Chapter Two
After the many blocks of industrial desolation that followed Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard, it was good to be in the thriving Dominican neighborhood, even if almost everyone on the street was male. They stood around in small groups, engaged, from what I could tell, in little more than jovial conversation and the expert killing of time. There were a number of attention-grabbing women around, too, but absent was that painful longing I would normally have experienced. I had more important things on my mind.
Loud, fast-paced, brass-dominated music came from everywhere, filling the air with a cacophony of competing rhythms. Everyone seemed to be in a really good mood for some reason. Were they really happy? Their lives were as different from mine as could possibly be. Life for them was inherently as part of a group, a strange concept for one as solitary as myself.
There was a clear view of the Hudson and the Jersey side while I crossed 145th Street.
“There is America,” I said aloud.
I heard someone behind me laugh.
“Land of the free! Home of the brave!”
I turned my head quickly to the left to see who had uttered those words so close to my ear. He was smiling at me.
“Hey man, what’s up?”
“Howdy,” I said, forcing a smile.
The man fell into step beside me, rubbing his hands together as if they were cold, smiling back at me like a long lost friend. I could see his eyes jerking around in his skull, taking me in piece by piece.
“Alright, man!” he said.
The guy probably wasn’t even forty but had obviously been beaten up by life so many times that he looked like he’d been brought back from the land of the dead and wanted nothing more than to go back. His new, designer knock-off clothes didn’t hide the fact that there was a ragged man within them. Maybe he was Dominican. He must’ve had the blood of at least three continents coursing through his wasted veins.
“Welcome to the neighborhood!” he said, laughing.
“Thanks!”
“Good place, you know?”
“It’s a vibrant community,” I said, immediately aware that this was an idiotic thing to say. I was nervous.
“Vibrant community! Oh, shit! Hey, my name’s A. S., man.”
He held out his hand to me and I grasped it. It was like shaking hands with a cold, oily rag.
“Jean.” I involuntarily played down the French pronunciation.
“What’s up, Shawn? I’m A. S. “A” as in apple and “S” as in snake!”
We both laughed at this. I’d never broken my stride and now just looked ahead, wanting to end this interaction but not wanting to be too rude. He also looked ahead and kept right up with me, as if we were old buddies walking along in comfortable silence.
“Beautiful day,” he said.
I made a point of not responding.
“So what you need, man?” he asked without looking at me.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Come on, man! Everybody need something!”
“Not me. I’m good.” I heard my voice shake.
“Girl?”
“No, no, no,” I said quickly.
“Fourteen, fifteen years old, you know?”
“No, thanks.”
“What, you some kind of faggot?” The brief laugh that shot out of him after he said it sounded a bit forced. “So you looking for some Christ or what?”
I laughed, but he did not. He wasn’t joking apparently. I guessed then that Christ was slang for some kind of drug. He suddenly seemed a bit agitated, snorting loudly and then clearing his throat and spitting straight ahead, right in my path.
“Help me out, man.”
I said nothing and began to walk a bit faster. He was reaching into the large pocket that hung down by his knee. Out if it he took something wrapped in a black plastic shopping bag. After carefully unfolding the bag, he removed a beat-up iPod, minus the earphones and cables.
“iPod, man.”
“No, thanks.”
“Fifty.”
“What?”
“Fifty bucks.”
“Sorry.”
“Come on, help me out, man!” He whispered the words softly into my ear as if making a demand of a lover, his chemical breath redolent of menace. I felt his hand grip my forearm. “Just give me five bucks.”
I wanted to get rid of him, and he surely needed it. When I took out my wallet, I could sense the man’s eyes trying to determine its contents. I pulled out a five, and he snatched it away from me before I even had my wallet back in my pocket. He did an abrupt u-turn and disappeared without thanking me.
“Fuck you,” I said under my breath, though he was already long gone by that point.
