On the way in today the train slowed to a crawl. Through my earbuds I half-heard the usual catchall explanations: train traffic ahead, signal malfunction. Then through the window there was an MTA worker in his hardhat and safety orange vest. He was perched in the dark realm beside the track, on some kind of ledge above the trash and debris, braced against whatever he could find so he wouldn’t fall. Then there was another, then another. Just workers in the tunnel on a Monday morning, getting out the way of the train.

There’s a number 4 scratched in the gray-painted wall at the fourth-floor landing of the stairwell at my work. Someone must have done it with a key.

A crazy woman sat near me on the train home. She was angry, agitated. At someone, I thought, but then it appeared it as at no one at all. I tried to understand her. But there was no sense to what she was saying, just patterns. She looped the same words and phrases over and over again, in slightly different ways: white people, garbage, smell, cemetery, white children, get out, disgusting, white soul, white face.

That’s the title of that Paul McCartney album. I wonder if that’s why. From the early ‘70s. An old TV with the interference. The horizontal hold. A beach somewhere. The sea. From an airplane. So you can see the waves but you can’t see them move.

Is this making me a better person? Then what do I do?

The beach, the sea, baseball. You think of baseball when there’s nothing else to think of.

The mind excretes thoughts. But the word is there. The word is back. Word, word, word, word, word. The psychedelic light show behind the eyelids. And the word.

I stood on the beach and waved to my wife and daughter as they waded into the sunset. Just then a ganja man appeared. Just as they always do, just about all the time. This time I decided to buy.

“How much for a spliff?” I asked.

He looked over his shoulder and approached me furtively, like we were accomplices in a crime. Which we were I guess, but it’s a crime that occurs a thousand times a day on this beach. Maybe this was theater. Make the sunburned tourists feel a thrill.

“Here mon, here,” he said, and tried to press a handful of fat joints into my palm. “Forty.”

“I only want one, man,” I said, pulling my hand away.

“OK, OK, OK,” he said in a displeased, slightly disapproving tone. “Here you go mon.”

Now I had three in my hand. His eyes darted left and right.

“Twenty.”

“No, no, I don’t need three. How much for one?”

With great reluctance he took a spliff back from my hand, leaving two. I figured I wasn’t going to do any better than that.

“Fifteen.”

I told him I’d be right back, I had to get cash at our place.

“Yeah mon, come find me. Come find me,” he said, and extended his elbow for a bump. “Ree-spect.”

Back at the villa I got my wallet and took out the cash, thinking to myself what it’d be like to burn a Jamaican beach dealer. Would he glower at me in my shaded chaise every morning as he passed by on his rounds? “Where da cash mon?” he’d ask, and I’d shrug my shoulders and return to my paperback. Or maybe he’d kill me with a knife. Drag my carcass into a powered dinghy and dump me out at sea. Really I had no idea what would happen.

I returned to the beach and found him a few paces from where we’d met.

“Here you go,” I said, placing the money discreetly in his palm, and I did feel that little thrill after all.

“Yeah mon! You wan’ anyting else you lemme know!” he said, and I knew from his tone he meant cocaine.

“Thanks,” I said, and turned away, not knowing whether I’d been ripped off, figuring I had, not really caring, with one more joint than I needed in the damp mesh pocket of my swim trunks.

5 Life Lessons by the Grateful Dead

1. Let a thing be what it is

It’s not perfect. Far from it. Maybe it’s ugly and cantankerous. But let it do its thing. It may surprise you. It will likely surprise you. Just let it.

2. Take control

If you wanna take control, take control. Do it. No one’s gonna stop you. Do it.

3. Don’t take control

Resist the urge to take control. Let go. Avoid making decisions. Do not assert yourself.

4. You’re a small part of a big thing

Believe me. Don’t you forget it.

5. Doubt yourself

Your instincts are probably wrong. The way you feel is inaccurate. If you think A, it’s probably B.

The Crazy That Is Jennifer

Overheard conversation in the break room this morning, between two women:

“You’re here!”

“It’s not snowing!”

“I know—”

“I just didn’t, you know, I didn’t want to spend another day in my apartment.”

“I know.” She begins to back away and turn around. “So come over when you have something ready—”

“Yeah, I’ve got a call at ten. I’ll come over after and we can discuss—”

“Great.”

