Trip so far: unsuccessful!

Chicago Thursday -- Chicago must have the worst streets anywhere, and that includes Minneapolis! I have fallen twice tripping on broken pavement and now actually stepping in a pothole in the middle of the street and going down hard on my left side. Ankle looks like a grapefruit or more like an eggplant -- big and purple.

This hasn't actually been my MOST unsuccessful visit to Chicago. There was the disastrous job interview 20 years ago when I came out in a rain storm, went looking for my friends in the Art Institute, had to deal with snotty minimum-wage-earning desk clerk having just had a horrendous terrible interview and being totally soaked and in tears. There have been many many trips to Chicago that resulted in public transportation mishaps, getting lost, etc. But most recent visits have been ok until now. Getting sick and now having a sprained ankle makes this my most unsuccessful visit in recent history.

It took me until Friday for some reason to go and get an ankle brace. My host for this part of the trip offered to go get some things for me, but I decided I wanted to pick it out myself and I had an ever-growing list that included pain killers, cough drops, and an unhealthy amount of comfort food! Spent the whole day Friday in front of the television doing nothing but periodically sleeping and checking my facebook games to see who played song pop with me.

The disconcerting thing is that it is now Sunday, in Davenport Iowa. I have the house to myself as my hosts have gone to visit their fathers, but mine is in Florida, too far to visit right now. And I am doing the same thing that I did on Friday. Despite having much to do, or having new cities to visit, I just don't seem to have the brain power, willpower, coordination, motivation to do any of the things I need to do. Maybe I am just residually tired from being sick and am just being too hard on myself. I just feel my vacation being wasted and slipping away from me. Even this particular journal is lackluster!

Sigh.

Hope to have better travel journals soon.

Travel to Chicago, again or, Sickness in Chicago

So since the theme of my reading on Wednesday will be Surrealist Summer Travelogue, I was revisiting a lot of my travel journals, which mostly start with Chicago. All of the same things apply. It is humid as hell here. The city is still delightful and feels a little more accessible to me every time I visit here, no matter how long it has been since the last time.

And as usual, there is "an adventure" or some difficulty on the trip down. This one keeps on giving. While on the way here, the air conditioning on the Megabus could not be turned off, in what I can only assume was some kind of "Speed" scenario in which the bus would explode if they turned the air down. So I had almost nine hours of pure cold air blowing on me, no matter how hard I tried to close the vents. The bus broke down in Madison and I was grateful not the have the air conditioning on, at least.

So, guess what? That's right, I am traveling in Chicago with a full on summer cold. Sore throat, feverish, achy muscles, have to go to the bathroom every half an hour -- which in Chicago, takes some planning. I packed my phone charger in the other bag that I took out yesterday, so even though I am at Millennium Park, or Grant Park, or whatever you want to call it (probably Millennium Park distances it from the ugly history it had in the 1960s), I am unable to take pictures today.

So, what am I doing in Chicago for this afternoon? I am sitting in Caribou. That's right, in Caribou, which I can go to in Minneapolis. Caribou which is right next door to Starbucks. But, they have a public bathroom and plug-ins so I can write my fascinating rant/travel story to you right now. It is on Michigan Avenue and it is across from Millennium Park, which I did go to for about half an hour, most notably to the bathroom in the amphitheater, and then to the dome-shaped thing. Even though I cannot take pictures right now. I can assure you that this Caribou looks like every other. And I have been told that next year every Caribou in Chicago will change over to Pete's. That is the sum total of my experience for today.

Yesterday, got into town, went to my friend's house, and slept until noon. Then, I went out exploring the neighborhood after a while, which is a largely Puerto Rican neighborhood and had a great Mexican lunch for $5 and went and explored Humboldt Park, which is on the west side. Then I went home, listened to a little bit of the Tony awards, did some stuff on the computer, and fell asleep early. I had hoped to go the Green Mill reading, but the cold had already set in and I found myself pretty much unable to move off of the bed.
I feel like I should write another metaphor here, but I'm not going to get one as good as the lotto balls. So you write your own metaphor, something about a mannequin or a doll who plays computer games. You get the drift. Cut me some slack. I'm sick!

More about my illustrious trip later. Hopefully it will get better. Or I guess I will die. I am still having that pain in my head that I refer to as my aneurism. Stay tuned . . . .

What chapter is this now in my accursed novel?

CHAPTER: GOING HOME

The phone call made Maureen homesick. She knew if she went home now, though, she'd never get back out. Twenty-five or not, they would find a way to keep her there, either through guilt or tears, or some kind of de facto imprisonment. She couldn't go home without money, that was certain. Maureen wasn't even sure if home was the right expression anymore. Seven years was a long time. She felt very detached from the whole experience. Who still lived in their small hometown at 25? Someone who was never going to leave. People who had married their high school sweethearts and had a few children by now. Most of Maureen's friends were gone, and the ones that had stayed had very different lives than Mo did. She felt a chasm. But she also need a touchstone right now. She walked to a bus stop with her back pack and headed back to the bus terminal, where she charted her path home.

Maureen sat in a booth inside the daytime empiness of a nightclub reading the newspaper and absent-mindedly reaching for french fries or a bite of her reuben. She glanced u at the row of clocks on the wall. Greenwich, Dublin, and local time: 3:30.
That it was 10:30 in Dublin suddenly made her anxious. Children were already well asleep, their parents preparing themselves for bed, making mental shifts, contemplating tomorrow's work, while they grapsed for the last waking minutes of their own.

Since it was Friday, no doubt many of them were at the movies or out dancing. Others were sitting in pubs just as she was now, bitching about their spouses, the boss, the lousy interminable week at work. Seven hours and a continent away, the day was ending and her own day was now slipping away even faster.

She sat back and looked around at this bar, where she had spent so many Friday and Saturday nights during summers and breaks, listening to music, stalking young men she had become fascinated with, sitting just as she was now, her back to the brick wall, legs stretched out over the brown paded seat, with one foot crossed over the other.
Here at home--The Land That Time Forgot--she had already run into some old acquaintances who offered no threat of exposing this clandestine visit. Across the bar, she noticed a hippie boy, with straight dark hair, thick eyebrows, and purple tie-dye who danced loosely with fluidity that few men ever managed. Her best friend, Karen, had been fascinated with him for several years before, herself, becoming a stepford girlfriend whose boyfriend had sickening pet names for her. Before she had cultivated three cases full of cosmetics, was on a first-name basis with the staff of the Body Shoppe, Mo remembered them standing together in below-zero ice storms protesting military interventions and wondering why no one ever started wars in June. Mo had nicknamed her Habib, Peace Bandit, because she would jump out of the passenger seat of Maureen's car with a small desk stapler, tacking peace signs to telephone poles in suburban neighborhoods.

Karen had moved back in with her parents, into the familiar house of her childhood. Mo had visited her once since then. In her mid-twenties, Karen lived in the same bedroom she had grown up in. Not even a move so far as the basement or the attic, with the same stuffed animals, the same posters of her teen idols on the wall. Like everything else in her hometown, stasis was the basis for Karen's life.

Sitting in the bar, Maureen watched the door, wondering if anyone she knew would come in. Stasis felt ok today. Unlike some of her old friends, Maureen felt she had been allowed to grow up but to come back and visit her old life. It was like growing older without outgrowing your first grade desk and chair, just slipping right into your smock and diving into the fingerpaints. Things should feel a little smaller, even if the smell of the chalk and crayons and the acid-based paper decomposing the phoenetics out the books all transport you to your first kiss under the monkey bars. The room makes you remember, until you sit down and realize that it's the teacher's chair that fits you now. But this afternoon, at 10:30 p.m. in Dublin, Maureen had assimilated comfortably back into that small school room.

Mo tried to remind herself that this was not just a routine visit home for Spring Break. No one knew she was here. Not Karen or her parents or her high school history teacher. She was on her way somewhere else. The grey-blue tables bolted to the brick facade had not changed in ten years. There were television as either end of the bar, with the sound off, showing baseball and soccer games. The tvs gave you something to look at besides the alarming front pages of newspapers or pink highlight-stained textbooks, less threatening than a lunch or dinner companion whose eyes force you to ask questions--or answer them. Eyes that force you to be present when you'd really rather not. Alone now, Maureen realized it was the luxury of absense she was enjoying so much about her excursion. There was no mother or father or Karen or Clark to be present for. Only herself.

Reggae music plays in the background, causing Maureen to smile. She remembered Clark's impression of Ebeneezer Scrooge being visited by Bob Marley instead of his old business partner Jacob. Get dee spirit, Mon.

It's this place--the grey tables and the ghosts of gathered friends where we don't worry about what will become of us nor do we lament what we've become, just giggle over absurd notions and stare at field goals, wondering what people are doing at Midnight in Dublin.

Maureen hopped on a city bus around town, one of only two routes, which would take her around most of the town. She wanted to soak up some more remnants of home before her bus shipped out later that night. As she passed her house, it felt strange not to get off and run into the front door, declaring herself home to Mom and Dad. She felt guilty as she saw the bricked in front porch. She could see her mother making dinner through the front picture window. Her father was leaned back in the recliner reading the paper. She slid down in the seat and sighed, hoping not to be noticed. The dog was chained up in the front yard, kicking up dirt and barking to a fellow traveler trapped on a leash jogging down a side street. It would be too easy to get off the bus and the next corner and trudge home, returning to her room which had been preserved as a shrine to her childhood. She and Karen could pick up as if the last seven years of their lives never happened. No Clark. No college degree. No domestic violence shelters or videos of detainees in China to block out in the middle of the night. Innocent and snug in her adolescent room, with a job her father would help her get, dreaming of other lives that she had gotten a glimpse of and never got around to living.

