{Albuquerque 1985}

Albuquerque 1985

There were giants in those days and Albuquerque still had abundant wildlife. If, in the mid-1980s, you were to scramble through the Loco Weed and the Datura, the Buffalo Gourds and the Spanish Bayonet, crawling on hands and knees through broken bottles and blown-out birth control, to the top of Piedra Lisa on a summer’s eve and peered back at the city, you could not, in all real honesty or concern, tell which was up or down. Albuquerque reflected back a perfect mirror image of the Canis Latrans galaxy – not the nearest, but certainly the most mischievous galaxy in our little corner of the universe. It was a wild and wooly town. Tumbleweeds blew freely through the streets and bears and coyotes were everywhere.

The ebb and flow of wildlife had to do with the fact that Albuquerque was a prime example – albeit a rapidly sinking version – of a sky island. It was a little ecosystem that extended for up to ten miles outside the city limits and had, at one time, connected to other regions of the state via riparian corridors.

Topping this island were the Sandia Mountains, those watermelon-colored majesties that distracted Coronado ever so briefly in his bloody quest for the Seven Cities of Gold. The Sandias exerted and influence of place over those of us who lived in their shadow. Like a full moon with an ocean tide, they tugged us toward them, making us think we could never elude their grasp. We would escape sometimes, though. We might get as far away as Lubbock or Topeka. But even in those flatlands, the Sandias called us back. Hell, fleeing to exotic locales in Europe, Asia, or South America did little to dampen their influence. Perhaps the drinking water contained some base ore that the Sandias acted on as a magnet. The far side of the world was no hiding place as they worked their spell, pulling us homeward.

In the foothills, the aptly named Arroyo del Oso, or Bear Canyon, was a veritable freeway of ursine traffic, with Mama bear and Baby bear taking daily strolls through town. (Presumably, Papa bear stayed at home watching the game.) Antelope bounded freely through the parking lots of the shopping malls and, though rare by then, there was still an occasional traffic snarl on the freeway caused by a migrating herd of buffalo.

While the source of much of the wildlife was the sky island, its catalyst was summer. Summer in Albuquerque. What the June 30th, 1974 issue of Time magazine called “an internationally acknowledged magical time in this little burg that sits in the middle of the second most famous rift valley in the world.” It was summer that brought out the wildlife, both two and four footed.

The tumbleweeds were a particular embarrassment to those of us who income relied on daily dealings with the summerly spate of turistas. We’d had a bad enough time back then with the mayor of New York City referring to us as a “dirty little back-water shithole of a town” on national television. Having tumbleweeds blowing across the street was mortifying. Out-of-towners saw that and expected Marshall Dillon to be facing down the bad guys in a gunfight at High Noon over yonder at the OK Corral.
Never mind the fact that High Noon was a restaurant in Old Town and that historians not only believe that Marshall Matthew Dillon never came to Albuquerque, but in fact, may have only been a fictitious character on a long-running TV show. In our cabs we would be driving down a road, a New Yorker as a fare, and a tumbleweed would blow in our path – invariably one of those five foot in diameter monsters. “Jesus Christ!” the passenger would exclaim. “What in the hell was that?”

“A tumbleweed,” I’d mumble.

“Jesus Christ! Mayor Ed was right. This is a stinking shithole.”

Albuquerque, New Mexico, celebrated in song, cartoon and… well that’s about it. We didn’t make the song Route 66, but we’re right there between Amarillo and Gallup. Neil Young would still find it a good place to eat fried eggs and country ham, but by the mid 80s he’d twisted that last number for the road and split for Santa Fe. The Sons of the Desert and Jim Glaser kept trying to get back here in their songs, though aside from the possibility of a little nookie, no one knew quite why.
Albuquerque: hometown of Ethel Mertz. Albuquerque: where Bugs Bunny felt he should have taken a left turn. Many of us who did take that missed left discovered why New Mexico is oft-times called the “Land of Entrapment.” People just got stuck here in low wage service industry jobs. An ex-wife and I found that out the typical way. Drunk one night and sick of our dead-end jobs in Tacoma, we packed our car full of random possessions and split in the middle of the night, tires rubbing on wheel-wells. We floated some checks for gas money and left town. Plowing through the Washington night, we began to sober up, realizing what it was we’d done. There was no turning back then and on and on we rode, one Walkman and an aspirin bottle half-full of amphetamines between us. We wound up in Albuquerque, cruising into town on the proverbial fumes. With a $20 bill and a car full of clothes and books to our name, the plan was to work for a month or so and then head on back east to live with her family.