“You know. The crazy that is Jennifer.”

I made a mental note of something to write about, something about vacation itself, something slightly vexing, where you hit a sort of wall. Was it something that happens in the pool?

It’s that excruciating moment when you enter the cold water. You know you’ll be fine a second later. But the shock and the dread of it are real. You stand one step deep and stare at the limpid ripples on that cold water and you almost wish you were back home in bed.

Don’t even really want to hear about it. What is there to say about this guy? He loves guns and he hates people.

Why do I have the disco hit “Ring My Bell” playing incessantly in my head?

Maybe ‘cause it stopped raining today.

Mom didn’t follow sports but she loved sports. The folklore of it, the mythology, traditions. The idea that people could get so happy about nothing at all. Or get so sad.

For the Super Bowl in 1979 we were at our neighbors up the street, the kid I’d been friends with all my life, Henry. The parents were having proper pre-dinner cocktails in the living room while Henry and I watched the game at the kitchen table. That was what went down in a house in a little college town with four grownups who didn’t give a fuck about football.

At a certain point my mom walked in and asked us who was playing. She didn’t even know who was playing on the goddamned day of the game.

“Cowboys and Steelers,” I said, with some idiotic pride, like I was in the know.

Without the slightest hesitation she said: “GO STEELERS.”

She knew, instinctively or through some convoluted experience, that the Dallas Cowboys were despicable and the Pittsburgh Steelers were worthy of love and support.

Until that moment I had no real idea of my own. I’d grown up without TV because this is how my parents chose to express themselves. To take their stand against vulgar American commercialism and conformity, dragging their children up alongside them. So today I was happy enough to watch any kind of flickering pixels on a screen, be they white and silver or black and gold.

But the moment my mom said that I knew she was right. One team is obviously, always, fundamentally, morally superior to the other. Cowboys suck.

So I rooted for the Steelers and they won.

This morning as I walked from the school to the train, I perceived in the corner of my eye a man prone on the street. A team of EMTs were huddled around him. One held a bandage against his brow. I wanted to look, so I turned away. I knew it wouldn’t be right somehow. I crossed the street and navigated a little crowd of people who’d stopped and turned around. I looked at them. Their expressions were unconcerned, unalarmed. Maybe the guy was alive, alert. Maybe he was going to be OK. Or maybe that’s just the way humans appear when they’re watching someone die.

I thought of that day in London with my dad. A cloudburst had come and the sidewalks and streets were suddenly slick. We approached a group of people who seemed to be standing still for no good reason. Then I saw between them a tall, dapper, dark-haired man who had fallen and cracked his skull. His dark crimson blood flowed over the slate-gray pavement and mingled with rivulets of rain. Someone was on a knee beside him, doing what he could, I guess, while help was on its way. My dad gripped my hand a little harder and we walked past.

None of This Matters

I was temping at Heublein, the giant booze company, in Hartford in the early ‘90s. I was assigned to some senior marketing guy, a balding, paunchy man in his late forties. I sat at a desk right outside his office, punching numbers into spreadsheets, gathering printouts, dicking around with PowerPoint decks.

He was in charge of product for all of South America, or maybe parts of South America. He had a trip coming up to Ecuador, Chile, some other places. Figuring out what the fuck they wanted to drink down there. Selling it to them. That was his task.

One of the company’s bargain brands had just rolled out a mint chocolate chip liqueur. A bottle sat on his desk, wrapped in its pale green label. I considered whether this was what he was currently pushing on the upwardly mobile people of Quito. For centuries they got drunk on cane liquor, maybe potions of it flavored with indigenous herbs and flowers. Now they were supposed to drink this goddamned sweet green shit.

One day I was struggling with an assignment, I don’t know what. Numbers weren’t adding up and a deadline loomed. I figured I had to make it right. Here I was on the 27th floor of a grand old building in downtown Hartford, Connecticut, wearing a belt and tie. Walking out the elevator every morning, past the water cooler and the mission statement framed and hung up on the wall. It was my role to get it right.

I must have sighed audibly in frustration and dismay. The guy shouted from his office: “Pat, come in here for a minute.”

