become more favorable, but it only becomes murkier and more misaligned. All I’m doing is ruining the memory of the previous visit.

Still sloppily focused on my supposed goal, I walk up to the Sportsmen’s but can’t bring myself to enter. It isn’t easy to peek inconspicuously through the window. I open the door a little and quickly scan the room, noting Toad’s presence and Stacey’s absence.

The last time around, Toad had seemed an outcast. Now, behind the bar, he has assumed a position of authority, and I feel like an intruder, absorbed in a moral disaster, working in spite of reason. I let the crack in the door close again and return to the car by climbing over the short wall outside Zimmy’s in such a manner that I can’t be seen by anybody who might have been looking down the street from the Sportsmen’s, as if I have something to hide: shame, perhaps; embarrassment, definitely.

It’s not dark yet but it’s getting there. I drive up Howard, enter the 412 Bar and order a bottle of MGD. “Good taste,” remarks a barfly. I sit at the counter and play the music trivia game—Which year did the Doobie Brothers album Takin’ It to the Streets debut: 1975, 1976, 1977?—dragging it out for as long as possible, delaying having to follow through on this futile mission, knowing that having come this far I must at least pretend to make an honest attempt at making contact with her even if my heart’s not in it anymore. I order another MGD.

I return to the library and sit there for a long time, consuming such mentally dulling trash as People and Rolling Stone, until the purity of my mission has become completely sullied, my presence in town a deadened mystery. I drive by the Hong Kong Café again and peer through the window. I return to the Sportsmen’s, open the door a crack again and stare in. Toad is still present. But there is no sign of her anywhere, and I am behaving more like a bedraggled, bedeviled stalker than a man on a romantic mission.

I drive up the alley behind the Sportsmen’s. The lights are on in the window of what I assume is her apartment. I climb up the rickety back stairs and open the door into the musty hallway. Her door, if it is her door, is decorated with a few stickers, and propped slightly open by a pair of large furry dice. I knock, and knock again. There is no answer, and I skulk off, descending the back stairs as quietly as possible. I could swear I saw the curtains move.

I drive around the corner and park outside the plant (I never did find out what that appealing remnant of downtown industrial architecture actually was) and sit in the car for a long time, pondering the situation. Following the timid tapping on the door, she could have looked through the window and seen the car driving down the alley, but in the darkness she wouldn’t have seen me at the wheel.

I steel myself and drive back up the alley. I park the car again and ascend the shaky back stairway. This time the curtain moves, unmistakably. I can’t keep going. I can’t go up there again. I turn around and leave town, trying not to be too disgusted with myself over this further massive failure of nerve, and more or less succeed in numbing myself towards this necessary end.

Despite the lateness of the hour, the bell-ringing Salvation Army woman is still standing outside the Greysolon building in Duluth. I drop some coins into her tin, and she regales me with the history of the building. Greysolon Duluth was the city founder. The Graysolon was once a Schroder hotel. Two Schroder hotels are still operating: one in Milwaukee, the other in Fond du Lac.

I get back in the car and drive around. After a while, I find myself in West Duluth, drawn to the massage parlor. The ruined blonde is still at the window.

“Two girls are working,” she tells me. “A white and an Oriental.”

I walk in.

A giant metal sculpture of a barely recognizable swan was shedding its rusted skin outside a red-brick factory. I stood beside a weed-enshrouded baby carriage, listening to the river—the Chippewa, presumably—and watching the leaves washing up against the bank. But such beautiful surroundings, despite their tangible existence, seemed hopelessly remote. I had disclaimed them in a seasonless, denatured city at the other end of the country. I pissed against a pillar, beyond the sight of the mothers and children that were lingering on the bridge above.

The children scattered as I clambered up the embankment. As the sun was setting over the cemetery, I wondered if this would be the last sunset I ever saw in a small town. I walked through an empty park thick with fallen leaves, along silent streets of wooden white houses, and back into town. At the end of another pedestrian bridge a slender, attractive Asian woman in a long black coat passed by and smiled at me. The bookstore was closing. The teenagers in the Democratic campaign headquarters were busy on their telephones. I returned to the hotel and sat in the lobby, browsing back issues of Us Magazine and brooding about Hibbing.

The lights of the Hope Gospel Mission shone brightly into the night: “Lives Rescued Rebuilt Renewed” read the sign above the door, upon which was posted a note inviting “potential residents” to ring the buzzer between the hours of five and ten p.m.. After that hour they were encouraged to call the police, who would, presumably, provide them with shelter.

Following the events of the night before, it didn’t seem advisable to enter the Mousetrap. A skinny redhead was standing outside, smoking. She smiled at me. I entered and looked down the length of the bar, surveying the rats in the Mousetrap. Most of the barstools were taken. The grubby hirsute owner brushed past me, dragging his bum leg along, without acknowledging my presence, which he had barely acknowledged the night before when he cleaned me out at the poker table. I had initially taken him for a local loser and he clearly viewed me as an unlikable and unwelcome outsider.

The skinny redhead smiled again as I walked out. Women in these parts smiled freely; they were just being friendly. On the next block I peered through the window of the Bottle & Barrel. I had peered through the same window at lunchtime and seen a few old men sitting at the bar. A younger crowd now occupied the place. I returned to the Mousetrap. The redhead was wrapped in the arms of a bearded young man in a hooded sweat shirt. She looked up at me expressionlessly as I entered. I went back to the Bottle & Barrel.

This establishment functioned as both bar and liquor store, with a bar on one side and sales counter at the other. Not wanting to sit next to anybody, I walked to the end of the bar and took the last seat. The voluptuous young bartender took my order: a Green Belt beer. I was the only person drinking alone but the next barstool was soon occupied by yet another shaggy, denim-clad young man. He cradled a small dog that served as a constant object of conversation to everybody that came into their proximity. It seemed more a substitute for its owner’s personality and a social crutch than an actual pet. They were soon joined by an exuberant young woman who expressed herself entirely in high-pitched cooing sounds in place of locution or laughter as they doted over the dog together.

I drank the beer and walked back to the hotel, which served mainly as a residential dwelling. A few scruffy old men shuffled through the lobby as I sat in a sagging armchair and considered the Hibbing situation. I remembered how Stacey had copied down my phone number on a separate piece of paper, presumably for safekeeping, and how she neatly folded it and slipped it into the back pocket of her gray pants. It was bad enough that I cut out early—at four in the morning—but to have done the same thing at four o’clock the following afternoon amounted to a massive and inexcusable failure of nerve and character.

Stacey had seemed surprised when I left the bar on Monday afternoon, just before she got off work, and she had insisted that the drunken oaf move out of the chair so she could sit next to me. How much encouragement did I need? It would be a cop-out to blame it on a hangover. Why should she give any further thought to somebody who was so unassertive? The timing and the location were ideal. Everything fell into place but me. Nothing was delivered. How, after all these years, can one have such experiences and not realize how precious they are going to appear in retrospect? Perhaps one subdues one’s self-consciousness at such times in order to avoid their purity being tainted by foreknowledge.

The three-story Antique Emporium on the main street was more like a museum than a store. The price labels on the ancient shadow boxes had faded long ago. One contained a crucifix and a miniature ladder made of a light brown waxy substance that had somehow remained intact for over a century, as had the flowers, feathers and strands of hair wreathed into hearts and crosses in other shadow boxes, exuding a powerful atmosphere of those frail and faded days when life was a lot more tenuous than it is now. One could spend an hour in that emporium and emerge to find one’s present day surroundings imbued with late-nineteenth century morbidity, even as one walked out to find the heart of downtown arrested in the sounds of 60’s easy listening. On this occasion, ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ piping out of the street corner speakers.

Tyler was flipping eggs in the kitchen of the Grand Avenue Cafe. I sat at a table against the wall in order to avoid him. “Good to see you again,” said the dark-haired waitress. After lunch, I walked across the footbridge, realizing it was the last time I would ever walk across it, and stood there, looking down upon the clear, glistening waters. The last of the leaves were falling. The trees would renew themselves. But we were less like trees than leaves: loose, despite all our efforts to prove otherwise, attached to nothing. I stood there for ten minutes, lost in the tranquility of a perfect autumn day steeped in peaceful sadness, the reward for all the pointless dread and vacillation; and soon they would pass, these rare moments of serenity, leaving only memories that would also pass.

The robust country girl who tended bar at the Bottle & Barrel was working behind the counter of the bakery, and remembered me from the night before. “I hope you’re saving some money,” I ventured after she told me that she had three jobs. “Just paying the bills,” she said, “maybe I’ll be serving you later tonight.” “I doubt it,” I said, “I’m on my way out of town.”

Leaves blew across the street in the autumn sunlight as I stood on the corner, nourishing myself on an apricot pastry. It seemed that I would never be in such a place again, never experience such weather again. The woman from the antique emporium passed by and nodded at me. I was already on nodding terms with a number of the locals. But there was no place for me in a small town. A jangled city creature, it would be difficult to dispel the impression that I had airs and graces. I had already rubbed a few people the wrong way after barely communicating with anybody. I walked back to the hotel, passing the library and the Rescue Mission for the last time. Gusts of wind whipped up clouds of dust in the construction zone. Gordon Lightfoot’s tour bus was parked outside the theater. It would have been fun to stick around for the show but I had made a decision to drive back to Hibbing.

“D’you mind if I order a drink here?” I was still reeling from the shock of paying thirty-five dollars for two modest cocktails when I was rudely addressed at the crowded bar. I turned around to face a wiry, amped-up, heavily tattooed young man and realized it would be in my best interests to restrain myself from informing him that I was vacating the space in a not untimely manner.

