Another Dance With Chemistry

Of course I’m at the bar alone. It’s just something I seem to be doing these days. I try to be constructive about it, try to get a little work done. Better a bar than home alone in my apartment where the outside world has a way of creeping in. Better to spend some time around a few familiar faces in a familiar place, especially on the nights when you’re drunk and it’s late and there’s nowhere to be. Sometimes I can’t help but think I’m the only person, anywhere, ever, who can go anywhere or do anything on his own. But I’m not thinking about that at the moment. I just have an hour to kill.

Everything seems to have settled down. Except for the bartender and someone who appears to be a friend of his I’m the only person in the place. Three weeks ago people were packed shoulder to shoulder, the crush of the crowd that began the day before Thanksgiving, rose through Christmas, raced to its inevitable crescendo on New Year’s Eve, and finally exploded when the ball dropped at midnight. Oh, the difference a few weeks make. Now are the days when the sky ranges in color from slate to gunmetal, and the only thing that glitters is snow. Now it’s only me, more or less, lost in my thoughts while I wait.

The bartender takes a minute to get to me, and that’s okay. We’ve seen each other before. I still don’t know his name. We exchange the usual pleasantries when he makes his way over, seeming to recognize me. I ask for what I want, he pours out a glass, I give him some cash, tell him to keep the remainder for a tip. Simple. If only every transaction was so easy. He goes back to his friend so I sip my single beer and sit and think and write. It doesn’t take long before my mind drifts as I scribble sentence fragments in my notebook.

On December 21, 2011 I wrote a suicide note. I hadn’t meant to write the thing. It wasn’t until I reread the thing that I realized what I did. Except for the last couple of sentences I can’t remember what, exactly, I wrote. Of course I did it at a bar, and of course I did it on the longest night of the year. In my distorted thinking it probably made perfect sense in the heat of the moment. At the very least I’m sure the note was overwrought, melodramatic, and maudlin. A single page of paper, written front and back with my small block letters in black ink. I felt too calm, too apathetic. What was I going to do? My own indifference terrified me. I stared at my phone, wondered if this was going to be the time I dialed those three little numbers to be carted away to the psych ward in an ambulance. All this through a kaleidoscope of molecules; of ethanol, sertraline, serotonin, bupropion, norepinephrine, all acting and reacting with one another in my bloodstream and in my head.

The way down had been long and slow. I hardly recall much of September, October, and November. I spent these months half asleep, slipping behind the veil, so to speak. Something wasn’t right but it was so subtle I didn’t notice. Then at the beginning of December I started experiencing episodes of severe anxiety. One day I was walking out of work, headed downtown to drink coffee for an hour or so before my weekly volunteering gig. A tree wrapped in strings of red bulbs glowed in the half-light. My heart jackhammered the back of my sternum. I was nearly in tears. I wanted to race home, curl up on my couch, and evaporate, quietly cease to exist. All through the fall and the beginning of the winter was the persistent thought that this was forever, that this was too much, that there was only one way out. Oh, I had fantasies, all right. I wanted to swallow every pill, capsule, and tablet in my apartment and chase them with a fifth of bourbon. I wanted to take the elevator to the top of Tower Plaza in downtown Ann Arbor and toss myself from the roof. I wanted to sit in my bathtub, point a loaded revolver at my head, and pull the trigger. The notion that your thoughts are only thoughts, and can’t harm you, must be one of the greatest lies ever told.

It was as if I met a woman wearing a black dress, a woman with long, dark hair and bright blue eyes. She introduced herself to me. I spent the evening talking with her, feeling I should know her somehow. There was something foreboding about her, the way she held her drink, the way she never broke eye contact with me, the way her perfume reminded me of something I couldn’t quite remember, a way about her that made me uneasy. Still we talked, and we danced late into the night, until I found myself outside, alone in the dark and cold in the minutes before I left for home. ”Hey, are you okay?” a woman’s voice called from behind me. “You look pretty low.” I froze. The tone was mocking. I knew it was her. I listened to her walk behind me, casually, taking her time, the heels of her shoes scraping and tocking against the pavement. I knew what was coming, then. She rested her hands on my shoulders and it all came back. I wanted to die. Finally she leaned in, her mouth only an inch from my ear and, raising all the hairs on the back of my neck, whispered, “We’re gonna have some fun.”

My bartender comes around and asks if I want another and I come out of my reverie. I only have a swallow or two left, and anyway, it’s almost time for me to leave. I thank him and tell him I’m okay. For the first time in months I believe what I say. Six weeks of a new drug and a reaffirmation of the old golden marketing standard—better living through chemistry. The population of the bar has tripled since I came in. I feel like I want to say something to someone, someone who has known me for years, someone to welcome me back to the world of the living. I want a handshake, an embrace, a sweet kiss on the mouth. But I look around and it’s only me. So I leave, and as a burst of Michigan January hits me I think about my dance with the woman who only exists in my head, and I recall the last words of what I wrote for her: Selfish, selfish, selfish. You haven’t given anyone a reason to care about you, Tim. No one is listening. No one’s even there.

The Only One in Black

(Note: I originally submitted this story to ShrinkTalk for a short fiction contest. While I didn’t win outright, I did earn an honorable mention. Click here to read the winning entries, along with mine. They’re worth your time.)

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The audience wants me to strip. First it’s just one voice, one lone drunk. Then a few more join in, and now I’m being encouraged, cajoled, egged on. These things just seem to have a way of happening. This bar’s gimmick—and they all have gimmicks, it’s part of the attraction—is its red ambient lighting. The place is packed, typical for a Friday evening, and I can’t see anybody because of the spotlight in my face. But the people here watching, they know me. I’m only too happy to oblige.

