The Bohemian Experiment

I

I step into the lobby, squinting at the sudden abundance of florescence. It seems hideously bright, like those lights they throw on the accused in a cop drama. I half expect a balding man in a suit to take off his coat, roll up his sleeves and tell me,
“If you tell the truth now, things will be easier…”
“Yes, fine, I did it, but I didn’t plan to, you see…it was a crime of passion. I know from watching Law and Order this type of offense is less serious. What man hasn’t, at some point, acted impulsively? I’m just like you, see…it could easily be me loosening my tie, asking the questions. Come on man, give a guy a break…”
“Sir? May I help you?”
The voice comes from behind a desk, produced by one of those blond, round, low-income American women whose age is nearly impossible to determine.
“Sir, breakfast doesn’t’ start til’ 8 a.m.
I’ve been standing in the dining area, idly handling a miniature box of cereal. I haven’t spoken in nearly a day and when I reply, “Yes, of course…” it sounds like I’m shouting at her. I see fear in her eyes, the perception of danger at this swarthy out-of-stater gripping Frosted Flakes, yelling at her from across the lobby.
I set the high-sugar enriched corn product down and stride cautiously to the desk. She hides behind one of those tight-lipped smiles that only narrowly masks discomfort.
“I need a room…one suitable for sleeping.”
I try to discern if I’m still yelling.
She smiles awkwardly.
“Is it just you tonight, sir?”
Sensing that my NE twang might frighten her, I merely nod.
Speech is not an ally tonight.
“Sir, it’s $39.99 per night.”
I grunt, reach for my wallet and remember it’s in the car. I point to the parking lot and turn out my pockets, hoping she’ll understand. As I step outside I take inventory of the out-of-state plates. On the interstate cars past east and west, motoring to some destination, setting a course towards the satiation of some need, all of us sharing Davenport, Iowa at 3 a.m…never to know each other, never to know the outcome of even a chance meeting…all ghosts, floating across the phantasmal plains, acting on the perception that something must be done to gain peace, that we’re somehow doing the right thing.
The cool prairie air is refreshing. I gaze out across the dark flatness, picturing myself as just a small dot on the surface of this vast landscape, the view panning out to all of the contiguous United States, then North America, the Western hemisphere, the globe, the planet suspended amongst a backdrop of infinite blackness. Some find the idea of feeling so small to be overwhelming, even depressing, that for all the self-importance of their actions, they barely even register on the grand scale of the universe. Myself, I always found the feeling to be liberating. All pressure was off.
I stand in the parking lot, eyes closed, basking in my insignificance, feeling the unbroken winds sweep across me, across us, knowing that if I share anything with the people lying vertical on starched, earth-toned motel bedding and sitting at 90 degree angles, foot depressing the accelerator, it’s that the importance of what we’re doing is greatly imagined.

The room has the same crass, homogenous attempt at charm as the lobby, a bland sterility that always struck me as uniquely American. It has likely been cleaned by another tick-like woman. The sheets have no doubt absorbed the semen of a traveling water-filtration salesman on his way to Wichita. I choose the bed with a slightly skewed angle of the television, thinking it’s less likely he wanked it here.
It’s nearly 3:30. I’m on the brink of dead-tired and lucid a point where it’s either sleep or smoke dope and navigate the doldrums of near-dawn Iowan basic cable. The latter strikes me as so depressing that sleep becomes the easy choice.
I’ve done over 1000 miles today. The desperation to put distance between myself and home had seemed to manifest itself as a tangible creature that was pursing me west. When stopping for gas or to rest I kept checking over my shoulder as if IT were lurking on the horizon. The miles had passed in a string of flashing white lines and gradually flattening landscape that didn’t seem to have a definitive beginning or end. Images from the drive were burned into my head, but they might as well have been gotten from a book.
I wonder why things that should be memorable aren’t and why the memories I do have don’t seem real.
It’s possible I don’t exist at all.
Flashes of the kids song, “..merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream…” float through my head, sung hauntingly by children who don’t grasp the truth of what they’re saying, who may not until, years later, they find themselves in the midst of a vast plain, potentially lying in another man’s semen, knowing how they got there only theoretically.

II

I call depression the black hole.
It’s not that you feel like dying, more like you don’t particularly feel like living. The strange part is that, however unpleasant, its sort of hard being sure that you are depressed, like that joke with the fish, the punch line: “what’s water?” and its kind of like, “what’s depression?” because its not some noticeable thing-it is reality-a flat toneless alternate reality, an old black and white movie. And it’s not like depression is a childhood rash that is caught once and that’s it. Depressed people get depressed. Depressed people are depressed.

