On The Outskirts of Athens

I celebrated my centennial slab of acid. I was with a man I knew little about except his name--Moustafa. We broke bread. Well, me and Moustafa, we were mucking around the bottom dregs of a grape farm and generally bungling about. The sloven members of our community. I walked among the vines. Buckled, really. Those days, I had been spending my time barefoot, barely barefooting by. In this practice, I felt real Greek. Like an athenian diner of a man. Moustafa sampled, ensanguining unripe grapes. The littlest he pinched, cashewed into his mouth. He soured. Occasionally, he doubled over as to demonstrate the destructive power of unripe fruit.

The broad-chested earth so that everyone may be able to sit down for supper. It was my last--I ascribed it with this importance so it would taste better; finality-- and me and Moustafa sat on the same side of the table, same side of the coin, which is to say the same side of the earth, which is to say me and Moustafa were more similar than I cared to admit, more than I cared. Plain as corn.

I went to explore an olive tree. It was beyond description. It’s leaves draped around its trunk, billowing blouse-in-wind. Clothes clotheslined. It made me feel I was looking into a future where New York capsized into the Hudson because it’s skyscrapers threw off its balance, the city’s spine exposed in gut-up trout, a future where peach saplings sit on heads like botany, like we’re just potted plants. A future where all the dogs of Mexico listen to me in reverence. Oh they’d follow me if they were blind. I built their city. A future where a sermon I deliver is the most potent ever heard. In the way we follow the north star, like some ursine preacher, I spit sunflower gardens from my podium. A future where I am lost in London subways, chalking my way into the city. A bird migrating south.

The olive tree had no olives. I felt water drip on my head. I thought the tree was weeping olive oil. I left. When I returned to Moustafa he was doing something unexpected, which was expected. He was eating cottage cheese with his hands. I looked up at him. He had a man e. He had regality. He owned himself. And Moustafa, he told me something that will forever haunt me: I will never be as sad as Pablo Neruda’s wrinkles.

I thought many things were sad. The way dogs pouted for scraps. The way snot-coagulate like salt lick, fly-zipped lips hungered against chain fences in anti-famine campaigns. The way some constellations frown. The way flowers deject in lilt. The way some poems smack me. These were the things that brought me great sadness. And besides that, I was a thinker, always with nucleated emotion. And now, I was thinking.

Give me the good and the bad. I’m a betting man. I dreamt up, on pipe, a casino in rural Greece where I tossed/forked over rocks to the wind as my bet and screamed poker hands to outgoing traffic. It was a sleeping bag, wooly shag carpet day. The sky in steel wool. When the saline winds swept up that week, I began to feel I was carried more by nature than any other force. This was in 1987, before the Greek Autumn ended. I felt citizen’s bodies were sutured to their heads by scarves, stapled onto buses and trains and the like. I had a dream newly-elected John McCain or John Wayne or John from down the street or any John really came at me, but more specifically my femur, with a crowbar.

I was recapping. Here is what I know: On the outskirts of Athens I took acid with a man named Moustafa. It was going well. Well, as well as I knew. I was repeating myself. All cerebral.

Let’s transgressionalize: I was writing poems with my left hand, keeping my head inside the womb. I was all nostalgia. From hip to collar. I realized I had forgotten, like what a ripe apple tastes like, the virtue of good reading. I realized I was wasting my time as my mom said, what time I had left. She was standing by 24/7 at my local airport waiting for the day I got home. Waiting for her child to find her again. Find ground again. My mother had both given me the good and the bad. Mostly the good.

I was tobogganing real fast down the slow lane. I was an illegal in many ways. I was wasting my time with the right people though, putting myself in the right places to have fun. And I was asking myself at this point about whether this was really what I wanted. I couldn’t decide.

Anyways, me and Moustafa smoked a spliff. Real nice. And I asked him why the homeless have croons that can haunt you, about why living in nature gives you new wisdom. I asked him whether this wisdom was good or bad. I didn’t care about his answer. He answered anyways. I didn’t even know why I was spending my time with Moustafa. He was as hip as a collar bone, which is to say not very. I told him I was going to live in a coal mine. Do I have a new voice? I’ve been practicing I swear. I will sound like the clang of metal on stone. Of sweat and soot-lick. Of hunger. A precious coal-mine canary. I took Moustafa with a grain of salt. I was taking myself with a grain of salt.

My brain was going wild. It was like I was looking through the windows of a dirty blimp riding low to the ground.

This is what I told Moustafa: Sometimes. Sometimes when a blimp goes low, even it can count the stairs on a staircase. This was a tidbit of wisdom I had learned from my time in Mexico, from my time cracking pecans with my teeth. Incise. Outcise. An exercise in outercise.