“This place is more expensive than LA,” I complained to Evan as I handed him the overpriced tequila and soda. For podcasting purposes, he wanted to record our immediate impressions of the Dylan show we had just witnessed at the Abilene Convention Center a few blocks away, so we repaired to the silent sidewalk smoking area where the sole occupant was a slender, timeless-looking woman. I had noticed her as we had approached the bar and assumed she was waiting for someone or shortly about to return to the company inside but she was still there, stylishly attired in a silky dress and vintage blazer jacket, with a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of Mexican beer in front of her. She seemed to be dressed for a more glamorous setting than sitting outside a bar in Abilene on a Friday night.

‘People keep talkin’ ‘bout this town called Abilene’... ‘the wealth and pain of old Abilene’... ‘I’m stranded at a truck stop in Abilene’... ‘I could own a town the size of Abilene’... ‘Abilene, Abilene, prettiest town I’ve ever seen’... This dreamy word had often been heard in song, evoking romantic desolation way out on the Western plains, and I was finally experiencing it, and it was, of course, somewhat less lyrical; and most of these songs had been written about the town of the same name in Kansas.

At one time this hotel and the adjoining saloon would have been the social hub of a bustling boomtown; then, as the city limits kept expanding, the hotel would have become low-income residential housing, while the increasingly less salubrious bar would eventually close, to rematerialize many years later as a fashionably revamped craft cocktail bar beneath luxury loft dwelling units

“It was more rough than rowdy,” I said, not really having much to say about the Dylan show. “It was moving. I mean, you know what you’re getting at this point. It’s more about what you bring to the experience, and I brought more than usual...”

“Well, you traveled all day to get there,” said Evan. Which was true. It had been a long day of flying and driving, along with all the usual transitional inconveniences, to get to Abilene. ‘Abilene, Abilene, women there don’t treat you mean...’

“It’s a gift, and one can’t complain about receiving a gift, especially from somebody who has already given so much...”

Upon hearing us talking, the languid-looking woman turned around and addressed us.

“Were you at the show?” she asked.

Her face, which had been hidden by a downcast curtain of light brown hair, was now visible, and the impression was striking. She possessed a delicate sort of beauty but there was something immediately disquieting about her.

We responded in the affirmative and returned the question.

“I wish,” she said.

“You could have gone,” said Evan.

“I’ve only been to one concert,” she said.

“Really?”

“Hozier, three years ago, in Dallas.”

“That makes sense,” said Evan, admirably resisting an easy opportunity to indulge in irony. He opened the Spotify app on his phone. “He has forty-five million monthly listeners. Let’s see how many Bob has... sixteen million.”

“And I’ve never heard of him,” I said.

“You’re not missing anything,” said Evan.

“Was it sold out?” she asked, turning around again and fixing us with those mysteriously stricken features.

“Just about. Luckily, there were a few empty seats in front of me that afforded a perfect view of the stage.” It was, apparently, the last stop on the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour that Dylan had been on for four years. “Has Dylan ever had a show that wasn’t well-attended?” I wondered.

“Funnily enough, on the second leg of the Rolling Thunder tour, three shows in West Texas and at least one show in the South were canceled due to poor ticket sales,” said Evan, at the ready with the intriguing minutiae.

“Where?”

“Abilene, Lubbock and Amarillo.”

“That kind of makes sense.”

“In the mid-seventies, perhaps.”

More information was exchanged, including names. Hers was Jane. We were passing through, she wasn’t: she was from east Texas and had been in Abilene for nine years.

“Are there any good bars around here?” I asked her, as this one, the Pour House, certainly didn’t qualify, and would send us to the poor house if we continued drinking there.

Jane pondered this question for a while before offering a considered response: “I think,” she said hesitantly, “there’s a bar at the DoubleTree.” This hideous glass-fronted hotel was visible from where we were sitting.

Looking over, I noted that Evan had downed his cocktail with remarkable speed, signifying a desire to move on.

“Let’s check out some other bars,” he said.

But Jane was already getting up to leave. “It’s been nice meeting you,” she said, and disappeared around the corner.

Evan and I set forth in order to further sample the local nightlife, and found ourselves aimlessly wandering the empty streets. Repurposed buildings were returned to their former selves in the forgiving darkness, making the town seem very old: a frontier outpost of hollowed-out, weathered brick.

“She’s been living here for nine years and she can’t name a single bar,” said Evan.
”That’s bizarre.”

“Maybe she’s newly single, hitting the town alone for the first time in years,” I suggested. |

“Or she’s been in a restrictive religious cult, or locked up in a cellar,” said Evan. “And she’s only ever been to one concert in her entire life? ”

“That was a sad admission,” I concurred. “Or maybe we’re just spoiled.”

“But she had to be in her mid-thirties,” said Evan, breaking stride beneath the marquee of an old theater. “Look, they’re showing Giant.”

“That would make sense,” I said. “It was filmed down the road... about three hundred miles down the road. She had a kind of old Hollywood look,” I added, returning to the subject of Jane. “Like a fallen woman stranded in a remote saloon, a staple of the Western.”

“But damaged,” said Evan, who was marveling over the immaculately preserved vintage ticket booth.

“She had a tragic countenance,” I said. “It was hard not to recoil from it.”

“Maybe she was a phantom,” said Evan. “She did seem haunted. The way she just vanished into the night.”

We passed another converted old hotel. Peering through the sidelight, we saw a man sitting on a sofa in what was once an opulent lobby, and he saw us: he got up and walked toward the door, and we walked away. In the distance, a robed figure drifted across the street.

“D’you really think that was the last stop on the Rough and Rowdy tour?” I said.

“Who knows,” said Evan. “Bob’s been known to change his mind.”

“It’s just pure gravy at this point,” I said. “He exists in the rare and exclusive realm of being beyond criticism.”

“It’s been gravy for the last twenty years, if not longer,” said Evan.

“Oceans of gravy.”

Leaving town was difficult but leave town I did, on waves of melancholic nausea, with the sun setting over the bare trees and lakes of northern Minnesota. For no good reason, when it would have been so easy to remain, I drove away from Hibbing.

It felt wrong, but I kept going. I stopped for tea at a Barnes & Noble outside Duluth, picked up a biography of Georges Bataille and read the words: “Avoid contact with all people in whom there is no possible resonance with what touches you most deeply.”

How many more times?

A placard covered with personal memories of Paul Wellstone stood outside the Democratic party headquarters on 2^nd Avenue. The gubernatorial contender died when his plane went down a week earlier near Eveleth, just up the road from Hibbing. The tragedy was gripping the entire state, but I was more concerned with the minor-key tragedy of my latest drastic failure of nerve to pay much attention to it.

There was no need to return to Duluth.

Obviously.

Her features dissolved, fading uneasily into my future, receding into her past. Even before I left, I knew I’d regret leaving. It wasn’t as if I had pressing matters to attend to. I should have walked in like a lion when I entered the Sportsmen’s on Monday afternoon, not like a lost lamb. Stacey had obviously been talking about me to her friends and customers, all of whom seemed to know who I was. All I had to do was sit there for another twenty minutes and ask her out for a walk. It was the place and it was the time. You live but once.

“What brings you to Superior?” asks the female night clerk at the front desk.

“Well, you know I’ve always wanted to stay at the Androy Hotel,” I say, quipping in an agreeably merry tone that takes me by surprise.

“Sure,” she laughs.

But that’s the truth, the sad part, one of the sad parts. And I already had stayed there, but I didn’t tell her that, not wanting any witnesses to my meaningless repetition.

I can’t get out of bed. I lie there for hours, haunted, disgusted, demoralized, emptier than ever for the lack of an experience I should have fully embraced, watching the winter glow shimmering through the orange polyester curtains.

If I was capable of it, rather than living dutifully and artfully, I could resort to the cop-out of making art out of unlived life. But I couldn’t bring myself to do anything. The failure of nerve in Hibbing brought everything to a grinding halt. Eventually I got out of bed, opened the curtains, and viewed the gray smokestacks billowing over the lake from the seventh-floor window.

Unable to get out of the car, unable to do anything but blurrily chastise myself while parked in an insalubrious West Duluth neighborhood, I read the liner notes of a Jackson C.Frank CD and vainly wondered if the destitution, insanity and early death that befell this unlucky singer might await me. I slipped the disc into the player and ‘Milk and Honey’ played as I drove out of town, passing the Duluth Armory, where Dylan saw Buddy Holly perform on the latter’s last tour.

A muzak version of ‘Little Green Apples’ filled the air, piped onto the streets from speakers on each corner, a fitting soundtrack to the emptiness of a bleak Tuesday afternoon in downtown Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where I somehow found myself.

A few students sat in the wooden booths that lined the windows of a corner-coffee house. I ordered the half-sandwich and cup-of-soup combo, and immediately regretted it. Not knowing what to do with myself, I got back in the car and got lost driving around a tangle of bland residential streets. I considered leaving town but knew that I would only find myself somewhere even less appealing. I drove back downtown, entered a bar called Clancy’s, stood with my back to the smattering of patrons, drank a beer, looked out of the window, and saw nothing.

I rented a clean and spacious room on the third floor of a four-story red brick hotel a couple of blocks off the main street, at the very reasonable rate of $42 a night. I looked out of the window at a rickety gray warehouse upon which the last fading rays of daylight were falling.

In its lonely way it was a friendly town. Lights shone cozily in the windows of houses and apartment buildings, and the few people I passed on the street greeted me. I combed through a few albums of 78 records in a musty pawn shop that was mostly filled with guns and DVDs. Then I entered another coffee house.