Month singular turned to months plural. We would try, but we just never could quite get together a decent running car or enough money to get much further than Amarillo. We might have a car with enough of a tune-up on it to get us to Ohio, but we’d try to parlay our cash funds into a fortune by investing in a half-pound of pot. Or we’d spend the car repair money on eight ounces of weed. Or sometimes we wouldn’t have a car at all. In those times we would buy some dope.

Sometime after the months passed one year, we divorced. I heard she made it out eventually. Went home to Cleveland and started the family she’d wanted. Hell, we both wanted the family. Just not with each other.

I’d blown through a half a dozen jobs and as many girlfriends since I’d been back in town. Both my labor and my loves revolved around cooking food or pouring drinks. The girlfriends were generally waitresses or barmaids I’d meet at a string of hash-slinging shit jobs.

I’d had my fill of cooking and waitresses both, so when I saw the ad in the paper looking for cab drivers, I thought I’d give it a shot. I filled out an application and they sent me out to train for two hours and then had me drive a full shift that night. I had no cash for change and no map save the one in the back of a shredded phone book I found in the trunk. I got both lost and yelled at, but at the end of the shift I didn’t have to mop some drunk’s puke out of the bathroom.

{Honest Employment – the Texas Years}

Vance and I were back in Lubbock, having painted the Pacer in a charcoal-gray house paint in order to better blend in. We did it mostly with rollers, and Vance had me paint a big skull and crossbones on the hood with a can of pink spray-paint he’d five-fingered from a Tru-Valu. We were beginning to get jaded with the hold-up game and sought to change our image to something more rakish and piratical. We felt that this new look should make us more legendary. Something in the order of ‘rode-hard-and-put-away-wet’ but with a little more sex appeal. We wore ratted out skin-tight 501’s and the snakeskin boots we’d had custom made in Juarez. We bought straw cowboy hats, too, for this new look. They were a bit too fresh – too ‘dude’ – so I came up with the idea of tying them to the bumper with fishing line. We poured a can of beer on them and dragged them down a dirt-road behind the car. After about three miles, we had achieved the desired effect – sort of a mid-80s West Texas grunge.

We had a cassette of Ted Nugent and played “Snakeskin Cowboys” over and over. It became our theme song as we drove up to pull a job.

We’d rented a two-bedroom apartment in Lubbock as a place to sleep and bathe. We had a semi-official rule that we weren’t to bring any guests around. Just to keep it safe. We’d told the manager that we worked as landscapers over at Tech, and he bought it. He didn’t really care as long as we paid the rent.

Vance was taking a shower one Sunday morning, and I’d gone down the street to get a pack of smokes at a Flying “F” Gas Mart – one that we hadn’t robbed. I was walking back, smoking a Camel and drinking a Dr. Pepper. It was a warm day in late August and I was feeling like I should be somewhere else. There was a Baptist church on every corner with parking lots packed full of pickup trucks with oilfield toolboxes, or bales of hay. I kept feeling like I needed to stand up on my tip-toes and I didn’t know why.

Finally, I stopped and did just that. I stood on my toes and craned my neck. I realized that I was trying to look down at something, or trying see something that was higher than the curb I was standing on. I’d lived a good chunk of my adult life in the shadow of one mountain or another. Lubbock was flatter than Wichita and just as sadly lacking in geography.

“We don’t ‘llow our men to stand on tippy-toes around here, cowboy.” I looked over my shoulder at a cute little blonde in a red and yellow flowered sundress and broad-brimmed straw sunhat; one of those garden party-looking things with the grosgrain band and twin streamers fluttering in the breeze. We were standing outside of Tabernacle Baptist on 34th street, and my guess is that she was either late for church, or had just snuck out. She laughed softly, reaching her hand out for my cigarette, so I assumed the latter. “What you doing standing like that anyway?” she asked.

“Weren’t quite sure at first,” I drawled, kind of hoping that I was, in fact, sounding like I was from Texas. “I just ain’t used to it bein’ so… flat, is all.”
“Jesus, boy. You from back east or somethin’?” She laughed again – her jade green eyes seemed to have gotten the joke and were laughing along with her.
“Nah,” I said grinning. “Just East Texas. I realized that I was still up on my toes and eased down.