I told myself to forget about it. Who knew what life had handed him? My instinct was to despise him and write him off as sub-human, but really I should have tried to understand and learn from him. Instead, my body language had certainly communicated that I regarded him as nothing but a nuisance. The next time something like that happened, I told myself, I would ignore my learned suspicion and treat the person with dignity he or she is entitled.
Anticipating the need to break my fast within the coming days, I took advantage of the fruit truck that was parked on Broadway between 164th and 165th Streets and bought a small bunch of bananas for half the price of what they would have charged in a store. When I put them in my bag, I noticed the batch of junk mail jammed into the back pocket along with my book. I had a habit of sticking my mail in there when I passed my mailbox. At the front of the stack was a piece of mail from one of my credit card companies that I could tell contained what they euphemistically referred to as a “convenience check.” It was a convenient way for these banks to dangle the potential for hard cash beneath the noses of their impulsively and stupidly materialistic cardholders.
The size of my own credit card debt revealed that I was no better than the rest of them, even if I always paid slightly more than the minimum amount due and never missed a payment. My nature was to be responsible about such things. But I was through with being part of the problem. No longer would I be a willing victim of First World economics. Those banks, I decided, had received my last payment. My self-liberation from debt gave me a burst of jubilant energy. The debt was only an abstraction that had tricked me into thinking I was shackled to a corporate desk all those years. Now, as far as I was concerned, it was gone.
I was standing outside a branch of my bank at the corner of Broadway and 165th Street. The convenience check was in my right hand, but indecision had a grip on me. I told myself to have the courage to survive. I was surely going to need more than the few hundred dollars I had in my checking account. The convenience check already had the amount pre-printed on it: $5,000. That was a nice round number. There was no point in wondering what Gandhi or Thoreau would have done. These were different times. Besides, Thoreau never hesitated to sponge off his family, and Gandhi’s “poverty” was only possible with the financial backing of his friends. This would be my own act of civil disobedience.
Thirty seconds after stepping up to the window, I had a copy of the deposit slip in my hand and I was $5,000 richer. My phone started ringing again as I was leaving the bank. I refused to look at it, but the sound of the unanswered ringing reminded me that I was truly alone in the world.
“What am I doing?” I said aloud. I wasn’t sure but refused to think about it. Thinking would only lead to surrender. I was going with my gut this time.
A bookseller had two long folding tables set up near 170th Street. There were a few used trade paperbacks and Spanish-language children’s books, but most of the surface area was covered with used porn magazines. They slowed me down involuntarily, my eyes moving over the topography of sexualized human flesh. The prominent color was bubble gum pink. At the end of the table, looking out of place, was a worn copy of a U.S. road atlas. I instantly felt very certain that the porn was there only so that I’d notice this atlas. The pieces were falling into place.
“Everything’s two dollars,” the man said.
I picked up the atlas.
“Least useful item on the table,” he said.
“This will be my holy book,” I said, pulling out my wallet.
“That’s cool, man. Whatever. Won’t do you any good unless you know where you want to end up.”
He happily took my money. The rolled atlas barely fit in my shoulder bag. I waved to the sidewalk merchant as I started off.
“May you enjoy the kindliness of strangers!” he called after me.
Actually, I planned to become that kind of stranger myself. Surely there was no shortage of suffering in America. My goal, my desire, was to show how living simply and non-violently might alleviate that suffering. The teaching of truth, I knew, could only be done by example. My biggest challenge would be to overcome my self-isolating instinct and learn how to open my life to other people. I would have to remember to smile. I would have to force myself to tolerate the mindless banter that allows strangers to get to a point where something of significance might be discussed. The idea was distasteful to me, but it had to be done. I had to try.
