I made eye contact with a heavyset middle-aged woman at the Union Square bus stop and I could tell by the way she looked back I was gonna hear it. It started with when's the bus coming, oh I saw one not too long ago. How long? Two minutes. But that was the 3, maybe the 2 will come. Then she said she'd been at the Blue Water Grill for a holiday dinner and she didn't really want to go because she had a church activity but her boss said please go, I'd very much appreciate it, so she went and the food was terrible, just terrible, but the people there were so nice, they made up for it by being so nice, someone ordered the cold seafood platter and it came with lobster on top but the lobster was waterlogged, from the ice you know, I'm a bit of a foodie, so she ordered sushi and it was not good but they were so nice, she didn't really want to go and her boss had asked her why not and she said she had a church activity and he said why would you rather go to that and she said because it's a church activity.

Of course, I nodded, of course.

He said I'd really like it if you came. She doesn't get along with her coworkers, they're all so young besides they don't really seem to like her, they don't really talk to her but for some reason people were very nice tonight she said, very very nice.

Warm, I said.

On the bus now. She in the seat in front of me.

She told me she likes to travel, have you been to France? And I had to say yes, she said where, I said mostly Paris, she said I was back in Paris five days, I was there in March, I like it alright, I really prefer the country myself. I was in Lyons. Do you know Toulouse? Have you been to Perpignan? Annecy? I had the most delightful time there, swans on the canals, it was Christmastime, the people were so nice. Aix-en-Provence? Yes, I said. Her eyes widened. Then she went to Geneve, they were jousting in the old town.

I don't like the bullet train!

You like to look out the window.

I miss it going by so fast.

Where else have you been in the world? I have friends in India they say come stay, you won't pay for a thing, of course I would pay I would not go over and just not pay but still. They tell me stay here. You could teach. You could teach English to the kids and she held her hand out flat to indicate "kids." I would go except the plane, I don't know what I would do, if I could break up the trip in half.

You could probably do that.

I can't sleep on the plane. I'm up the whole time. At home in my bed, one two three. On the plane I drink water, I'm very careful with the jet lag. I walk up and down the aisle drinking water, up and down the aisle. In Paris I was exhausted. At three o'clock the concierge at the hotel said you better not fall asleep, don't fall asleep. She wags her finger. But I fell asleep and the next day I was fine.

Are you Irish? What's that accent, it sounds like an Irish brogue. Have you been to Ireland? Have you been to Spain? Barthelona. It was so nice. You can take a bus into the Pyrenees! Little towns, they call them pueblos. In a little town I went to mass the mass was in English, Espagnol, Italian… French! Spanish. German!

I wondered if she'd list a few more languages, why not. Maybe Esperanto. Maybe invent one too. She said when I went to Denmark I studied with a tutor every day after work, I wanted to say hello and goodbye and thank you, they were so surprised!

So surprised when you spoke.

So surprised! Danish is the strangest language. But the strangest of all is Finnish.

There was a mad gleam in her eye from time to time and an odd, mincing way she said some words. Like nice. And she said them with the trace of a sigh too.

"Are you a writer?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "That's… um, that's quite a… lucky guess."

"I wasn't guessing!" she said.

Do you write on the computer, she asked. She said she used to edit herself as she wrote but now she writes first and edits later. One bad habit she got rid of, she said. On to the next one! she said. I love Pennsylvania she said. Bethlehem. This time of year. They have a little trolley train you take, you get on, you get off, it's free. You go to the tent of Pennsylvania Dutch arts and crafts. They have a star.

She tells me about her favorite Japanese tea room.

You get the rice with the adzuki beans.

She tells me about the café she loves, Le Gamin, where it's always hugs and kisses and the café au lait is better than Paris. They're so nice. She tells me about her favorite sushi.

"I can tell you're a real writer. This is being imprinted in your brain. You don't have to write anything down, you remember."

"I try."

She laughed.

"All anyone can do is try."

And finally we were at 86th Street. She shook my hand and left.

BE unconscious BE unconscious BE unconscious BE.

On the subway home from Rudy's I remembered with a start Aimee describing her sister Judy's death. The cancer had spread from her breasts and ravaged her stomach and spine, she had grown bloated and jaundiced – apparently a symptom of the late stages. In spite of this she'd been OK, moving around, talking. Then they prescribed Oxycontin in an unusually high dose and within a couple of days she became disoriented and panicky, ill at ease, not knowing what was going on. At the very end, Aimee said, she was frightened, wide-eyed and in distress. As her nephew Brian held her hand her heart and lungs failed for good; she experienced some sort of systemic capillary release and blood streamed out of her eye sockets.

In my moment of exquisite humiliation the somber face of New Jersey Nets coach Byron Scott peered at me from the TV.

There is a quietude on the subway that deters drama, even action of any kind, even thought. When there is a commotion everyone refuses to be perturbed by it. Their stubborn calm in its choppy wake produces an absurd, theatrical incongruity.