I walked in apprehensively. He peered at me from behind his desk, from behind the mint chocolate schnapps. He seemed like a man perfectly in his place, confident, at ease. Every self-doubt I’d ever had he’d never had, or rooted out many years ago. In my nervousness I beheld him with a sort of wonder.

“Let me tell you something.”

“OK.”

“None of this matters. Do you understand? None of this—this, everything—” he made a little sweeping gesture with his hand—“matters at all. Not at all. Do you know what I mean?”

I nodded slowly.

“It doesn’t matter at all. Don’t worry about it. Take my word for it—I’m serious. Nothing, none of it, nothing here, nothing you’re doing, nothing I’m doing. None of it matters.”

“OK.”

“At all.”

“OK.”

“OK. OK?”

“Yeah.”

“OK. Don’t you forget it,” he said, and turned his head back down to the documents on his desk, signaling for me to turn around and leave.

As I hung my head in my morning reverie, sitting on the 2 Train, my nostrils filled with a familiar smell, airy and a little bit sharp. I realized the man sitting next to me had just put a menthol cough drop in his mouth.

I had a very intense dream last night that I had driven a car into someone’s house—maybe backed it into their house. And the way they reacted, and the way I did, and everything that happened next—which was unclear—formed the basis of a great novel, beautiful and meaningful and profound.

When I awoke in the middle of the night I thought I should take notes about it for the morning, to make sure I didn’t forget. But I lazily tried to fix it in my mind instead. I still thought it would be something beautiful that I could carry into the world.

And now this is all I have. Or is it?

As I sat in my boss’s office I noticed that the windows in the building across the way reflected our windows, but bowed them like fun house mirrors so they all looked like giant eyeballs peering back at us.

I leaned against the train window as we went express from Jay Street to Seventh. Tired.

Outside the Coney Island haunted house the operator, a big guy about forty, leaned on a rail and spoke to a couple of ticket takers, high school guys on summer jobs.

The cars were mostly empty. Here and there a mother and daughter, a father and son, darted around the corner to be plunged into the black portal, grimacing with apprehension.

“Open a checking account and a savings account,” the man said.

The boys nodded.

“Start a credit card. Open a line of credit and buy some shit.”

A few moments passed and a few more empty cars rattled past the gates of the inferno.

“Don’t buy too much shit. You’re establishin’ credit.”

One of the boys murmured something I could not hear.

“One-fifty, one-fifty. One-fifty in checking an’ one-fifty in savings.”

The group fell silent. All the cars were gone now. The stretch of track that ran out front, past the turnstile, glinted in the August sun.

We thought we were all so clever defying the man, doubting reality. Denying the existence of moral absolutes. Look atcha. Like a rolling stone.

This is what we get and I still don’t know what to do.

The cough is back. Dormant for hours sometimes, other times spasmodic to the point where I wonder what will happen if I don’t stop. I see myself pounding on our bedroom door, rousing Sara and wordlessly directing her to dial 911. But this has all happened before, and before, and before.

There’s a new guy panhandling on the F train lately. You can tell he’s coming. It starts with a little commotion, a spasm in that gauzy atmosphere that unites and separates us all on our way home from work. Is it a fight? A lunatic? A few heads turn. Most don’t bother. But then he appears, marching down the car and shouting: “I’m HUNGRY. Can SOMEBODY HELP ME OUT? I’m HUNGRY. Can SOMEBODY HELP ME OUT?”

The choice of words. The emphatic, urgent declaration. Then the more delicate question—not “Can someone give me money?” Not “Can someone spare some change?” Can somebody help me out? Could mean anything, really. Up to you. The words lie there on the floor, inviting us to pick and poke at them.

I thought he’d walked by when I realized he’d stopped his litany and taken a seat across from me. Like any other rider I suppose. He was eating a slice of chocolate-frosted cake from a clear plastic single-serve container. The kind you see at the deli and never, ever buy. When he was done he cast the trash beneath the bench and pulled out a wad of cash. He tossed it in a heap on the empty seat beside him. A mound of bills, some balled up and some in clumpy piles. Then he gathered it all up again and began to count. Singles, some fives. There must have been, I don’t know. Thirty dollars, forty?

TROOPS

No way they’re paying admission, so they’re either tunneling in or coming in over the retaining wall.

TROOPS

And he was like, “If you could take care of Chet. He’s in the stairwell. And he’ll be hungry.”