After serving me lukewarm tea, the man behind the counter graciously reheated the water. He was of German extraction and had moved to Eau Claire a few years earlier to be with his wife. It was apparent from the wall hangings and the scattered literature that this was a Christian establishment. I sipped the weak tea and continued to brood over my failure of nerve. This time yesterday all I needed was sustenance of a gastronomical order to hold myself together until Stacey got off work. She was washing glasses on the other side of the bar, directly in front of me. We were physically close, connected, and that’s the way it had been since we met. I could have ordered a meal in the bar. Several people had suggested I do so. There had always been others around. So what? That could have been easily remedied if I’d had the sense to invited her to hang out when she got off work. I considered the not unthinkable possibility of returning to Hibbing.

A stranger wandered in, loudly inquiring about how much a cup of coffee went for. Upon noticing a chess set he asked an aquiline-featured man who was sifting through papers at a Formica table if he wanted to play. The latter begrudgingly agreed to give him a five-minute game. I sat at one of the computers and checked the horse racing results I’d missed over the last few days.

Due to the lack of dining alternatives I found myself at the same place that made me queasy earlier, opting again for the revolting half-sandwich and cup of soup combo: this time the salami and cheese sandwich, made of the cheapest luncheon meat—a horribly melted mess that induced further biliousness.

I coughed up $2.50 to see Mamma Mia at the old downtown theater, just for the fun of it, and thinking it might be amusing to hear Pierce Brosnan sing. It wasn’t, but I was rewarded with the experience, for the first time in my movie-going life, of being the only member of the audience. After an hour I left, telling the boy at the box office that he could go home.

Beneath a yellow marquee, the Mousetrap Tavern. A long bar stretched down the room to an empty game area that contained pool tables, dart boards and other amusements. Parallel to the bar was a darkened room where a number of grubbily-attired men, all beards and sweaters, were playing poker.

The clientele was relatively bohemian by the standards of small town Wisconsin. The bruiser on the nearest stool kept playing the Doors on the jukebox, and they sounded great. Morrison was singing his own death, forecasting and romanticizing it from the very beginning—‘The End’—of his career. He was often maligned these days, regarded as a figure of fun by envious men, and because the image he projected has been degraded, to death, by shabby imitators. Such profundities wafted through my mind as I ordered another cocktail and walked over to the card table. The rats in the Mousetrap were playing Texas Hold ‘Em, no limit.

A short cherubic kid with wisps of hair sprouting from pudgy features sidled on to the barstool next to mine and inquired with an ominous friendliness after my presence in town. Not wanting anybody to be party to my aimless meandering, I told him I was just passing through while visiting friends in Minneapolis. His name was Taylor and he worked at a local restaurant. He couldn’t take it anymore. He had tried in vain to introduce the locals to more adventurous culinary fare but their palates were inured to blandness. His dream was to become a sushi chef, and towards this end he wanted to attend a sushi academy in San Francisco, but saving up the necessary $5,000 was proving to be a problem. He complained vehemently about his next-door neighbor. “There’s a difference between a black and a n—-r,” he said, and proceeded to illuminate me as to the distinction, using this neighbor as an illustration of the latter type. I wondered how he might fare if he ever did make it out to California. I asked him about the poker game but he wanted nothing to do with gambling: his uncle, a pool shark, had been murdered.

I walked over to the card table, sat down and bought in. The bearded character at the end of the table, hunched over his chips, was raking it in. There were four other players, all similarly grimy and hirsute (strangers in town are immediately indentifiable: they’re clean-shaven). There was no conversation between the players. The fellow sitting directly opposite me fixed me with a hostile stare, which I held until he turned away. He probably took me for a city slicker, or a queer. The best player got up and lunged his way, with dragging leg, across to the bar. Taylor walked over, pulled up a chair, and sat down behind me. Nobody else at the table acknowledged him. I wondered if he was a local pariah and if his attachment to me reflected unfavorably upon me in their eyes. I won two hands and could have won more if I’d been braver but I wasn’t able to get into the rhythm of the game or figure what I was up against, and I didn’t care. Nobody said anything when I got up to leave, forty dollars worse off, except Tayler, who bid me goodnight.

The piped muzak was no longer playing on the street. I thought more about returning to Hibbing and atoning for my failure of nerve. Why not? It was only a three-hour drive.

There’s not much incentive to get out of bed the next morning. It’s almost noon on a suffocatingly hot day by the time I finally rise to the occasion. I find my way to Churchill Downs. From there I’m directed to SportsSpectrum, apparently the largest off-track betting facility in the country. The California tracks won’t be running until
4 p.m. eastern time. I buy a cup of coffee. Naturally, there’s no cream or even milk, just synthetic powdered muck.

I park by the Seelbach Hotel and walk along a street of abandoned theaters and wig shops. It’s Saturday afternoon, the streets are deserted, and I can’t find anywhere to eat until I stumble upon an Italian restaurant that serves only Middle Eastern food on weekends. A beshorted Caucasian homosexual brings me a vegetarian kebab that I’m too dispirited to eat. It takes half an hour to wade through half of it and push the plate aside.

I drive around old Louisville with its streets of red-brick dwellings that I might have lingered upon were I in a more receptive mood. At 3.30 p.m. I return to SportsSpectrum, sit down at a table with a plastic container of overpriced watery beer, and peruse the Hollywood Park card in the Racing Form. A young man in a purple
T-shirt joins me. He’s excited, having already made $150. For the next few hours our fortunes vacillate, his more dramatically than mine. He leaves about $350 ahead. I make $23, and I’m delighted with it.

The sun goes down and a blue moon rises over the horizon. The reality of Lexington as a boring college town in summer doldrums comes as something of a shock. Once again my expectations erred on the overoptimistic side. I pull over in the campus area and dine in an otherwise empty Chinese restaurant.

I stumble upon the Kimball House, an unobtrusive red-brick building on a residential street: a boarding-house masquerading as a motel, presided over by a crotchety old widow who resembles Eudora Welty. She leads me through a maze of corridors to a small room containing a single bed, a chest of drawers, a rocking chair, and a lamp with a huge dead cockroach lying in its upturned shade.

I venture out for a couple of drinks in a couple of frat bars, the only places I can find, and return to sit in the lobby, below the ceiling fan, on a battered veiny sofa. There’s a vintage metal city-to-city mileage indicator on the wall. Arrangements of dilapidated furniture stand in hallways and alcoves. The building is eerily quiet. I seem to be the only guest.

The old lady is knocking on the door at check-out time, 11 a.m. the next morning, making certain I leave in a timely manner. She fusses around the room, bemoaning certain liberties that have apparently been taken with the air conditioner.

Then begins the familiar futile quest for coffee on a Sunday morning in a Southern town, ending in a styrofoam cup at Burger King.

There’s nothing much left to look at in Harrodsburg, no old men sitting in the shade of the courthouse square as in the old postcard in my collection. For hours I meander along rural routes, without any pointless pall hanging over me. Another Dairy Queen shake, another Tylenol. Horse Cave boasts the novelty of a bookstore that’s actually open, and an abandoned hotel falling apart by the railroad tracks. In Bowling Green I have the entire downtown to myself.

Nashville’s Broad Street has been transformed into a family-friendly simulacrum. The rough dives that were operating five years earlier are all closed down, they couldn’t compete with the Hard Rock Café. I have a couple of beers in Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, which is still relatively intact, and leave town.

A carload of black youth tailgate me for a while, then overtake, gesturing in a menacing fashion, and I set off on a gloriously lucid night drive. I stop for dinner at a smoky truck stop, reading Milton in a booth—‘When I consider how my light is spent’—while at the next table a thick-necked trucker pours half the contents of a sugar shaker into his coffee.

At midnight I arrive in Memphis. Wolf’s Corner is closed. There are no vacancies at the Kings Court. I put up at the Admiral Benbow. The TV doesn’t work, neither does the telephone, and there are shit stains on the ceiling.

The blonde finger-stroking waitress is behind the counter in the Arcade. “I remember you from the other day,” she says. This, indeed, is encouraging, but I’m entirely lacking in forward thrust, unable to follow through on this invitation to further conversation, and I just sit there berating myself while she goes about her business. No further opening presents itself and I do nothing to create one. I return the car to the rental company and check into the King’s Court.

The young man behind the counter at the Center for Southern Culture sports a Charley Patton tattoo on his arm. Recognizing a mutual interest, I attempt to engage him in conversation, but he isn’t having any of it. It’s impossible to engage him in conversation on a subject that he apparently feels strongly enough about to have indelibly impressed upon his body. The tattooed are a strange breed; they usually seem to be overcompensating.

Opposite the Civil Rights Museum, situated at the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Jacqueline Smith, the motel’s last resident, is being interviewed by a European news crew. After being evicted from the Lorraine she pitched a tent on the opposite side of the street and now dedicates herself to protesting the museum, which she views as antithetical to the values espoused by Dr. King. “Do we have so little imagination that we need to spend thousands of taxpayers dollars recreating a fake Birmingham jail, to understand the conditions under which Dr. King was incarcerated?” she asks.

I meander along South Main and the tracks again, alongside a magnificent row of abandoned warehouses. Two prostitutes are leaving as I enter a place that advertises itself as a barbecue restaurant, making me the only customer. I order the baked chicken dinner from the waiter, who is also the cook, and suffers from impetigo. Half an hour later he brings it out: two chicken legs with peas and beans served out of a can, unheated. I remind him that I requested white meat. He claims that this is white meat. I send it back. When he returns the so-called vegetables are warm but the chicken legs are still cold. I order a beer, but they only carry Bud Lite.

A sweaty man in a hospital shirt bums a smoke from me and we walk down South Main at twilight, as he rhapsodizes incoherently about short dresses.

