TROOPS

a doctor’s expression could change to one of deep concern

I gazed out the window after putting Jackie to bed, before shutting the shades, and noticed again the window next door. There was a curtain on the bottom, suggesting a semblance of civilization, but through the top shone a single, harsh, bright light, not a normal bulb but a sparkling dot like a little star that made the room featureless and white and I wondered how anyone could tolerate it, what went on in there, was it some kind of torture chamber.

TROOPS

Francine believed with all her heart that the altar was Calvary and that again Jesus was offered up for sacrifice.

On my way out of the Bay Ridge Ford Service Center I walked toward the barrier at the entrance, a chain guarded by a man in a booth. I was going to step over it I guess, or walk around it, when there was the man lowering it to the ground, Sir Walter Raleigh-like, so I could walk over it without a care. I thanked him.

“OK, hey! You’re welcome, you’re welcome! No problem at all. No problem. Only one thing, just—see, this here’s a street. There’s cars comin’ in and out. So if you would do me a favor. Just use the sidewalk over there.” He indicated it on the far side with his outstretched hand, still holding the chain in the other. “Just so, you know. For your safety. You understand? Just a favor for your safety.”

I smiled and nodded and agreed and thanked him and smiled.

“‘Cause this here’s a street, see. There’s cars passin’ through. So as a matter of safety. Your safety, you understand? Just as a favor. Use the sidewalk please. Next time. You understand? But you’re welcome, you’re welcome. Have a great day!”

Late at night while washing dishes I had an insight that the Grateful Dead’s peak years of cultural influence were not the ‘60s but the ‘80s.

When I got into the Dead I thought I was late to the party. The ‘60s had happened, the ‘70s too. Jerry fat and gray. I wasn’t around for the Acid Tests, the Be-In. The Fillmore, the Carousel, the Avalon. What could it have been like to go to a concert on a Tuesday night, get dosed by Bear and wind up naked in the park, not lost and despairing but with a dozen kindred souls, all laughing ecstatically, scrutinizing the straight world as it awoke to go to work and not giving a fuck except about the universe? This happened, I know. But not to me.

Shows seemed to occur on the fly yet were promoted—and so memorialized—by gloriously psychedelic posters. Cost a buck to get in, maybe five or maybe nothing. For years this band had played in parks, on the street, on campuses, all the while revolution in the air. I know—I saw the pictures in the books. How I wished I was there. All the clothes were cooler. The hair. Everything was happening and nothing was predictable. You could probably go right up there and sit on that stage if you wanted, by the tangle of cables and the speakers with the tie-dye grilles.

When their audience got bigger the Dead responded in kind: a sound system three stories tall, shows that lasted hours and hours, long weird Dark Stars. Egypt on a lark. I missed all that, too. Now the band seemed diminished, constrained; endlessly touring the hockey arenas of the United States, subject to regulations as to when to stop. Set lists, though still varied and unique, had acquired a creeping formality: some songs were openers, some closers; there were first-set songs and second-set songs and everybody knew the encores. The weirdest music all tidied up and filed away in the middle of the second set. There were tendencies for certain sequences. Tendencies for sequences of sequences. Ronald Reagan was president; nothing was happening and everything was predictable.

I got it on good authority that Jerry was a junkie and I thought, my God. The darkness of it. The coldness. In my naive head all filled with flowers it seemed like a betrayal.

But the music was still there. Jerry bent at the neck, playing furious triplets in dorian mode. The drummers never hitting anything at once. Or on the one. Phil. There was a careening, dangerous quality to the music—dangerous in the sense of something big that’s falling over—that could be quite compelling if you were so inclined. And quite not if not, which kind of proves the point. Turns out the formality provided a context, a foil. The deviations, the surprises, they meant more than mere chaos ever could.

In fact the Dead were never more powerful and influential. They reached many, many more people than they had before. If you were a kid in Pittsburgh, or St. Louis, or Santa Fe, you went to the Dead show when it came to town. Like it or not. There weren’t a lot of kicks to be had in this country in 1983. No Instagram and nothing on TV. If you wanted to do anything interesting you’d better see the Grateful Dead.

