Munchausen

Once I was in the forest with my grandfather, Mike. He was a great outdoors-man, and he was teaching me how to hunt. I never saw Mike get scared of anything. Except that day. We were trailing some deer, and, out of nowhere, this huge goddamn bear flies out of the brush. Looking all ugly, showing his teeth. He stopped and raised up on his two back feet. Mike froze. He had his 30.06 still on his shoulder, might as well have been a walking stick. The bear came back down on all fours and charged. I was learning many things at that time, including fire-starting. I patted my pockets as quick as you like and found two flints. One I threw as hard as I could at the bear's head. It flew into his maw and sank down his throat. It didn't kill him, but he was hurt and he turned around to think things over. I saw my opportunity. I whipped the other flint up his ass, sidewinder style. I chucked that flint so hard that it struck the first flint in the bear's stomach. Explosion. Man, I blew that bear straight back to hell.

I thought about that the other day when a friend of mine was proud that he'd figured out how to get the toilet to stop running.

Quiet Midtown

It was quiet at MOMA the other night, after we got in. We said hello to the woman behind the desk and strolled past the security guards. We'd just turned the corner when, suddenly, cacophonous noise. There was a jazz quartet, dancing babies, and hundreds of people. Four open bars and food stations. I knew this had to be the place.

I sent my short, fat, gay, Indian companion to get us some white wine and cheese. When he came back I introduced him to the tall man I'd been talking with. "But he's not Indian like that. He smoke-um peace pipe." "Yeah," my companion said, "me trade-um wampum, round-eye." "Round-eye?" the man said. Then we all laughed. There's no shaking art-types. We were here to see the new etchings exhibit by Lucian Freud.

At the stairway beneath a helicopter a volunteer told us there was no drinking upstairs. My companion and I left the tall man and went back to one of the bars. We never saw him later, upstairs, when we pressed into the crowd at the start of the exhibition rooms. Freud doesn't really do sketches or studies. He prefers etchings, and can think in reverse, in mirror-terms. There was a series he'd done of his daughter with a Pluto t-shirt on. He wasn't happy with her face and had the printer buff out the brass plate where her face had been, but kept the background and body the same. He'd had it buffed out twice. The third time he was finally happy and printed copies. All three were shown here. "Look at the second one," my companion said. "That totally sucks."

We went next door and had a drink at The Modern.

We had a drink at P.J. Clarke's.

We had a drink at Old Town.

We had a drink at Fanelli's.

We had a drink at The Corner Bistro.

It was oddly quiet at Employees Only when we arrived. A slow night. We sat at the end of the bar next to the entrance and my companion visited the bathroom. The mustachioed bartender asked if I'd like some real Absinthe. "Yes." My companion came back from the bathroom. He declined, but ordered some Rittenhouse rye whiskey. The bartender performed the ritual. With the sugar cube, the fire, and the slotted spoon. He advised me to take it slowly. It was a little more than a shot's worth. It took me about three swallows. A little later, as the walls began to move oddly, my companion announced he was going to try out the secret bathrooms downstairs. I told him I didn't think he would make it out alive. People's faces were at once blurred and sharply in focus. Eyes straying to the middle of foreheads.

I thought about my companion. His husband is in New Mexico. He's a lawyer, or something. My woman is in Indonesia and I hear from her less and less. We're friends on Facebook, but her status hasn't even changed in two months. As far as I know she's still about to board the puddle-jumper to Jakarta. "He's not Indian like that, you sonsabitches!" The mustache-bartender was too polite to hear me. Maybe I hadn't said anything. Maybe it was in my brain. I tried it again. Same non-response. Right now we have each other, my companion and I. He likes Paul Simon and Luna Bars, but I like him anyway. Lucian Freud has sometimes been criticized for portraying people with hyper-realism. Almost in caricature. So what? Let people have moles and lazy eyes. What I've been resisting in online communities is a streamlined version of the self. Second Life is for masturbating. Also, I feel oddly displaced on Facebook. I'm connected constantly with everyone I know, or can be, but am alone in my apartment.

Fourteen hours later my companion came back upstairs from the bathroom. He told me a story about his adventures down there and I listened silently. He sat down next to me when he was finished and he was silent, too.

