1) Lost to a stranger

She's looking into my eyes, she's holding my hand
She says, "You can't repeat the past."

I say, "You can't? What do you mean, you can't? Of course you can."

--Dylan (Summer Days)
________



Nashville all new to me. There wasn't a cloud in the sky for eight weeks, my first summer there. Cloudy days are restful, you eventually realize. Indoors, a gauzy purple to me. Days squinting at my new surroundings, never adjusting my eyes.

My sister Jane guided me pay-phone to pay-phone to "Sunnybrook Lane", in the one of the outer wheels of sprawling Music City. To this new family domus on the outer rim. Am I visiting? We don't know. I might be moving in, I've got all my stuff.

I hear it is practically a mansion and there's a Jacuzzi. Not likely we'll ever be any richer than this. Come see this Amazing. What Dad can gather together these days of his prime.

All of us of us at peace with me now, somehow. I am a confirmed ne'er-do-well, Mom's friends have sons and daughters who are neurologists. I've been a lost cause for so long I'm circling back around again, close like a satellite, anticipated to crash within one hundred years.

Man on a downtown street corner, my eyes don't deceive me, he's actually holding a sign that reads "mendicant". That's some sense of humor and deserves a reward but not from me.

Mend-i-cant.
I can't... I won't!

______
Twice a week I drove Dad's white Mercedes (with Hollywood CA. plates) to Andrew Jackson's Hermitage. I wrote back home to friends, go south and east for Living History and Modern Times. Iowa was never meant as a destination for our ancestors.

They fucked up and stayed and grew bitter with secret self-reproach. Leave Iowa! Finally concede the 1800's trip west was a failure and return East, South-east.

Each day the sort of day you don't know what your favorite time of day is and first you put breakfast on the scales because it's first.

Driving down Granny White Pike with Talking Heads or The Traveling Wilburys on the stereo , on my way to nowhere special, was it having private tours of the Hermitage, was it late at night, popping pilfered dentist pills and listening in the dark to my OTR tapes of Fibber and Molly. The euphoria spread into the morning and there was never any edge. Cans of beer always kept me ahead of a hangover, and stinking but I didn't know.

My older brother visited and with my mother guided me in to apply for a job at one of the New Concept super bookstores... this one an independent.

Grand, wonderfully over-staffed, books tight on the shelves and a cafe specializing in muffins the size of melons. Beautiful young baristas, young women with southern accents and no thought to the future but that evening's night out.

___
My first month, I took my granddad's old alarm clock to work with me and left it in the car because at lunchtime I wanted to hear the ticking of my room, the ticking of last night's protected sleep and this nights promised peace.


Two weeks with a new tic, uncomfortable new shoes and I'm tugging at my collar. In charge of Humor as a specialist or expert, and if I don't like someone I can be as obsequious and diffident as Valentino selling $3,000 Newman suits to a lottery winner.

In the elevator alone , on a mission to find a book, I walk in circles as if I were climbing a narrow spiral staircase.

Start to my right on the way up, on my left on the way down. 20 seconds of isolation and peace.

I can see the humor shelves from here at Information, Please, and there's a problem with pests. They are waiting their turn or nudging one another aside to lift my Far Side and Calvin books up into upheaval. Or they buy the books and leave gaping holes where I had every one packed in and flush to the shelf, ready for a photograph.

I shelve Philosophy too (I could be taken as a pretty classy broad-minded fellow here! ) And no one so far to expose my ignorance of Spinoza.

Inventory put "Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance" there---an accommodation since that's where the freaks naturally go to find it, apparently.

"I wore out so many copies of this, man."

"This is for my son."

Jesus? Lord. Am I the phony elitist.

Seething inside when I had to gift-wrap a copy this morning.

____
Can't get in on a conversation with most of these co-blings. Got to look up the TV schedule and find out when "Thirty Something" is on.

Cleavage! A young divorcee! You can spot them. She's coming my way, fresh and she's smiling, wait, she's no divorcee. Glance at the ring finger. Diamond ring, gold band, modest for Nashville. I'd like an adulterous hand-job if you wear that ring. Oh she's so lovely, sweet petite, my heart is Gee. Unseemly glee.

But I'm dressed like a clown. My last girlfriend took me clothes shopping one hour before she dumped me. What get-ups. It's like she vandalized me, swearing this was how guys dressed in the Hep neighborhood of Boston. "These slacks... fasten with Velcro, you're not pulling my leg are you? " NO, no , no. Hey I'm doing you a favor. These trousers make you look like you've got a butt, John. Then I've got the clothes my mother and my father. The clothes my monkey's uncle. Khakis and blue oxford shirts, with neck-ties.

"Hi there! Do you know if Mariah Maye is working today?" asks this lovely bride with the bobbed brown hair.

Carter looks up from his book. "She's starting Monday".

"Oh, do you know her?"

"Only biblically," he dead-panned.

"Well tell her that her friend Sarah stopped by and that I need to talk to her soon about her chivalrous co-workers." She grins but I sense trouble.

Stunning. Carter laughs, tells me, "I only know her brother. Think Mariah might have been at my 5th birthday party..."
____ _____ _______
Dreaded lunchtime soon. Scared of an invitation, so I duck out, hurt there's no invitation. Lunch time isn't long enough to use the car so I walk down to the only eatery I know, a fern place, and have an egg-salad sandwich with the decorative metal chairs killing my back. Worries me I'll run into a co-bling and have to make with the gab or be mute. This is my personality profile. Sucks. And I'm reading The Bear. The prose is opaque, not mysterious. I haven't any idea what's going on in the bookstore. But this book here . The pages are swabbed in black. I'm imagining I'm reading The Bear, maybe I'm asleep.

___
Who starts Monday? Mariah Maye.
Oh, Andy's sister?
Oh, from the University school? I think she went to the University school.
Oh. The Mayes, Mayes Hosiery Mill, right?
Oh her granddad invented the tube sock.

Invented the tube sock, ha! What's a tube sock, it's an artless sock. Peg leg sock.

I j.o. in tube socks you ever j.o. in a tube sock?

My brother dated a Chicago girl whose dad invented the Pringle Can.
There's a low level abstraction for you.

Tube socks may not have been invented but they sure were introduced to the public.

I like tube socks.

Yes, we know you do.