Maureen shivered, trying to slough off this vision. The bus continued on past the junior high and high school complexes, down was passed for the town's sorry mainstreet. It couldn't compare to the bookstores and used clothing shops of campus town. The new mall had a Gap and a Sam Goody and seven movie theatres, bringing them up to the 1980s.

Once when Maureen had been home for Spring Break, she had called up the local YWCA to find out what was going on in the area. The YW on campus ran the rape crisis center, and Maureen had been one of the first volunteers involved in setting up a women's resource center there. At home, the YWCA ran fitness programs for children and seniors. The history of the YW was that it was not always socially accepted for women to exercise and participate in sports, and so even the most seemingly innocuous events or course offerings could be traced to its feminist roots.

The hometown Y saw it somewhat differently. When Maureen called to asked about Women's History Month events, she started to wonder if she had forgotten how to speak intelligible English.

"Do we have what?"

"Women's History Month Events."

"Women's what?"

Was this swahili? Had she gone into an ecstatic trance, suddenly speaking a new tongue? The women on the other end sounded too young to have a serious hearing problem. Maureen tried one more time, more slowly. "Women's History Month. March. Do you have any events?"

"No, I'm afraid not" the woman finally said, gingerly.

Maureen hung up and went into the bathroom. Her mother was at the grocery store, her father still at work. Was it even possible for Maureen to have come from this place? Had she been dropped here by aliens? She fished around in the drawer for a pair of scissors. She pulled out strands of hair, cutting as close to her head as possible. I am not from here. I don't want to look like anyone from here, she recited as she cut. She heard the front door open as the last strand fell into the sink. Maureen locked the door and took out her father's electric razor, shaving down the stubble to matching lengths. She swept all of the hair out of the sink, rinsed it out, and stepped, bald, to face her unsuspecting mother.

Maureen pulled a Twinkie out her backpack surreptitiously, trying not to be noticed eating, which was in clear violation of city ordinances according to several signs along the top of the bus. As Maureen ate the Twinkie, pushing it up quietly out of its wrapper, Maureen's thighs started to burst the puny screws and slats of her kindergartern chairs, her paint colored smock burst open revealing grown up clothes and she started to float up out of the city bus seat. She hoped no one would notice, and vowed to step carefully, not crushing cars or small children, as she, the fifty-foot woman, tried to tiptoe quietly out of town.

The city bus turned the corner and Maureen saw her next Greyhound waiting in front of the terminal. She got off and went inside for her ticket and rushed quickly into normal sized seats that fit her grown up body. She looked out the window and waved goodbye as she looked at her home town one more time.

Maureen rolled over and looked at the clock. She was groggy from the pain of her cramps. Meanwhile, Clark blithely got ready for work, gathering papers together and humming something Maureen couldn’t make out. As she tried to soothe her sore abdomen, she wished Clark would feel his own testicles expand and contract, feeling every single sperm as it was forced out, the way her left ovary released its egg in a red wash. She wanted him to feel blood run from his groin drop by drop like the Chinese water torture coming from between her own legs.

Aspirin did no good on the first day. She was exhausted and woozy. There was no way she would be able to go door to door and ask for money for a cause today. She had several hours yet before she would have to call in. Tuesday was Clark’s early day. She was thankful that he would at least be out of the house by 8:30.

Clark came by and brushed his hand over her head. “What are you doing awake so early? Get up to see me off this morning?”

Maureen glared at him, but when her gaze failed to ignite his zipper to flames, she shuffled out of bed and into the bathroom with a grunt. A tiny spot on the sheet clued Clark in to the situation. He said a quick goodbye and muttered something to Maureen about behaving herself and not picking a fight with any cops today. She grunted at him from the other room as the bedroom door closed behind him.

Maureen walked down the sidewalk quickly. She passed a small storefront with a pink neon light: Psychic. A woman called out to her from inside the doorway. "Would you like a tarot reading young woman? Where you going?"

Maureen turned around and walked back to the doorway to see her mystical barker. A tall woman, Maureen guessed in her late 30s, with dark hair and a simple long, red skirt and white blouse. Maureen smiled at her. "How much?"

"Twenty-five dollars."

Maureen turned around to leave The woman stepped forward. "One card. Five dollars."
Maureen hesitated. "Nah."

"Come here. I'll give you one card anyway. You look like a nice girl."
The woman sat down at a small table and shuffled a round deck of cards. She set them down and asked Maureen to select a card. She set down a card.

"Ten of wands. Reversed. You're running away from people. From the ecstasy that comes from losing yourself and being part of a group."

For three nights. the tarot card floated in front of her closed eyes. Ten of wands. Dancing unafraid. Wild celebration and childhood. What we lose when we become adults, when we become aware of ourselves as clumsy and naked and awkward. The knowledge of apples and fig leaves. This is what we lose when we become aware of convention and standing out, not realizing that if we are all free, then we don't stand out for being free. Then we stand out for being stiff, for being frozen like monuments. We forget how to giggle and how to dance and how to move our hips and sway, until our hips beomce stiff and rigid and frozen into place and the slightest movement hurts. We forget how to speak outloud. We open our mouths and nothing comes out, the squeak of a rusted wheel or a baby bird (re)learning how to chirp for the first time. Squeaky hips and squeaky lips and dances and words unable to come out and be free. Dance and celebrate and remember your body and remember your dreams ad remember yourselves. Feel the sun turn orange on your back and dance into the night and into the dawn and just dance and dance and dance. Beath the drum and wave your arms and sway. Forget yourself naked and wild and forget the dark. Get your tan in the moonlight.

Two more chapters of my accursed novel

CHAPTER

In April the bombs started falling. Maureen's stomach started to hurt as she looked at the picture on the front page of the newspaper, black smoke pouring out of a bright orange fire, against the dusky sky. It resembled some kind of post-apocalyptic impressionist fresco, perhaps recalling some long ago battle. It was a stunning, horrible photograph that she couldn't take her eyes off.

For once, Maureen didn't know how she should feel. Politics usually seemed pretty clear cut to her. Meeting violence with violence only bred more. Everyone she had ever admired said so. Gandhi, Jesus, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King. It was a principle worth taking even to the grave, refusing to take up arms, to take a single human life, no matter how viciously it was being lived.

She'd seen the photos of mass graves, reminiscent of those she had seen in history texts from fifty years ago. She remembered a story in Ms. Magazine, which told of an ethnic woman and her husband--Maureen couldn't remember if they were moslem or Croat--who had been captured by Serbian troops. The man had to watch as his wife's pregnant belly was cut open and their child removed and murdered, while she bled to death. Mo's stomach muscles tightened just thinking about the excruciating pain that woman must have felt. Maureen felt like vomiting. She closed her eyes, hoping to meditate on peace, believing that adding a little good energy to the world couldn't hurt, even if it wouldn't accomplish anything tangible. But all she could see was a large pregnant belly, open and bleeding like some kind of a horrible cocoon, with a woman's screams and gunfire and a weeping husband as the soundtrack. She frantically dug around in her backpack for her radio and headphones.

CHAPTER: CALLING HOME

Maureen's father talked with an accusation in his voice. Why are you doing that sounded to her seventeen year old ears like an inquisition, not a search or request for facts and it was consequently returned with what the hell business is it of yours followed by deep remorse hours and years later as she wondered how she could have been so mean to her own father who liked nothing so much as to tease or crack a joke, even if his humor found its mark on a too-fragile adolescent ego or on her mother's rage and insecurity and years later when she tried to remember when she and her father had quit talking, had learned to become strangers, she found two main culprits.

The first showed up when she was thirteen and even though she was unprecocious and didn't know about set yet, she was awkward in my awareness of herself sexually. Maureen had come across an article on incest and the first time, it occurred to her that fathers were men and could even think of their daughters in "dirty" terms and even though her father was not like that, it made her feel strange just the same and then guilty for the estrangement. But a few years later, she became privvy to information about friends whose fathers and stepfathers were "like that".

The other shrift came when she started to respond agrily to the accusations she perceived in his voice. She blamed myself for both. She had begun to try, when talking to her father, to hear the words not the tones and sometimes to repair those chasms, but they had never had the full and deep honesty it would take to rebuild those bridges slat by slat and Maureen wasn't sure if she had the courage. So phone calls were times to laugh and share news about their lives and sometimes Maureen sat in her room, on the bus, in a cafe, hundreds of miles away and tears burned in her eyes not for lost years past, but for years not yet lost, not recoverable.
The operator came back on the phone and Maureen wiped each of her cheeks with the back of her hand. "Maureen" she had after the beep. After a few moments, she heard a click like a small door opening, like a priest pulling back the screen to face a new penitent. Only this conversation would not be anonymous. Her confessors knew who she was, if not the right dispensations to offer.

"Where are you?"

"Um. I'm not sure. I'm at a pay phone somewhere."

"Well, what's the area code?"

Maureen looked around on the phone. The number above the receiver was scratched out. "Don't know."

"Why do you always call collect? Don't you have a phone card?"

"Now you won't pay for my phone calls Mom?"

"I'm just saying. I bet you call your friends with your phone card. But if we want to talk to you, we have to pay for it."

"Yeah, whatever."