I rise early and walk to the Arcade, with the intention of making contact with the blonde waitress, and asking her out. If she acquiesces, I’ll stay in town another night. She’s behind the counter, with a co-worker, washing dishes. I stand there uselessly, waiting for her to notice me.

“D’you need anything?” she asks, when she finally turns around.

I just blurt it out right in front of her coworker: “D’you want to get a drink?” I raise my cupped hand in the internationally recognized symbol for tippling. Never mind that it’s only nine o’clock in the morning.

“I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m working and I’ve got a boyfriend.”

They must have laughed heartily after I left, never to return.

Two winos addressed me as they passed by on the sidewalk: “We’re still celebrating Christmas. Hang in there Curly... you’ve got curly hair.”

‘I know,’ I said.

Sitting on a bed in the King’s Court motel, Memphis, spiraling into familiar staleness. Once again it starts to feel as if I’m settling some obscure score with myself in a climate of increasingly flavorless repetition.

I walk along South Main street on a gray muggy afternoon and stare at the waitress’s legs in the Arcade Diner. Rufus Thomas is hanging out in the Southern Folklore Center, looking sharp in shorts and knee socks. I board a bus that weaves around a medical complex for a long time before dropping me in the middle of nowhere, sweating on a bench. Another bus takes me back downtown where I ride the trolley down Main Street on a beautifully subdued evening in July. As far as I can make out, there isn’t a more exquisitely quiescent street in a major American city. But for how long?

I always felt close to the South, but the South never felt close to me. Nothing came of that romance. Smoke drifts through fading sunlight as I sit at the counter in Wolf’s Corner with the old black men playing pool behind me. I cross the street and enter the Arcade. There’s a different waitress behind the counter, a blonde in a short green dress. As she points something out to me on the menu, her finger touches mine. It gives me a lift. The sun burns down to the ground. I walk along the railroad tracks and look down upon the river.

Whither withering Dixie? I rent a car and head up to Jackson, Tennessee, a town I have long liked the sound of. But I don’t like the look of it. Once again my curiosity goes unrewarded, or maybe I don’t make the necessary effort… to make something happen; there is certainly room for improvement in my attitude.

But sometimes it seems that I don’t get much help from my surroundings. The humidity is a factor, as is toothache and lack of proper diet. There isn’t a single restaurant open in downtown Jackson. I dine at a Krystal Burgers on the highway. It would be hard to prepare more unappetizing food, even if one tried. One has to laugh, or groan, when Americans criticize English cooking. The citizens of a country where one can drive for two hundred miles, even along rural routes, and find nothing to eat but the most revolting fast food have no right to criticize the dining practices of any other country, especially one where delicious food is easily available in even the most remote communities.

The unvarying tasteless slop served up at one fast food restaurant after another, the newsless papers, lifeless pap on the radio, the oppressive consistency of every town’s outskirts. There isn’t much left. It’s all history now, constricted by expansion and hammered thin. Your Bourbon, Beale and Broad streets. The past has been sanitized for family consumption. And one day even these days will seem to have been charming.

But I still can’t get enough of what’s left. Up the highway, through various drained little settlements, my once insatiable appetite for desolation dulled; the inner life that once filled out those vacant towns not as rich as it once was; the emptiness within too in tune with the emptiness without.

In the evening I arrive in Paducah, the Quilting Capital of Kentucky, and follow the leafy streets of crumbling brick mansions to the banks of the Ohio. On the levee a man sits on a bench and scrapes mud from the tires of his bicycle. The crash and plunk of skateboarders enlivens the empty main street. A tiny red-brick tamale hut looks promising but it’s closed: I decide to eat there the next day.

There’s nowhere to stay downtown. There isn’t much choice but to dine at MacDonald’s and check in to the Sunset Inn, the cheapest place I can find on the highway.

The next morning one of the Mexicans in the next room exhibits undisguised surliness towards me. He probably thinks I’m rich owing to the rental car. I take coffee at a lunch counter and walk around town, ducking into air-conditioned antique stores in the heat. The tamale hut is still closed.

Bourbon Country, that’s what they call it, but it’s almost impossible to find a bar. Eventually, I find one, with a giant TV screen blasting commercials at an obnoxious volume, and no customers.

It’s hard to reawaken a sense of wonder around here. I fill up on the outskirts of Henderson. The gas pumps very slowly. “Do you have a kink in your hose?” asks the attendant. “Funny you should mention that,” I say, and continue up the slow, twisting river route. Every twenty minutes another anti-abortion billboard and another crummy little town with its tanning salon and video store. I assume that the emptiness of these places is a manifestation of my inner emptiness, but perhaps there’s no psychic exchange going on. Perhaps the emptiness is already there, and will remain after I leave. Perhaps it’s not all about me, after all. How strange to ponder this possibility, having operated under that assumption for so long.

Owensboro is another seething vacant town. I sit on the bluff and gaze down at another river. Smokestacks fume dreamily on the opposite shore but any potential tranquility is ruined by fun-loving people motoring around loudly on some form of water skis.

It’s a relief to find an open store advertising Racing Forms in the window. The little man behind the counter makes no effort to hide his unfavorable impression of me. He notifies me that the Churchill Downs season is over, that Ellis Park is now running. I walk out, fed up with scared and suspicious small-town people who pride themselves upon their non-existent hospitality... their barely suppressed hostility.

“I never seen a person I didn’t love,” said Howard Finster. I wish I could say the same thing.

The agonizingly slow Dixie Highway delivers me into Louisville. I take an evening stroll along the abandoned rows of storefronts on Third Street. I need to lie down.

For over three hours I drive around in search of accommodation. There don’t seem to be any cheap motels in Louisville and I’m not prepared to pay for a more expensive place, as I only need somewhere to lie down for eight hours, and it’s getting late. The cheap motels can be found out by the airport, so I’m told, so I drive to the airport, and find none there.

In a state of great agitation, I drive as far as Shively, Kentucky, where I find the Royal Inn, a frightening place, more housing project than motel. It consists of two floors with an enormous patch of overgrown turf in the middle. The woman at the desk appears to be dying of lung cancer. In the adjoining bar four fat Kentucky girls with frosted hair, wearing shorts, perform a karaoke version of ‘Boot Scootin’ Boogie’ on a small stage. An old-timer gets up and sings “King of the Road.” I lean against a wall, drain my beer and return to my room.

There’s a Hotel Androy on the main street in Hibbing, similar in appearance to the one in Superior, but this one functions as an apartment building for seniors. The one visible sign of the town’s most illustrious native son is a tacky Fifties-style diner called Zimmy’s, presumably named thus in an attempt to lure in the occasional Dylan tourist.

I enter the Sportsmen’s bar and sit at the opposite end of the counter from the locals. Scarface screens on the television above the bar. “You don’t have to do anything,” says an old man to an old woman at a table behind me, “all I’m asking you to do is to sleep with me.”

The barmaid is a vision of loveliness with big sad brown eyes and a Louise Brooks haircut, attired in a short-sleeved black-and-white polka-dot shirt and black pants. She washes glasses on the other side of the counter, directly in front of me. When I order another Budweiser she pushes a bottle of Summit across the counter. “Budweiser gives American beer a bad name,” she says. Then she comes out from behind the counter and plays a game of darts with a woman who, like many small-town Midwestern women, has the appearance of a big city lesbian.

Time passes slowly. It’s only 9.30 and I’m rooted to a barstool. The town’s resident punk takes the seat next to mine. The word ‘Libertine’ is tattooed on his right arm. He’s impressed that I know the meaning of the word, which happens to be the name of his band. There’s a well-known English band with the same name but that doesn’t seem to bother him.

“Women in this town are like parking spaces,” says AJ, “they’re either handicapped or taken. It tells you something about this town. I’m twenty-eight and my girlfriend’s forty-three.”

“Does she have any kids?”

“Yeah, but they all came out C-section, you know, caesarean. That unit ain’t never been stretched. Don’t tell me I don’t know how to pick ‘em.”

AJ formally introduces me to Stacey, the bartender. My mission, of course, is transparent: It’s the same one she was on when she drove into town a year earlier. She arrived alone, in a pick-up truck, knowing nobody, and landed a job in this bar. Dylan’s house can be identified, she says, by the Dorito’s truck parked in the driveway. She keeps coming over to talk and drink with us. “Would you care for a beverage?” she says, “Can I refresh your drink?”

A middle-aged man and two middle-aged women, all wearing blue jackets with the address of a local refrigerator company on the back, enter and take a booth. AJ refers to the locals as “sheep-pimpin’ goat-rapin’.” A loud hairy man behind us keeps shouting unintelligibly. “Are you feeling special tonight?” asks Stacey. “Appropriate,” he replies. His name is Toad and his sobriquet can be explained by his complexion, although Stacey also addresses him as Raskolnikov. “You’re about as baked and cagey as the man himself,” he says to me, referring, presumably, to the man himself.

‘Solitary Man’ plays on the jukebox and Stacey refers to it as “my song.” I’d like to talk to her more but other patrons keep engaging me in conversation. A skinny, sloppily drunk ex-army sergeant called Kevin, attired in an ill-fitting Minneapolis Vikings uniform, plants himself on the neighboring barstool. He is good enough to intercede on my behalf when a large bruiser appears behind me and loudly announces that he wants to “deck the Limey.”

Stacey says that she’s burnt out on men, that her exodus to Hibbing was expedited by the dissolution of a relationship that ended when she discovered that the man she’d been involved with for five years had impregnated another woman with twins. She mentions Echo Holstrom, Dylan’s ‘Girl from the North Country’, and expresses a desire to meet her: Echo, apparently, still lives in the Iron Range and occasionally comes into town.