Thanksgiving

I wasn't raised in a part of the country where it snowed. Shoveling isn't something I associate with a chore. I like it. I like it in the same way I like ironing. When it's over it feels as though I've accomplished something.

I found myself this past winter in Minnesota, in a suburb of Minneapolis. I'd been staying in a rented house when the blizzard hit. It had snowed all night and when I woke up at five the driveway and walk were covered in four inches of snow. I went out and began to clear the walk. It would be a few hours until dawn and the plastic scraping against the concrete was hushed and insulated. I found a cowboy hat in the house and used it to keep the snow out of my face.

I lit a fire later and watched the snow keep coming. It was almost noon when I shoveled again. I almost couldn't tell where I'd been earlier that morning. I had to keep the driveway clear, though, because it was time to visit George.

I'd met George a week before at the nursing home almost a mile away from my rented house. He sat in the dayroom with his friends and looked out the window at the snow and at five watched the news. He was tall and rangy with a long neck and happy, birdlike eyes. He was missing the index finger on his right hand. He'd played baseball for some team in southern Minnesota when he was younger. A pitcher. Straight out of the eighteen nineties with his long legs and slight frame. "I could throw them all," he said. "Curve, knuckle, spitballs. I had an eighty-six-mile-an-hour fastball." He'd been scouted by the Cardinals. "I coulda played for those guys, too." But he'd been at work one day at the envelope factory when his hand slipped and the paper press severed his finger. He kept pitching. "My curve ball was never the same, though, after that. Used to be I'd toss that ball with such a nice curve it'd come right back into my own mitt." He chuckled. "But it never was the same."

I'd created tall banks on both sides of the walk and driveway. I preferred to shovel when it was dark. It was meditative to hear only the scraping and my breath.

I saw George on the last day of the blizzard. He'd only recently come back to this Home, he'd tried a stint at a larger facility, but didn't like it. His roommate swore too much. Plus all of his friends were here. His wife would come often. His son, too. I asked if got to visit home much. He said he'd just had Thanksgiving at his son's house. It was a good meal. I asked if he ever went home to visit his wife. His eyes became very bright and he had to blink a few times, then wipe them. "No," he said, "I think if I ever got to go home, I wouldn't ever want to leave and come back here." He was quiet a while and looked out the window.

I never saw George again. I had a ticket out of town for the next morning and he died a few months later. I haven't been back since. The snow was petering out, but it still covered my old tracks and I went out to shovel the walk and driveway in the quiet very early morning for the last time. It was still dark out. I thought about George and his mangled right hand and his suddenly bright watery eyes and a home. I have none, but where is a place I can imagine of such happiness that I hesitate even to visit for fear of never wanting to leave again, and how do I get there?

Bozeman, Montana - 11/22/07

Quiet SoHo

It was late and quiet at Spring Lounge the other night. I sat with my short, fat, gay, Indian companion at the bar. He was drunk. We'd been drinking Rebel Yell and trading jokes with Dermot, the bartender. He'd just put one into the universe that would send him straight to Hell, if he believed in it. I didn't, and was trying to think of something equally foul, when my companion, who had been near dozing, snapped awake and asked us what the best thing about having sex with twenty nine year olds was*.

My companion rebounded after visiting the bathroom. I asked him if he'd heard of the girl in the East Village with the X-ray eyes. He said something disgusting, then apologized. I wasn't joking. She's Ukrainian and lives on Eleventh and Second on the fourth floor of a walk-up. She's a child. People come from all over and wait in lines down the hall and stairs to see her. She sits on her couch and inspects you. Her grandmother translates. She can see your organs.

"There is a girl in New York City," said my companion, "who calls herself the human trampoline. And when I'm falling, flying, tumbling in turmoil..."

Dermot ambled back over and said some terrible things. He let them sink in and ambled back away. My companion asked me about the lines down the hall. "Why do people believe?" I said I thought it was the nature of this city. Maybe the country. You can invent yourself here. If you say you're something, then you are that thing as long as you want. You don't even really have to back yourself up. If you can convince the people you meet that you're an art dealer, or a writer, or a music producer, then it doesn't matter that you work at David Z. People want to believe.

We agreed that there are exceptions. My companion asked how I'd heard of the Ukrainian girl who can see you from the inside. "I saw her," I said. "She said I was fine."

(*There are twenty of them.)