Passenger(42)

I head east through midtown, from the corner of Madison and Cathedral to the light rail station on Howard. I sit on a bench and watch people file on and off the tram. Their faces are grim, stoic, statuesque. There is dignity to them. There is compassion. Watching them, I am aware that I am an outsider. I cannot look so dignified and compassionate in my absence of self. Unlike them, I have been rendered useless—broken, ruined, wrecked, discarded. There is more dignity in their desire of the day-to-day than in my search for the impossible. Is this all it takes? A few weeks and I have given up? A day in late summer glaring on a computer screen cripples my momentum?

In The Odyssey, it takes Odysseus something like twenty years to get home to Penelope and Telemachus. When you don’t know who you are or where you’ve been, you realize you could have easily been searching for your way home—for your own Penelope and Telemachus—for equally as long. For a whole lifetime. For a lifetime of lifetimes.

As the tram pulls away, I am left alone with a squad of dirty pigeons pecking at a discarded bit of pretzel.





*





Hours later it is coming on dusk. My feet burn from retracing the Green Line and my lungs are sore from breathing in nothing but cold air all day. As I mount the steps to my apartment building I am caught off guard by two sharp bleats on a car horn.

“Mozart!” Clarence calls from the cab of his rusted red pickup. I notice someone has taken a thick swipe of white paint over his name on the side of the vehicle. “Hey, Mozart! Been sniffing around for you all day, man!”

The truck sputters and dies in the street. Clarence hops from the cab and bounds over the curb and up the porch steps. He nearly crashes into me in his excitement.

“Hey, Clarence.”

“Boy,” he says. “You look like shit. You need to take better care of yourself.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard.”

“Hey,” he says, “you need to do me a favor, yeah?”

“What?”

“Here.” He slaps the truck keys into my hand. “The truck, bro. Have it. Take it.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t want it. I’m through.”

“Through with what? Driving?”

“Hauling junk,” he says. I quickly envy his childlike elation. “I’m through, bro. Take the truck, keep it. And here.” He pulls a frayed nylon wallet with a Velcro tab from the rear pocket of his jeans. “Take this, too.”

“It’s your wallet, Clarence…”

“Yeah, man, but not no more. I’m through with it all.”

“Why are you talking crazy?”

“What’s crazy about it? See, I got to thinking, and in thinking, I start wondering why you should be the only one so goddamn lucky to start over. Experience is cheap, so I can have as much of it as I want. So, see, I’m doing it now, too. Just like you.”

“Clar—”

“And quit it!” Laughing, he holds up one finger. “That ain’t my name no more, either!”

“Then what is it?”

“Don’t know. Haven’t gotten a new one yet. But I will, jus’ like you did. And it’ll be something good. You’ll jus’ see, won’t you, Mozart?”

“Clarence, I don’t want your wallet and I certainly don’t want your truck.”

“Ain’t my truck,” Clarence—or whoever—shouts, already bounding down the porch steps and strutting up St. Paul. “Ain’t got my name on it. You see my name anywhere on it, Mozart? Because I don’t.” And he laughs again as he one-foots a hopscotch grid on the sidewalk. “No, sir! I sure don’t!”





*





On the street, narrow-eyed children, wise beyond their years, eyeball me like the stranger their parents have always warned them about.





*





I stock my medicine cabinet with toothpaste, a toothbrush, some roll-on deodorant. I buy some canned soups and stack them in a pyramid on my countertop. I buy clean socks and underwear and even a new shirt, which I wear for the first time at The Neighborhood one evening. We play a double set and, during intermission, Maxwell and Dougie sneak off with their women. Timmy Donlon sets saucers of Old Bay along the bar and rounds up a group of thick-chested, overly confident men. Winner gets a free pitcher, Timmy Donlon hollers over the crowd, and each overly confident man is provided with a plastic drinking straw. There is an iron bell over the bar, rung when a tip is more than generous, that Timmy Donlon rings now. The overly confident men, a half-dozen in all, jam the straws up their noses and begin snorting the spicy seasoning from the saucers. Two men immediately tap out, coughing and sputtering, red-faced and doubling over as if from a roundhouse to the stomach. Bleary-eyed and trying to laugh, both men dump an arm around the other’s shoulder and slink in a defeated fashion to the far end of the bar. Meanwhile, the others continue to snort down the Old Bay, and the crowd, which is sizeable for a weekday, cheers them on. Maxwell Devine, uncharacteristically jubilant, has returned from his romp upstairs; he sits behind his kit and kicks off an up-tempo beat that compliments the event. The crowd claps and a few women clamber to tabletops to shake their asses. I turn around on my piano stool and jump right into “Flight of the Bumblebee,” which fits perfectly with Maxwell Devine’s drumbeat, and this sends the crowd roaring.