Maureen heard some mumbling in the background and the click of an extra phone being picked up. Her father's voice came on. "How are you doing? Are you ok?"

"Yeah, Dad, I'm fine."

"You ok for money?"

"Well, I'm starting to run a little low . . "

"I'll put some more in your account."

"No you won't!" her mother interjected. "If she wants to run around the country like this, I'm not paying for it anymore."

"What the hell does that mean, anymore? I've been living off my savings. Remember? Job--four years of college I worked and three years after. Don't act like I haven't
been paying my own way."

"Oh, is that what you call it? Paying your own way? Finding a daddy figure to support you these last three years so you can say you're independent?"

"Fuck you."

"Don't talk to your mother like that."

"Sorry."

Her father continued. "Why are you doing this? Why do you want to run around like a bum? You should just come home and get a job."

"I just . . . this is just something I want to do, Dad."
"Why?" There was the tone. "Most young women don't do things like that."

"I'm not most people."

"That's for sure," her mother snorted. "Well, you can just pay for this little excursion on your own, young lady." Maureen heard a click on the other end.

"Why are you doing this?" her father continued.

"Are you talking to me, or Mom?"

He chuckled. "I know why she's doing this. I just don't understand you. This whole thing with your professor, and now this trip thing. What are you going to do with yourself?"

"I don't know, Dad. I don't need money. I'm going to stop somewhere pretty soon and get a job."

"What kind of job?"

"I don't know. Temping, maybe. I've got good computer skills. Maybe something in a little bookstore."

"That's what we sent you to college for? To work in a bookstore? To type in an office all day? Do you even have any work clothes with you? How are you going to go to an interview."

"Look," Maureen tried hard to keep her voice measured. Don't get annoyed. He's just asking you an innocent question. "I'll work it out, ok?"

"Did he do something to you? Did he beat you up? Did he have an affair? Did he run off with one of his new students?"

"Dad!"

"You can't go around running away from things. You can't just turn yourself off and
go disappear."

"I just needed to get away. Look, just because I'm not around everyone, being melancholy doesn't mean I'm running away. You don't know me anymore. I've been gone for seven years now."

"We miss you. How long can you do this? Eventually, you're going to have to stop somewhere and settle down. Don't you get sore from sitting on that cramped little bus all the time?"

"Well, sometimes. But then I get off for a while. I go look around, stay overnight when I can afford it sleep in the park during the day." Maureen was sorry as soon as the words left her mouth.

"You sleep in the park? That's just great. When people ask me what my daughter does, I can tell them she's indigent."

"I'm not sure I'm ready to come back. I mean, yeah I'm a little lonely. I miss Clark. But this is important."

"How? What is so important about this? I want to know how you think you're saving the world running around on a Greyhound and sleeping the park"

"By finding out about it, Dad."

"Then what?"

"I don't yet. I haven't thought that far ahead."

"See, that's what I mean. You have to start thinking about things. About things other than what you want right this minute. The world's not like that,Mo."

"Look, I gotta go. I think someone else wants to use the phone." Maureen looked across the empty parking lot.

"I'll put a little money in your account. Pay it back someday. When you get a life, ok?"

"Whatever. I don't need it Dad . . . "

"You're mother and I love you. Stay safe. I don't want to come identify your body in Nebraska or wherever you are. Ok? Just be careful."

"Bye."

Maureen hung up the phone. She noticed a large old car, some kind of old cadillac or LTD circling the parking lot. Maybe they just wanted to use the phone, she told herself. But she was too spent to take any chances. She cursed her stupidity for picking a pay phone in the middle of a big, open, empty parking lot on a Sunday morning. She stepped down the curb onto another piece of pavement, and the car sped around and entered the other lot. She clutched her backpack to her and trying not to look like she was noticing them, walked faster toward the sidewalk . If she could just get to the street, which was busy enough for people to notice her, maybe the driver(s) of the car would give up on her. She thought she had seen two people in the car, but didn't want to look too closely, for fear of encouraging their company.
Maureen walked faster, listening to the car heading towards her. Her cheeks felt hot. Stay safe. We miss you. She started to cry and broke out into a run toward the intersection. A car slammed on its brakes to her left. "Watch where the hell you're going. What are you trying to do, get killed?"

She stepped backwards onto the curb and watched her pursuer(s) drive off. Shaking, Maureen set her bag down on the grass and sat on top of it, running her hands through her scalp and crying, watching pictures of her father and her mother identifying her body.

Thinking of her mother always made Maureen think of sadness.. And then guilt.
No one over sixteen wants to be thought of as a tragic case. But in her mother, she couldn’t help but see loneliness. Despite their worry, Maureen saw her own life as happy and independent life. Suddenly, Mo’s mother had develed what seemed to her a newer dependence on her, a new need for family, as if through Mo, she could either repeat or redeem her separation from her own mother. Maureen felt her own indaequacy as a daughter, worried and guilty about leaving her completely alone to fend for herself.

When Maureen imagined her mother the young woman, she saw dreams deferred--a small, slightly older version of myself, wringing her hands and trying not to cry at airport terminals. Trying. Trying so hard.

Chapter 10 of my accursed novel

CHAPTER: Chicago


Twenty years ago, she might have hitchhiked her way out of town instead. Stuck out her thumb in front of a kindly cross-country semi driver, or jammed with a van full of hippies. Maybe she'd be telling her story to a nice older couple who reminded her of her grandparents--a couple who would listen politely and later, after dropping her off, be grateful that their own grandchildren where married or in school right now, not traipsing around the country aimlessly. But she had answered too many late night crisis calls, made referrals for rape counselors and emergency room treatments, to place that kind of trust in the kindness of strangers.


Maureen surveyed the 2:30 a.m. bus station. A couple of guys her age plunked quarters into portable televisions for 15 minutes at a time. A group of young black guys were animately playing pinball, shaking & slamming the machine. A few children were scattered around the terminal, sprawled over rows of seats, sleeping oblivious to their dingy, uncomfortable accomodations.


She looked down at the floor. It was unmopped, but there were no visible signs of life there. Maureen dropped her backback down into a corner and lowered herself onto the floor. Cupping her head & arms around the backpack as a pillow, she closed her eyes and immediately fell into that middle place between sleeping and waking. She felt her breathing change and the sounds of pinball and television and waking, crying babies drifted a little further away. It turned into a wallpaper of sound. Black wallpaper with dancing flowers blinking duller and brighter with decreases and increases of noise. In front of the wallpaper, she dreamed where she had been. She walked through rooms of Clark's house that led downstairs in the shelter, where children ate breakfast before school as if they were in their own homes.


The wallpaper fell, rolling itself down the walls of classrooms where she had studied Spanish and history. Clark wrote notes the wallpaper in incandescent marker, moving quickly from panel to panel, top to bottom, to fill the entire room. She watched his lips form words taht she was forgetting to hear and all she wanted to do was jump out of her desk and run over to him, but he was so busy writing that he didn't know she was there. And then a voice came into the classroom over the loudspeaker announcing "Now boarding at door 7, the 3:15 for Chicago and all points east . . . ."


The wallpaper faded to gray and then white as Maureen forced her eyes open and looked up at the fluorescent light over her head. The bus room sounds rushed back to her and she saw a small line of people--the tv watchers and a couple of the pinball players, and a young mother with two children--all with their suitcases on the floor beside them, waiting to board the bus.


Still sleepy and disappointed, she sat upright and focused her eyes on the young woman. This small family might have passed through a shelter like the one Mo was leaving. Maybe this was a midnight run away from a battering husband. The family looked a little grungy. The woman's toddler daughter flopped limply over her shoulder while the son, maybe 7 or 8, leaded against his mother trying to catch--or not to lose--a few moments of standing shut-eye.


As Maureen stood up and grabbed her backpack, heading toward the short line, she hoped that the bus wasn't already too crowded. All she wanted was a seat to herself to stretch out, without the obligations of conversation, to sleep. And maybe to re-eneter the wallpapered classroom to see how her dream might have ended.


Maureen stretched out with a book, grateful that she wouldn’t have to share a seat with anyone. She was prepared to advise potential neighbors that she had a long trip ahead of her and would want to stretch out to sleep. , which was true, despite the fact that she had no set destination. After a couple of months on the road, she was beginning to view as interlopers anyone who would be on the bus less than four hours--dilettantes of the road. As a hearty cross-country traveler, she has surely earned some stripes. Her legs stretched across both seats causing her feet to jut slightly into the aisle, a large knapsack riding shotgun, and her nose seemingly buried in a book from which she peered up furtively as people passed her seat, new passengers would stop in front of her then begin scanning the rest of the bus for more welcoming accommodations.


Comfortably dug in, Maureen moaned as the bus driver stood up beside the front luggage rack and turned on the small television sets perched throughout the bus. He popped in a videotape, informing them tha their family-friendly distraction for the next two hours would be Pollyanna.


Maureen tried to focus on the text before--a storebought copy of Steal This Book. Abbie Hoffman was, ironically, advising junior outlaws on how to get free greyhound rides by various nefarious machinations, and Mo was kicking herself for shelling out her money to the authorities for her trek. Despite her anguish over the system, though she knew she was too ernest to pull off a scam straight-faced, she convinced herself that it was just as well. There were always too many revolutionaries in jail, many, she suspected, for foolish rather than meaningful breaches of the law.