I’ll never be able to explain how I got here. One night you’re a drunk expatriate looking with bemusement at your first burlesque performance. Before you know it you’re one of the emcees, a character in the goddamn show, and you can’t connect the time between. As it happens I’m exactly where I started three years ago. It’s on this stage, in the back of this hilarious red bar, that I invented Johnny Crash.

The DJ gives me some music. The crowd, a healthy mix of girls and guys from the sound of it, goes nuts when I unbutton my shirt and expose my chest and stomach. Black shirt, black pants, black jacket. Johnny Crash is, of course, the emcee in black. (Burlesque is about ridiculous puns if nothing else.) It started as a joke because a black suit was all I had, but the all-black ensemble came to be my thing. People dug it. So there’s this unofficial rule where none of the other performers wear black if I’m running the show for the night. And tonight I’m the goddamned ringleader.

The song’s a rocker. I mime the lyrics of the chorus into the mic. “Does anyone, anyone want to be you?” More hooting and hollering, some of it ironic, some of it genuine. I violently swing my arm through the air in front of my body and the DJ cuts the music. “This ain’t boylesque,” I say. “Did you really come here to see me?” A few yells of affirmation. “Bullshit! No one came here to see my average-sized cock!” The crowd, fueled by liquor, loses its collective shit laughing. Aside from half a pint of Guinness I’m stone sober.

You’d think a part of me would be abashed or ashamed. I’m a transplanted Midwestern boy at heart, after all. By all accounts I’m a normal guy. I have a day job in advertising, for fuck’s sake. And I’m not the type to want to lead some kind of double life. Everyone knows I do this. Hell, I invited my brother and his wife out to see one of our gigs when he was in town. The reaction’s always the same when I say I hang out with people with stage names like Charlie Darling or Helena Hellcat or Johnny fucking Crash.

I make eye contact with a pretty young woman in the front row, one of the few people I can see. I know her, actually. She’s a performer, a relatively famous one who’s done a few shows around the country. She isn’t performing tonight. I ask her if we can get a little taste of what she’ll do next. She smiles coyly, stands, spins with a flourish and gives the crowd a little leg. “Oh, sit down already,” I say. “You’ll have to see her next Saturday, right here. Ten dollar cover.” A few mock boos and jeers. “Oh, Jesus, you fucking people. Alright, alright.” I open my shirt again to a short burst of distorted guitar and cheering.

To my left, just off the stage, waits the new girl. She’s performing tonight under the name Venus Sera. She became a regular gawker of our performances over the last four or five months. Hard not to notice those tattoos (full sleeves) and that hair (Uma Thurman’s haircut in Pulp Fiction) on the body she has (good god almighty). She caught me a few times after, said she was interested in maybe performing. I advised her to talk to some of the girls and see about lessons. Now here she is, dressed in a blue and white corset with blue garter belt and blue stockings. I allow myself a second to imagine the tasseled pasties on her tits. Maybe she’ll want to fuck me at the end of the night. More accurately, maybe she’ll want to fuck Johnny Crash. Even now she’s damn near batting her eyelashes at me. I don’t even know her real name.

Feedback screeches through the mic. “Whoa, Jesus, settle down,” I say. “Don’t make me pull it out like I did last time. Just kidding. I pulled his out!” I point to someone who vaguely looks masculine in the glare of the light. The stage is hot from the lights. I should be sweating. I glance at Venus Sera again. She is shivering like she’s caught in a blizzard wearing that getup. For an instant I feel a twinge of sympathy before I remember why she’s here.

Me? I can’t help myself. I love the attention. I love the lights and the crowds and the and the skin and the spectacle and strangeness of it all. And god dammit do I love being Johnny Crash. Knowing I created him one night three years ago—a work of fiction, an alter-ego, distilled from the ether in the heat of the moment. It’s happiness so much like pride in one’s work. Satisfaction in knowing one can become someone else entirely, just how easy it is if you work at it a little. And I keep getting away with it, every Friday and Saturday night.

The audience is getting restless. It’s showtime, Venus Sera, ready or not. I button my shirt and speak my rehearsed lines about her. I’m already disappearing, already going, already gone. Later I’ll hardly remember a word I’m saying. I’m beyond them all, absorbed in my performance, and the audience applauds as I give my heart away.

Dark Circles Under Your Eyes

Another attendant opened the door for him at the top of the stairs, and a huge roar of smoke-hazed, lime-lit laughter, coming out of the door like a blast from a bomb, hit him in the face. It was like the world’s laugh in his face, Netta’s laugh, the last laugh of everybody at his failure and isolation, his banishment from the world of virile people who were happy and made love and had friends.

HANGOVER SQUARE, by Patrick Hamilton, 1941. p 247.

The last thing I wanted to do was go back to the apartment. Lately I’d been finding more and more reasons to stay away from the place, excuses I sold myself and flimsy pretexts I took advantage of if it meant a few fewer hours there. I was more and more afraid of spending time in my apartment alone. I hadn’t been sleeping well and it showed in the dark circles under my eyes. My parents called it raccoon eyes. I remember being the only one in the immediate family to show fatigue, exhaustion, or dehydration in this way, and it’s only gotten worse with age. There’s always a slight puffiness of my lower lids, and something like shadows under my eyes in pictures I see of myself.

I wasn’t thinking about any specific thing as I walked out of work in the middle of the week. The time had changed. Michigan Stadium loomed against the five o’clock sunset. As I neared my car the thought emerged that I didn’t want to go home, at least not right away. If I hit the road immediately it would be well into twilight by the time I made it to the driveway, and darkness would set in for the night by six.