Stacey continually replenishes my glass with vodka kamikazes and plays ‘Only Happy When It Rains’ on the jukebox. She and Toad dance on the bar. Kevin joins them and collapses into a heap of chairs on the floor. “I’ve never enjoyed myself so much at work,” says Stacey. We linger in the bar until after closing time, talking at one end while Kevin and some other regulars occupy the other.

There are a number of rooms above the bar. Stacey resides in one of them, but it is to somebody else’s room that she invites me, after she shuts the bar down, for the purpose of further conviviality. We climb the rickety wooden stairs at the back of the building, carrying bottles of wine from the bar. “I don’t trust you,” says Kevin, slurring and flailing, barely able to make it. Now he too wants to hit me, but he’s in such an advanced state of inebriation that his threats aren’t too worrying. He seems to resent the attention I’m receiving from Stacey. “He’s got a good vibe about him” says Stacey, in my defense. I appreciated that.

She briefly enters her room, to get something. Through the crack in the door a portion of mattress can be seen on the floor. We proceed to the messy room of her neighbor, Jim, across the corridor, to partake of weed and wine.

Everything is spinning, including ‘John Wesley Harding’ on the stereo. Kevin makes repeated attempts to grab Stacey’s ass until she finally kicks him in the shin and insists he gets out of the seat so she can sit next to me.

How much encouragement do I need, for Mercy’s sakes? When the others leave, I also leave. Goodness knows why. I should have stayed. Madness or cowardice, either way it’s inexcusable.

At 3 a.m. a lone police car drives slowly along the deserted street. I wait for it to pass into the distance before getting into my rental car and driving back to the hotel.

It’s a struggle to get out of bed and out of the room by 11 a.m.. I grab a coffee and a couple of stale muffins at a bakery housed in an old theater but I’m too sick to eat. I find Dylan’s boyhood home and stand on the other side of the street from it for a while, attempting to savor the atmosphere, knowing I’ll never exactly be in this position again.

The clock strikes two as I sit in the library, groggily perusing magazines. Stacey had said, before I foolishly left, that she would be working in the bar until four o’clock this afternoon. I walk the few blocks to Howard, buy a vintage Nelson Algren paperback at the Goodwill store, and enter the Sportsmen’s with the wrong attitude.

AJ is sitting at the bar with his mother, whom I have yet to meet but who seems to know me. She calls out to Stacey, “Look who’s here… he’s back.”

Stacey evinces the same seductive shyness that she did before she started drinking the night before. She leans over the bar and tells a story about driving to Minot, North Dakota just to see what it was like, and finding the lumberjack-type men there so frightening that she didn’t dare leave her motel room.

I’m practically asleep at the counter, drinking tasteless Bud tappers on top of an all-consuming hangover. I should have eaten, it would have put me in better stead. But, really, there are no excuses. Stacey is getting off work in a few minutes; her replacement, Jackie, has already arrived.

I should have walked in with a plan, approached her directly, and asked her to take a walk with me. Nothing could have been sweeter than to walk the cold leaf-strewn streets of Dylan’s hometown with her at the tail-end of a hungover afternoon. That would have been enough… an echo of Echo. But I couldn’t allow myself even that much What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking. I walked out of there, turned my back on a dream, threw it all away..

“It’s been nice meeting you,” she said as I wrote down my phone number. She copied it down on a separate piece of paper, folded it neatly and slipped it into the back pocket of her gray pants.

Out on the highway, I succeed in forcing down half a Subway sandwich. Then I turn around and head back into town, pass Dylan’s house again and drive down Howard one last time. The good people of Hibbing have no idea how magical it was to me, and why should they? I hadn’t realized it myself yet. If anything, they probably viewed me as a slumming opportunistic elitist, and perhaps they wouldn’t be far off the mark.

Too tired, restless, hungry. No excuses. None whatsoever.

Look at a map, find the middle of the country, trace it as far north as possible, keep going, and that’s where Duluth will be found, in a North as distant as the South is deep.

Until the last moment I agonized over it, sitting in the airport surrounded by a hefty plane-load of bland and bulky Midwesterners, seeing all too clearly the advanced state of discomposure that awaited me, compounded by harrowing insomnia, and conscious of having exhausted this self-indulgent, alienation-addicted way of traveling; yet, with nothing further to prove to myself in this arena, continuing to repeat myself, ramming it into a dead end.

As the last call for passengers was announced I hovered around the entrance gate. What could possibly await me in Minnesota? I was under no obligation to make this trip. It wasn’t something that needed to be done. But all the grinding indecision was just another part of the process, something that had to be worked through. I walked like a doomed man through the tunnel, onto the aircraft. Camus had written something about travel being ‘an occasion of spiritual testing.’ I wasn’t feeling up to it.

At least I had a whole row to myself. I stretched out in my winter coat, but no sleep came, as I knew it wouldn’t. A tall woman in knee-high boots was sitting on the other side of the aisle. I looked over at her and down into the darkness of deserts, mountains, and frozen wastes.

I rented a car at the airport and drove north as the fading autumn foliage emerged out of the cold gray dawn, revealing stripped, spidery limbs of trees and others still resplendent with the colors of the dying season, seeing why Minnesota is known as the Land of Lakes. A Saturday morning bluegrass show played on the radio, broadcasting out of Minneapolis. It seemed that I might have come to the right decision after all.

The Midwest is in the perpetual grip of an aversion to style. Duluth is grim grayness, hard sadness; I soon find myself relishing it. Following the usual search, the usual disappointment of finding no old hotels. On the other side of the bay, however, in the town of Superior, Wisconsin stands the Androy, a residential/transient red-brick hotel on the main drag.

The chain mail-clad clerk is reading Camus and listening to Tom Waits. He informs me that there are more bars per capita in Superior than any other town in the country, which isn’t hard to believe. While I’m filling out the check-in form a surly hirsute local stands beside me at the desk, gorging himself from a bowl of Halloween candy and sizing me up in an unmistakably malevolent manner.

I return to Duluth and dine at a malodorous Chinese restaurant. A half-dead rabbit lies in a pile of feces in its cage in a musty second-hand bookstore that’s open late. In the casino I attempt to engage an attractive broken-looking, chain-smoking woman in conversation. She has just won $200 on a one-arm bandit, and couldn’t be less interested in talking to me.

Steam pours through grates, dead leaves blow around the deserted Saturday night streets. A wall sculpture on the side of a building commemorates the 1920 lynching of three black carnival workers by a white mob. It is situated on the opposite side of the street to the lamppost where the lynching took place, outside a bar called Cozy’s.

A naked man in a hoodie looks down at me from one of the windows of the Carter Hotel, another residential place, situated on a steep street leading down to the bay.

Old-timers push their walkers through the lobby of the Greysolon Plaza, piped music box melody fills the air. There’s no shortage of poor old white people in these parts, a breed noticeably lacking in Los Angeles, although I am adding to their number.

A pizza joint with an adjoining bar and stage appears to be the liveliest local nightspot. I stand at the bar, surrounded by couples and chattering groups. A hardcore show, featuring the Dames and Kentucky Chokehold, is taking a long time to get started. I’m reminded of all the shows I attended during my misspent youth, usually alone, always among the first to arrive, standing around unknown and unnoticed, waiting for the show to begin, never part of any scene. London, of course, has an entirely justified reputation as a cold and unfriendly place, as does Duluth.

A stranger in late autumn, in the coldest part of the country, driving across the John A. Blatnik bridge between two blighted industrial towns, is in an ideal state of transient desolation. It doesn’t get much better than this. But I’m not ‘feeling it’.

A raucous Halloween party is in full swing in the bar on the ground floor of the Androy. It looks like much more fun than I’m capable of having. A woman in the elevator thrusts a toffee apple into my hand. I fall asleep while watching junk on television, to be awoken after closing time by the bestial whooping, yelling and crashing around of yahoos in the corridor. From what I can overhear, they’re looking for a party. I prop a chair against the door.

A rusting blackened hulk of obsolete and obscure purpose is almost intimidating to gaze upon, such is the sinister majesty of its decay, as I drive aimlessly around the port terminal, through miles of industrial scenery on the banks of Lake Superior.

The Seaway in West Duluth operates solely as a merchant seaman’s hotel, a home for crusty old salts, some of whom are relaxing in the lobby, in tattered furniture, with Curly’s bar, next door.

On a neighboring side street in the dingy maritime environs of Duluth’s west end my attention is drawn to a bleak and forbidding massage parlor. “Sixty dollars gets you a bath, an adult video and a massage, the rest is on tips,” says the haggard, yellow-toothed blonde in the booth. I proceed no further. Surely these women must work on some of the grisliest men in the country.

The rose bushes are bare in Leif Erikson park, and dead leaves are packed in black plastic trash bags. A sparrow twitches around in an ungathered pile of fallen leaves, eyes frantically darting around, unable to take wing, hopping away when I reach out to help it.

The lights in roadside houses twinkle cozily from within and lakes lie glistening in the frozen darkness of northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. A Styrofoam cup of tea lasts all the way from Duluth to Hibbing, Bob Dylan’s boyhood home. Upon arrival, on a Sunday night in November, I’m predictably disappointed to find that the Hibbing Park Hotel is not a lovingly restored relic, as I’d been led to believe over the phone, but a modern monstrosity; and it’s not on Howard Street, the main drag, but out on the highway. I lower my expectations, but not far enough – and even then, I’m still over-idealizing. Nevertheless, in the absence of alternative accommodations, I check in, and immediately leave, driving the mile it takes to reach downtown, and take as much of a stroll as is possible on such a cold and windy night.

Ravaged industrial landscape and bare trees whip by on the train ride south to Philadelphia. A woman a few seats away asks me for a light. “You look like you smoke,” she says. Something has been missing from my life since I quit.

