The American

i left my partner, l, alone to move into our new apartment in Toronto because a few months ago we were together in New York and I took all my clothes off in public and I was in front of the American flag and the cops showed up and now I have to go back for my court date for this silly thing that happened out of love, this strange and beautiful thing, and I want to go back to L because I love her. I don’t want her to be away from me, to be alone in the endless air in the nothing between the clouds and the nothing that rolls on and rolls on and on and on. To what.

There’s a man a few seats up from me. He’s handsome and I can’t stop staring at him. He has slicked-back black hair, tattoos on his neck, his eyes are deep blue almost blond. He’s charming the stewardess. She touches his hand, they share little smiles, secret smiles when she passes. I turn my head away when she passes and I hope she doesn’t see me, I shrink away, grip the armrest of fiery death this metal box of wires in the sky in the nothing. The handsome man drinks his drink cool, his cool drink, and he smiles and everything belongs to him.

In secondary security at the Newark International Airport I see the handsome man again. He’s arguing with a US customs officer who threatens to send him back to Canada. The handsome man says he’s in New York because he’s in love with a woman and she’s here, he’s going to her and he won’t leave, he’ll fight to get back to her and I love him now. He’ll never win. I’m with him. Now I’m the handsome man. A customs officer calls me over:

“Why are you here?”

“I have a court date tomorrow.”

“When are you leaving?”

“In two days.”

Silence, no eye contact.

“Welcome to America.”

It was July. It was July 6. It was wedding season, we’d driven through the Independence Day states of the northeast Maine and New Hampshire, in New York, New York with L, American flags were in bloom and us too. We found one flag afternoon, massive and shining of jewels in a Williamsburg park by the baseball diamond. Shining, L dared me to pose nude in front of it, the American flag, and we laughed and I did it because I loved her and America, the centre of the universe in motion, I loved her and now and a click of the camera, quick.

And then the cops came. One of the officers was young and disappointed in me like an older brother might be disappointed in me, like my actual older brother is disappointed in me. He looked me in the eyes and he said, “People have died for that flag,” and he wasn’t kidding and he was right too. He handed me a yellow ticket with a court date, disorderly conduct. I called a lawyer and she told me that up to fifteen days in jail was the worst thing that could happen, fifteen days and I’d never go back to America. The worst thing.

Back to now. I’m on a train, it’s grey and it’s raining. A woman sits next to me and she smiles and she smells like Halloween candy and she spends the entire train ride texting and I read my book, Alan Watts’s The Way of Zen. He quotes Chuan Tzu, saying:

The baby looks at things all day without winking; that is because his eyes are not focused on any particular object. He goes without knowing where he is going, and stops without knowing what he is doing. He merges himself within the surroundings and moves along with it.

Hmm, and we’re at Penn Station and the woman from the train walks next to me into the street and there, in the New York street, she smiles and the sun is shining through a mist of the grey rising away into the nothing. A dreadlocked construction worker smiles too and her eyes are blue and she looks like she’s high and I smile and we’re all smiling now, smiling in America and tethered.

There’s a jazz band playing behind everything, playing from a bar low beneath our feet like nostalgic non-existent 1950s, tourists gape their phones in the air aiming at their faces. I walk to 37th and 9th where a friend moved from Toronto to there, to here, and she has an apartment and she has a couch for the night and her name is Joy and when I find her building Joy buzzes me in and I find her apartment so many floors up, my feet echoing hello all the way up to Joy who hugs me on the threshold and she says, “Baby, I’m so busy, I’m sorry,” and she has to leave and she puts the key in my hand, in my pocket, the key to her apartment, and she says, “I’m seeing this new guy, he’s cute and tomorrow we can all grab drinks if you don’t end up in jail!” We laugh. She offers me no coffee, no wine, there’s a cat in the room and it’s wearing a bow tie. It hides from me somewhere near, hello. I text L, I tell her I’m safe, soft words, I’m safe.

And it’s night and I walk my entire life through Lower Manhattan, a feeling filling the air like if I stand here long enough something will happen. Something to change this. My phone rings in my pocket and I ignore it, I can’t answer to anyone calling, no one knows I’m here. No one but L, Joy, and the state of New York and a woman passing asks me directions. She’s looking for a bar called Local 138 and it’s on this street and “I don’t know it,” I say, “but I can help you find it, the numbers go up from here,” and she says, “That would be swell,” her drawl the wind through the wind chimes. We’re approaching 100s and we walk.