She was not anxious to waste her time and her bail money in that manner.
The television continued to draw her attention away from the manifesto before her and she could not help from staring up, mesmerized as she was repulsed. One of her favorite things about life on the road had been the lack of distractions. She could listen in on people’s conversations if she liked or stare out the window in a reverie, contemplating the long corridors of trees like a receiving line, pine trees lifting their skirts in curtsey, ballerinas skinny string bean pine trees with bird legs, olive oyl in green fur coats and tutus. But she could just as easily sleep or read or just entertain her own thoughts. She especially loved the dark quiet overnight bus trips, with the occasional small overhead lights turned in here and there in the bus, as night owls quietly read or stared into the darkness trying to make out barns and silos. But the television demanded her senses engage like an angry parent screaming for a child to pay attention or a neglected lover trying to hold onto their allure. The television screen reached out to her jaw and tipped it back each time her independent mind tried to reassert itself.


Images of Big Brother imposed themselves over the young face of Halley Mills, Stalin in a ruffled yellow dress, his flat square social-realism index finger poking in her face and informing her that despite the insistence of MTv, the counterrevolution would be televised. On the streets of the cities loud music was constantly coming out of overhead speakers on the street and in Minneapolis, Mo remembered noticing video cameras perched from atop streetlight poles. As long as you are never alone with your thoughts, unable to entertain private ideas, you will never cast off your shackles. A chicken in every pot a car in every garage and a television in every room.


Maureen intermittently set her book in her lap, her finger inserted in the book to hold her place, and picked it up again, trying to reassert her attention span. Midway into the movie she began to wonder how the name Pollyanna had gained such a bad rap. Did people really loathe the cheerful little girl more than the complacent sourpusses under the thumb of an aristocratic tyrant? Was meanness and cowardice really preferable to optimism? the bumpy bus ride was also starting to make her horny and she felt slighly blasphemous to think of sex while watching Pollyanna. She tried once more to turn her face toward the window and avoid the halogen gaze of a child who no longer existed. If she couldn’t read or think, maybe she could at least catch a short nap and ream of what might be at her next destination.


Heading west from Chicago, they were informed that there would be a long lunch layover in the next small town. Maureen craned her neck to see the approaching road signs: Dixon, Illinois. Boyhood Home of Ronald Reagan.


It had been a couple of days since she had managed a full shower, although she took sponge baths each day in whatever restaurant or bus terminal washroom was available. She felt a bit grungy, but stopping in the gas station restroom to check herself in the mirror, determined that she was still presentable to go out looking for food. She stepped into a bathroom stall to change into the fresh dress she had brought from her backpack. It was a sleeveless knit dress that fit like a t-shirt, perfect for the warm June day, with a bright yellow sunburst amid a tie-dyed milkyway.
She tucked her shorts and tshirt into the smaller bag she carried with her on stops and headed down the street, looking for a place to while away the afternoon. She passed several fast food restaurants, but kept walking, as she preferred to frequent small, family-owned restaurants, thus supporting the local economy. She found a small diner that appeared to be the remnant of an A&W, with the long davenport covering most of the parking lot and the inert call boxes still standing at each space.


Maureen walked into the restaurant and looked for an open booth, suddenly conscious of the fact that she was the only person there under 60. She tried to slide furtively into a corner table and began to study the menu, aware that almost everyone in the restaurant was staring at her. She was unable to find anything truly vegetarian on the menu and tried to query the waitress about her options. After a few surly responses, Mo decided on a small salad and grilled cheese sandwich. She pulled Abbie Hoffman back out and flipped through, trying to read while she waited for her food. The feeling of sextagenarian stares on her uncombed head and sweaty face was as distracting as Pollyanna’s cheerful interventions, and when her food finally came, she ate with her head down and her cheeks angrily burning, wishing she had gone to Pizza Hut instead where she could at least get a slice of cheese pizza without being treated like communist ex-convict from Mars. She paid her bill immediately after finishing the gooey Velveeta sandwich tossed in front of her and left a 25 cent tip. Once out into the town again, the streets lined with elm trees and clapboard houses, she determined that their “liberal radar” must have failed to activate the trap door that must surely lie just outside of town, waiting to keep out radical maurauders like herself. She went straight to the gas station that served as Dixon’s bus depot and boarded the empty bus, grateful for an extra hour of quiet at last.

Chapter 8 of My Accursed Novel

CHAPTER: DULUTH (MAYBE CHANGE TO THE GULF OF MEXICO OR SOMETHING LATER)



Maureen sat down on what passed for the beach and stared into the enormous lake. ignoring behind her the sculpted paved path on which joggers and elderly couples wandered by chatting, and glancing only occasionally into the lake.


Four birds stood just at the edge of the water, with round heads, duck bills, grey feathers and white breasts. Three of them stood to the left, tittered and ran backwards from the lapping waves coming to the shore. The fourth, just in front of her, stood still, unfraid of the water rush its spindly legs. Maureen and the bird stayed still, hunkered down against the breeze, staring into the water.


Maureen suddenly wanted to feel wild. Her skin itched to touch the sand. She wanted nothing more than to take off her tshirt and roll barebreasted through the sand. The solitary bird toddled off in front of her, not quite fully up to the others, always keeping a little distance before it finally and slowly joined its friends. One of the birds began to suqll, its head pointed upward, neck pumping up and down like a calliope, and they spread their wings out across the water, no form, no V, no leader, just an agreed upon path.


Maureen felt so peaceful that she began to feel restless. She should be doing something. She wouldn’t be able to sit here forever, so it became difficult to sit at all. How long should she stay here? She looked around behind her and noticed a small alcove further down the beach, which looked somewhat secluded. She picked up her bag and walked toward it.


Once there, she settled into the stones. The fit her perfectly. Crossing her legs into a perfect lotus, her back straight and the waves rolling toward her. She sat with her eyes closed, facing the lake and feeling the red warmth of the sun on her eyelids, smiling, and sunning herself like a lizard praying on the rock.


Maureen looked around. She could see almost no one. Just a few people on the walkway, but they were probably too far away to see her. She looked around one more time and removed her t-shirt and leaned back against the rock. She felt the stone beneath her shoulders and the wind and warmth of the sun on her breasts, which were rarely afforded such sensuous luxuries. She wondered if the people on the barge about a half mile out on the lake could see her. She pulled her tshirt in front of her breasts. She tried not to feel self-conscious, but to focus on the feeling of the sun on her shoulders. She titled her head toward her shoulder and closed her eyes as the wind blew up the nape of her neck like a lover planting a kiss. She wished Clark were there with her to sit and listen to the rolling waves, to cradle her like the stones did. She wanted to kiss him here on the shore, lie together in the sand. She wanted to call him up and beg him to come join her -- find a graduate student to teach his summer classes and sit here with her on the beach. She knew that Clark would never just walk away from his work like that.


The waves jumped up at her in a game of tag, never quite making it to the tip of her show or the leg of her pants. One large wave came close and she started, giggling. She became fixed on the tide going simultaneously in and out and the way the wind generated a cross breeze across the water, creating wrinkles, as if plastic wrap had been spread over the lake. Finally, she took her shirt down again, lay on her back in the sand, and fell asleep to the warmth of the sun and the sound of the waves.

Chapter 7 of My Accursed Novel

CHAPTER: Mo gets on the bus, after stepping out of a hostel


The day was full of promise. It was the first warm day of the winter season. Not just one of those December days that are warmer than they should be, but a day that carried with it the smell and promise of spring. It was episodes like these, the hint of what was around the corner, that had made her come to love living in the Midwest. It was your reward for surviving the winter. It was the kind of day that made you carelessly run outside with no coat on, even though you knew that tomorrow you would suffer with a sore throat and a red stuffy nose. It didn't matter. It was a small price to pay for hope. That, to her, was what the seasons were all about. Hope. Keeping a promise. Cycles that would move on and change. Seasons allowed no complacency. You had to enjoy them while you could.

No matter how beautiful the spring day, with the sun warming the top of your head and the smell of lilacs in the air, and the soft, green grass between your toes on those first few days you dared to go barefoot again, it would soon turn into summer. The grass would turn brown in the 100 degree temperatures and sweat would run down your back as if you were standing, fully clothed, in a shower. Sometimes the nights were so hot, you would toss and turn for hours trying to get cool enough to sleep. But at least the crickets would sing to you while you lie awake staring out the window. And those starry nights, when you could look out into the universe and see everything! Who would want to sleep anyway? Even that, too, would soon give way to the crisp crackling of colorful autumn leaves beneath your feet and the comfort of cool evenings warmed by blankets and bonfires. Childhood memories of leaping into a high pile of leaves returned each time she passed a sour-faced boy or older man, taking the rake to his yard as if it were a great chore that mother nature had assigned. It was virtually impossible for autumn to come and go without her remembering high school football games and homecoming festivities, bundled up under blankets in the stadium. And even though high school had not by any means been a highlight of her life, these were good memories that warmed her and made her eager to greet the fall. Even that first snowfall of winter was a delight. She was still not too old to go outside and make snow angels on that first big blizzard.