A bar was the immediate and obvious answer. I wasn’t feeling self-destructive or even particularly bad. I just wanted a beer and a place to sit with a drink for an hour or two away from the apartment, a place to lose myself in quiet anonymity among the din and murmur, a place to sit and scribble sentence fragments and unconnected paragraphs into a notebook with a pen.

The first bad sign was the parking lot. I had made it to the bar before a lot of the afternoon traffic clogged the roads, but already the parking lot of the bar was packed. Newer models, too. A lot of Volkswagen Passats, Toyota Camrys, Honda Civics, a 3-series BMW or two. Most of which were similar, muted shades of gray and silver.

From the look of things a corporate event was running long. A small catering table was set up immediately inside the door. The length bar itself was packed with people crammed shoulder to shoulder. The tables were a mess, scattered and rearranged in the main room, each with two or three empty steins. The only places to sit were at the shelves bolted to the walls. The bartender made eye contact with me, seemed to recognize me, nodded. He tilted his head toward the crowd as if to apologize. I half smiled, shook my head, turned, and left.

Traffic was still thin for the time of day and the commute home went relatively quickly. After a few minutes I noticed the faint smells of engine coolant and grease blowing through the vents. You piece of shit car. That was another thing. Kill yourself to live for the privilege of burning the equivalent of three months rent from your savings. How much money is that? What would that buy me? A month’s rent on a decent studio in Brooklyn. A hell of a vacation anywhere in the lower forty-eight. A solid month of living day-to-day without a job. On and on and on.

Does anyone, anyone want to be you? The music played quietly through the speakers as my attention shifted back to the road. I smiled maliciously at myself. No, they don’t. They couldn’t, I thought, because you don’t even want to be you.

I didn’t bother going inside after I pulled in the driveway. If I couldn’t get a beer at my usual place, maybe I could get one in the dive five minutes from my apartment. My breath trailed behind me as I walked. Lights, vines of garland, and wreaths were strung up downtown, and I thought, Oh, no.

The dive was kind of bar that sells twenty-four ounce cans of Labatt Blue for a happy hour special. Instead of office lifers the bar was filled with blue-collar shop workers, people who worked odd shifts, and the unemployed. And they all seemed to have been drinking since three in the afternoon. Here, too, it would be impossible to get what I wanted.

By then I needed something. I paid for a bottle of Bud, drank it quickly at the far end where it was still noisy, and thought, Isn’t there a bar in this town where a man can brood?

Without thinking I had started toward the last place, the place I most often frequented with other people when we wanted to go out and drink. Halfway there I realized where I was going. It was a risk, yes. The bar could be packed because a band was playing, or worse, could be filled with people I knew.

When I got there everything was quiet inside, subdued. Low light and Christmas decorations strung up on the walls. There were a few people scattered at the tables and booths, and fewer at the bar itself. I got my beer, climbed onto a stool, and drank. I didn’t think for a while. Just sat and scribbled in my notebook.

“Is anyone sitting here?” a woman asked. A man, maybe her boyfriend, or fiance, or husband, or date, or whoever, was with her.

“No, go ahead.” The three of us exchanged brief smiles and nods and withdrew back into our respective reveries.

As I sat and drank and wrote and tried not to think it hit me. They hit me. The ones who mattered, the ones whose names and faces are brighter and clearer than the rest. Long hair or short; blonde, brunette or redhead, and the matching (or mismatched) eye color; the tattooed or freckled skin; the softness and the warmth. Then the memories of the kinds of things they said to me, remembered only as indistinct feminine voices.

I think you’re a sweetheart.

You’re a hot fuck.

You are awesome and I think you deserve this, even if you don’t think you do.

But everything ends, and every girlfriend, or girl I briefly dated, or a friends-with-benefits arrangement that was becoming something else quickly—they’ve all said, in some way, explicitly or obliquely, the thing that meant it was all over.

I can’t even begin to keep up with you, Tim.

Then I remember I’m lying in bed, alone, with the fan going in the room, awake for what feels like half the night. And after holding it off for so long I admit to myself for the thousandth time the thought that always, always destroys me: I’ve been so starved of affection that on some level I had been in love with every girl I ever so much as kissed.

You try to be a decent guy, try to work hard at and improve your craft, live as independently as you can, but at the end of the day all you have to show for it is a mind-numbing job, a scattered group of friends you don’t want to be around, a fistful of antidepressants that only make everything a little less unbearable, and nothing and no one to go home to except a cold, lonely bed and another fractured, restless night.

Jesus, Tim. The things that keep you up at night. Of course it’s fatalistic and of course it’s irrational and of course it’s largely a narrative you’ve written for yourself. The only thing you can do is let them appear and hope they pass.

I looked up from my drink, across the bar, out the window into the garden area that had been closed down for the winter. At least I can go out to a goddamned bar by myself, I thought. I looked down into the last few inches of beer. The girl behind the bar asked if I wanted another. “No, I’m alright. Thanks.” I felt different. No better or worse, just not the same when I walked in. I was tired. It was getting late. As I finished my drink and stood to leave I caught sight of myself in the reflection of the glass. Even in the dim light of the bar I could see the sleeplessness all over my face.

Another Night Like This Might Kill Me

My landlord keeps the heat off until the first of October. He pays the gas bill and keeps it out of the rent, so I guess I can’t complain too much. Most nights it doesn’t bother me but the tail end of this September has been brutal. The apartment is on the second floor of a house with almost no insulation; the wind howls and takes any heat out through the windows in chilly drafts. It’s been in the sixties and seventies during the day but a frost almost covers the grass in the middle of the night. I tried to talk to Carl, the landlord, convince him to flip the switch a week early but he said it’s in the lease. No heat until October.