The spacious majesty of the Philadelphia Museum of Art is impressive in its emptiness. I have the Duchamp room to myself and spend a long time looking through the ‘Etands Donnes’ keyhole, until a group of trainee attendants are led in, who proceed to experience great difficulty suppressing their sniggering amusement at the master’s hauntingly provocative last work.

A bus drops me in the center of town. Within a few minutes I stumble upon one of the last fleabags in town, the Parker. Fifty bucks for a room seems like a lot when the telephone doesn’t work. In the elevator a disheveled aging bachelor (or so I assume) addresses me: “Is loneliness a killer? They say boredom is too. I’m fifty-six years old and I’ve suffered from loneliness and boredom all my life and I’ve never had a heart attack or a stroke.” He laughs loudly as he exits the elevator. There’s a bar on the ground floor, adjoining what’s left of the lobby. I look through the door: a man at the counter gives me a come-hither look.

I walk to the station to retrieve some belongings from the large bag I left in the baggage department; I place them in a smaller bag and return to the hotel. On the street, a tragic wino asks for a light. “You don’t even have a match,” he yells, walking towards me in a threatening manner. “You shithead! What’s going to save your ass, that lousy fucking book you’re carrying?!”

A pink-haired old lady sits in the ticket booth outside a porno theater. Philadelphia, with its narrow, moody streets and row-houses, is a fine city for night-wandering. I walk through the closed-up market area to the triangle of steak sandwich houses on 9^th street, where fish cakes, cheese fries and other disgusting delicacies are sold.

Back at the hotel, a couple of naked men with towels draped around their waists pass by me in the corridor. “I like your shirt,” one of them says.

After a walk down to South street on a crisp sunny winter morning I visit the Mutter museum, a repository of medical curiosities, where a selection of fetuses in varying stages of development makes me thankful that I’ve never knocked anyone up. On the way back to the station I pass the pink-haired lady, still sitting in the porno theater ticket-booth.

the curtain rung is broken,
dusty yellow curtains trail across the filthy carpet

Upon the recommendation of a panhandler, I put up at the Abbey hotel in Baltimore. After viewing a few rooms I opt for room #10, which is marginally less squalid than the others and nearest to the lobby. $45 isn’t cheap, considering... the curtain rung is broken, dusty yellow curtains trail across the filthy carpet, the walls are covered with dents, the TV doesn’t work, there’s no bedside light, and the shower temperature is so volatile that it’s impossible to stand under it for more than a few seconds at a time.

I walk too far, all over town, to the Fells Point area, filled with empty sports bars and other uninviting businesses. I sit in an empty Barnes & Noble bookstore, browsing magazines. On the way back to the hotel I am spat on by a stranger. It wasn’t his fault. I just happened to be walking by while he was spitting.

I engage in some relatively civilized banter with the night clerk’s son, who, throughout his mother’s shift, lounges in an easy chair in the lobby, while a parade of dangerous and diseased-looking characters file up the stairs.

In room #10 I get into bed and begin to masturbate. While engaged in this pleasant pursuit the door shakes and there’s a rattling in the keyhole. I let out a shout to indicate that the room is occupied but the door is pushed open and a black youth stands there, giggling with imbecilic menace. Without a word he closes the door. Flustered, I pull some clothes on and go out to the lobby. There’s a new woman behind the desk; she’s so fat that she can barely move. The intruder is also present, with far-gone hooded eyes, accompanied by a prostitute. He seems peeved that what he refers to as his room is occupied. I ask him if he wants to stay in it. “Yeah,” he says, malevolently. I tell him that it isn’t possible, return to the room and barricade the door with the heavy closet. As I move it a swarm of roaches scurries up the wall.

With all the noise in the lobby, falling asleep isn’t easy. At the top of her lungs, every second sentence, the night clerk yells out “You know what I’m saying?!” I stuff tissue paper in my ears and drift off for a few hours.

The train depot in Richmond, Virginia is situated many miles from downtown. With the help of the phone book and a voluble cab driver I find the Massad, a mostly residential hotel, where rooms rent for $45 a night. The lady at the desk recommends a restaurant on the next block, the 3^rd Street Diner. The comely waitress wears motorcycle boots; the pork chops and rice are delicious, and my appetite for benign decay is satisfied by a walk around Richmond on a February night.

Much atrabiliousness is experienced trying to get out of town in a rental car with no CD player or tape deck; that I haven’t made up my mind which road to take doesn’t help. I settle on the 64-North and stop in Charlottesville at dusk. A beautiful young jogger, dressed in black, smiles at me in a purely joyful manner. The town seems to be filled with down-to-earth, well-adjusted people, and is therefore rather boring.

I had been planning on driving into West Virginia and staying at a motel but I’m diverted by an ancient hulking red-brick building on a hill, towering over the town of Staunton, Virginia: the Stonewall Jackson Hotel.

Some lights are on so I drive around to the back entrance and enter a cavernous lobby with no furniture in it. The night clerk informs me that it still partly functions as a hotel, rooms are $28 a night. I take a room on the fifth floor that commands a view of the town. Through the wide-open door of the room directly opposite mine a wheelchair sits beside the bed, and on the bed itself lies a half-naked crippled midget, watching TV. Throughout the night visitors file in and out of his room.

The hotel seems to serve as a haven for the local mentally ill, many of whom can be found in the basement, lining the corridors, leaning against walls, heads lolling, smoking, striking odd poses, and wandering in and out of an acrid communal room, in which a television flickers in front of an assortment of broken and threadbare furniture.

In the elevator on the way back up a cute grubby towheaded infant is wheeled around in a playpen by her father. I walk out on a cold night. A train roars through the station.

I should have stayed longer. There was nothing to prevent me from doing so. It was highly unlikely that I’d find anywhere better. But for no good reason I felt impelled to keep going. Charming town, too, Staunton. The local custom of serving stewed apples as a breakfast side dish is commendable.

The proprietor of an antique store exhibited great warmth towards me owing to his having served in England during the war, but the 78s I bought from him—Rev. J.C.Burnett, Rev. Nix and Sylvester Weaver—all broke when I knelt on them by mistake.

It takes a long time to cover a short distance along the narrow mountain roads of West Virginia. There’s nothing worth listening to on the radio. The roadside is an endless thicket of bare trees. Five minutes in Monterey, twenty minutes in Elkins, five minutes in Phillipi, twenty minute in Grafton. ‘Be Humble or You Will Stumble’ reads a sign outside a church.

Clarksburg is drained of all vitality. I like the look of it, but those that see me don’t like the look of me. I arrive just in time to make water in the library restroom. A tramp is straining over the basin, emitting a mephitic stench.

Across a bridge an abundance of red brick beckons. A worker is up on scaffolding, fixing the sign above the Greyhound station. Two men acknowledge me outside the Parsons hotel, a residential dump by the look of it. Only two businesses are open on the main street: a tobacco shop, where I buy a candy bar from an unfriendly young man, and the gutted interior of what was once a department store where a woman is attempting to run a restaurant of sorts. I order a cup of tea and she pours some iced tea into a Styrofoam cup and heats it in a microwave.

The river town of Parkersburg is sixty miles away. I thought it would be interesting. It wasn’t. Another downtown turned into another mall. I drive across the bridge into Ohio and back, then head to the interstate conglomeration, dine at a Shoney’s and check into a Best Western.

In the absence of more appealing dining options, I get coffee and apple pie at McDonald’s. The motion-activated faucets in the rest room don’t work, at least not for me. I impose upon a teenage employee as he emerges from one of the stalls and seek his advice as to how to wash one’s hands under such conditions. He places his hands under the faucet and water pours out, but when I do exactly the same thing, nothing happens.

With many different church services to choose from on the radio, I head east. Charleston looks uninviting on a cold Sunday morning and I lack sufficient spirit to explore it. Beckley, Lewisburg, White Sulphur Springs. It’s a relief to return to Virginia.

I’ve been on the road all day. I have seen nothing, I have done nothing. I hold some hope for Lynchburg. It was once the home of Luke Jordan, the blues singer and minstrel show performer who recorded eight sides for the Victor label in the late 20s, including ‘Church Bell Blues’ and ‘Won’t You Be Kind’.

There is an hour of daylight left to savor on a gloomy late winter afternoon. From the mansions on Garland Hill to the warehouse district there is plenty of faded architectural splendor to delight in. On Main street there’s only one place open, a remodeled tavern of sorts: a coffeehouse called Percival’s. A few young people are gathered in a pool room at the back.

“Are you a member of the book club?” asks a tall, attractive girl in tight pants. I reply in the negative. “You should be,” interjects a distinguished-looking professorial type, who happens to be walking by.

“You look like a cross between Mick Jagger and Bono,” says Jessica, the tall girl. “You have the sex appeal of Mick Jagger and the hair of Bono.” After roaming around alone for days on end in varying states of alienation, this is a nice thing to hear from a twenty-year-old beauty in a strange town, and it feels odd to be engaged in conversation with anybody at all.

“But don’t Jagger and Bono have the same kind of hair?” I feebly respond. I bum a cigarette and sit down with her and a couple of her friends. I am charmed by how charmed she is by me, how mystified she is by my appearance in town, that I could just happen to walk into that coffeehouse in that town on a gloomy Sunday evening. She hates it there, in Jerry Falwell’s hometown - the buckle of the Bible Belt. The previous summer, she earned $8000 selling encyclopedias door to door. “I’ll remember you forever,” she says when I leave.

I shouldn’t have left. I drive back to Richmond on a minor highway and put up at the Massad again. Night of the Iguana is showing on late-night TV. “A failure is somebody who doesn’t know an opportunity when he sees one,” opines Shannon, the tormented tour guide played by Richard Burton, as he writhes around madly, crucified in a hammock.