While others griped and complained when too much snow make them housebound, or caused them to miss work, she still remembered the childish delight of a snowday. She never passed up an opportunity to sit at the window with a cup of cocoa, or to go outside and dance while the snowflakes fell. And she loved those endless "white nights" where the sky was lit up from the impending snow clouds, and you could walk outside even if the street lights were not on, and feel as if you were walking in the dawn. And now, even after the harshest days of winter, with its ice storms and cold winds that made you turn your head away as if you had just been slapped in the face, she was delighted with the promise of the season. Delighted that old man winter had let his fair daughter come out and play for the day. Many of Maureen's friends had moved south or west after graduation, and whenever they called, they made it a point to ask what the temperature was there, and to remind her that there had been a cold spell--75 degrees--the other day. She laughed good-naturedly and reminded them that she did not mind the cold weather. That soon enough, it would be so hot, she would miss the snowy days and the ice storms. Only once, when the wind chill fell to 25 below did she envy them.


And for her faithfulness, she was now rewarded with a glimpse of spring.

Travel journals on my way to New York: August-September 2001

Chicago 9:30 AM 5 hours of fitful intermittent sleep

Chicago--where the trains make the streets shake and everyone pretends not to notice. Walk down from the bus depot, down Canal St. which is the coolest name ever for a street I think. Down Jackson. Down Wabash. Too restless to land anywhere. Abortive attempt to eat Jerk Chicken pita and read neighborhood and alternative papers, including the Chicago Reader, the Village Voice of the Midwest. Restless inability to sit still. Abandon heavy spicy gravy meat. Too hot to eat in Chicago. It's always unbearably humid here. People must sweat here even in February. My jeans weigh down my legs, making me too heavy to walk, weightless like an astronaut in a heavy suit, clumsy, unnatural. The food around me all smells heavy, thick, makes me sweat just thinking of it. Completely paranoid that I will get sick--get a cold--out here on the road and be miserable.

The Chicago bus station, rebuilt and relocated in the 1980s, is always miserably cramped and chaotic. Several other people in line with me are headed to Minneapolis and we listen to rumors from staff and other passengers about which buses might leave first--should we wait and route through Madison or Milwaukee? One young man with a Cuban-sounding accent, and I band together to try to figure out the fastest way to get off the floor of that miserable station and on a bus home. It is 8:30 pm and the bus through Madison is not due until nearly 11:00. There is a very short line of people at a door marked Milwaukee. I motion to my conspirator. He holds my place in the Madison line and I jump into Milwaukee. Soon the announcement is made-- Milwaukee, Twin Cities. He jumps in line behind me and we pile on the bus, where we will sit for nearly another hour as others figure this out as well and we pack the bus to 100%+ capacity.

7:30 pm - I can't believe I am finally on a bus! The Chicago Greyhound station is a nightmare. Constantly filled to capacity with lines of people passing through, waiting for connections that never seems to come. My bus left an hour late, but still :45 earlier than the next scheduled bus.

Hammond, Indiana. GI housing and power plants. Towers like giant monsters everywhere. Like those dress maker dummies, only huge, mutant, foreboding. Angry women with their hands on their hips. Haven't been on terra firma since I got on the bus. Interstate 90 from Chicago through this first part of Indiana is like being on the EL trains--the highways are all built above ground like one humongous overpass. But once again, I have waiting out for the less crowded of the 2 buses and have a seat to myself where I can sleep. There are even empty seats on this bus, unlike the one that pulled away 15 minutes earlier, the one everyone was struggling and fighting to get onto.

More power plants. Domes and pools. Indiana must be the Newark of the midwest. Dinner stop coming up in Elkhart, home of the mini-motor home.

Indiana is unimpressive. Good choice to leave Chicago at night. This is the "old economy"--smokestacks and lighted towers. Social realism, soviet style art glorifying the unity of the grime-covered workers. Coalminers or, the other way, glum lifeless apocalyptic future of automatons working beneath a permanently hazy gray sky.

Chicago was delightful. Stretched out and slept in Grant Park beside Lake Michigan.(like the yippies 35 years before me) Felt so GOOD to stretch out after a night scrunched on the bus and then 6 hours of walking.

Indiana must steal or gamble away all of its road funds. This is the worst maintained toll road I have ever been on. What do they DO with the money?

For all of the ugly sprawl of mall areas, the conformist monoculture of chain restaurants and department anchor stores, neon is a friend to both the insomniac and the night traveler. Miles of dark highway with nothing to gaze upon, save for reflected headlights in the opposite bus window and intermittent glances at the moon leave you stranded and suspended, lacking concept of time and geography. Signs of life outside the window, distant from the highway, anchor you, keep you from drifting too far away. It's not quite home . . .

10:30 pm. The Ohio Turnpike. Another new state.

This is much more grueling than I expected. After only a few days, I am already dreaming of home-fantasies of aborting the trip and going to home to her hard futon, messy house, and no groceries.

Managed the coveted back bench of the bus -- 3 seats across-- for the Boston-New York trip. Smell of the bathroom, but room to stretch out. Several tall young men eyed me enviously. The bus is filling up but I am hopeful. There is something sacrosanct, foreboding, about someone already in the back set. I am stretched out where everyone can see me, marking my turf, writing. Not making eye contact, not inviting.

Got a hotel room in Cambridge, the desire for a night in a hotel--privacy, naked time, silent vegetation in front of the television. I have heat rashes all over my body from 5 days spent almost entirely in clothes in hot humid weather. Skin needs air, to breathe. Although there was the brief thrill of public nakedness in the bathroom stall at the Chicago bus station on Thursday changing clothes.

This is only the 2nd of 5 buses that have actually left on time. Go Greyhound and leave the waiting to us.

Spending money faster than expected. ATM in South Station is broken. I leave for New York with 5 cents in my pocket.

Statue of Liberty should add to its sign: Now Entering America. Video Monitoring in Use.

The older man sitting in front of me looks a lot like Gerald Ford with a couple of Richard Nixon features thrown in.

Slept through New York State entirely on Friday. First part of the trip where I had to share a seat, so I shouldn't complain. Very groggy, 3 1/2 hour sleep Cleveland to Buffalo. 3 hours awake in Buffalo waiting for Boston Connection. Awakened every 2 hours for connections, forced to get off bus in some cases. Almost like being POWs, I imagine. Sleep deprived, marched in and out of “holding centers", standing in line, uncertainty of making (being chosen for) the next bus out, crammed in like cattle, loading and unloading your own bas, carrying all the positions you can fit in one or to bags. Obviously, fear for your own life is not omnipresent--unless your driver has substance abuse problems, extreme sleep deprivation like me, or is on a suicide bomber mission. So far so good.

Narcolepsy. Newly developed Pavlovian response to being on the bus. Can't keep my eyes open. Just woke up in Connecticut.

I have become an intellectual nomad--unable to land on anything. Even during my trip, spent most of my time walking walking cities and never stopping. Hard to even get myself to stop and have lunch anywhere--always the feeling there was something better or different or more unique waiting somewhere.

*******************************************

I feel guilty for coming home to normalcy after being in New York. Like I should be there. Like I shouldn't be allowed to forget. The images so clear in my mind already starting to fade, to look like tv re-runs.

I came home terribly sick from the greyhound trip. I tell people I have just been to an underdeveloped national called Greyhound where I suffered inadequate sleep, poor nutrition, etc. You've already read the refugee/pow comparison here.

I sleep constantly. After 12 hours awake I'm completely exhausted. Can't tell if it's depression or from the trip. I've finally started dreaming again, but every time I do, I dream that I am in the middle of a disaster. Last night, I was a school child who saw a tornado. I keep trying to tell everyone about it, but no one believed me and would come in from the playground. Everyone finally saw it and got in ok. I think we were in a fire station hiding from the tornado, although the basement seems to have been the one from the house I grew up in. That makes sense, since we were the only house on the block with a basement and everyone used to gather at our house during tornado alarms. I know there was a disaster in my dreams the other
night too, although I can't remember what nature. Not a plane crash or war, nothing quite that obvious. Only remember the feeling of it.

I'm living in fits and starts right now--I get a burst of energy and start something, but then lose momentum for a day or more. Don't know what to do with myself.

Actual travel journals I found while looking through my novel manuscript: Travel Journals from 9/11/01

Travel Journals & September 11th


I underestimated how physically, and consequently emotionally, grueling this trip would be. I also underestimated the travel narcolepsy that would develop, leaving me only 10 minute or so blocks of writing time as I fell asleep very soon after starting to write. Not a GOOD sleep mind you, as buses are cramped spaces, even for someone as small as me, and even when you can manage to get both seats to yourself.
I was tired from the trip and hadn't really had any decent sleep or alone time. I really hadn't even been able to be naked for more than a few minutes at a time while showering at my friends' house or changing clothes in the bus terminal, and I was starting to get a rash from the heat and from always being dressed.

It rained the whole way to New York and I didn't get into town until about 6:00 that night. My hosts and I walked around, hiding under awnings when the rains and winds got too intense, and finally made it to a pub where we could have dinner. As the rain let up, Bob walked me down to the Chelsea Piers and showed me around. I still felt very out of sorts and was anxious for the next morning, daylight, and a decent night's sleep to start fresh.

Several days prior, traveling from Chicago to New York, I had become stranded in Cleveland at 3:00 am when the two buses that left Chitown dwindled to one and we were at the mercy of Greyhound company. On the way from Boston to New York, I scribbled something to the effect that riding the Greyhound was like being a refugee. You were dragged off the bus in the middle of the night with all of your possessions, you were given no information about your fate or when you might be able to leave, you were malnourished--you didn't DARE leave the station for food and were therefore depending on vendables or possibly the Greyhound cafeteria. The only difference between a Greyhound passenger and a refugee was that you didn't fear for your life--unless your driver was depressed or a suicide bomber.

Even now, six days later, I can't believe it.