It only took a few influential stoners to go at first, then next time ‘round there’d be a horde: younger siblings, someone’s preppy girlfriend and all her friends, jocks who got drunk in the parking lot. And this cycle of influence was a machine: for years the band played up and down the East Coast every spring and fall, through the middle of the country every summer and on the West Coast all the other time. It would be difficult to not go to a Grateful Dead concert.

And everyone took acid. Didn’t matter if they liked the band or not. Many did, but for sure many didn’t. I remember the scene at the Springfield Civic Center in the spring of ‘86. I went with my Deadhead friend Bill like always but there were lots of others from our school. Being a devotee I hoped pridefully that they’d get it, that their minds would be blown by the music. Of course they didn’t give a fuck—except maybe one or two that did. There was always the one or two. But most of them were there because it was there, man. I recall watching a friend, a popular kid whose tastes ran toward the Hooters and Crowded House. He roamed past circles of dancing hippies, bemused, while his best friend sat nearby, cradling his LSD-exploded head between his knees. What the fuck were they doing there? Wrong question. How the fuck could they not be there?

The Dead in fact instilled in the American adolescent a reflex for taking psychedelic drugs and going to the coliseum, maybe telling off a cop or two, then finding their way home Gonzo-style to put the pieces back together. Wake up late for school and mumble at their moms. Kids began to do this at every show—not just the Dead. When Iron Maiden came to town, same thing. Clapton, same thing. The Police, Def Leppard, Bad Company. Didn’t fucking matter. No matter the music, no matter the culture it was intended to represent, when performers looked out from the stage they saw thousands of dosed-out teenagers whose perceptions and reactions could not be relied upon too well. The Acid Test continued.

This was the true influence of the Grateful Dead, and their legacy too.

TROOPS

The nurse looked and clucked in horror.

I check my spam folder as a procrastination exercise. Nothing legitimate, nothing new from that Estonian hacker trying to make me think he’s watching me. Just parking deals at JFK and LGA. Discounts at the go-kart track.

Awoke to someone using the whole keyboard at the end of a tune, rumbling bass notes. I had been dreaming about moving out of a house and writing songs at the same time. The songs, two of them, were turning out well except I was having trouble rhyming “morning.” The line was something like, “And if we’re still together come the morning,” and I wanted to avoid rhyming it with “warning” ‘cause I’ve done that already in another song. Can’t have two morning-warning songs. But what else? All I could think of was “adjourning.”

We sat at the bar with money in dwindling piles, like gamblers with their chips. The team was losing, losing, losing and then it was winning, and then it won. We talked about music and restroom hand-drying technology.

We joined our families outside. The sun moved slowly. Maybe sometimes not at all. Finally we said goodbye to our friends who are moving and then we left.

Blink

I don’t know whose idea it was. Maybe mine. But one night we got drunk like we did a lot of nights and drove the back roads home. At a fork there was an orange-and-white striped barrel with an orange light on top, blinking stupidly into the dark, guarding nothing, warning of nothing.

We stopped and I got out. No cars around, no houses. I grabbed the thing—could it even be lifted? Was it weighted with cement or somehow affixed in place, per some regulation? No. I had it in my arms like it was waiting to be taken. I carried it back, hurriedly, conscious now of the illicitness of my deed.

I placed it in the trunk and we drove off, happy, laughing. Satisfied. A fuck you to the Man under cover of the night.

At home we displayed it in the kitchen for a while. We formed a circle around it and watched it blink at us. We laughed. We stopped laughing. We drank. We laughed again.

Finally we dispersed and I took it upstairs to my room. I examined it in the quiet and the solitude. It blinked relentlessly. If I focused on the light everything else around it disappeared. I could almost hear it. Feel it. I put it in the closet and went to bed.

I awoke fitfully before dawn, disturbed by an alien presence, menacing and nameless. The light was pulsing through the gaps around the closet door, filling the darkened room with orange bursts. It seemed to have grown brighter in the night. Stronger. I pulled the covers over my head.

In the morning I opened the closet, hoping somehow it’d be gone. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. I opened the window and leaned out. There was a basement window well below, maybe five feet deep. I dragged the thing over and heaved it out. I watched it fall heavy through the air, wobbling a little. It landed softly, quietly, in a bed of copper-colored leaves. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. I went down and buried it good under the leaves and dirt. Soon winter would come with ice and snow. We’d all move out eventually. Get married, have kids. Careers.

But the infernal blinking would go on and on.