A few years ago I was going to work on the Broadway local and it was crowded, every seat taken and people shoulder to shoulder and back to back, trying to ignore this enforced intimacy. A young black man, perfectly well dressed, who was sitting down and had been completely quiet the whole trip suddenly cried out, "Why can't I get the good pussy!? All I ever get is the ugly ass black pussy! Why can't I get the good white pussy?!" He seemed genuinely distressed, uncomprehending, intent not on shocking or dismaying anyone so much as venting a legitimate grievance to the world. "Why do I always get the ugly black pussy!"

When he burst into his rant a faint current of shock jolted the cabin almost imperceptibly, for the briefest moment, then every face returned to its neutral, unconcerned demeanor.

I gathered my groceries and got off the bus in a hurry, the heavy double plastic bags twisting from the handles, one perilously half-gripped. When I hit the sidewalk the wind blew the receipts out of the unfastened bag. Suddenly animate, they flew end over end into Madison Avenue, given over to queer forces that kept them intertwined even as they followed a butterfly course. I walked up the east side of the street and kept my eye on them in the middle.

For some reason I felt that without any particular effort I would soon cross their path again and pick them right back up.

I jaywalked across 104th Street as the receipts continued their halting progress. They darted left halfway up the block and emerged between two parked cars onto the sidewalk ahead of me. A gust lifted them up and blew them against the shuttered Checks Cashed place. They fell by the wall for a moment then drifted again away from me. Each time they rested I gained on them and just before the bodega I caught up.

I bent over, picked them up, crumpled them into a ball and dropped them in the trash can on the corner.

I feel my face and note its increasing distension, below the eyes and between the eyebrows.

Went out for a drink and a movie and more drinks with Eevin and we wound up talking about cocksucking and fucking and pussies and pussy eating.

What else is there after all.

Emmett was drunk, he got picked up by a drunk driver. Her name was Claire and she was 41.

Yesterday Jim and I traveled to Princeton, New Jersey to train an ad agency to use our software except it wasn't really Princeton but a place called Cranbury which was just industrial parks by the side of the highway. I remembered keenly this awful landscape: the main road divided by the pointless grassy strip, low-lying buildings behind uniform walls of shrubbery, endless mazes of interconnected, half-filled parking lots. Building 7. Building 9.

I ordered a martini.

I sat hunched over reading the Voice, realizing I looked tired or lazy or something this way, the paper on the stool beside me. There was absolutely no one else there but the bartender. She came out from behind the bar and sat on a stool at the far end. She joined her hands on the bar as though in prayer and stared straight ahead for quite some time.

Finally a few other people came in and I was relieved for some dumb reason – I didn't want Mona to come into the cavernous room with no music playing and not a soul but me huddled over the paper.

The gin was getting warm.

It rained a full day and a full night.

When I came home yesterday I considered my apartment building and how unfamiliar certain aspects of it remain: what's behind it exactly? Where is that half-roof I see from our kitchen window with the door to another building, that strange suspended space from a city of fantasy or myth? That's where I watch the rain beat onto puddles and how I know it's raining hard. Where's the overgrown and trash-strewn courtyard below our living room where we beat out rugs? After four years it's still disorienting, mysterious; only the brick face and identical red awnings tell me it's my home.

On Saturday I waited for Mona at Double Happiness. The bartender looked like Jacqueline Bisset and she was brusque and a little nervous and she said just so you know, we have a private party at nine.

When he died he remembered with a start the names of so many things he'd never know again. But they were just words now, finally separated from the world and lingering in space: crash pad, envelope, turquoise, biscuit.

As I rest at night electricity pours into my various prone electronic devices: phone, camera, MP3 player, PDA. And as the electrons buzz toward their new nest I feel a wave of comfort, everything being renewed.

One night B. and I were walking to my place arm-in-arm, drunk, talking about nothing and thinking about sex, and when I put my foot down I felt a soft, spongy, shaking thing where I'd expected concrete. I jerked my foot up and released a terrified rat that sped away into 103rd Street.

When I lived in Connecticut thoughts of moving to the City expanded in my mind until it seemed inevitable and once it did I had one dark vision: slogging up a sidewalk at night after work, looking for a street sign to mark the yawning black path to my anonymous home around the corner. And I was struck with depression at the thought of it and I figured whatever came, I'd have to fight that off, and it's true, I'd better.

This morning I walked to the subway on Central Park North on the beautiful wet sidewalk, matted with pale gold leaves and what appeared to be crushed, soggy yellow chalk. A panhandler approached me, Can I get sum breakfast?, and feeling guilty for having turned homeless Jeff away the other day I reached into my bag and pulled out I mournful little palmful of pennies, dimes and nickels. I placed it in the man's hand, must have been like thirty-seven cents, and he stared at it with some distaste.

There's a show on TV called "The Reality of Reality."

A man, overcome with lust, fornicates a cold puddle of mud.

The guy Mark who runs the little ad agency we sublet part of our office to, I never really met him officially so the first time he called my name I was startled.

"Bye Pat!" on the way out.