“Bullshit you are. East Texas, New Jersey, maybe.”

I laughed along with her this time. “East Texas, New York,” I corrected, holding my hand up in the air in surrender, “but yeah. Busted!” We stood there for a few minutes, looking at each other, grinning, not saying anything. A light breeze had picked up, tugging at her dress, playing with her long blond hair, tossing it into her face. I reached over and brushed the strands out of her eyes so I could see them. I wanted to say something – anything – but I was at a loss.

“Yeah?” she said.

“Ummm. Hey, I got a six-pack of Pearl back at the apartment. You want to come and… uhh…”

“Naw. Thanks though,” she replied quickly. “I gotta get to work.” She seemed a bit relieved at having the excuse ready and usable.

“But, hey, maybe I’ll see you around.” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Rhonda-Gayle.”

“Raoul,” I said, taking her hand in mine.

“A good traditional vaquero name,” she said, as she turned to walk away. “Adios, Muchacho.”

“I ain’t no cowboy,” I yelled after her. “I’m an outlaw!”

She looked over her shoulder at me, smiled, and threw a backhand wave as she shook her head.

She was a half a block away when I stuck two fingers in my mouth and whistled.

“Hey!” I yelled again. “Waylon Jennings, Lubbock’s own native son, says that Ladies Love Outlaws!”

She said something, but I couldn’t hear her.

“What?!”

She turned back to me with a smile and cupped her hands around her mouth. “I said, ‘and I ain’t no lady’!” She grabbed the hem of her dress and pulled it up to her chin to reveal a clear lack of underwear. She weren’t no lady, but she was damn sure a woman.

Vance and I had spent so much time getting drunk and robbing places that we’d failed to notice that the women in this neck of the woods were incredibly beautiful.

{Street Voyeur}

A couple of months on the road left me realizing that sleeping outside was for chumps. It wasn’t the homelessness I was after, but the proximity to danger. What was it Henry Miller said? “There are people who can not resist the urge to get into the cage with wild beasts and be mangled.” That was what it was. I didn’t want the powerlessness that came with homelessness. I didn’t want the days on the street, didn’t want to wake up in an alley or mission.

There were giants in those days. Men and women who lived at the edge and beyond. They balanced over the crumbling cliffs of disaster. They leaned out and kissed the Blarney Stone of death. They swung so far out over the chasm that it might take years for centrifugal force to pull them back in to safety – if their line didn’t break first. They were old-school nighthawks. They avoided the clubs where the hip and with-it partiers went. They were connoisseurs who saw the beautiful style of a dive bar tucked away under an overpass. They knew the thrill of buying an eight-ball of meth behind a back alley dumpster. They knew that the owners of a certain bar were suckers for guns and if you went there around closing, they’d stay up all night and do coke with you and let you shoot guns out of the back door of their office, using the cable T.V. tower as a target. They knew where to go for a Mexican cock-fight, or a blowjob from an illegal Thai immigrant – not that they would go for either, but it was the knowing. Like a birding aficionado, they could mark it off their scorecard. They knew where the outlaw bikers had their secret after-hours bars. They raced through side-streets, headlights off, blowing stop signs at eighty miles an hour.

They avoided the gangs though. They were just too unpredictable. Bluffing seldom worked with them. They had no fear because they had no sense. Let me rephrase that – they had fear, but not of being enslaved by the prison system. They took pride in being put down by the man. They thought that their guns gave them freedom, but the guns and the killing only sold them to the man.

{Street Voyeur}

I used to hitchhike up to British Colombia on weekends. I’d always spend time hanging around the back alleys in Seattle. I’d hook up with the homeless and we’d trade stories and swigs. I’d take those stories I’d heard, and I’d embellish them, build on them. I was a natural born story teller. A fucking con. But, again..., who was I conning? When I had a story well-polished, I’d trade it, so to speak, for some dope, or a blanket, or some other coin of the realm. I picked up the glazed and jaded look of my brothers. I learned the art of the rant. But because I didn’t live there, I was suspect. I’d pass on through a little later in the day, when a ride would take me to the border and beyond. I slept outdoors in Vancouver. Office building landscaping, parks, whatever would hide me. One night I escaped a motel room beating from a hooker and another guy she’d picked up.

I went into the streets to live deliberately.