“I’m cold,” she says. We got in late, later than usual, and our lovemaking did little to warm the sheets before we slipped between them for the night.

“You don’t feel cold,” I say. Her back, her thighs, her stomach, warm and soft and feminine but I believe her. I can feel the chill on the tip of my nose.

“Can you get another blanket?” Her voice makes it sound like her face is buried in the comforter.

“You could put your pajamas on.” I rearrange the covers and sheets, try to make the thickest and warmest bed with what I have. It’s too late; we are in the dark hours long after the Act and too early for the Act to begin again in the morning. She said she likes sleeping naked with me. Still, she doesn’t answer. I don’t want to argue anymore. Jesus it’s been cold the last few nights.

“Any better?” I press myself into her, curl my arm around her stomach, pull her into me a little. Her back feels warm against my chest. I inhale the hair at the nape of her neck and let out a deep sigh. She shivers.

“A little,” she says. A few moments pause, and then, weakly, “thank you.”

We both lie in bed awake, avoiding the subject. I try not to think about it, so my mind wanders. I think back to when I was a kid in past autumns, the nights a month or so after school started, trying to fall asleep under a mound of blankets because my parents always waited almost until temperatures went below freezing to turn the heat on. Maybe this is the reason I renewed the lease with Carl after the first year, I think. I think about the burnt dust smell coming from the basement ducts, the hum and rattle of the registers as the furnace kicks on for the first time. I think so intensely about this I can almost smell the same childhood smell as I lie next to her.

“So now what?” I say. I am tired and I want to make love to her and I want things to go back to how they were and I want my fucking landlord to turn the furnace on so I can sleep in a warm bed for the first time in I don’t know how long.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” she says. Her voice is clearer now, speaking into the cold air in the bedroom instead of the comforter. I wait for her to go on, but she only sighs, or holds her breath, or somehow both.

“I don’t know what I want you to say.” My voice is an octave lower than normal now at three in the morning, rough like an idling diesel engine. “Say something.” Anything. Talk to me. Jesus it’s cold.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” she says again. She sniffles once, softly. I squeeze her naked hip. If she acknowledges me I can’t tell. She is crying. Maybe trying to hold back actual tears. I imagine the small streams running down her face in the dark, eyes open. All I have to do is ask her to roll over and face me.

Instead I roll over, face away from her. I wait for a minute, two, wait for the rustle of she sheets, wait to feel her cold fingers against my chest, her breasts against my back, her breath against my neck. She doesn’t move. The narrow space in bed between our backs grows cold and we lie, as we have for weeks, like two strangers, two people too afraid and cold and tired to even vent the pent-up animosities we gained over our two years together. In the end I say what I always end up saying to her and I wish, like always, I was able to say something, anything else.

On A Yellow Summer Evening

The grass had turned to dust. Ellis looked across his front yard, large swaths of yellow and brown with a rare patch of pale green here or there. It was worse in the back because the rear of the house faced south. The grass was so far gone it crunched under Ellis’s feet like broken twigs, even early in the morning just after dawn when everything was covered in dew. It was like that in the morning when he went for the paper. The day’s heat was already growing. He knew it was worse in some years than in others, and this just happened to be a bad year for it.

Ellis and Annie sat in the shade of the front porch of their house. There was nothing else to do on a summer evening as hot as this. An oscillating fan blew hot air at them. It was late in the day and the front of the house faced north so the heat wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Still, this was the fifth day the temperature nearly hit one hundred. Ellis wondered if the records set when he was only six or seven years old were going to be broken. Annie only sat and listened.

“I know it’s hot out here girl,” Ellis said, “but it’s a lot worse inside.” Annie only turned her head to the sound of Ellis’s voice, then turned her attention back to the park across the street where a handful of kids batted a baseball around. Ellis never got around to installing an air conditioner in the house, not even a window unit. He had meant to, sure, but he only thought of it at the tail end of a heat wave, and by then he didn’t see the point. The temperature on the thermostat in the bedroom read ninety degrees.

“Hunh,” said Ellis. It wasn’t so much a word as a noise, something between a cough and a groan. “Imagine playing ball in this heat. I hope they have enough water.” He thought maybe he should say something, like his neighbors used to do for the kids. Maybe offer pitchers of lemonade or frigid water from the spigot on the side of the house. But he didn’t have any lemonade, and the hose was coiled in the back yard.

“You’re not paying attention, Annie.” The dog looked straight ahead, panting. “That’s alright,” Ellis said. “I know it’s hot.” The thermometer on the front porch read one hundred and ten. Couldn’t be much more than a hundred, Ellis thought. That thermometer sits directly in the sun. He reached into the cooler for another can of beer. Annie’s tongue snapped back in her mouth while she watched him. Ellis withdrew an ice cube along with the beer and flipped it in the air to the German shepherd. She chomped it to pieces.

The police scanner crackled inside the house. Someone robbed a convenience store and was fleeing on foot. The suspect was described as wearing jean shorts and a white tank top and was carrying ice cream bars and possibly a gun.

“This heat’s getting to people,” Ellis said.

The sun burned the sky yellow. Dog-day cicadas hummed in the trees. Shimmers of heat rose from the end of the street to the west, and even from the fields on the far side of the park. The sound of an aluminum bat intermittently making contact with the ball cut through the heat, followed quickly by shouts from the kids. The air reeked of tar. It began to liquefy where it patched cracks in the road. As cars drove through they left long black trails of it on the pavement. Ellis wiped the sweat from his face with a handkerchief he always kept in his hip pocket. Each time after Ellis brought it out for its purpose at the moment he folded it back into a neat square before returning it to its place.