Everybody walks around holding a flower. A flower to give. And mine is keeled over, isn’t it? It hasn’t been watered properly. It hasn’t prospered. Oh, what to do? It has been stepped on. My garden trampled. I took to ask Moustafa a question, but I found he was trying to launch himself from a tree onto the moon. He failed by way of gravity. Silly Moustafa. But he had a smile on his face, his flower tucked behind his teeth, and this was added to my scrapbook of sadness.

I found Moustafa and I had walked to a town. It was nearing dusk. We had been walking on dirt, that red dirt that hugs the memory of your foot long after you forget. I was sad again.

“I have started placing more importance in my footsteps, Moustafa, for I am having a harder time knowing where I am in relation to where I was.”

“Why are you talking like that?” Moustafa asked. “You tripping already?”

In fact, the drugs truly set in when I was talking to a fruit vendor. 30 minutes later. He had a cart of oranges and cucumber, tomatoes and peaches and plums. I learned how to taste much before I could talk. If you can’t tell you spend a lot of time in your own body, I told the vendor, said, I had dropped out of Dartmouth the last year because, because, because it just wasn’t right for me, but this Papaya was. I could appreciate it. I was learning to taste again to get the ash of cigarettes out of my mouth. I was looking in the mirror differently nowadays. It was because of the drugs, Moustafa told me. I didn’t trust him. Sometimes Moustafa made me sicker than a leukemic dog.

Anyways, I was talking to the fruit vendor whose name was Kostas and Kostas he told me that not thirty minutes away lived the most beautiful girl. He said she was from America, from New York or New Jersey or New Haven. He said she was new. He also said he could swim without getting wet. And that he could camel up: drink water once per week. I’m not sure if I’m making up the last two points, he just looked like a man who knew his way around water.

And so me and Moustafa decided we want to see the girl. It had been a long time since I had thought about women.  My first girlfriend not three months back had tried to kill me with a knife in a cocaine-induced rage. She came at me swinging, screaming her top off about “Give me the good and bad. The good and bad.” She tried to gut me open. Scale me like a fish. It was the most sobering moment of my life. And so I took that boat.

I was topsy-turvy now. After that lucidity I needed a break from pragmatism. And so I was drinking myself into parenthesis. Into apostrophe. Into a bracket of society that maybe I shouldn’t belong.

Honey is just bees vomit. This popped into my head. It’s beautiful.

I wanted to rant. We were walking on dust, me and Moustafa, we were walking in a Greek town. Quiet. Like a ski town abandoned in summer. The dogs hummed on and I felt great peace. The thrum of a bees nest, unbroken like a line of static, world on standby like surface tension.  I knew what this felt like. When I was twelve, my father ripped Tolstoy in half, because he could, and I read the great novel, “And peace.” I remember mornings on naugahyde, I remember her dog, I remember “And peace,” and I remember peace. I remember the way I was smiled upon.

It took us hours to find the house because Moustafa wanted to chase hogs. I am not too proud to admit that I did it as well. We picked the little squeelers up and pretended they were our babies. We wrapped them up in imaginary linens. We sang right there until the farmer came and threw us out. We played Jesus with the little pigs. We played ourselves. We played ourselves out.

“Jesus met his mother on a wooly day,” I told Moustafa.

“This little piggy went to the market.”

“A holy day.”

When we arrived it was night, but we still wanted to confirm Kostas’ claim. I had eaten my papaya. My fingers were bleeding juice.

I thought of a word. It was wholly accurate: roats. The lines of juice that run down your fingers, gum to your chin. They were the lines that made you excited, That made you more yourself than yourself.

Roats: a meditation on raspberries. Raspberries look like bells, like thimbles, like sweet, and I just can’t stop thinking about the things that are stuck in my teeth. Little things: broccoli and the bigger problems of the world. We can floss, but on the day to day, we floss everywhere but our teeth. I wondered what this meant about how we solve our issues. It wasn’t specific enough to help, never specific enough.

It was a pure house--white, red shutters. Unabashed innocence. I found footholds leading to the gutters. I passed a room where a Greek barrel of a man snored bubbles. His Olive-Oyl wife perched on his gut. I found the room. Moustafa was a ways down wrestling with a shrub. I hopped in, making more noise than I wished. The girl’s bed was big. She stirred. I froze. She woke. My heart stopped. She sat. I looked at her.  She looked at me.

The problem was I wasn’t sure what to do next. She pulled the blanket up around her neck; Ineffective; Rainboots against a firehose. And it was her face that stuck with me. The eyes especially. She had these blues. These light blues. Like a tablecloth my mother would sew. Like a baby blanket. Like everything clean in the world. And the problem was that she was scared. It was that virgin horror. The first real Bad. I felt guilty. I felt un-absolved and un-cemetarized in her eyes. A dead man walking. Moustafa was still struggling to get up and through the window. He hooked a foot onto the ledge. I closed it on his calf. He yowled, but I only knew this because he later told me he did. I was not listening. I was never listening to Mosutafa, I realized. And this was not a bad thing either, I realized. There were more important things. This was a more important thing. In the girl’s eyes I felt plain and for the first time afraid of myself. I was looking at the mirror in the worst way. The surface tension broke. And suddenly I was lurched somewhere else. Seagulls over an abandoned boat on the sea. A small, wooden affair.