The massive bare steel towers of the George Washington Bridge were looming to the west when I reached the corner of 178th Street. I’d left the office almost three hours before. The mile-long bridge was the only way to walk out of Manhattan to the west, but the GWB bus terminal was right across the street, and for a moment I considered going in and checking out my options. Quickly, though, I decided against it. I didn’t need some environmentally destructive petroleum-fueled engine to move me forward. Simplicity would rule the day. After only half a block, I saw a sign:
BRIDGE WALK
PASEO-PUENTE
“I won’t be this far east again for a very long time,” I said aloud, each step to the west feeling like a revolution.
I climbed the steep, curving ramp far above the earth and moved out over the river on the bridge’s footpath. Suspended hundreds of feet above the water, the view was amazing. The Hudson cut into the land to the north, the tree-covered cliffs of the Palisades rising up from the river’s edge on the Jersey side just as they had when Henry Hudson first sailed past this spot. With the haze at a very low level, I could see all the way south, past the multi-dimensional Manhattan skyline that had once seduced me with its promise of adventure and inevitable success, to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, where New York Harbor emptied into the Atlantic.
Peering straight down over the edge, my hands involuntarily squeezed the waist-level iron rail, the only thing between me and a straight drop to the bone-crushing, organ-rupturing surface of the water far below. Jumping would be almost too easy. There was nothing and no one to stop me except myself. I’d considered such a permanent escape so many times before. Knowing that there was another option, that there was a way out of this existence, was a comfort. If I were to live, it would be by choice. At least I possessed that power over my life.
But desperation is better used as a springboard to adventure than as a justification for surrender. Having nothing to lose freed me to try anything at all. I would leap sideways rather than plunge downward. Ignoring the blend of fear and doubt that were simmering inside of me, I pressed on.
One thing I could not move past was the pain in my toe. It felt like something had gone quite wrong. I’d hoped that I could ignore this problem out of existence, but it was getting noticeably worse.
“Fight!” I said aloud, the roar of the steady traffic drowning out the sound. “Fight!”
Stopping again, I pulled my wallet out and removed my four credit cards, video membership cards and a bunch of post-it notes covered with faded phone numbers that I no longer needed. It was time to reject government sanctioned corporate loan-sharking and to rid myself of the tools of an anesthetized life. I held the stack of cards and wallet clutter over the rail for a moment and then opened my hand. The stack drifted apart, and each card and slip of paper began to flip over and over in the air. My feet tingled as I watched them fall.
Then I took out my phone and dropped it over the edge as well. It had to be done quickly so that I wouldn’t be tempted to check the number of my missed call. I didn’t want to know. Immediately I worried about the environmental impact of dropping a cell phone into the river. From then on, I decided, I would be more conscious of the environmental effects of my actions.
Feeling as if I were in the midst of committing some great crime, my legs carried me forward with unusual speed, and I reached the New Jersey side of the bridge more quickly than I’d expected. Everything there looked different. It felt different. Pedestrians, while tolerated, were not especially welcome. I was the only one.
A few minutes later I found myself, literally, on Main Street. Fort Lee appeared to be a tidy, all-American town inhabited largely by middle-class people of Korean descent. There were still a few vestigial Italian bakeries and delis, but there were far more businesses and restaurants catering to Korean tastes. On either side, there were quiet, tree-lined residential streets with well-manicured lawns and aluminum siding-encased houses. Such a place was exotic to me. My adventure had truly begun. Every step forward into this new territory reminded me that I was a stranger here, that there was something new to be learned, that this place might change me somehow. I loved that feeling.
After a slow start in Manhattan, I was rapidly pulled deep into America, as if riding upon the continuous whoosh and roar of flowing traffic. But I still hadn’t smiled at or spoken to a single person. Everyone was sealed off in one of those speeding vehicles or in the houses I passed. I began to wonder whether it would be possible at all to meet a stranger in this country unless I spent a lot of time hanging around chain retailers.