At 6 p.m. the bus pulled out for San Antone. I read the dreadful Faulkner book* all the way. By the time we hit San Antone it was dark. A sign on top of a seven-story building proclaimed The Traveler’s Hotel. I walked towards it, took a look around the empty marble lobby, returned to the bus station to retrieve my bag from the locker, gazed longingly at a beautiful Mexican girl, drank a Coke, played two games of Galaga, returned to the hotel with my bag, and checked into room 520 for a week at $109. I took a shower, jerked off for the first time in almost a week (the last time having been in a Greyhound restroom somewhere in Florida), and fell asleep early.

I rose, unrested, at a relatively civilized hour. The maddeningly loud air conditioner was putrefying the claustrophobic room with malodorous stale air. I alighted from the streetcar near a hat store and bought a twenty-dollar cowboy hat, got a shoeshine on my black winklepickers, and gorged myself on several flavors of ice cream at Baskin & Robbins. Then I found charmingly shambolic bookstore, which—according to a leaflet handed over by the owner, Mr. Norman Brock—is a beloved local landmark. The young guy who works there, Steve, alternates between an English and Texan accent, looks Mexican, and says he’s from Worcester.

I wandered around downtown, couldn’t recall what happened when, not that anything much happened or that it was worth remembering, let alone chronicling, and I still couldn’t figure my way around—where Commerce meets Broadway meets St.Mary’s meets Houston. I retired to an old bar called Logan’s, across the alley from the Alamo, just like the song. I sat in the corner over a few 55-cent Lone Star drafts and read the Dallas newspaper. A bum staggered around the pool table, practicing his shots. I left in an elevated state and dined on tacos at Evangelo’s, and paid with a five-dollar bill with ‘Jesus Saves’ stamped all over it. Some graffitied repartee on the restroom wall read, ‘I drank twelve beers in a row, break that record.’ - ‘Tell your mama I drink a case of beer each day, bitch.’

A fat cop, foundering under the weight of his guns and straps, stopped in his tracks on the opposite side of the riverwalk and stared at me. I stared back and moved on. The riverwalk came to a kind of life, couples took their evening meals in the evening air; an unavoidable sadness fell from somewhere. At Baskin & Robbins I had a double cup: strawberry cheesecake and daiquiri ice. I returned to room 520 and sank into a stupor while reading the Weekly World News. I sought refreshment at a dreadful bar, the Senate, a few doors down. They charged five cents for a box of matches, and it closed at 10.30. I returned to the room. Craving fresh air, I forced the window open. I jerked off, and all too soon fell asleep.

“That’s Angel’s room,” I had been informed by the desk clerk upon noticing a more airy and spacious room on the same floor, that appeared to be unoccupied. The management didn’t seem to understand anything I said. I was the youngest tenant by about fifty years. Sitting on a bed in a cell-like room with a wash basin in the corner and sunlight pouring in through dirty curtains, I caressed the cigarette-burned blanket. I’d been wearing the same pair of black trousers for three weeks. In order to save twenty dollars I had forfeited a bathroom. They didn’t have a washing machine at the hotel, and the nearest laundromat was miles away. Nevertheless, I walked out, taking my rancid clothes and rancorous humor with me. A jumpy Mexican started talking to me on the street; he asked me if I was coming from the unemployment office, and when I answered in the negative he asked if I’d just been to the blood bank. I waited twenty minutes for a bus on Broadway before giving up. I returned to my squalor and lay sulking from a faraway place on an unmade bed. I smoked a few drags of the jay that the Indian gave me.

It’s nasty stuff but I immediately feel the benefit. I go out again and wander around in a heady haze. Steve, the young guy, isn’t at Brock’s bookstore, nor is old man Brock, but I find another eight boxes crammed with vintage postcards, mostly rubbish, and sift through them all. It takes ages but I find some cheap and rare treasures. By the time I leave I’m weighed down with grogginess and every step is a drag as I make my way to Luby’s, a cafeteria full of tempting delights, cooked and presented with care, and priced reasonably. I consume a lunch of ground steak with rice, some kind of exotic battered vegetable, fruit salad, and lemon meringue pie. I visit Brock’s again. It really is a dreadful place, filled with piles of useless and overpriced literary junk.

Following a visit to the library and a double ice cream cup on the riverbank, I feel nauseous, and the only way out is in, so I burn some more leaves at the hotel and take off, once again in elevated spirits. The beautiful battered blonde is behind the bar at Logan’s. I play ‘City of New Orleans’ by Willie Nelson three times on the jukebox. The other bar-lady is thrusting at the pinball machine. I lean against the pool table and drink two bottles of Pearl. A bunch of grim-looking killers walk in and start up a game of pool. I move to a table as Brenda Lee’s ‘I Want To Be Wanted‘ trails through the smoke-filled air.

An old man sitting at a table diagonally opposite keeps staring at me. He wears red shorts and a red cap, his face scrunched up and toothless, a ruddy compressed mass of alcoholic venosity. At first I think he’s just being friendly but as he stares he points a greasy finger toward his mouth and motions me over. I don’t understand a mumbling word he says. Finally, I grasp that he wants to treat me to a meal at Church’s Fried Chicken. I politely decline. Back at my table I notice that the old goat has his hands underneath the table, placed on his crotch, and that he is rubbing his most secret parts as he keeps eyeing me and pointing his finger at his mouth.

This relentless ogling is a little unsettling. I leave and take a long walk around downtown. I find a perfect old hotel called the Navarro, with a comfortable lobby filled with old furniture, where the tenants can relax, unlike the bare marble floor of the Traveler’s lobby, and I wish I was staying there. I eat a Babe Ruth and some Starbursts and then, ironically, hit Church’s for a couple of pieces of chicken. I ride the streetcar down to the farmer’s market and walk about there for a while. I play a couple of games of pinball in an arcade, but the three-ball limit dulls my love of the game.

Next to the Aztec theater, where The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which I’ve already seen at least ten times) is showing on re-release, a middle-aged black man approaches me and asks if I have any rolling papers, which I don’t. He then asks if I smoke and says he’ll give me a taste before I decide if I want to buy some. First, we have to go to the Hyatt hotel, where he works. I lean against a balcony by the river, waiting for him to return. When he does he hands a bag to me, saying it’s worth more than ten bucks and that he has to break a note to come up with change. I give him my twenty dollars, and he leaves the goods with me for security. A minute later, in full knowledge that I’ve been ripped off, I open the bag and find that it’s stuffed with oregano. I feel kind of pleased about that. I walk back to Logan’s and sit at the bar, listening to ‘City of New Orleans’ and swigging a Pearl.

Back at the hotel, I have a long conversation with two of the management boys in the lobby, who tell me, among other things, that the cops are ‘cool’ here, and that work is easy to come by. They furnish me with the address of a firm of decorators. I give up on Walker Percy’s The Movie-Goer and read the first thirty pages of The Scapegoat by Strindberg before falling asleep.

I rode the streetcar down to the farmer’s market and bought some fruit

I left the lights on and kept waking up and not bothering to turn them off, awoke in good spirits, showered down the hallway, and rode the streetcar to the farmer’s market, where I bought some fruit. When I returned to my room there was a maintenance man there, securing the hated air conditioner into the window. The maid had seen fit to report that the window was open. “If the window is open, the air conditioner will fall out,” says the maintenance man. But the unit wasn’t even working, and the window wouldn’t open.

After he left, I tried to force it open again. I tried everything. What I needed was a screwdriver. There was no fresh air in there. With all the accumulated tobacco smoke and dirty clothes, it was difficult to breathe properly. The only potential relief came from the ceiling fan, which made too much noise. On the few days that the window had been open my pleasure in the surroundings had been greatly enhanced. When I informed the choleric old sod behind the desk downstairs about the situation, he said “What d’you need an air-conditioner for in this weather?”

‘Eat Here and Stay Young... We serve the finest chop suey in the city’ reads the faded lettering on the window of the Shangri La on Alamo. The ancient waitresses are so slow that the food is cold by the time it reaches one’s table. The chop suey is inedible and my can of Falstaff is encrusted with grime, but it’s pleasant to sit in a torn red vinyl booth by the window.

A Mexican couple at a bus stop took an interest in me. The guy had five crucifix earrings dangling from his lobes, the girl had a freshly inflicted scar torn across her wrist. A troupe of young ballerinas emerged out of a building on Alamo as I was passing. One of them turned around and looked at me. There then occurred an incident that although it took place long ago and far away, is too precious to ever be sullied by the written word.

I bought a screwdriver at a dollar store and returned to Logan’s. Upon seeing me enter the silver-haired bartender went straight to the cooler and grabbed me a bottle of Pearl. She was wearing a sweatshirt with the word ‘pony’ printed on each arm. I sat at the bar, the youngest and only solitary customer, and watched with interest as she adjusted her pack of Pall Malls into the right place on the counter and carefully placed the lighter in the correct position on top of it. An old guy walked up to me and said, “You should look happy, that’s a fine hat you got, son.”

I played ‘City of New Orleans’ twice on the jukebox, and a couple of rounds of pinball. So what? I left and walked around for a few hours before returning to the hotel. When I got out on the fifth floor the guy who was residing in the room opposite mine got in. I liked the look of him; he was the only other young person in the place, a healthy young man. I unscrewed the air conditioner from the window frame and placed it on the floor. Then I sat by the window reading Strindberg and eating grapes, with the sound of the traffic and a cool breeze blowing in.