Having curious fantasies, daydreams, at work that while I’m focused on my screen someone will walk up from behind me and punch me hard in the back of the head. This act will be outrageous, of course—others will look in horror, will intercede to help me, to confront my attacker. But on a certain level it will also be deserved.

I navigated the mists of perfume and miscellaneous promotions at Macy’s to find my way upstairs to buy a blazer. All was calm up there, sales associates hanging out, gossiping lightly. How could this still be a business? Every other brick and mortar store closing doors.

A woman assisted me in a pleasingly unhurried, uneager fashion. She seemed to have been there, pacing these same aisles, for decades. Try this size, looks good, do you need a shirt? I realized yes but not a moment before she asked. She left me to browse the racks, instructing me to come back to her for help, not any other clerk. We all know how it works.

At the end I bought what I wanted to buy and I guess what she wanted me to buy too. I applied for the credit card just to get the discount, just like everybody knows. She noticed we were born the same year and expertly punctuated our interaction with a gesture of informality: “You’re as old as me?” Smile, nod, we’re not getting any younger.

She does this for a living.

Summer is the time for sickly drinks: white beer that tastes a bit like puke; thin, acidy rosé. These aren’t my favorite drinks but they must be drunk abundantly in summer.

We took the bus back down to the beach after dinner, to go to Funny Land. A big family got on, grandmother, mother, kids. A loud, misbehaving girl; a quiet, sweet one. Another with a wooden leg. I wondered what their lives are like.

The plane from the tail cam looked Christlike in the rain in the morning.

Outside you couldn’t see anything but the wing. The instructions regarding step here, don’t step there. For maintenance personnel and monsters from the Twilight Zone.

Charles de Gaulle smells of piss and perfume in equal measure. The piss has gotten more pronounced over the years, renovations deferred, maintenance budgets cut. Rate your experience with a sad face or a smile.

The jetlag dreams were difficult. An enormous project at work, as big as the sky, impossible to complete. But I had to try.

 I got a magical bit of time after my crazy dentist screwed my implant in again and before I had to go play with the guys at the Navy Yard so I went to our old haunt Nancy Whiskey, unchanged from the early 21st century, tin ceiling, Irish flag, full of people who don’t belong in TriBeCa but are there anyway: old black guys, young black women, construction workers playing shuffle board and shouting curses. And me. “Gone Daddy Gone” by the Violent Femmes is playing and maybe that’s the only song everybody can agree on.

One of the construction workers spies a local crossing the square outside, a pretty young thing with a halter top, and proclaims, “Number 10 with a bullet right there!” A guy at the bar says, “But they never come in do they?” I guess you can see why.

Actually no one gives a fuck about the music most of the time. Except when something suspect for its softness and obscurity plays. You can be soft and universal, like “Maybe I’m Amazed.” But otherwise someone’s gonna shout a profane complaint.

U

I accidentally named this document “U.” It’s the letter my finger found when it was looking for none. U, like what? Fuck u comes to mind of course. Or Nothing Compares 2 U. Or both.

I left work and walked up Carmine waiting for something to happen. For something to remember and to read about. I peered at the faces of passersby. A little desperately. They looked the way they always looked. Wan. Preoccupied.

I turned the corner and approached the West 4th Street entrance. There was a minor commotion—two cops had been to see a homeless guy, or crazy, or something, sitting on the stoop in front of the Korean pastry shop. They turned away, apparently satisfied, and stepped into a yellow cab that was idling, unattended, at a diagonal to the curb. One got in the driver side, one got in the passenger side, and they drove away.

U.

There’s a turnstile at Houston Street where the readout is gobbledygook, just an unbroken string of near-alphabetical symbols like from some Nordic language. I’m often behind someone who balks at the sight of it, their MetroCard prone above the slot, then zags into the correctly functioning one at left. I go straight through and use it anyway. Nothing happens. Nothing doesn’t happen.

I awoke to the strains of “Love and Marriage,” such a strange song, great music, weird lyrics—“you can’t have one, you can’t have none”—that it plunged me into a new reverie. We all know who Frank was, banging broads left and right, manufacturing his myth. But I wondered about the members of the Nelson Riddle orchestra, or whoever, it doesn’t matter; they are anonymous by design. Showing up for work at a studio in Los Angeles, having whatever inside their heads— a fight with their wife, or their kid, a new car, an afternoon at Santa Anita losing whatever they made on the last date betting on that sure thing. And here they are, in the string section. Second violin. Playing that curlicue lick that no one’ll ever forget. And going home to the only people who know who they are.