I keep waking up thinking it never happened. I have probably 30 pages of notes, a head full of images I can't sort out that keep coming back to me. My best friend asks me if I am having nightmares. I say no, I haven't dreamed in days. The most shocking symptom to me is how belligerent I feel. I have no patience for whining or complaining about anything. I have the trump card. A pass. The thing that sends me to the front of the line every time. "I was there when it happened." Everyone knows what that means.

For the next hour we are glued to the television. We can only get one station. The frightening events unfoldlike everyone else in the country, we wonder how widespread the attack is; how many more planes, how many more cities will be affected. Everyone is frozen in front of the television waiting for more news.

We run back and forth between the close-up shots on television and the full eyewitness account we have by leaning out and looking down Sixth Avenue.
I finally decide that it's time to stop seeing it on television and head down to the site to try to make it more real and to try to understand. So within 15 minutes I am dressed and head out the door.

Hoards of people are walking slowly toward downtown. The streets are largely taken over by pedestrians who gather together spontaneously around car radios and portable televisions. We stand together and watch or listen to a few minutes of news and then move on to the next block, all on our pilgrimage to get as close to the site as possible.

There are lines at all the pay phones; cell phones are working only sporadically. I walk down a side street between Fifth and Sixth avenues to a spare phone to call home and come out the other side five minutes later only to find the other tower is also down

As I make my way down Manhattan, there are people outside Yeshiva University saying prayers, the Kaddish I presume. There is no airline traffic except for the F16s.

Hearing them overhead elicits a shudder from me. People look up or run outside to get a look whenever they go by. The closer you get to the site, the more people you see with face masks and wet towels around their shoulders. On the way downtown, one woman sees me crying and stops to ask if I lost someone in the attack. I explain to her that I didn't but I feel overwhelmed by it. She touches me on the arm and smiles. "You're so sweet to be so upset." We talk for a few minutes, she tells me again how "sweet" I am and we part ways.

It seems that everyone in the city has made their way to Canal Street, The first thing I hear is frustration as much as anything. "How could this happen?" "Why didn't they stop them?" Emergency vehicles pass up and down the street, in and out of the site covered in soot and trailing smoke.

I manage to find an open café. On the radio they keep talking about how this is like a movie. They compare it to "Die Hard," "Independence Day." I think how much it is like the news, that there are people around the world who live with a steady stream of violence like this every day. There's not much conversation among strangers. There is some talk about this as the beginning of war, but for the most part, there is silence. This is personal to everyone who witnesses it. The police are tense and afraid as concerns of car bombs start to surface. As quickly as you can make your way a little farther south, they chase you back out. "I can't believe it" is all I can repeat over and over as I hold my hand over my mouth, intermittently breaking into fits of sobbing.

I slowly make my way back up to Chelsea, stopping periodically to peer back. It's been an exhausting day. People are starting to worry about logistics as the sun goes down. How are they going to get home? Where are they going to stay? There are simple black and white printed signs everywhere urging people to give blood. People are being bused to Lincoln Center. United Artists Theater in Union Square is closed but offers shelter for the day to anyone who needs it. Traffic begins to move uptown again. The president observed a moment of silence, but New Yorkers have had an entire day of it. There's nothing to say. It's unfathomable. The streets below Union Square are desolate except for emergency vehicles and foot traffic. As I reach my temporary home, I see several boys skateboard down the center of Broadway.

I sleep fitfully, listening to sirens all night. One lone Verizon truck parked on our block gives me some cause for concern. Is it going to go off in the middle of the night? Each small sound makes me start out of bed. I am more paranoid than I wish to be. I run through all the questions all night. Is it over? Will the subways be safe? What will I wake up to tomorrow?

I am sitting in the McDonald's in Times Square watching CNN and I can't stop crying. I go into the bathroom for an all out weeping before I leave and go back out into the street. "Apocalypse Now" is playing at one of the movie theaters in Times Square.

The mood on the streets is morose. Some people are out and about, but quiet, still stunned. Several people describe the city as a ghost town. There is virtually no car traffic down Broadway, except for emergency vehicles and an occasional taxi. The woman delivering mail says to a man with a briefcase, "Where are you going? This is a ghost town. Nobody's going to work." A young man tells his friends "I can't believe that asshole called and asked me to come to work after what happened." And it feels true. There are the ghosts pouring out of the wreckage, but there are also the living ghosts as well. Everyone on the street is a shadow of themselves. No one can look anyone else in the eye. All we can do is look away, stare off into the distance. In a few days, I will come to understand why Oedipus had to scratch his own eyes out in anguish.

We are still trying to grasp the immediate event, not the big picture. Mary says that I'm lucky. I get to go home, walk away, whereas the people who live there will be dealing with this for a long time. I feel bad about this. She's right--I won't have to be there to rebuild the city or my life. But I will carry this around with me for a long time as well.

The black smoke of yesterday has given way to gray and white clouds. I make my way up to Columbus Circle in Central Park today. There is a bit more bustle here than the lower parts of the island, but the knowledge of what happened is still with everyone. A few people are talking about it, some sitting and reading the papers. Others just sit around, silently, alone or with friends.

Somewhere around 3 p.m. there is a palpable break in the mood. Like yesterday, today is a gorgeous day. The breeze is warm and a little cheering. There are more people streaming out into the streets, activity is picking up. Several people walk beside me and strike up conversations about what has happenedthe first time all day that has occurred. We share our sense of grief and personal loss with one another. "Can you believe it?" are still the words on everyone's lips. The city starts to feel alive again. Later that evening, the restaurants and cafés start to fill up a little more. The mood is not jovial by any means, but people are trying to get back out, trying to feel better.

A 3 year old child who, not knowing what happened, nonetheless understands more than you might think. "Everybody's so sad," he tells his mom. "I'm going to sing for them so they'll be happy."

After dinner with a friend, he invites me to walk part of the way home to SoHo with him. He gets me past the barricades, showing his ID with his address to the police guards, and I am admitted to the military zone that surrounds the area. There is no getting to ground zero, and I don't even try. But even being a few blocks in is strange, eerie. For one thing, I've never had to walk past police and armed guards just to go down the street. The candlelight vigil that began at 7 p.m. is still going on well past 8 o'clock. We stop by a fire station where people are lighting candles and writing messages for the firefighters on the job and the ones who lost their lives.

We go past St. Vincent's hospital where it's a sea of television vans and live interviews, including the local Spanish channel. There are small lights everywhere from the handheld recorders. If there are mourners there, they are not as readily obvious.

Surprisingly, while Midtown is largely closed, the area just south of Union Square, which is on the edge of the closed off parts of the city, is bustling. All the restaurants, cafés and grocery stores are open. Posters of people who are missing are just now starting to go up on light posts and street signs, as are pleas to abstain from retaliation against any of our neighbors.

I am tempted to stay, settle into a café and start writing. But it's getting late and I am now walking home alone. Crime has been minimal, surprising considering the high concentration of police in one area of town. The personal way that everyone there feels about this event seems to have kept most people from indulging in their worst tendencies. I feel safe walking down the street. Still, better not to tempt fate.

By evening the wind has shifted north. As I walk back up to Midtown, the smoke stays thick all the way down and starts to settle in my lungs. It reminds me of walking down the street while people are burning leaves, only much more intense. My throat starts to burn and for about a half-hour I find it difficult to breathe deeply.

Nighttime is the eeriest. Processions of police cars and emergency vehicles provide most of the light among the smoke-filled sky, carrying loads of police, doctors or rescue workers. I decide on a small deli a block and a half from where I am staying. I sit down with a fruit tray and start making notes when I notice a taxi go the wrong way down the Avenue of the Americas.

The scariest thing isn't the sirens. It's when the sirens stop right in front of you.

Police cars wheel around and block off the intersection in front of where I am eating. I pack up my food and notebook and go running down the street. Others are running as well, spewing out rumors as we go. There's a bomb in the subway. Bomb at Penn Station. Bomb at the Empire State Building.

The edge of the quarantined area stops at the end of the block where I am staying. My door, half a block down, is presumed to be safe. The police officer says, "I hope this is safe. I'm standing here." I run upstairs and tell my hosts what's going on, to mixed reactions from the two of them one is nonchalant, the other is hanging up the phone and running out the door. I decide that half a block is not enough buffer and walk down a little further. After 45 minutes I go home and stumble into bed.

I feel weird about leaving, but Thursday was my scheduled time to leave anyway. The place I am staying is small and my hosts have another guest there with whom I have to share the futon, so there is little incentive to stay. I cry in the shower, which appears to be my new morning routine.

The island is open again and the bustle and traffic are back. Taxis are honking and trying to get through. This is the New York I am accustomed to and it makes it even harder to leave just as things are trying to come back to life. There is still great sadness on everyone's faces. Sirens, barricades, police on every corner tell you everything is not really normal. There is a haze over downtown that replaces two days of billowing smoke.

On Wednesday the Greyhound Web site had said to take a train to Newark and catch the buses from there. That's what I'm prepared to do. Having walked by Port Authority yesterday, seeing police and barricades everywhere, I am surprised to call Greyhound and find out that it's open. I drag my heavy bags down there and am further surprised that no one has stopped me or tried to check my bags. I get in line, hoping to make the next bus to Cleveland and all points west, prepared for a day of sitting in line.