Ellis heard them before he saw them. Two figures, a tall one and a short one, walked up the sidewalk towards his house. Ellis settled his glasses over his ears and the bridge of his nose.

“We can say hello to Mr. Murphy,” a man’s voice said. “See him on his porch?” Annie perked up again, her tail thumping the concrete of the porch.

“Hi Mr. Murphy!” a young boy said.

“Hi, Derrick,” Ellis said. Derrick was seven or eight years old, a tow-headed, blue-eyed kid. Derrick reminded Ellis of his own grandson, though the grandson was now in his twenties and married and had last visited right around Memorial Day.

“Staying cool, Ellis?” said Harrison, the boy’s father. He was in his thirties, with a dark, neatly-manicured beard and dark-framed glasses. They lived up the street. Both of them sported athletic shorts and white t-shirts. Annie’s tail thumped harder as Derrick patted her head.

“No such thing, in this weather,” Ellis said. “Beer?”

“Might a little later,” Harrison said after a moment’s thought. “The boy and I are going to get ice cream at the Frosty Swirl on the corner.”

“I would have drove,” Ellis said.

“I think we’ll be alright. It’s not too far, and it’ll taste better this way. Or that’s what I have to tell myself. Anything to try to keep cool during these dog days. You’d know about that, wouldn’t you Annie?” He grinned and patted the dog on top of her head. Ellis laughed politely, with an effort. He liked Harrison, even his puns.

“They say we could break the all-time record,” Harrison continued. “Set back in 1936.”

“Hottest damn summer on record,” Ellis said. “I haven’t felt anything bad since.”

“You remember that?”

“Oh yeah.” Ellis produced the handkerchief again. “Oh yeah. I was about Derrick’s age. We lived in Lincoln Park, my mother and father and brother and me. We used to soak our shirts in water before we went to bed, or put our underwear in the ice box for a few hours.”

“Can we get anything for Annie?” Derrick said to his father.

“You’ll have to ask Mr. Murphy.”

“Can we?” Derrick said. “I mean, is she allowed?”

“You can ask her yourself,” Ellis said.

“Would you like that?” Annie tilted her head from side to side. “Do you want dad and I to bring you some ice cream?” She swiveled her head to everyone in turn expectantly.

“Vanilla’s her favorite.” Ellis winked at Derrick. “She’ll love you for it. Probably start following you home once school starts again in the fall.” The boy seemed happy.

“We’ll be back,” Harrison said. “Any requests?”

“Buyer’s choice,” Ellis said. Derrick jumped from the porch to the front walk, skipping the three steps. Ellis watched the two of them walk up the street where they disappeared into the shimmering mirage from the heat off the pavement.

Ellis thought back to that summer. The records were set when he was just seven years old. It never got below eighty at night, if he remembered. He couldn’t remember how long the heat lasted, whether it was a few days or a few weeks. Ellis watched the kids in the park across the street and remembered his baseball days on the school playground where dirt paths were worn into the grass after a summer of running into imaginary bases. The stretch from third to home was slightly longer than home to first. First to second and second to third were about the same, if at flatter angles than they should have been.

“I think Derrick might have a treat for you in a bit,” Ellis said. “I bet that’ll feel good, girl.” Annie stopped panting and inched closer to the front of the porch. The kids in the park drifted closer and closer to the street, moving with the shade cast by the trees.

Maybe I should think about getting an air conditioner, Ellis thought. Just a little one for the bedroom. God knows I’d be able to sleep better. Annie, too. But what was the point? He couldn’t exactly afford one, gas being what it is, especially with his old Ford. And besides, it would only get used a few weeks out of the year.

“Maybe I should do what my old man did and get a fifty-pound block of ice and put a fan in front of it,” Ellis said. Annie stopped panting. One of the kids really got ahold of one. The bat rang out like the kid just hit a metal pole. Ellis watched the ball cut through the humidity, curving towards the street directly in front of the porch. Annie jumped. Ellis watched her watch the ball.

It happened fast. Annie tore off the porch to the street to chase the errant ball. She wouldn’t listen to his commands. She raced into the street to retrieve the ball. Ellis went after her. Blades of grass broke beneath his shoes. Then the car, the car that came from nowhere, a mirage from the longest, hottest days made manifest. Tires screeched. Ellis didn’t know if the car even saw her. The kids running towards the ball and Annie and Ellis shouted. Everything stopped. Even the cicadas momentarily ceased their droning. The heat hung over Ellis’s face like he was trying to breathe through a hot, wet towel. Annie was nowhere to be found. If she was hit she should be right here, Ellis thought. Where is she? Where…?

Nails scraped on the asphalt. From the opposite side of the car where Ellis couldn’t see trotted Annie, wagging her tail, carrying a baseball in her mouth. Ellis waved to the driver, mouthing a “sorry” and “thank you.” He breathed heavily. The driver looked shaken and annoyed, but mostly grateful nothing happened. She gave a wave and pulled away, leaving a trail of tar in her wake. The cicadas resumed their concert.

“Is he okay?” one of them asked. They all were sweaty. Annie dropped the ball at Ellis’s feet and wagged her tail happily.

Ellis only nodded. He turned the ball over in his hands, feeling the minor scuff marks on its surface. Annie sat in the street, watching the ball. Ellis tossed it into one of the boys’ open gloves. “You boys just make sure you’re drinking enough.”

“We will Mr. Murphy,” the dark-haired one said. Then to the others, “Let’s go back to my house. We have central air.” The boys waved to the old man and dispersed. Ellis turned back to his house, Annie on his left hip.