* The Private World of William Faulkner (Avon Books, 1954)

I curled up against the world as we entered Florida along the Gulf Coast—ugly, imposing and vast—a full moon slowly moving along the frame of the windscreen. Vast monolith condos loomed along the gulf, black dunes and a black sea, and the full moon shining over it. I was socially ostracized, thankfully, as my fellow travelers blabbered on behind me, endlessly spewing forth their senseless exchange. There was a Swede, a New Yorker, and a jabbering wretch on his way back home to Daytona, having failed elsewhere, who kept saying, “It’s a trip.”

In Pensacola the boys were pulled over by the cops outside the bus station. I shuddered, played a few games of Black Knight pinball and got back on the bus, expecting the worst: through Panama City, through huge cities the names of which I forget, names I’d never heard before, vast unknown sprawl in the night.

Tallahassee bus station, midnight to 7 a.m.. Desolate, desultory, and painless. I sat with a 65 year-old bull-baiting enthusiast called Andrew Martin. He was on his way home to a ten year-old town in Florida called Spring Hill, where his girlfriend, a mountain woman from Kentucky, of similar age, awaited him. He was engaging, funny, cheerful, and he carried a gun; he looked like Ed Gein in his later years. He thought that he stank, so he went to the men’s room to rub himself down, came back with his shirt still off and applied deodorant to his rancid pits. A drifter with fat ankles and a curiously winning way stood menacingly outside the glass doors for about ten minutes. Then he entered, spread himself out on the floor and told his story—how he hit the Northern cities over the course of three weeks, that Jacksonville is a shithole but there’s a cool bar near the bus station called Lola’s. The night caretaker, Stu, an evil-looking but charming ex-marine, would stop and talk as he went about his business, cleaning the buses. Various black queens wandered in to drink from the water fountain, one of whom pointed at me and said, “Don’t he look like Boy George?” A leviathan ex-wrestler also dropped in occasionally for no discernible reason other than he was stranded and broke and looking for a way out. But mostly it was just myself, Andrew Martin, and an old black man flopped out asleep on one of the plastic TV seats all night long.

A woman who works at the bus station showed up and strongly warned us against setting forth while it was dark outside, seeing as how a couple of “n----s set fire to two girls” a few weeks earlier, but at 5 a.m. Andrew and I went out in search of breakfast. We walked up and down the strip. The restaurant we had been told about wasn’t open, neither was anywhere else. The Spanish moss drooled in the early morning darkness, and police cars slowly cruised by, solitary wayfarers roamed, and I felt the sweaty handle of Andrew’s heavy bag sagging in my hands as I relieved him of the weight. On the subject of the murderous firebugs, Andrew said “They’re not allowed to do that.” It was funny the way he kept saying that, and he meant it too.

We were obliged to return to the bus station for a mostly inedible breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage, hash browns, toast and coffee, as the canteen filled up with the ejected passengers on a rest stopover from a westbound bus. The old black guy got up from the floor and turned on one of the pay-televisions (attached to the seat): hurricane Blanche was raging up the coast. I read the morning paper. Another bus spilled forth its flotsam. A beautiful black woman wearing a blue suit sat quietly to my left. Andrew kept pointing at people and saying they were “mountain people,” and how he ought to know because he went up there and married one. I couldn’t catch the beautiful black woman’s eye. Andrew wrote down his address on a scrap of paper and invited me to stop by some time.

The bus trip was a complete drag. I was the drag. “Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee” on a cold and lonely Saturday morning, the moon on its way back over the globe. I headed straight to the Gridiron at 7am for coffee at the counter before heading off in search of hotels. For two hours I walked high and low, mostly low, and found nothing, because there was nothing to find. Like so many downtowns across America, all the old hotels are no more. The Hotel Tennessee next to the bus station is no more; the Lorraine Hotel was closed; even the Y, viewed as a last resort, was closed indefinitely.

The sun took a long time to come out. Some old winos were drinking some ‘cheap shit’ in an alleyway. They cadged cigarettes off me and as I walked off one of them said, “He don’t look like he’s strong enough to hold himself up.” I asked a number of people if they knew where any old hotels were, but no one did. I sought the advice of an old guy who looked as if his forehead had been sliced off. Finally, presented with no alternative, I was forced to forsake my quest. I decided to spend the day in Memphis and leave on a night bus to Dallas. I read the local newspaper over coffee in a Kress luncheonette and wandered along the railroad tracks by the river. At 11 a.m. I went to the Bon Ton restaurant, just like last time. The saddest forkful of whatever happened to be dangling on the end of that cold steel fork, which happened to be trout.

The bookshop on the square wasn’t open yet. I sat in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, leafed through the current issue of the glossy Memphis magazine and learned that Cybill Shepherd, a Memphian, recorded an album of local songs called Vanilla. A cop at the bus station gave me directions to Graceland. Strange, dreamy music, punctuated by a voice promoting some kind of religion, blasted from a loudspeaker in an adjacent parking lot as I waited at a bus stop outside the Trailways station. A black man marched up to me with a demoniacal gleam in his eye, and looking as if he had every intention of mugging me, demanded “Cash.” Then he held out his hand, said his name was Ricky and that he didn’t mean any harm, that he needed some money for his bus fare. It was an ingenious trick, and I gave him some.

After repeatedly being asked if I wanted to score by various parties, I couldn’t take it anymore and walked up to the next bus stop, which happened to be opposite the Greyhound terminal. Another young black man attached himself to me. He was friendly and advised me to clean up my appearance, my disheveled hair being the main cause of this advice. He ranted on about what a nowhere redneck town Memphis is, how it’s years behind the times and the bus service is fucked, and there’s a new bill about to be passed that will do away with the transit system altogether.

Memphis was a huge ugly sprawl, as I discovered on the bus ride to Elvis Presley Boulevard. I bought a ticket for the Graceland tour and waited with the others for my number to be called over the PA before I could board the allocated bus and be driven across the road to Graceland. Only the ground floor was open as Elvis’s aunt was still residing on the upper level. The guides, one to each room, introduced themselves by first name and delivered their over-rehearsed speeches. There was one girl in my group, a brunette with eyes full of mystery and a big ass, that I developed a fleeting crush on. The Jungle Room, the Trophy Room, the cars. I fell asleep in front of a ten-minute film. Then we all formed a line in the Garden of Meditation, waiting to pay our respects at the family graves.

Eventually I found a bus stop and a car pulled up containing a friendly couple whom I’d noticed earlier when they had also been walking outside Graceland, checking out the thousands of inscriptions and poems from fans all over the world that cover every square inch of the surrounding walls, testifying to the fact that no other entertainer has inspired such love from the masses. They offered me a ride back downtown, wherever I wanted to go. They were on a business trip from Chicago and had refused to enter Graceland, considering it too much of a rip-off and not in the spirit of the great man’s life on earth at all - ‘Elvis the humanitarian’ was the most propounded message on the tour. They dropped me off opposite the bus station, where I made sure that my bag was still in the locker and had an awkward exchange with the cop who’d given me directions. He asked me if I’d taken in Elvis’ tour airplane ‘Lisa-Marie’, named after his daughter: I hadn’t.

I returned to the square, hoping the bookstore was still open. It was, thankfully, and they still had the same copy of Esquire I’d seen there last April, containing within it the entire script of Two Lane Blacktop. I walked along the river, knowing it would be for the last time in a long while, had a beer in Hazel’s bar, and in a final spate of greed, indulged in a burger at the Gridiron. ‘Always On My Mind’ played on the jukebox. I settled in the bus station cafeteria and read the Two Lane Blacktop screenplay, which shut out everything else and fit the mood perfectly.

At 9pm the bus pulled out of Memphis and I looked down on the black waters of the big river. I didn’t want to leave the South. The bus was packed again and I was seated, for once, on the left side, next to an old black lady from Memphis, on her way to Houston. She ate a box of Colonel Saunders as if she were picking at a loaf of bread. Behind me a henpecked man pitifully attempted to defend himself against a female voice that continually berated him for his bad habits: drinking, smoking, and so on. Throughout the scolding I pictured his antagonist as thin and sexy. When I finally laid eyes on her I was surprised to find her obese and plain.

I was greatly looking forward to spending time in Austin and optimistic that I’d be able to find a lodging there to suit my modest requirements. I slept off and on, using my denim jacket as a pillow. We arrived in Dallas at 6.30 on Sunday morning and there was an hour’s wait before the bus to Austin set off. I had a seat to myself and read the Dallas Sunday newspaper. There was a magnificent gothic building in the middle of Waxahatchie. At a rest stop in Waco I walked around the block a few times and stared at an exquisite red brick relic of a hotel and a vast white Freemason’s Lodge.

Austin wasn’t as old as I’d hoped. Having settled into the continual fatigue of being in transit that is so easy to live with and vastly preferable to the majority of alternatives, I combed downtown and found nothing. I visited a bookstore and as an excuse for speaking to the girl behind the counter, inquired as to when they received the Sunday Los Angeles Times. Again, I asked around about cheap hotels, and again there weren’t any; there didn’t even seem to be a skid row. I was directed over a bridge, to the other side of the Colorado river, and after walking for what seemed like hours, finally found the motel in question, where a fat man behind a mosquito net told me there were no vacancies.

Sadly, I resigned myself to pulling out for San Antone. I waited at a bus stop as hundreds of cars drove by. What they said about Texas women seemed to be true. I skipped the next Greyhound to San Antone, hoping something might come up. I returned to the bookstore. The girl wasn’t there. ‘Different Drum’ played on the radio. I took it as a sign. I saw a book by Thomas Merton. I took it as a sign. I read about Harry Partch in an old magazine. I wandered around and around, had a happy hour cerveza in a bar which had photographs of Cadillacs all over the walls. In another bookshop I bought a dreadful old paperback called The Private World of William Faulkner for fifty cents.