In a way it’s sort of a relief finding out you’re depressed, realizing there’s a reason why you never really laughed that hard or smiled too much or loved anyone as much as you thought you probably should, why you thought the world was generally kind of shit and in a way never really cared about anything, because it was a bit like nothing was ever real, it all felt like anesthetized skin. It’s why everything is just a little sad, not in a sob and get it out kind of way, but in a that’s just the fucking way life is, man, way. When something sad actually happens the world feels heavy, pushes you down and you just want to sleep, because you don’t quite want to die but you don’t quite want to be awake.

I don’t want to be awake now, Saturday night, sitting in my room, thinking that I used to have a girlfriend and a job while now I just have a dull emptiness that sits slightly above my stomach. I’m breaking up weed on my old Star Wars plate. I take a Rizla out of the blue pack, fold it into a canoe shape, and place the herb inside. Next I pinch in the ends a little bit and in one motion roll it up, lick the gum, and seal it shut. Finally I twist one end to make a sort of fuse for lighting and place a little piece of cardboard in the mouth end to make a filter.

“Come on in my office,” he’d said to me. The boss’s office is like a Don’s office in a mobster flick. You always go in there to get good news or bad news. The boss man always delivers good news or bad news, like God in scripture. It seems what isn’t good or bad isn’t much worth talking about.
He said to have a seat and the he told me that he didn’t need me anymore. Of course, it hadn’t come out in exactly those words. There’d been the usual assurances that, “It’s not that I want to get rid of you, but right now I just can’t keep you on…unfortunately your position is expendable.” My position, not me, is what he said, but it feels as though the latter is true. It was pretty much the same as what she said. “We’ll let you know if anything opens up again” meaning the same as, “Let’s still be friends.”

It’s a little past eleven o’clock. I flick the lighter’s igniter, hold the end of the joint over the flame and take a couple of small puffs to get it going. I hold the J in one hand and the remote in the other, flicking through the channels to find some proper stoned fodder. I flip to PBS, hoping to find something. I’m in luck: NOVA is on. A scientist with a pretty serious beard and aviator-type frames is talking about the scientific implications of something vs. nothing. All scientists seem to have horrendous taste in glasses. Dr. Spencer Smith, Physicist, M.I.T., is in the tail-end of his explanation of why it’s easier for something to exist than nothing. According to him, it’s physically unnatural for nothing to exist. Dr. Smith is trying to put into simple terms what probably looks more like a math equation in his head. He summarizes by saying that something is more plausible than nothing because nothing is unstable. “The closest physical phenomenon we have to nothing is the black hole, which eats up everything around it. But even a black hole, which is a sort of growing, swirling nothingness, will eventually grow so big that it becomes unstable. The universe is essentially seeking stability, which it attains in the form of matter. Therefore, you could say it’s in the universe’s interest to produce something.”
Math is one of the languages of the universe. When I’m feeling down it helps to think in detached mathematical terms. I want to ask Dr. Smith about the black hole inside of me. I feel certain he could write up an equation to explain depression, that scientifically it isn’t evil or sinister, it’s just one phenomenon among many. The universe doesn’t have a conscience. God doesn’t even have a conscience. Only people. I imagine Dr. Smith would tell me something like, “Son, life is simply inertia. People get up each day and carry on, hoping for something to alter their path and put them on course to a future which is better than the present. You simply need a force to redirect you in the frictionless void of depression.”

I  take a drag off of the joint and blow smoke out of the window next to my bed.   Once you’re stoned it’s hard to say exactly how it is you feel better, or if you do at all.  The best time is right before you get high because you think once you do, you’ll feel better.  I get high because if I don’t, I’m left with the reality that I’d rather not feel the way I feel.
I pay fifteen dollars a gram to not feel how I feel.

NOVA is over.   A big ash has fallen on my crotch because I was so absorbed in the program. Smoke hangs in the air, looking like clouds in places where the light hits it at a certain angle. I flip next to the Discovery Channel which is airing a BBC nature documentary. I like these shows because they remind me of the savage realities of nature, that while the universe seeks balance, it does through upheaval. Change is the way stability is ironically reached. The universe is a fractal and I am just a self-similar piece of the irregular whole struggling to create something out of nothing. But to due so I must change…I need a personal supernova…a metaphysical big bang…
The narration of David Attenborough sounds like a voice-over of the non-conscience of the universe, of God, explaining the brutal struggles of nature in a neutral tone.
“After separating a young impala from the pack, the lead lion closes in. The impala has speed, the lion endurance. If it slips up, the pride will feast.”
I try to discern if the impala looks scared but I can’t tell. I’m sure even if it is, it doesn’t perceive fear in the same way that I do. It probably only knows that it needs to run fast.
Just as it seems the prey has opened up a safe lead it stumbles and within seconds the lion has sunk long claws into its hindquarters and closed jaws around its neck. The tragedy of the event is something I project. There is nothing inherently sad about it. The lion must eat so the impala must die. Not even it feels sad over its demise. I yearn for the young buck’s outlook on life. I pray for its blind, unthinking acceptance. I’d rather suffer the merciless fate of a beast a million times over rather than the self-conscious, self-pity of a man.