“You scared the hell out of me, you know.” Annie circled and lay on the porch, her middle pumping in an out. “Don’t ever do something like that again.” She let out a tired, heavy sigh. Ellis gave up—he couldn’t be mad at her for more than a minute or two—and eased himself back in the wicker chair. His shirt stuck to the small of his back. He reached over to the fan and clicked it to its highest setting. The beer he left sitting on top of the cooler was already warm. He dumped the rest over the porch railing into the bushes. Ellis thought about reaching for another.

“Something happen, Ellis?” Harrison asked. “You look like you were just in the shower.” Sweat soaked through Ellis’s shirt in a V from the neck, and he was wet under the arms. His arms and legs were slick and shiny. Beads of perspiration ran down Ellis’s face. The handkerchief was soggy.

“Decided I’d go for a quick run with Annie,” Ellis said. “About died. I’m not as young as I used to be.”

“We got you something too, Mr. Murphy,” Derrick said. The boy presented the old man with a chocolate malt.

“Well thank you very much, young man! A malt, too. I used to drink my weight in these when I was your age.” Derrick held the cone out for the dog. She lapped at it, sending streams of melted ice cream down the boy’s hand an arm while he laughed.

“And when, exactly, were you his age?” asked Harrison.

“I told you,” said Ellis, “summer of thirty-six. A lifetime of long, hot summers ago.”

“You’re a mess,” Harrison said to his son. Annie had finished with the cone and took to cleaning the boy from his wrist to his elbow. “Go home and clean up. If your mom asks tell her it was my fault.” Harrison dug into the cooler and sat in the empty chair next to Ellis. “Seriously, you’re sure you’re okay? I think we have a window unit from our hold house somewhere in the basement. It wouldn’t be any trouble.”

Ellis considered this. The breeze from the fan made him feel cool, almost chilled him. It would be good for Annie, but she usually ran straight for the basement when it was like this.

“It’s a good thing this doesn’t happen too often,” Ellis said. “The heat’s getting harder and harder to bear every summer.”

Ellis and Harrison sat on the porch, each pulling another can from the cooler every so often. They watched the sky change from yellow to blue to black. Harrison got a little drunk. So did Ellis. The heat was supposed to break sometime in the night.

The Blue Hour

Sometimes I forget exactly where I am. About once a week, on average, I see a car parked near the corner of Keech and South Main with the driver leaning toward the open passenger side window, taking a photo of Michigan Stadium. Once there was a man taking a photo of a woman at the northeast entrance. She wore a blue shirt with maize, block-lettered ”Michigan” on the front. He motioned for her to move this way or that, trying to get her in just the right frame for a shot of the stadium and the background, and her, and the wrought lettering on the gate above her head. The other day an entire family—dad, mom, two young sons, all wearing University of Michigan apparel, all positively beaming—stood in front of the entrance at the corner of South Main and Stadium while someone kneeled on the sidewalk and snapped mementos for them.

I work on South Campus right next to the stadium and drive by the place five days a week. My car is parked fewer than three hundred yards from the iconic block M painted on the fifty yard line. When I started this job in September this made me happy—or it made my inner child happy, at least. When I was ten years old my mother (it was always my mother, fanatic U of M football fan, who now drives back and forth between Ann Arbor and Louisville for most home games every year) decided I was old enough to attend a game or two every year. My most recent visit inside the gates for a football game was just this past October, a ridiculous triple-overtime circus Michigan won against Illinois. The first-ever contest I saw from the bleachers in person is known in college football lore as The Miracle at Michigan, when Colorado beat the Wolverines wtih a sixty-four yard prayer on the very last play as time expired. I was in fifth grade.

I’m just old enough to remember Michigan Stadium with a handful of its older features. For the first few years of my memory the field was natural grass and the scoreboards relatively low-tech, the kind you find used by high schools around the country on Friday nights. Then the scoreboards were replaced sometime in the mid-nineties and included video screens. The grass was replaced by artificial turf several years ago. Steel skeletons enclosed the stadium as brick was laid to expand seating and include luxury boxes three years ago. Most recently I watched university staff dismantle the older video scoreboards in preparation for newer, even larger high-definition screens in preparation for the 2011 season.

I cared about these things. When I lived away I made a point to cruise by the stadium if I happened to be in Ann Arbor, see what the construction looked like, remember all those Saturdays with my mom as we walked up Hoover and Greene to the gates, smelling grilled hot dogs and sunny Michigan autumn as we made our way to our places in Section 39, row 44, seats 7 and 8, tickets she has had since time immemmorial.

Cared, in the past tense, being the operative word. Most days, now, I couldn’t care less.

My commute to and from work has become something of a concern. I live in Ypsilanti, only ten miles from the office and about twenty minutes of driving during rush-hour traffic most days, but increasingly larger chunks of time are missing from my memory. I’m in the car, and I know I’m driving and awake; I crank “Vs.” on I-94 with the windows down in the afternoons. I am entirely on autopilot back and forth. This is not entirely comforting if it means I’ve become anaesthetized to the realities of the eight-to-five monotony. More likely it means I simply stopped giving a shit.

During one morning commute about a month ago, shortly before eight in the morning, I almost nailed a rooster on the street in the Ann Arbor about a mile from work. The thing strutted out from the golf course south of the stadium. I saw it in time to jerk the steering wheel to the left and miss him. Whether it wandered in from farmland around the city, or if it was wild and had a home in the woods, or even if it escaped from some urban farming experiment I have no idea. It was too horrible to ponder the meaning of it. “Jesus Christ Tim,” I thought, “you are in fucking Ann Arbor, the state’s last, best hope, and you almost smoked a goddamned farm animal with your car in the city limits.”