There is jubilation in the bus line when we are told that an earlier bus is being brought in to accommodate all the travelers. At 12:15 p.m. I ask someone to watch my bag while I go to the bathroom. When I come out, everyone is running upstairs. Port Authority is being evacuated. Eventually, so is Penn Station, the Condé Nast magazine building and, rumor has it, the Times Square subway station. (The woman sitting next to me on the bus later calls her cousin, who informs her that there were 42 bomb threats in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday.)

At 1:25 p.m. we go back in and someone immediately screams "bomb" again and goes running up the stairs. I am not budging. There is no bomb, I declare, and I am not losing my place in line again. At 2 p.m., we finally start boarding buses. There is chaos as I try to get information from anyone I can, including drivers, baggage handlers and other passengers. Reportedly, Port Authority has been evacuated three times today, and it seems, once on the bus, that they are trying to evacuate us again. The drivers refuse and people pour out the doors and onto buses like refugees, tired, edgy, frantic to get onto the next bus out. I keep repeating the mantra that I started out on the sidewalk. "I should have gone through Jersey." I Greyhound driver walks past me. I pull him aside and say "Go grab a bus and meet us back here. . . " Everyone on the sidewalk smiles or laughs.

Soon after we get back inside, buses start pulling up to the docks and hundreds of people pour out of the doors in large streams, frantic to get on any bus out of town. Last minute decisions are bein made by drivers about the routes they will take, so you have to ask 3 or 4 drivers if you should get on their bus or not. It is chaos and is straight out of a movie scene. Refugees, again, are all I can think.

I hear the driver of the bus I will be on arguing with someone from the station. "Just get them on the buses. These people are going to riot if we don't get them on a bus."

Loaded up at last, we start driving through Port Authority and toward the sunlight and the street. At the end of the ramp, the bus is stopped and the driver gets out. We all groan. Just keep driving. The driver returns and the sunlight of Manhattan finally comes through the windows and we all take our last looks as we head for the Lincoln Tunnel.

Everyone cheers as we leave New York, anxious to put this as far behind them as possible. I don't want to forget. It's too soon to go back to normal, although I assume all of this will fade in time as all memories
do. I wonder as I leave, if leaving alone will make it fade. Everyone holds their breath as we pass through the Lincoln Tunnel, which is open for the first time in days. Then the collective sigh on the other side alive, our bus intact. There is no other comparison--we have crossed to freedom. It is shocking to watch New York from the Jersey shore as we pull away. The buildings are still smoldering and the skyline is small. Only the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building stand out now.

The next morning, up and back into line to head to Chicago and then home. I call home from my hotel and in the middle of conversation every few minutes, I break into loud sobbing. I can't stop myself. This will be my pattern for the next several days--spontaneous bouts of sobbing.

The man sitting ahead of me starts obsessing about his luggage. I am tired and fed up with problems, delays and complaining. He goes on and on wondering if they have put his luggage on the right bus and eventually declares "this is a nightmare". I snap. "I just got back from New York. This is NOTHING."
The first few days back have been difficult. I feel guilty for leaving as early as I did. I should have stayed and participated in the vigils, or even just been there, continued to be a part of it. I have tense e-mail discussions with my friends, who are also all trying to make sense of it from afar. I try explaining to them that if you can talk about war and the big picture of this, that you are operating from a position of luxury. Having been there, it is just an intensely personal trauma to me. I am still walking around in a daze, unable to look anyone in the eye. All I can do is look away. The first few hours of each day I can think of little else. I'm light-headed and become extremely tired every few hours, as if I have a concussion. It takes me until the late afternoon for anything to be able to distract me.

Back in Minneapolis, life is disturbingly normal. On Hennepin Avenue, people are going to the theater as usual, laughing and having fun, the streets are crowded, and marquees are bright and festive. I do not belong here. I am not ready for this. No one here can possibly understand what is inside of me right now and I struggle to keep from sobbing every so often as we ride the bus, as I look at our very intact skyline, as I listen to people talk about something other than the attacks.

I feel perversely grateful to have been there. This is not abstract to me the way it would be if I had only seen it on television. I know that when I see something like this on the news in the future, my conversations and debates will be on an entirely different level. But I also still feel empty and distracted and do not know what to expect or what I will feel from day to day. Suddenly I can't talk about it enough. I want to stop everyone on the street and tell them where I've been and what I've seen although oddly, the more I tell it, the less I seem to be able to convey.

I still keep thinking it couldn't really have happened, that it was impossible, just a product of my overactive imagination.

There is also survivor guilt. I should have gone down on the 9th as planned and I would have gotten to see the buildings once in my lifetime. I was supposed to have gone down there the day it happened, but I didn't. It's as if I was there, but not FULLY there. I should have been one of those people in the gas masks and wet towels, covered in soot. It should have been me, except for one extra hour of sleep.

Then there are the constant flashbacks. The sounds of sirens set them off. Skyscrapers. Steam coming off the IDS tower later in the fall, sometimes nothing at all but the sounds of voices and conversations and the pictures in my head. For the first two months after I return, I cry every single day.

The dreams do eventually start, and some of them are disturbingly accurate. One morning in December, I dream that I am in Central Park, on a beautiful sunny day, like September 11th. As I make my way downtown, it becomes as dark as night and there is thick billowing smoke. Among dark coal-like ash,. animal carcasses, particularly goat's heads, are being excavated from the site--mad cow incineration scenes meet the World Trade Center. That day, 13 bodies are found at the site--the first in months.

Six months later, I don't want to forget, but I don't dare go back into those memories fully. To have a full and visceral memory of any moment of those four days means touching something that I don't have the strength for. The tears are still just at the edge, particularly when I tell someone I was there on the 11th and they give me "that" look of disbelief. The more I have to explain it, the harder it becomes. But my tears are still a little shallow. I can't continue to sob every day, but I can't let go of it either. I don't want it to go away. I want to turn the clock back to September 10th. I want it to never have happened. But I can't have that, and so I can't give this away either. I weathered the worst of it. I weathered the hopeless feelings, the thoughts of killing myself. It was difficult to imagine that I could ever be happy again or see a point to my life. There were flashes of those thoughts.

I feel irresponsible now. After being an activist most my adult life, I find myself having to turn it all off a little, building a little cocoon around myself. It is never not with me. But I am finding a lot of happiness in my daily life, and have had to keep the focus on that right now, on what is possible and positive. And like my extremely personal reactions that day, have to leave the bigger picture to people who had the luxury of only seeing this on tv. At the moment the best I can do is make a little place for myself and take things as they come, trying not to be overwhelmed.

Chapter 1 of my accursed novel

That is what I have come to call the project that I have worked on intermittently and/or has sat in a drawer, on my computer, etc. for the past 25 years. I think that should I ever finish it, which I probably won't, maybe that will be the title. My Accursed Novel. For now, to have something to post, and maybe even get some comments, I think I will serialize it here. I would especially like comments such as "it's not so bad . . . ." But criticism, particularly the constructive kind, but whatever, is also welcomed, nay, highly encouraged!

CHAPTER: THE STARLIGHT MOTEL


I am a woman escaping.


Maureen looked around at the room that had become her "halfway house". A sterile, quiet, beautiful motel room with a white wood desk. She felt like the battered women she had spent two semesters working with as a volunteer at the shelter. She was grateful for a moment of peace, the breather. Unlike those women, what was chasing Maureen was not going to come bursting through the door with clenched knuckles and a red angry face. It would come out of her own mouth, and so she tried to remain silent. It would conjure in her sleep, and so she hadn't slept in days. This space belongs only to me, she thought, only to me. The way the ducks and the ice own the river in the winter.


I am a shaman, she scribbled quickly into the notebook she had picked up at Walgreen's on the way over. I have come back from walking death. I heave been empty among my own bones and felt nothing. Not numbness. That has its own feeling. I am empty, fleshless, and now I dance because I have come back and because I have bones that creek and bend that have reconnected themselves in the right sequence and because I am not a bee pollinating dandelions, attaching myself to other people. I've come a long way to get here and tonight I can finally sleep in a strange bed.
Freedom is its own squandering. It's why we probably need marriages and church and school and government. Left with absolute freedom, we sit in a stupor, our minds racing over the things we could be doing, while we sit inanimate in indecision. Or we flit from one thing to the next. From tv to dancing to praying to singing to writing to whatever comes next. Our free self becomes an adolescent sleepover at the house of the family with neatest stuff. We know our freedom can't last forever, and so we try to do everything at once and pretend our freedom has no limits. And so we never get around to what matters most.


Jack Kerouac would have called it her Sansara self--this false world. But eventually, Maureen tired herself out and began to feel lonely. She got up from the bed, where she had been lying down and scribbling in the dark, and turned on the lights and the television. She put her sweatshirt back on, but not her pants and stepped quietly out of her room and went down the hall for a soft drink from the machine, careful not to let the door close completely behind her, as she had left the key somewhere under a pile of clothes and notebooks and whatever else was in her backpack. She went back to her room undetected and closed the door. She could hear someone else's television through the wall.


Motels like this were where you came for illicit affairs and she thought about meeting someone in the hallway. She focused on one of the men she had seen earlier at the ice machine. She slipped her hand inside her panties and began to imagine what might happen if . . .


She removed her t-shirt and leaned against the side wall. She felt sexy and melodramatic and unreal, like a character in a play. Maybe Blanche DuBois. She looked own at the round white parts of her breasts cupped by the lace, lighted by the moon. She wanted all of the men she had ever been in love with, who had not loved her in return, to be there now, to see her sitting in the half-light, half-dressed. She picked up the remote and turned off the television and laid back, running her hands along her body. She was torn between her sensual self-exploration and the desire to get up and write some more of her thoughts down.