After the army, I thumbed around the country. I walked through downtown Detroit with a seven and a quarter-inched blade, Buck General sheath knife strapped to my belt, a .32 pistol tucked in my pocket. Some crazy whitey who would shit his pants if he was confronted, but wasn’t because anyone who would walk through this neighborhood with a gun and a knife in plain view had to be much badder than he looked. And who’s to say I wasn’t? The fact is I got by most of my adult life without a severe ass-whooping because I looked rough. I knew how to cultivate the physical look. The right combo of smokes and drink, for the voice. A couple of whites and a few nights without sleep gave an edginess that, try as it might, a desk job just can’t replicate. I can’t act, can’t read believable lines from a script, but I can ad lib like a motherfucker.

{Street Voyeur}

I was stationed in Tacoma for a while. For the street connoisseur, South Tacoma Way was a street classic. In the same way a golfer will appreciate the intricacies of various golf courses, an aficionado of the street appreciates certain cities and neighborhoods. Bikers, hookers, homos, Korean mafia, runaway housewives, drug-addled teenagers, and war-addled vets. Smells, graffiti [more]. There was an unintentional art to these neighborhoods. A certain confluence of happenstance that created an intricate web of power lines and dumpsters, stray trees growing through the cracks, [more]. The appreciation factor ran highest when there was the greatest chance of personal danger or death. Trenton. Philadelphia. Detroit. Memphis. Louisville was good, though the danger level wasn’t as high. I did get taken for about sixty bucks in a drug swindle.

{Street Voyeur}

That whole trip to Memphis plan fell through. The friends pussed-out on me. I wound up in the Army. But that was where the training started. First there was the lying. These people didn’t know me. They hadn’t grown up with me. I found the stories I could get away with and the ones I’d get called on. I learned how to spot a lie and a bluff, when to call it, and when to keep shut. (Though I never did learn to play cards, a fact that bugged me to no end. I just never could remember what beat what.) I learned when to sit back and just enjoy a craftsman at work. Most importantly, I also picked up on the stories of the ones who’d really been there. The ones who’d lived the street life. From them I learned the tone, the stance, the lingua franca, the raison d’être, the code, the law. I’ll let you in on a little secret. It’s all built on lies. The poets, the prophets, minstrels; the Guthries and Steinbecks, the Dylans and Kerouacs, the Cashs and Springsteens, they were the ones who made it all up. Non-street people created stories which were embellished and passed along, self-perpetuating, growing, becoming the mythos of the asphalt. If you didn’t know better – or maybe if you did – you might think it was some sort of a conspiracy to keep the streeters in their place. If they viewed the life as a romantic adventure, they wouldn’t try to rise up and gain power, As people fell on hard times they embraced the stories. But then, they had to. They had to grab hold of something to convince themselves that there was a reason for all this. There was no choice. If they didn’t they went mad, they joined the ranks of the babbling, shit-encrusted prophets of the street corner. You didn’t come back from that.

{Street Voyeur}

I began hanging out at the AmRaq, but not because I was slumming. I went to the streets because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. (How did I come to this place? How did I meet Bill Shebab?) Not that I lived in some glamour palace. But there was some sort of draw for me, like an addiction. There was something thrilling about hanging out with the hookers and the dealers and the transvestites without actually being a customer or a resident.

I guess I’ve always been something of a street voyeur. I don’t know when it was that it started or why. I had a friend in high school who’d lived in downtown Memphis. Well so he said anyway. He always was a lying son of a bitch. But there was some little bit of magic in the stories he told of the streets. Old lilywhite kid hanging with the soul brothers. Maybe that magic came from the fact that he was doing something dangerous. [Or maybe I saw it as dancing with the dark. I’ve always been afraid of the dark]

Maybe. I think it was more about becoming another person. Con men pretend they’re some rich person, or a high-powered business executive in order to pull a fast scam. They trade up. Present some flash while remaining innocuously invisible. I was trading down. I was putting on the dust and ashes, the rags of the street trash. Was I looking for that cloak of invisibility or not? It was like identity theft. I wanted to pull a con, but who would be the dupe, I didn’t know.
Americans love a scam as long as they aren’t the victim. It’s a standard Hollywood storyline. The perfect swindle, the perfect heist. We love to see some asswipe get his comeuppance at the hand of a brilliant con artist. But again, who was the dupe here?