Later in the day, or maybe in the week (all of my work days are beginning to run together), after my freak-out somewhat subsided and I took a break from pricing New York apartments on Craigslist I killed a few minutes reading AnnArbor.com, the replacement of the Ann Arbor News, before lunch. As it is a mostly-online source for news, readers are invited now and then to vote in weekly best-of polls for places around town and the county: best breakfast, for example. This week was the best place for happy hour, and this day the results were released.

Two occurrences of “you need to get out of here!” signs inside of a week was pushing it. The best place for happy hour in Washtenaw County? Not Sidetrack in Ypsilanti, nor Ashley’s, nor any other of the local institutions. No, as voted by AnnArbor.com’s readers, the best place for happy hour in Washtenaw County is Red Robin. It’s the half-off appetizers and two-dollar margarita specials, see. I threw my hands up in frustration and disgust even though nobody was watching and and if they were, nobody cared.

This past weekend I dogsat for my sister and her husband. The two of them recently moved from Atlanta to an apartment complex in Novi, Mich. temporarily, before they soon move into a house. Her complex of townhouses is named Central Park Estates. The roads are named after streets, or more like typical pie-in-the-sky Midwestern concepts of New York: Manhattan Circle, Wall Street, Empire Drive, none of which bare any resemblence to their real-life counterparts, not even in the worst fictions. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Tim. Is this really the life you’ve built for yourself at age twenty-seven?” At least my own apartment, modest though it is, carries a certain degree of Midwestern respectability.

Despite our vast differences my sister are alike in some crucial ways, one being our inability to keep much in the way of food stocked in the cupboards and the refrigerator. So when she left a note telling me to help myself to whatever, I knew I’d have to venture out into Metro Detroit for dinner. Even in small, college-town Ypsilanti there are a few options within walking distance. The last thing I wanted to do in fucking Novi was burn gas or throw money at delivery frivolously but, alas, my sister’s ridiculous townhouse was at least three miles from fast food, let alone anything worthwhile.

My resentment grew. Nothing but ugly three-story steel-and-glass office complexes, all with signs advertising space for lease, all occupying swaths of lush, painstakingly manicured land. To hell with urban planning or efficiency, there’s some more green space. We can always build more driveways, parking lots, and roads to nowhere. As I drove on office parks gave way to enormous strip malls in the midst of suburbia hell, strip malls populated by aging Gen Xers and Baby Boomers driving new Focuses and Mustangs and Malibus and CTSes because God Help You if you don’t Buy American. Finally, exasperated and defeated, I gave up and pulled in front of a Jimmy John’s, furious and somewhat ashamed of myself. It was twilight when I drove back to my sister’s place—the blue hour, it’s called by artists and photographers, supposedly the best light for blond-haired blue-eyed people. In all that melancholy blue sky and light, with all my windows down and the wind whipping through my car, at that moment all I wanted was to push the fucking thing into Lake Huron and see Michigan cities shrink in the distance behind me.

One evening earlier this week I drove back to Ann Arbor several hours after work in the face of four-dollar-a-gallon gas. I parked in one of the lots, different than one I use during the day, sat on the trunk of my car and quietly stared at the eastern facade of Michigan Stadium for a while, coincidentally at twilight. I remembered leaving work on Fridays just this last fall the day before a home game, and I smiled at the thought of hearing the marching band play The Victors nearby. But that pretty feeling was fleeting. The love I felt for it all was replaced by indifference, love’s opposite, and when I looked toward the stadium in all its hugeness and significance I barely cared I was there.

The New York Vignettes

The cabbie put the hammer down as soon as my friend said “Brooklyn,” and we sped along the expressway at ninety miles per. Half an hour earlier I had descended from an overcast sky into a vast green and orange expanse emanating from the five boroughs, and before that I had seen the streets of Detroit as thin and insubstantial as spider silk. All it took was ten minutes on the highway in New York City until we hit a a traffic snarl.

I almost asked my friend, who graciously offered to play hostess for the next three days, why the hell we were at a dead stop on a major freeway at ten o’clock at night on a Wednesday, but caught myself as I glanced at the license plate of the car in front of us. I repeated the location silently during the ride, scanning the skyline of some indeterminate part of the city, trying to make sure it was real. It was then, in the back seat of a taxi careening down the Brooklyn Expressway during my first trip to New York City, after I had awoken that morning in Michigan, after a full day of interminable and irrelevant work minutiae, after I had seen Detroit from the air as a tiny place I could cover with my hand, that it hit me.

For a while, at least, I really was somewhere else.

————

On Thursday, my first full day in the city, we walked.

We walked to and from subway stops, wandering the streets in Park Slope, where she lives in a studio apartment, until we stopped in some place for breakfast. We walked through town to the Brooklyn Library. It took a few hours through Brooklyn to rid me of some of my habits. I expected a sudden end to an area, a halt to the rows of nineteenth-century houses. I somehow expected it all to stop. The city just went on, and on, and on. Then we disappeared underground for twenty minutes and reemerged on a different planet, Lower Manhattan.

We walked near New York City Hall. Through Chinatown, the Lower East Side, SoHo. We stopped and ate expensive cupcakes expertly paired with expensive beer. Then we kept walking. NYU and Washington Square Park. Distinct neighborhoods emerging within blocks of one another. This was something I knew but did not appreciate until I saw it first hand, and I was angry at myself for my lack of worldliness. But every time I passed a vacant store front or for lease sign, some speck of urban blight even in the most expensive real estate in the country, I felt the vindicated, even if only slightly.