The Call

The man stands at the intersection, waiting for the light to change. His phone vibrates in his pocket. He withdraws it and answers.

“Is this Bradley Allen?” says the voice.

“Yes. Brad. Brad Allen.”

“And you are survived by your wife Carolyn Ladd Allen, your son Jeremy and your daughter Cynthia.”

“Survived by?”

“They are your next of kin.”

“What do you mean? I mean, yes. But what do you mean?”

“Do you feel that you are receiving this telephone call in error?”

“Why am I receiving this telephone call?”

“Standard call, sir. Standard procedure.”

“Procedure for what?”

“For the recently deceased.”

“Did I die?”

“Sir, our records clearly indicate.”

“How can I be dead?”

“No one expects what’s next, sir.”

“You mean all of a sudden I’m dead, and now I’m talking to you?”

“There’s no accounting for one’s experience of the passage.”

“Everybody gets a phone call when they’re dead?”

“Well that’s not all they get. And not everybody.”

“So why me?”

“You’re in the database for a call, sir. That’s all I’m at liberty to say.”

“Then what happens?”

“That’s entirely up to you. I just need a moment of your time.”

“I don’t have any time. I’m dead.”

“It’s just an expression, sir.”

“Well get on with it.”

“That will be all.”

“That will be all what?”

“That will be all, sir. Thank you for your time.”

“What did you need my time for?”

“As I mentioned sir, you were in our database to receive a call.”

“For what? To do what?”

“There’s no action item attached. None that I can see.”

“So what did you do that you needed my time to do?”

“Well, I made a notation. Of course.”

“A notation for what?”

“For my records. For our records.”

“What does the notation say?”

The briefest silence.

“Oh, I beg your pardon sir. I understand. It’s not really a notation so much as—well, I guess we do call it a notation! I don’t want to get into semantics. I don’t want to take any more of your time. What I did was, I placed a tick mark by your name.”

“A what?”

“A tick, a check. Actually it’s more a radio button than a box. They’ve updated our interface.”

“A check mark for what.”

“To indicate a call was made.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s my job.”

“What for?”

“I’m not at liber—actually, I’m not aware. I can tell you that I’m not entirely aware.”

“Aware of what?”

“Of why we need to indicate that a call has been placed to you.”

“But what happens? What happens now?”

“Well, the database is updated and other parties are notified.”

“Other parties?”

“My colleagues. The database is in a workflow.”

“What do they do?”

“Oh I have absolutely no idea, sir.”

“Am I going to get another call?”

“Possibly. Possibly not. I’m not at liberty to say. Again, I’m actually quite unable to say.”

“But I’m dead?”

“According to what I’m seeing on my dashboard. Well, I can only surmise. You are in the database. The dashboard doesn’t really tell us much.”

“What does it tell you?”

“Your name. Your telephone number. Your next of kin.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s what’s visible to me.”

“Something else might be visible to someone else?”

“There are hidden fields. Which is to say, they’re hidden from me. But I have no idea whether those fields are populated. Or visible to someone else.”

“What literally happens when I hang up this call?”

“On my end sir? I submit your record for further review.”

“What about on mine?”

“That’s entirely your affair sir.”

“You don’t know what happens to people when they die?”

“All I know is that under certain circumstances they receive a telephone call from myself or one of my colleagues.”

“What circumstances?”

“That I’m unable to say. That’s not visible to me, sir. It’s not apparent.”

“So what do I do now?”

“There is nothing further required of you from my end.”

“I see.”

“Actually sir, that’s not entirely correct.”

“Yes?”

“Before you hang up, you will have the opportunity to take a survey regarding your level of satisfaction with this call.”

“Satisfaction?”

“My degree of professionalism. Of courtesy. My willingness to answer your questions to the best of my ability. That type of thing.”

“Right.”

“Is there anything else I can help you with today, sir?”

A long pause.

“Sir? Sir? Sir?”

Two construction workers held another between them as they walked, his arms around their shoulders. Right around King Street in the beautiful, sunlit end of day. Was he drunk or had he fallen off a scaffold? It was impossible to tell.