He's frequently on the phone, schmoozing in his blustery adman's voice, sometimes saying fuck.

He's noticed I'm into the baseball playoffs so he has fixated on this as a subject of small talk but I can't for the life of me figure out where he's coming from. I think I heard him on the phone tell someone go Red Sox. And before Game 3 against the Marlins he wandered over and said, "Do you think they can come back tonight?" even though it was 1-1 so his question made no sense whatsoever.

"I… Do I? Yes!" I found myself saying idiotically.

I suppose good salesmen do this, they get you to say shit you have no idea what it is you're saying. Or why.

49 Russian miners trapped as water enters mine.b

Could there conceivably be a more ominous headline? It's worse than Asteroid races toward earth for crying out loud.

First, the number: 49. So sinister. Not prime but odd and angly, as though it were chosen by some cruel consciousness. And what a great number of people to be suddenly shut out of the world: we imagine a cooped-up, agitated gaggle of men, hardworking men, vodka-drinking Russian toughs breaking down. There are 49 of them. Any lower number would somehow seem much more tolerable – and seven or eight, well, if they were lost their number would at least suggest a noble band of brothers, a family. We might fantasize that their last hours were dignified and we'd elevate them each in grief. But 49!

Second: water enters mine. Has nature ever sounded so malevolent? It's like monster enters bedroom. Water enters mine and does what it will, and we all know what it will do. Water! The situation is utterly, irretrievably dire.

Why'd I have to go and pick the Chiefs and the over. The over?! Players crossed the line like yuppie mountaineers popping Mt. Everest in a hailstorm. And by that I mean few. And far between.

The over!


The cabbie fucked up and didn't cut across the avenue to turn left on 105th so he left me off on the far side of Mad and I grumbled and he apologized. On my short walk home I came upon a driver, drunker than me, staggering out of his town car toward his door. His uneasy gait, expensive shoes padding on the pavement out of time, betrayed his inebriation.

Once inside my building I charged down the hall like a toy soldier, I don't know why. Chin up, barrel chest, arms swinging. I checked the mailbox for no particular reason at all, with complete conviction that it would be empty. And it was. I closed it swiftly yet methodically, making a game of formalized gestures. I stomped up the stairs full of conviction but by my landing I was panting and frail, all too human.

Went to the Yankees-Red Sox playoff game, the stadium packed and a lone helmeted sniper visible above the lip of the roof, perched in some forbidding place beside a row of lights.

Foul balls arced swiftly into the soft fleshy surface of the crowd, to be absorbed like grains of salt on a thirsty tongue.

The tattoo between her milky shoulder blades said "passion." In some archaic font, which was all italics, where the esses looked like efs. Paffion. I looked down from the Yankee game on TV and there she was backlit in its glow, limbs akimbo, her tank top hanging just below: paf…?!

Passion.

A very tall man cut into the bar, his profile regal, elevated. He was thin, oblivious. Then gone.

We were watching Game 1 of the American League Championship Series between the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Shouts and taunts, bordering on the cruel. The Yankees lost a hopeless charge, down five-nothing then up to five to two when they ran out of outs.

C. and I walked east and ducked into a wine bar off Sixth Avenue and shared a bottle of Spanish wine, talking about failed relationships. I told her about B. from Milford or was it Guilford, the all-American blonde daughter of the airline pilot and the alcoholic wife. I went there for dinner and her mother got so hammered she slurred the word goodnight.

Then me and B., we fucked on her daddy's chair. His precious TV chair no one else was permitted to so much as sit on. This I didn't tell Christina but I'm saying it now. We fucked on his big black leather armchair in front of the TV. He'd be stricken with horror if he knew – and anger, God knows – so this lent the circumstance a particularly erotic charge. She faced me, kneeling uneasily between the arms, and we had at it.

A smell like Ovaltine filled my nostrils on the train. It warmed the air around us in its cocoa glow. And I became aware of a faintly sticky sloshiness at my feet; I lifted my shoe and let it drop again and sure enough it splatted in something: a shallow river of milky hot chocolate. The source was an overturned Starbucks cup – a young woman was fussily, pointlessly righting it after spilling its entire contents at her feet. A short, stout Columbian man with a hoop earring stood nearby, acting like he didn't notice. The Red Sox won the American League Division Series tonight and are due to play the Yankees on Wednesday. I watched the game at a bar with Christina and she was delirious with excitement, nervousness, alcohol, finally joy. "The Red Sox won! The Red Sox won!" she screamed, punching me in the ribs, jostling drink all over my shirt. "Easy." "The Red Sox won the championship I mean the division series!" The moment of the final strikeout, Boston up 4-3, Oakland batting, men on second and third. Christina leapt to her feet screaming and yelling and Jason and I exchanged a rueful little Yankee-fan toast: here's to our friend, her team. After I dropped her off in the cab I was listening to the Kinks' "Victoria": from the West to the East; let her sun never set on croquet lawns, village greens; sex is bad and obscene; Though I am poor I am free, land of hope and gloria, ‘toria fucked them all.