By the end of the first day I wanted to die. I was tired but happy. My friend asked me what I had thought of the city thus far.

“I really like New York City,” I said. I was telling the absolute truth.

————

On Friday, my second full day in the city, I spent most of the day alone. I had awoken late, much later than I wanted, and my friend had long left for work. I flipped through a few pages of a Nor For Tourists guide, memorized a few stops on the subway map, then threw it on the bed. Before I left Michigan I told everyone I was going to, “I don’t know, walk around and look at shit” when they asked about my plans. I had no plan.

The skies threatened rain most of the day but did nothing except occasionally spit, and it was cold—early April Michigan weather, if I ever experienced any. I spent much of the day riding the trains, climbing and descending flights of stairs, intentionally losing myself until the train stopped and I jumped off. Then down one small street that looked interesting, and another, and another, until I was tired of the forties so I caught the train again and took it to the seventies.

In the afternoon, before I hoofed it to The Met (one of the few touristy things I wanted to do), I stopped, hidden somewhere in Manhattan among the skyscrapers away from the major avenues. I looked up, and above my head, in one of only a handful of times in my life when I saw more building than sky, two skyscrapers arc and nearly touch above me. I was suddenly dizzy. Distortion of perception; vertigo in reverse. For a moment, two, I marveled at the bigness of it all, and then the smallness of myself, and if any damn thing I did mattered. Then I looked around me at street level again, and almost everyone I saw was, like me, dressed in black.

Later, much later, on a long train ride home after a long day and a night in a bar lit in all red light, my hostess friend again asked me if I was having a good time, and in some sentimental haze made worse by the beer and the fatigue I said something or other, and that I might have I loved the place, and again I was telling the truth.

————

I hit the wall during the in-between hours of Saturday and Sunday, my third and fourth days in the city. I spent the previous several hours in the company of New Yorkers, most of whom were several years older than me. For their part they tried to include me in their conversations, and I tried to join, but these were not my friends, and they knew it, and I knew it. After dinner we all ended up at a bar in Brooklyn, and I remember losing it at around two-thirty in the morning because the bars in Michigan are only open until two.

I sat, drunk and tired, at a table stacked with empty pint glasses while an Englishman regaled the group with a story about Germans and white sausage. Taxis passed in the street outside, and for a few seconds I nearly forgot where I was. It was all noise; overdrive cranked up to ten. Everything was meant to distract, to disorient. I felt a pang, and I realized, for the first time, that I missed Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti.

I was a little envious of my friend; she found her own spaces, her own people, made a go of own life among millions of others in New York City and was doing a damned decent job of it. But the more I thought, the more I wondered if the place would ever be right for me. I wanted to return to my bars, my friends, the people and places I love, the things I wanted to do but hadn’t, or discover things I never knew existed. The two places really aren’t so different, I thought, leaning back in my Brooklyn bar chair: the same ridiculous stories and conversations, the same drunkenness in the wee hours from the same craft beer styles served in the the same decors, and it doesn’t matter if you stumble home drunk or take a cab or hop the train or use a friend as the designated driver because in the end every goddamned bar is exactly the same—I thought, with all my cynicism and provincialism, of New York City as just another bullshit town, and I didn’t even know whether or not I believed myself.

————

I left late Sunday afternoon. The pilot said we were flying out of LaGuardia to the northeast. I collapsed in my seat, staring out the window to the tarmac, reflecting on the events of the previous few days. Because I was exhausted, or because I experienced a vast array of emotions, or because I was legitimately sad to be leaving, or because I was legitimately happy to go home, I sat in my seat on that fucking plane on the verge of tears. But we taxied to the runway, and the engines throttled up, and before I knew it, as quickly as I arrived, I was gone from New York City entirely.

Somewhere over Pennsylvania I thought of a few lines from The Great Gatsby, one of my favorite stories, as I popped peanuts in my mouth one by one. I experienced New York in a series of disconnected vignettes; unlike Gatsby there was no narrative, no overarching plot, no theme to neatly tie everything together at the end. The narrator, Nick Carraway, explained his feelings in the closing pages of the novel, and at the moment I felt so like him: nearing thirty with a shrinking list of single friends to know; knowing the power the city had over me, but knowing of its distortive effect; fearing I wasn’t suitable for life in the East.

I wanted to return to the Midwest, to Michigan, my home.

I have memories from the ludicrous to the mundane: I watched women take their clothes off for two hours in an honest-to-god burlesque show complete with nearly-nude fire-swallowing and puns from an emcee with the stage name Albert Cadabra; I stopped in some random pizza place for a slice and a Coke; I watched tourists take pictures of the Tiffany’s storefront on 5th Avenue; I experienced rush hour subway traffic, and thought about how it wasn’t so different than hitting the daily congestion on I-94 at the State Street on-ramp in Ann Arbor; I walked the Brooklyn Bridge on a bright, sunny, breezy spring day and ate a hot dog from a street vendor; I listened, with amusement and disdain, as someone at dinner described New York City as “at least thirty percent more attractive than almost any other American city”; I roamed through Manhattan’s Upper East Side on my way to The Met, and in front of the Scientology Center, just a few blocks from what is arguably the country’s flagship art museum, I watched a golden retriever leashed to its owner circle, squat, and shit right in the middle of the street; a million other things I’ve forgotten for the moment; I experienced everything and I didn’t experience nearly enough.

This was my New York. I saw and did and experienced so many things, and my visit to the city is unquantifiable. It simply was. I spent three and a half days in New York City and acquired collage of memories, images, sensations and stories to tell, and somehow, now that it’s all over, I can scarcely be sure I was ever there at all.