We talk about nothing, we walk together in the night. She’s a student and she’s new and her name is Mary Lou and she’s from Needles, California, “The greatest wasteland armpit west of all of Ohio, which is also an armpit,” she says, and the bar is warm and she asks me to sit. Six men fill the table beside us, they’re watching a muted TV with the moving mouths of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and they’re drinking beer from glasses as big as their heads, their heads that play football as big as two or three people, drunk, all of them silent but the room somehow loud like a headache heartbeat pound in your ears and Mary Lou won’t tell me who she’s voting for, she says, “We’re in New York take a wild guess, ya fool.” She tells me about the price of apartments and the price of tuition and the price of transit, I tell her about my court date and she laughs. We’re drinking flat beer in the heart of the world and she says, “So what do you suppose is gonna happen?”

“With what, exactly?”

“That court date of yours. You think you gonna win or you think you gonna lose?”

“I don’t know, I have to leave it up to fate I guess.”

“You believe in a silly thing like that?”

“I don’t know. I guess I never thought about it too much.”

“Well, you best get to thinkin. You can’t just let everyone else in the world decide who you are. Who are you anyway?”

I don’t know how to answer that question. I offer to buy another round.

“Lemme tell you somethin, boy,” she says. “When I was just a girl, like a little one no bigger than one of them legs of yours, my Daddy brought me to a ranch, the kind with all kinds of horses. Big ones, lil ones, pretty ones, ones that’ll bite you in half if you ain’t careful. All kinds. He said I was gonna ride one of them for the first time. Oh boy, if I wasn’t excited. I’d wanted to ride a horse since I’d heard one gallopin around in the big ol world just outside my Momma’s belly, God rest her soul. It was all that I thought about. And here I was, just a moment away. It felt like a lifetime. And I remember that first horse right down to its yellowin crooked teeth. It was smaller than the other horses and spotted, it had long hair and looked like a pretty little girl, just like me. It looked like me if I was a horse. I was in love with her right away. I whispered, I’ll love you always, if you let me, off into the air as if she could hear me. As if she could understand somethin like the love of a girl. And my Daddy put me up on that horse and he said now look, this horse is strong. Stronger than you. You gotta really dig yer heels into it, it won’t hurt none. Just remember this one thing: The two of you gonna work in tandem now but only one of you decides what happens to you. And you’re the one who decides which of you that is. You in charge? Or is the horse in charge? You’re both big enough and strong enough to decide on that,” and she finishes her beer and says, “Well, go on. Grab me another one then.”

“But wait, what happened?”

“Oh it bucked me alright. Made a mess of me. I couldn’t even look at another horse for oh some odd four years at least, goddamn. I cried and I cried.”

“What happened in those four years?”

“Oh nothin,” she says. “Well, somethin. But it’s hard to describe. But shoot, everyone has a story like mine. Everyone. Everyone got a story like that one. You’ll see.” She gets up saying, “Well, I changed my mind. I gotta go, boy. Keep that drink for yerself.” I ask her to stay and talk more. She smiles, says good luck, have fun, maybe I’ll find you in Toronto someday. She won’t. And she’s gone. Quick as she came. I stay with another flat beer and the six silent men then wander. Wonder descending like nets in the night. I think of L. I text her,

thinking of you

then:

hey, I love you

She doesn’t text back. It’s late.

Morning. I wake, I learn to tie a tie. I thought of maybe a woman maybe I’d marry one day who would maybe want to tie my tie for me forever and then, outliving her, I would feel the need of her, of another, of any other as I stare at my now forever untied tie. How much I could lose, everything all at once.

The line outside the courthouse curves around the block of the great brick building of justice and scatters into the sleepy New York morning street, different than any other morning like a low longing howl. Here’s what happens: I’m ushered through security, a metal detector, I stand in another long line. I hand my yellow ticket, the one the officer gave me, to a woman at a counter behind a plastic window. I’m told to go to courtroom #3. People fill the halls like we’re all in high school between classes, everyone shuffling feet and slouching. I walk into courtroom #3. Pews on both sides like a church, mostly full. I sit next to a man who falls asleep and is kicked out of the room by an officer. I’m the only one, aside from the lawyer representing the hundred mostly men in this room, wearing a tie. All eyes look down complacent, mostly indifferent. The judge looks kind, her red hair to her shoulders, and she speaks and a fury of disappointment veils her face. I breathe. I think of Alan Watts. I think of Chuan Tzu. I breathe for sixty minutes and I’m quiet and the minutes pass slowly like an entire lifetime sitting there alone and after sixty minutes my name is called and I stand next to a lawyer, in front of the judge.