I take the last few drags of the joint and snuff it out in a candle.  The house feels like a tomb. I can’t get the image of the lion’s face covered with impala blood out of my head. Outside something crashes in the bushes, reminding me that here, now, in the darkness of the night the unmerciful rhythm of nature moves on. Undoubtedly at this moment, right outside my window, dozens of creatures are locked into a life and death struggle. It makes me feel a little better that I don’t have to live in constant fear of getting eaten, but I fear that I am ultimately as important as some creature whose biomass is recycled as energy just so the universe can go on existing .  I’m scared that the black hole inside me is the black hole of existence.   I fear that  Dr. Smith has it all wrong, nothing is the natural state and everything that exists is a cosmic aberration, and if that’s true then I might as well get lost in the nothing of joints and depression and self-pity and paralysis.  I have the suspicion that the nothing of not me is no more important than the something of me.

III

“I think you’re, like, depressed. Seriously. It’s like, you’re really negative about everything.” She pulls the crust off of her garlic bread and dips it into her pasta’s sauce.
“You’re paying, right? Remember you promised to take me out the other weekend, but we didn’t go so this can be to, like, make up for it.” I resist the urge to slap her and call her a cheap bitch. She takes the piece of garlic bread she’s de-crusted and squeezes it a little. The oils run together and dribble onto her fingers.
The waitress drops the bill on the table, smiles and goes back through the swinging doors into the kitchen.
“You were totally checking her ass out.”
It doesn’t seem worth denying.
“So you know that internship I applied for in New York, at the advertising firm? Well, I got it.”
I take what is left of my potatoes and flatten them out on the rim of the plate. I want her to acknowledge how smooth I’ve gotten them.
I smirk.
The silence is not a tactic.
“Well, I accepted it. I’ve always wanted to live in New York, and it’s a really good agency. It’s such an opportunity for me.”
The power in the relationship had long ago shifted to her, meaning she had less to lose were it to end. To me, being in a relationship makes it feel like I somewhat have my shit together. At least I’m a capable enough male to attract a mate.
I look at the bill and try to calculate the total in my head.
”Seriously, are you even like, listening? Do you have anything to say about what I just told you?”
I can’t be sure if I do or not. The emptiness I feel seems to be aware only of itself.
“I was also thinking it’d be best if I do this on my own. I don’t want to be tied down to anything. It wouldn’t be fair to me or you. I mean, maybe you can come visit me. It’s not like I want to stop talking. Let’s just see how we both feel when I get home.”
I carve a geometric pattern into the potatoes. It looks a bit like ancient Sumerian runes.
“I leave for New York in two weeks. I don’t want to not see you, but it may be harder, you know? I mean, it’s not like we can pretend I’m not going away, that things are normal.”
She hasn’t used the words ‘breaking up.’
I think about what the waitress with the nice ass is doing and realize how a restaurant is all these different worlds depending on one’s role: patron, wait staff, cook, dishwasher, manager, hostess, but nobody ever really considers another’s because they’re wrapped up in their personal universe. Nobody’s reality can be felt by anybody else, which goes a long way towards explaining human relations. I have all of these ideas in my head, but to somebody else I’m just a body. A lump of flesh. Not them.
“I don’t know what else to say right now. I should probably go. Just think about things, OK? Let’s talk in a couple of days.” She stands up and puts on her coat. As she walks by she puts her hand on my cheek and looks at me sadly, then leans in and kisses me not quite passionately, but more than a peck. “I’m really going to miss you.”
It’s not until I get home later and lay down on my bed that I start to cry, and even then it feels like my body is doing it on its own, as if I have no say in the matter.