Moustafa made me take the acid. This much is clear to me. I can barely tell how I got to this point and all I know is what’s in front of me. I remember Constance, but I always remember Constance. Oh, I was trying so hard to forget. So hard. I interrupted myself. My brain was heavy with it. A leaf weighed down by dew. My brain was leaky with it. An uncorked tub. A basin boat lost in the Atlantic. And I did didn’t I? I couldn’t escape it. I could never escape myself. Sometimes it’s harder to be somebody nowhere than nobody somewhere. I spent a lot of time in my own body, that’s something I told myself so I remembered. I often found myself wandering so I forgot it frequently. I needed somewhere to go so I could remember where I came from. But, I remember her and that knife and that trip where she showed me how to gut trout. I remember the small boat we were on and I remember the lighthouse we stayed at. I remember clearly.

The lighthouse was on the shore. We--me and Constance--had got it for a weekend. We won this contest. Constance, she had sent this slip of paper into the magazines about me. About why I wanted to go to this lighthouse. And they picked us, packed us food, and placed us by the shore. We had this boat. I used to take it out and fish. I caught trout and halibut and salmon. I remember how the cradle of the waves used to clutch the boat. Gentle. Soft. God holding on to a baby’s ankle, palming it like ham hock, grounding it. I felt home.

And me and Constance spent the weekend there. I remember the weather. Clouds like packaging peanuts dusted across a baby blanket. It was the second morning and I was woken by Constance, but not when she was next to me, not when she was next to me. She was outside. She was so far. She was screaming. I remember the flight of stairs. I remember the door. And I remember the man.

He was splayed like a felled tree. All his ribs exposed. All his rings exposed. All that squeezed out and splattered, Pollocked across the sand. A toothpaste tube wrung from waist up. The man had crashed his boat into the rocks. The lighthouse had gone out. Constance, she pulled my arm, tugged my arm, ripped it out of its socket, ripped me out of my socket., ripped my from my footsteps, up and out of ground. I was truly unplugged. Constance told me to get the shovel.

The grave, out of respect, was beautiful.

Constance went for our cocaine when I was digging. Jesus guy, christ buddy, god pal. These are the things we said when we didn’t know what else to say. And so when Constance came out of the lighthouse with that knife all I could say was that.

“Jesus, Constance, put that down,” said, “Christ, Constance, please,” said, “Oh God.”

And Constance she really, truly broke. She came at me with that knife screaming about the good and the bad and about me. I couldn’t judge. She was rapturous, thunderous in her worship on pew, on street, of god, of bottle. I never felt I could compete. She was mucked up in her own ways, but weren’t we all? I was an alcoholic member of the Witnesses, but not of the religious order. I was always a witness. I was always watching.

Humans worship the book of exodus above all other books. We love escape. And so I ran from Constance. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was scared, but not of her. I knew she would never cut me, just stop short and cry, hang on for dear life like a coat clawing at a coat rack. It was just I was afraid. I had dug the grave. I was confused. I had dug the grave. He was under the ground now. He was dead, decaying. I didn’t need more. I didn’t need more. I had tested how far I could kick that bucket and here I was and so I took that boat while Constance was screaming and I took it out to sea. I haven’t seen Constance since. And I truly felt scattered. A lost ball after the solid thunk of a fracture, a glacial seem in a pool break. A stray pig.

I sailed until I was no longer hip-linked to anything.

And the take away was this: I got the feeling I was evil. It was a deep-seated feeling, a root canal feeling. I felt evil from my cuticles to toes. A jehovic alcoholic. Constance made me feel for my choice. I had been given the bad. I was the bad. I felt haunted. Vomit boxed against my uvula. I ate cottage cheese from my hands. I was chewing. I was giving myself the bad. I needed the good. I realized my diet was unhealthy. A man needs the good and the bad: my spiritual alimentation had keeled-over. Lurch and retch. I felt a deep-seated hate towards Moustafa. I was angry for no reason.

Humans do not own biological patience. Even the string of a bow can’t stand at attention forever. I couldn’t stand there forever and so I asked, but more stumbled than asked,“Why do papayas bleed?” asked, “Why is it dogs have the most beautiful lullabies?” asked, “When should I go home?” asked, “Where did you have the best olive of your life?” asked, “Where is home?” asked, “Why does Neruda own sadness? Why is there none left for me?” asked, “Why won’t you give me the good and the bad?” and then I stated, “Hey, and if I’m honest, it’s me who asks for minor details to calm me, minor details to calm me about reality and lives, asking for the good or the bad, as if I’m trying to force them to observe. Force myself to observe. And maybe that’s the saddest thing.”