The worst thing that could happen.

The judge looks down and her glasses slide to the end of her nose as she reads from a file.

“So apparently you exposed yourself in front of the American flag.”

She laughs. The officers around me all laugh, some of the indifferent men too.

The lawyer next to me shuffles. “Are you sure it was in front of the flag?”

“Oh yes. The officer was quite explicit in his language… I’ve never come across this before. I suppose it’s lewdness but…I guess he didn’t like the flag too much.”

I want to speak up, I want to say that no, she’s wrong, that I love it, that I did what I did because I loved it, because I was full of love, that I loved everything then and I was naked and I was strong and it’s L who I think of and I think of Alan Watts and of Chuan Tzu and I stand there in my tie silent in the laughter like the wind.

“Hmm…we’ll just fine you twenty-five dollars?” she says like a question.

I look to the lawyer next to me. He asks if that’s okay. I say yes. I’m told to wait outside the room, someone will collect my money. A man in the hall asks me if I’m funny. I don’t know what he means.

“You know, you funny or somethin? Like, was it a serious protest-type shit or was you just bein funny?”

I was being funny, I tell him. I thought it would make a good photo. He looks me up and down, he says, “You crazy.”

I pay my punishment. Twenty-five dollars. I text L, tell her I’m safe. She asks when I’ll be back. I say soon and no response.

Subway to Williamsburg. Men singing on the subway car, if I have to beg and plead for your sympathy / please don’t leave me girl. I buy Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Mitch Horowitz’s Occult America. Henry Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi. This notebook. I’m in New York wearing a tie and I’m free and all is right with the world now, coffee. Stoops like altars on every building, I’m yearning now, this is what it feels like to want something, to worship something, I want to sit smoking cigarettes. I wonder that because I grew up Catholic all my heroes are dead or saints or both. I find a golden yellow sweater balanced perfectly on top of a garbage can and it looks clean and I put it on and it fits perfectly and this is it. This is my reward. I go back to Joy’s couch, the empty apartment, and I rest. The cat with the bow tie hiding somewhere near, another life with me but hidden.

Joy comes home. She asks me how things went. I tell her, everything, and we laugh. Soon we sit together on the L train. A woman, drunk, looks Joy in the eye and she says, “Don’t you look at me, sheeit.” Joy looks away. The woman says, “I’ll fuck you up, don’t you fuckin stick your eyes at me. Fuck.” Silent. Our stop.

We’re in Bushwick and we meet with Joy’s new boyfriend and he’s as tall as he is wide and he’s handsome as he is tall and he tells me about working in film now, how he was a truck driver once, “In another life,” he says. “Strange, the shit life throws your way and it just keeps going on and going on and on and on.” We go to a bar and we buy some cool drinks and we drink them real cool. The presidential debate plays on every television, Obama and Romney projected on the wall, on every wall, electric in the air. Americans gathered in America, all speaking America, more and more drinks. Joy goes home with her new boyfriend, I can’t remember his name now. What even happened then but a lot of things lost. I go back to Joy’s alone.

I leave in the morning. I don’t remember if she said goodbye. Maybe there were tears. It was so long ago and there are so many things I’ll choose to forget. How much was my choosing.

My final morning in America. As I walk to Penn Station slow and alone now, barely here, New York becomes one sound magicless and grey. Blond weave, hair on the ground, I barely notice anything now. Hungover, bad dreams: My best friend leaves me, my partner upset, I’m a jerk always. I’m a fool of the worst kind and the worst part is I romanticize it all. I sit waiting in the airport. I’m alone. Nearby an orthodox Jewish couple reading with their child, old ladies playing cards, people in suits, people on their cellphones, all of us walking to our airplanes, coming and going and leaving after all. The airport smells stale like the iron smell of seeing someone you love walk away with another person, another person who isn’t you, who isn’t the handsome man. I text L and she doesn’t text back. Later she’ll leave me.