High school was about the talk. We made this plan that we were going to hitchhike to Memphis after graduation. We were going to live on the streets. Shit. We were fucking white bread punks. I’d read Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and thought the whole Beat scene was the hottest thing since sunburn. Of course I was twenty years too late to get in on the authentic beat life. At first, it was just that desire for the whole bohemian lifestyle. It was kind of a model. But there was some other driving force going on that I couldn’t name. Still a desire, but an aching one. Not quite moth-to-the-flame, but… well, hell… maybe it was.

{Interlude: Psycho Chick - Part 2}

The psycho chick up and split one day, much to my relief. Me and Bo, another cabbie, had eaten some chocolate mescaline and were hanging out at Alameda Bridge. When we went back to my place she was gone. All her shit was gone too. Bo and I sat on the couch, enjoying the tail-end of the trip while my cats ran back and forth across the living room putting on a kitty-sex show. In retrospect it was kind of creepy, but at the time we were just howling with laughter – him at the cat, and me at the fact that the Psycho chick had split. We’d had some grins, but overall it had been a fucking nightmare run. The whole thing left me a little unstable. I needed to settle my life down.

After she left, I was still working days, and that meant running patients to hospitals on a Medicaid charge. Those folks were dirt poor and never tipped. I didn’t harbor ill feelings toward them; it’s just that I was only a half a paycheck away from the street. I survived on tips. For a while, I was coming home with maybe five or six bucks in my pocket. I had entertained the idea of asking to go back on nights, but once I did that, it might be tough to get back on days. I just toughed it out on the limited tips.

There was a 25¢ hamburger stand nearby, and often I’d go there and load up on burgers. Sometimes though, I had to decide between eating and drinking. Eating was better for me, but after the burgers there was TV and heartburn. TV and loneliness. I was by myself. Being alone scared me so much that sometimes I’d just stop at the 7-11 and buy a pint of Jim Beam and a 32 oz. coke. I’d mix it up and drink myself to sleep. Sometimes I might do that for a week or more. The pain of being alone was worse than how my body felt after a couple of days of self-medication. And that was what it had become by then. At some point the fuel of the party life had ceased to be fun and had become a self induced treatment for the awful gnawing pit of loneliness that was my existence.

There was a deep longing for companionship. One would have thought that hanging out with the guys would have been fun, but it wasn’t. In fact, with one or two exceptions, after the first time I’d gotten laid, I rarely had any close male friends. The ones I did have were almost strictly drink and drug buddies. We got hammered together. Stone-cold shit-faced. Ripped straight to the motherfucking tits. We rarely went out looking for girls. We’d hoot and howl and slobber and grab our dicks when they were around, but we generally didn’t go out in pursuit of them. Of course part of that may have been a difference in standards. Most of the guys I ran with in the Army had no compunction about sleeping with anything that didn’t have a dick. I was a little more careful about who I slept with. You’ve heard of Gay-dar? I had definite Sleeze-dar. If there was the remotest hint of trash I would back away. I wasn’t rude to these girls. I just would not get involved with them. It wasn’t just the social disease thing. Or maybe it was, but it wasn’t gonorrhea. They did not possess what I sought in a woman.

Like I said, there were few guys that I was close with. There was something that I found in the companionship of women that I did not find with men. It wasn’t necessarily a sexual thing and I don’t believe it was anything like what women have as friends together. It was something different. At the time, I wasn’t sure why that was. But I think I’ve got more of a clue now. But this was where my head was by the time I met Bill Shebab and Maria.

{Interlude: Psycho Chick}

I was living with this girl I affectionately call the “Psycho Chick.” I’m not sure why I called her that aside from the fact that she was quite probably insane. We were the sole patrons in the Hofbrau one night. She asked me if I was “a jerk or what” and I rode her home on the handlebars of my bike. She was renting a room from some old lady down the street from the ‘brau. She stripped off her clothes, and I followed suit, knocking over her parakeet cage in the process. The next morning I hopped back on my bike and, as the rosy-phalanged dawn crept over the hills, smoked a cigarette and whistled a little tune I’d never learn. She moved in with me a few weeks later.

She had some sort of a chemical imbalance. Sometimes she could drink all night, and other times, one sip and she’d pass out. In either situation, she was just out of control. I’d get calls from the bars to come and get her. I’d come in, throw her over my shoulder and stick her in the cab. This meant not only missing out on other fares, but it meant paying for her fare out of whatever tips I made that night. I realized that it would be cheaper for me if I was drinking with her instead of letting her go off on her own so I put in for a transfer to days. My feed baby status made this fairly easy. It also gave me some of the milk runs, running packages around the state, or picking up passengers from down in Fort Bayard and bringing them up to the V.A. hospital. No tips on those, but they were nice guaranteed rates.