IV

I’ve just arrived in Denver. It’s eleven p.m. I’m sitting in my sister’s basement trying to get my head around the fact that I’ve just seemingly teleported across two time zones and 2000 miles. I am cognizant of the vast distance that passed beneath me but it doesn’t feel like I’ve actually traveled it. I know that I departed from New Hampshire nearly forty hours ago, pulled away from one mountain range, plunged down through an immense, flat valley, and stopped in the shadow of another mountain range. Everything else seems uncertain; it may or may not have happened. I’m here, now, is the only thing I’ sure of, but even that has a dreamlike quality.
I arrived to the usual fanfare of hugs and smiles and, “how was your trip?” to which everybody always replies, “good” or “fine” when they’re actually thinking, “I don’t have a fucking clue, now that you mention it.”
I feel like a wild animal brought in off the streets. I creep cautiously around, sniffing at things, deciding if they’re safe. I fight the urge to urinate in the corner of the room and mark it as mine. Either way, this place is my home now. I’m not sure if I like it, but at least there’s free HBO.
Logically, sleep makes sense, but I know it’s not possible right now. The belongings which stuffed my trunk and were piled up in the backseat, nearly cutting off all visibility, are scattered around me, half-unpacked. I decide to start putting everything away and hope sleep overtakes me before too long. Whenever I feel lost I make things neat and tidy so that it seems like I have control at least over my own little corner.
Wherever I live I essentially recreate the same space with a collection of items which follows me around. My room is pre-fabricated, able to be disassembled, packed up, shipped out, and put back together again in a new locale. I’m not sure if the same can be said for me. I am Humpty Dumpty: prodigal son, vagabond, wanderer, lost soul.

This long, flat, plastic bin has been holding my dress slacks for the past six years. Once I pulled it out to get ready for a job interview and as I snapped open the seal the sour smell of puke hit me in the face. There was vomit all over my pants; quite old, by the looks of it. I never found out who puked on my pants.
I begin to unpack t-shirts that are balled up in my duffel bag and put them in the dresser. My favorite is an old Coca-Cola T from circa 1975. It’s white with a blue-ribbed collar and sleeve ends and in the center is the swirling Coke logo, proclaiming itself the official soft-drink of the U.S. Olympic team. As if athletes drink this stuff. The shirt is so old and frayed it looks cream colored when I put it on. It was pilfered from my friend’s grandparents’ basement. They have a condo up North in the mountains that we went to on winter breaks while the old folks were down in Florida. One New Year’s Eve we stumbled upon a stock of prescription pain killers needed for recovery from open heart surgery. We went through about three bottles in two hours, popping them like candy, tossing the into each others’ mouths like trained animals, chasing them with, “you’ve got to be shitting me” amounts of booze. We were out of our minds, and as so often happens in that state, decided a change of clothes was necessary. We went rifling through the drawers downstairs and found matching shirts. The next morning we woke up in positions one only wakes up in after massive substance intake. One had his head cradled in his arms on the rim of the toilet, another sitting up straight at the kitchen table still clutching his hand from a game of poker, another one of us vertical on the couch, a massive sandwich with one bite missing on his chest, myself face down on the bed, fully clothed in that classic drunken just-barely-made-it-to-bed pose, all of us wearing identical Coca-Cola t-shirts, all of us asking, “What the fuck happened last night?”
I take my old pocket knife out of a side pouch of the duffel bag. My dad bought it for me at a yard sale when I was a kid. We were on our way back from an errand and we stopped in, “Just to have a look, m’boy.” I knew that he’d let me have one thing, even if it took some cajoling. There were tables and crates filled with relics of the homeowner’s life. I sifted through until I came upon the black handled knife with a price tag of $50. I picked it up, ran my fingers over the grooved handle. The old man saw me, came over and said,
“Now that’s a good knife.”
He held out his hand. “May I?” he asked.
I placed it in his palm and he flicked it open with an ease that showed it had been his blade.
“This is an antique, you know…still razor sharp though,” he said.
He picked it up a section of the paper he’d been reading and sliced it clean in half.
“That’s how you can tell a knife’s sharp,” he said.
He held onto the knife as if reconsidering whether or not to part with it.
“You have good taste,” he said. “How bout I let you have it for a buck?”
Just then my Dad walked over. “Find anything good?” he asked.
The old man showed him the knife. “I think he had his eye on this,” he said.
“How much?” my dad said.
“Got a dollar?” the man said.
My dad dug in his pocket and produced a paper square bearing Washington’s head. “Hey, the price is right,” he said. “Does it even work?”
“Oh, it works all right,” the old man said, pressing the knife into my hand and giving a wink only I could see.
In the dim basement I flick it open, grab a piece of paper off my sister’s computer table and slice it clean in half.
I pull out a folder that contains papers, photos, and cut-outs from old magazines.  There are many photos of myself and as I look over them they seem like hard proof I’ve compiled over the years to reconcile the feeling that so many moments from my life seem like they are just snippets of a forgotten dream. There’s the one of me and the boys with the massive beer can pyramid we constructed in the spring of freshman year…of me and my sister standing on her front lawn, the sun glaring off of her husbands shiny, black, IROC-Z…of Lisa and me, her in a blue dress and me a shirt and tie, having dinner in front of the harbor, the one of me and my buddy after a camping trip where I’m holding up a poison ivy covered arm…a solemn-faced younger version of myself wearing a red sweatshirt and a scowl whose cause has long ago been forgotten.
All these photos I carry around, pin up on the wall like a psychotic mural of self-obsession, bring to mind the philosophical fragment, “if we lose self-awareness, we have no guarantee that we exist at all.”
I am aware of my awareness of a past I’m semi-aware of, that at times I’m linked to only by these photos.
Also in the folder are old tickets, most of them from baseball games I’ve attended. There’s the one from the Sox Game at Fenway where Roger Clemens threw a no-hitter, the game when a rookie Nomahh Garciaparra hit the game winner off the Monstah in the bottom of the ninth. There are several tickets from Mets games at Shea, the oldest from an age where I sat in the backseat and didn’t get the things my dad and uncles were laughing at, up until last summer, when, fully anointed as a man, I’d joined in the commentary. A single ticket from Yankee Stadium, from the day Mickey Mantle died unexpectedly overnight, turning the not particularly important match-up with the Cleveland Indians into a mad rush to get to the Bronx and pay homage to the Mick. Right before we left the house to catch a train, my uncle instructed me. “Now, if some guy on the subway is staring at you, what you’ve got to do is, you say, “What the fuck are you looking at you banjo-eyed cocksucker?” At fourteen years old I wasn’t sure if I had the gumption, but I remember on the train looking around for any pair of eyes that was lingering too long, ready to prove myself as a man to any banjo-eyed SOB.