Masturbation, it occurred to her, as she rubbed her hands over her belly, is like a form of meditation. You have to empty your mind of day to day things and focus on your breathing, your clitoris, your hands. It's no good if you conjure a conversation you had last week, or a Jerry Lewis movie, or start making a grocery list or worrying about your unpaid phone bill. With a partner, there is always someone to focus on, someone to pull you back. But alone, you need a Buddhist's self-control to stay focused.


She picked up the remote and turned the television back on. She turned sideways on the bed and propped her feet against the wall for balance, so she could still look at the television while she touched herself. All cheap motels have a dirty movie channel, she told herself, and when she came upon channel 43, she put the remote down and focused on the movie on the screen, thinking again about the man at the ice machine.


Maureen got up and looked outside the window. This was the kind of motel room women disappeared from. A busy, urban road that had narrowed into a slightly rundown section of town, it was nestled a long driveway's length from the road. It was not too far from the lake and still had a sign advertising color televisions in the room.
Once inside though, the room was suprisingly clean. There were a few cigarette burns on the bedspread and some permanent ink stains on the formic and faux wood desk. It was not the kind of hotel with its own stationary and a pristine bible in the bedstand.


The mysterious second door led not to an indoor lobby with a whirlpool, the way it might at a Ramada Inn, but to a cement balcony that, were it not lacking a ladder, might just as easily have been a fire escape. Maureen stepped out the back door and eased herself onto the cement. She sat with her back to wall, her knees arched, and feet flat on the cement. She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. Without realizing it, she began talking outloud, answering people she would see later in the week, or replaying conversations that had already happened. She sighed and "shushed" herself, leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes once more.


Maureen could hear fighting out in the hallway and someone pounding on the door of the room next to her. She started to lift herself from the balcony, to go back into her room and lock the door. Instead she relaxed her legs and sat back down. After a few minutes the manager came stomping down the hall and the noise subsided.


Eventually, Maureen became bored with her self and wanted to talk to someone. She ran down the list of people she knew, pacing slowly around the room. It occurred to her that of all the people she knew, she didn't feel close enough to any of them to call and talk to them about what had happened.


She started to take inventory of her "friends". Who could she call now? She tried to think of someone she would want to talk to right now, or someone she could crash with while she decided what to do next.

Travel Journals: Minneapolis-Chicago-Indiana, September 2001

I'm pulling this out of my archives. It's a piece of writing that I've never really done anything with--my travel journals leading up to September 11, 2001.


Travel Journals, September, 2001


Again (and always) at the bus station, feeling out of sorts. Uncertainty over small things—whether or not to check my larger bag (I have 3 bags including snacks—1 over the limit); will I get a seat to myself where I can stretch out to sleep? I don’t want to be the last one getting on the bus. Maybe I should just go home and scrap this trip. When did I become so ill at ease with the world? Two drunk men hover around the bus terminal. One wanders in, stops inside the door standing still and weaving. Through the doorway, our own gazes are fixed, impatient and hopeful, waiting to board our bus. The man assumes we are staring at him, pauses, begins shouting at us. Why are you all staring at me? I didn’t do nothing. I DIDN’T DO NOTHING. He mutters and crosses from one side of the station to the other.

Earlier another drunk man passed through the terminal, escorted by security. There was no evidence he’d done anything wrong beyond his obvious mental and partial physical incapacitation. The cop “steers” the man over to the lockers for some reason. I thought I saw the cop slap at the man, but in peripheral vision, hard to say who smacked whom. The cop is trying to get the man to use a locker, but the man is having difficulty. Hell, I’m sober and I had a hard time using them. The cop starts yelling at him impatiently to just follow the directions and the man becomes more and more frazzled, more desperate, starts yelling “mind your own . . . mind your own . . .” More slapping. Really, it’s more like swatting and I can’t tell who started it, but it’s making me anxious and my sympathies fall with the man being slapped as he struggles with the locker. Suddenly the cop grabs him and starts throwing him around, throws him over a table, handcuffs him and takes him away. I can’t figure out why he had to be in this guy’s face in the first place. I never know what to do in these moments. I want to yell and tell the cop to leave the poor guy alone. All I can manage is to seethe passively, muttering “fucking cops”.

The originally scheduled bus is overloaded, so they call in a second bus. Drivers are called in the middle of the night and we finally leave at 2:00 am, an hour and forty minutes later than scheduled. Damon Wayans does not hassle me about my bags and I manage the much-coveted back seat of the bus, which has three seats rather than two, in which I can stretch out and sleep through the night trip. I watch the Seattle-bound bus next to us fill up like a clown car, wondering how they’ll fit all those people into that bus. I start to feel anxious for them and finally settle into my own seat, grateful and sleepy.

After five hours of intermittent sleep, Chicago—where the trains make the streets shake and everyone pretends not to notice. I walk down from the bus depot, down Canal Street, which I always think is the coolest name ever for a street. Down Jackson. Down Wabash. Already too exhausted and restless to land anywhere. It’s always unbearably humid when I’m in Chicago. People must sweat here even in February. My jeans weigh down my legs, making me too heavy to walk, so overweighted that I become weightless, like an astronaut in a heavy suit, clumsy, unnatural. I’m completely paranoid that I will get sick—get a cold—out here on the road and be miserable for the next 10 days. An abortive attempt to eat Jerk Chicken pita and read arts papers. The unbearable humidity and lack of sleep make this the wrong choice of cuisine. Abandon heavy spicy gravy meat and move on to the lake. I wander around the Art Institute. Look at the Surrealists. Sit in the Café. In Grant Park I stretch out, backpack under my head, and sleep. I pride myself on my ability to sleep anywhere—on a bus, by the lake in Chicago. It feels so good to stretch out in the grass after a night scrunched into bus seats and 6 hours of walking the city. I take off my shoes and curl my toes into the grass, feel earth beneath my sweaty, soggy astronaut jeans.

Back at the bus station, I can’t help but wonder why they abandoned the much larger shelter on Clark and Randolph, right in the middle of the Loop, for this small, crowded, out of the way station. Ten or 12 blocks from the lake, at least 6 blocks from anywhere to get a sandwich or a bit to eat. The old station had a Burger King, a gift shop, several levels to explore. You had the sense you were in the city, not hanging among warehouses in an even seedier area of town. Too many undesirables at the old station, I’m sure. The new station is constantly filled to capacity with lines of people passing through, waiting for connections that never arrive.

Hammond, Indiana. GI housing and power plants. Towers like giant monsters everywhere. Like those dress maker dummies, only huge. Mutant, foreboding. Angry women with their hands on their hips. I haven’t been on terra firma since I got on the bus. Interstate 90 from Chicago into this first part of Indiana is like being on the el trains. The highways are all built above ground like one humungous overpass. I start to feel a bit seasick overlooking roofs of small houses but completely unable to determine anything about the land we’re traveling above. Once again I have scored the less crowded of two buses and have a seat to myself. There are even empty seats on this bus, unlike the one that everyone else was struggling and fighting to get on only 15 minutes before mine. Smugly, I stretch out, take off my shoes, and rub my feet as I look out the window and scribble. More power plants. Domes and pools. Indiana must be the Newark of the Midwest. Dinner stop coming up in Elkart, home of the mini-motor home.

Indiana is unimpressive. I made a good choice leaving Chicago at night. This is the “old economy”—smokestacks and lighted towers. Social realism, Soviet style art glorifying the unity of the grime-covered workers. Glum lifeless apocalyptic future of automatons working beneath a permanently hazy gray sky.

Indiana must steal or gamble away all of its road funds. This is the worst maintained toll road I have ever been on. What do they do with the money? For all of the ugly sprawl of mall areas, the conformist monoculture of chain restaurants and department anchor stores, neon is a friend to both the insomniac and the night traveler. Miles of dark highway with nothing to gaze upon, save for the reflected headlights in the opposite bus window and intermittent glances at the moon leave you stranded and suspended, lacking any concept of time and geography. Signs of life outside the window, distant from the highway, anchor you, keep you from drifting too far. It’s not quite home, but so familiar nonetheless.

10:30 pm. The Ohio Turnpike. Another new state.

Airport Tales - A semi-incoherent reverie

In Atlanta, everybody calls you baby.


Flight numbers freak me out. They’re how they identify your plane for years afterward. I always hear Tom Brokaw’s voice in my head saying my flight number.


My airplane has no row 13.


The hardest thing is re-creating the rhythms of life. The rim shots embedded in family dinner at the dinner table.


(Why) (Do) All airline pilots talk like game show hosts?

I was the passenger singled out for the baggage search. My crimes are multiple:
• Buying my ticket online
• Buying a one-way ticket
• Having a connecting flight

One of my friends has sent me his poetry DVD—An Invitation to the Terrorists Ball. I hold my breath as the Cuban woman in her blue suit looks through my bag.

If we started to crash, would there be time to pull the cushion from below the seat and put on my life jacket? How long does it take to plummet 30,000 feet, anyway? Someone behind me tries to push her way past me getting off the plane. Imagine if we were in a nosedive? No. Don’t imagine it.


Alice Notley – don’t arrive anywhere in your sleep. Don’t mix up night and day. Soul and detective.


Put away all negative thoughts or notes containing therein during takeoff and landing as your negative vibes may interfere with the plane’s equipment.


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