But even with all that, she’d wake up screaming in the middle of the night. Freaking wicked nightmares. Or I’d have to hide all the knives, or sit on her until she got some kind of focus on reality. We also got heavy into meth then. It started with just a snort here and there, but quickly evolved into blasting it. I could never do myself, so I’d tie the bandana around my bicep and hold it while she shot me up. She’d push the plunger down halfway, milk it for a second and then – WHAM! 666 volts of electricity racing through my veins, throwing me back, pasting me to the wall. It was insane. We’d be doing this at two in the morning, then jumping in the car and driving at ninety miles an hour up to Jemez to hike out to the hot springs where we’d sit until the sun rose.

She was a habitual shoplifter and was constantly coming home with trivial penny-ante bullshit things that she’d ripped off from the Furr’s Supermarket. Twice she got tossed in the can while she was drunk. Once for DWI and once for beating up a cop. After the second time in jail, the nightmares started getting more frequent. Then came the night I kicked down the bathroom door and took a gun out of her hands. Fucking kill yourself, I thought. Just don’t do it in my house.

{Fear of the Dark}

I was drawn to the night, and to the children of the night. Ironically, I’m terrified of the dark. I know. Sounds wussy. But I always have been. I’m not sure where it came from. I don’t even like to close my eyes. It causes them to be red and irritated. People always think I’m stoned.

But I don’t like to close them.

When I close my eyes it’s dark and I’m alone.

When I close my eyes I can feel it sneaking up on me, coming towards me. Heart-pounding panic.

I remember when I was twelve or so. We lived near some woods. My friends and I had a fort out in the woods. We’d never spend the night there though. Every now and then, we’d get caught out there at sunset. Walking from the woods, we could see the light at the forest’s edge, but around us was pitch black. We’d try to walk calmly toward the light, but suddenly there would be that mind-numbing panic and we’d start to run. We couldn’t see anything but silhouettes of the branches that whipped our faces, poked our eyes, clawed at our clothing, and tripped us up. There were spider webs and slime. And there was always that presence. As we began to run there was always a low moan that rose up in our chests, becoming a full-bore, shrieking scream by the time we broke out into the meadow. We’d laugh about it afterward, but none of us could describe what the fear was about or where it had arisen from. I don’t know about the other kids, but I never slept after those rapid retreats from the wood. At bedtime, I always made sure my drapes were open so I could see the streetlights.

Maybe that’s why I like the city. There’re lights there. As dark as the city might be metaphorically, there was always some literal light to run to. Even in a town like Albuquerque, that shuts down at 2 a.m., there is someplace to go. You can find some human being alive and willing to talk. Someone who isn’t out to rob you or beat you or cut your fucking liver out for grins. There’s a host of convenience store clerks and restaurant managers and truck stop waitresses that you can be normal with. When the darkness closes in on you, when you feel you are walking too close to the edge, you can grab some little piece of normal, Even if it is just for a minute or two.

I was a lonely fuck. I admit it here on these pages that I cried myself to sleep many a night from the pain of being alone. I tried to surround myself with people. Being alone meant being with “It,” being alone with the presence. But, paradoxically, I didn’t have a lot of friends. I kind of kept to myself because I was afraid that I’d be rejected and therefore left alone. This wasn’t an utterly paranoid delusion. I’d had friends and lover leave without warning. I had no chance to prepare. Suddenly I was alone. It would come creeping round, especially in the dark of night. It would try and talk to me. It whispered voices in the night. Alone was when I drank the most. Alone was when I chose a pint of Jim Beam over food. Alone was when I pulled the covers over my head. It couldn’t get you then. Every school child knew that. I knew that there was no such thing as being “alone.” Alone was a lie they told you to get you to sleep.

In the dark I was afraid that there was someone else there. Who? Why was I afraid of them, it, he, she, whatever the fuck? That was what drove me to the city lights. It’s what drove me to the arms of another – lying to get there if need be. Because there was the sense that something was there. And here is the thing… there is the sense of being alone, but this sense that there is that big something out there. We don’t want to be alone with “it.” When there is another person there, we can at least treat “it” as a third wheel. Ignore it. Hope it will take the hint. But when we are alone and in the dark, there is no doing that. It demands our attention.