I plug in the old clock radio my grandfather bought for me. Back then it was top of the line with its removable flashlight and night-light, but now the flashlight is long gone, the night light dead. A lot of the buttons don’t work so in order to set the time I have to go in reverse, minute by minute. It feels like time is moving backwards as the minutes tick away one by one, and in my head is a timeline, creeping steadily back through the years, to the moment when my grandpa put the box in my hand and I felt overjoyed at being the owner of this machine. But now my grandfather is dead and this hunk of plastic and wires is realer than him. I can’t help but think someday, somebody might pull it down off an old dusty shelf from an attic or antique shop and I’ll be long dead but the clock radio will still be around.
I open the brown journal with different leaves pressed under a coat of plastic. The inside of the back cover reads:

Happy Birthday
Love always,
Lisa

I begin to write:

Have unpacked all of my things and now am just sitting here, as if waiting for something to happen. It’s weird being in this unfamiliar place surrounded by familiar items. Why do I insist on keeping all of these things from my past? I’m a spiritual packrat, hording reminders and memories. I suppose it’s comforting to hold onto them. If I had no link to the past, it might feel as if I was floating, lost, through the ether of time, a spaceman who’s become detached from the confines of his ship and is drifting through the enormity, certain only of death. If I threw all of my worldly possessions away, would I feel different? Would I be different? Maybe it’s necessary to get rid of reminders of the past in order to make a new future. These things are just placeholders. By themselves they mean nothing.
Maybe people need physical things because our existence is primarily physical. Ideas can feel aloof and not real. People want something they can hold on to, wrap their fingers around and press into their bosom. Humans are only gifted enough to begin to conceive of a world beyond the physical. It is but a glimpse in the corner of our eyes. We are primarily creatures of substance. Everything in our world, even the most deeply spiritual, is symbolic. In things are rooted deeper ideas we just aren’t capable of explaining. We cling to objects because the ideas they represent are the only proof we have that there’s something beyond the flotsam of this physical realm.

I put the journal down, this thing that represented her love for me, love that has died, even though she wrote, “Love always.”
All of these things I’ve brought with me are tombstones, marking the place where something once lived, but now is gone, things which at the time seem like, “Love always,” but nonetheless fade away until they’re no realer than a dead person under a stone which reads, “In loving memory of…”
It’s late. I’m beyond feeling beyond tired and sleep is now plausible. I turn the lights out, strip down to my underwear and get in under the covers.   Again, the words,”Merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream.” float through my head, sung in the same voice. This time though, the song is oddly comforting and I fall to sleep quickly.