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| Wanting to see the streets he'd grown up on, I visited his town. Downtown was deserted: my main impression was of rubble. As I walked past the neglected Deco facades, empty within, I thought out of habit, "This would make a great cafe!" or, "What a place for a punk show!" The sites were picturesque, forlorn in the best tradition of dead-end towns. |
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| His presence seemed to hang over the place, though I'm sure the drifters crowding the sidewalk outside the downtown liquor store, or sprawled on the park's patchy lawn, weren't aware of it. He'd lived with his parents on the city's north fringe, a safe distance from here. Like his schoolmates he'd been raised on tomato soup, grilled cheese and Saturday cartoons. These were the people he superficially resembled, and if he'd been an ordinary boy, their company would have satisfied him. But as he grew older and more restless he came down to the South Side more often, first for the Mexican food ("They don't card you when you ask for beer"), later to seek out the drunks and religious freaks, whose freedom he envied. One day he met a man named Jesus Christ who was planning to save the world with artificial light. This man was a visitor from the Sun which, it turned out, was no ball of fire but a vast light bulb run by an advanced intelligence. He went to the man's house, toured his laboratory, browsed through his obscure books. |
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| I was driven into town by an old friend, across dry brown hills scattered with cows, in a blue Chevy pickup. I rode in the open back, the wind blowing up my pantlegs, swirling through my hair, drying the midday sweat from my skin. Finally we reached the dust-choked valley where everything stood still. The town rose slowly around us, changing from open pastureland to wide yards filled with scrap metal, then corner fruit stands, single houses, a rail line, warehouses, empty lots, a breakfast place, till the storefronts turned continuous and we reached the center, where department stores and banks stood abandoned, and people lived like rats in the derelict hotels. |
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| When we stopped at the curb, the heat was like a wall. Ours was the only car on the block. A police cruiser turned the corner and came slowly past. I vaulted the side of the pickup and landed on the dusty sidewalk. I felt like I was on a movie set: "People live here!" I reminded myself. An old Chinese man stood at the corner, swearing loudly at a parking meter. A couple of fat white girls grabbed my arm and asked me for money. As the beat-up Chevy drove away, it hit me: this is all he knew. He couldn't just leave, like me. He didn't travel as a boy, or have friends in other towns. Imagine trying to guess, from this, what a more multidimensional place would feel like. Then imagine going there, finally, and finding that San Francisco or New Orleans or Chicago had no kindness for the likes of you. You thought the musicians, the poets, the hooligans of the night would pour from the cafes and welcome you with cries of: "Fellow artist, where were you? Eat with us, sleep with us, share our women. You've found us, brother, we are your people!" |
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