Just past the small suburban town of Leonia, the sidewalk abruptly ended, though not for lack of need, as evidenced by the narrow dirt path, barely wide enough for one, that had been worn away in the weeds on the side of the road. My legs were feeling rubbery, but I could handle that. What I had a hard time ignoring was a new affliction, a condition I believed was called prickly heat. The discomfort, the rash, arose from the friction of my buttocks rubbing together during my lengthy walk. The pain, and my obsession with it, quickly intensified to the point where I found it necessary to slide my hands into my back pockets and hold my buttocks apart while I walked.
There was a small packet of tissues in a pocket of my bag. Taking a few of them out, I turned away from the traffic and carefully nestled them between my ass cheeks. To my surprise, it almost completely eliminated the discomfort. I wasn’t sure how long the tissues would last down there but I was proud of myself for having discovered a solution.
A slight breeze shook the newly blossomed leaves that covered the road like a canopy, and I turned my face up to them. The beautiful sight of the sun shimmering through their light green translucence completely filled my field of vision. It was like a 1970’s love song. Keeping my head upturned, I took a deep breath and then exhaled, releasing all of my anxiety. Everything was going to work out. I had hope.
I was passing over an interstate. By studying the atlas, I determined that it was I-95, as well as the start of I-80. From here, one could choose to drive either to Miami or San Francisco and stay on the same road the entire way. A small mosque with a minaret stood right beside the interstate. It looked lonely there all by itself. Just off a highway exit was a high-end chain hotel with an exterior of menacing black tinted glass. The thought of all of the horrible corporate meetings and middle-class weddings that happened in there made me grit my teeth. A flawless, deep-green lawn of pesticide-treated grass surrounded the building. Little red flags, warning of the presence of poison, fluttered in the traffic-generated breeze along the lawn’s perimeter.
Past the hotel, there were no more houses, just constant traffic and trees along both sides of the road. There was no dirt path on the other side of the guardrail, so I walked on the hot tar. Under my feet crunched the shrapnel of the car culture: otherwise unidentifiable bits of metal, rubber, plastic and glass strewn along the shoulder of the road like the debris of a great war. Feeling weak and tired, I kept my eyes focused on the ground just a few feet ahead of me. Might continuing my fast on this day have been a mistake? To admit such a thing would naturally lead to the question of whether this entire adventure was a mistake. I couldn’t even consider that.
An explosion surrounded me. What felt like the hatred of a million men hit my face. My eyes closed, I waited for severe pain or unconsciousness. For a moment, I was certain that a car had hit me. But when finally I opened my eyes, I was still standing. There was no blood-the liquid splattered on my face was clear. There was not even any pain. Feeling something in my hair, I shook my head. Little bits of brown glass dropped out and joined others just like them on the ground. When I saw the red and white label lying there, I immediately recognized the smell and understood what had happened: someone had thrown a beer bottle at me from a passing vehicle. It had hit a telephone pole and exploded into hundreds jagged fragments that rained down upon me.
“Mother fucker!” I screamed with all my rage, although there was no one to hear me.
As I was carefully shaking the glass from my hair, I heard the roar of a motorcycle coming up behind me. It sounded like it was slowing down. My heart was pounding when the motorcycle pulled onto the shoulder just a few feet ahead of me. The bike stopped, and the driver turned and looked at me. The black-clad figure had the tinted visor of his helmet pulled down, concealing his face. The man, or whatever it was, pointed to the back seat of the bike. I said no thank you by nervously waving my two hands in front of me. I’d had a phobia of motorcycles ever since I was a child. If I ever were to climb on one, surely I would die. The biker gestured for me to come closer with a gloved hand. I took a few steps in his direction. My reflection looked back at me in his visor.
“This is no place for a man to be walking alone,” he said.
The voice was deep and ancient sounding and had some kind of undeniable authority. I could feel the truth in this man’s words.
“I’m ok,” I said.
The man stared at me. It felt like a judgment. Finally, he nodded once. Turning away, he revved the bike and roared off. I watched him go, thinking of my words to him, wondering if they were really true.
