There’s a godawful electronic squawk outside sometimes, like from the radio in a cop car, but loud. At night. When the weather gets warm. Like a kind of mechanical bird that’s back to life, looking for a mate and a place to build its nest.

Here I am meekly waiting for the software update that will solve it all. The update that reaches into my soul to save it.

When I run past the Pavilion Theatre in the morning I glance at the green plywood covering the entrance, wondering if any progress has been made. Sometimes the makeshift door is open and you can see straight through to the box office on the left. A worker might stroll in or out. There’s a chair in there too for some reason. Other times it’s closed and days and days go by and nothing.

TROOPS

This was more or less the situation when I returned to the neighborhood for the Easter vacation.

TROOPS

Every inch of the garden, the house, and the surrounding grounds was ransacked, yet no trace of the missing lama was found.

There was a discarded flyer on some steps that led to a workroom at the end of the platform at Chambers Street. It read: Win Anywhere. Win Anytime.

TROOPS

“We’re wasting precious time. We

Man on the phone, walking across the street by Grand Army Plaza:

“When I bought this thing I was like, wow.”

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 17

Dad loved to buy records. There was a store in town on the second level of a dreary little strip mall, near a laundromat, near a drugstore, near a printers. He’d go there two, three times a week, bargain hunting in the cutout bins. For Promotional Use Only – Not for Resale. The Nice Price.

I’d go with him and sometimes he’d let me buy something but never something good. All the real music cost money. Presence. Animals. Let It Bleed. Beautiful covers with beautiful words in tight, unscarred plastic. Tantalizing me with that beautiful, impossible sticker: $7.98. I could get something for a couple of bucks, maybe four if it was a double album and Dad felt generous. Bands I’d never heard of. Compilations in garish hues.

My dad would buy anything as long as it was cheap. Kenny Rogers, Carpenters, Lovin’ Spoonful, Rascals, Average White Band. Didn’t really seem to matter. He liked to exit the premises with at least four or five in that square, yellow bag, not spend more than twenty dollars.

Sometimes I wondered whether he liked music at all.

One Tuesday night after dinner he got the itch to go. A school night. A work night. Everyone was about to settle in for Happy Days.

“C’mon,” he said. “You wanna go?”

I wore my Aquaman pajamas and my Spider-Man robe. But I wanted to go.

“Honey,” Mom said to him, exasperated.

“He can go!”

“In his pajamas? Paul.”

“Who cares? It’s warm out.”

There was a moment when nothing happened. Then something remarkable did. My mother gave a faint little shrug and returned to her newspaper, looking back down through her reading glasses—a series of gestures that meant: OK, fuck it, I don’t care.

So there I was wandering the aisles of Record City in my nightclothes. Did anyone stare? The other customers were all heads down, thumbing through stacks like you’re supposed to do. But had they looked away the moment before I saw them? Jerry, the paunchy, gregarious owner, had greeted us in his usual jolly way. Not appearing to give a fuck, either. Was it a conspiracy? Would they all howl with laughter as soon as we were gone?

For a while I laid low in the nether regions of the place. Along the far wall was a swivelling rack of aluminum-framed display cases with posters front and back—images waiting to be worshiped on adolescent walls. I paged through them glumly. Kiss Destroyer. The four men in their body suits and makeup; giant, snake-fanged shoes stomping on a silhouetted pile of rubble. Jimmy Page sweating profusely in his dragon-covered suit, his disheveled hair magenta from the spotlight. Queen sitting on the stone steps of some monument somewhere, looking bored. Jimi Hendrix in a military coat and purple velour pants. Some kid at school said his bandana was always soaked with LSD. Two men in business suits shaking hands in a desolate industrial complex, one of them ablaze. 

I found a copy of Tommy at a surprising discount. Dad okayed the purchase and handed me a fiver. Stunned by my good fortune, I walked to the front and handed it to the young woman behind the counter. She examined it with a frown, and turned to me with a look of concern. But not for my clothes.

“You know what this is, right?”

“It’s Tommy.”

“It’s the Tommy Soundtrack. It’s not really Tommy.”

She handed it back to me so I could see. I turned it over and I felt a shock of shame. Elton John, Eric Clapton, Tina Turner. A parade of names that weren’t the Who. Ann-Margret.

“It’s like, some of it has other musicians on it,” she added helpfully. “Other people singing.”

I now became aware of my little penis and balls naked, hairless, against the polyester of my pajamas. I was a fraud. Not a man—not even a real boy—before this woman, this judge. But I felt called upon to respond. To defend myself. To survive.

“Is it… good?” I stammered.

She shrugged. “It’s not bad. It’s OK. Some of it’s good,” she said. “But it’s not Tommy.”

“How much does Tommy cost?”

“Fourteen ninety-eight.”

I was about to return this disgraceful, odious object to the stacks, as a demonstration of some kind of principle, or maybe just pride, when my father approached, oblivious to my predicament of course.

“What are you doing, Pete? Buy it. Just buy it already,” he declared.

So I handed her the five dollar bill, wadded and wet from my sweating hand. She rang up $3.99 plus tax and gave me back a little handful of change with a littler smile. I took my faux Tommy under my arm and we left.

Or was it just a dream?

TROOPS

I even drove down with Karen to visit him in Wildwood (she had a license, I didn’t).

Sitting on the train to work I felt a sudden jolt of pure dread, inexplicable. It went away in a moment, leaving me with an unpleasant buzz.

I'm Sorry

I saw the van turning but I had the right of way. I kept walking. It kept turning. For a moment I thought: I’m not going to run away. I’m right. He’s wrong. I’m going to keep on walking. But he was turning, turning, speeding up. So I ran. I ran to the other side of the street.

He’d stopped now—after he saw me running. I stepped up to the window.

“Hey! What the fuck are you doing!?” I screamed.

I saw a flash of defiance on his face. Like he was going defy me. New York City, not fuck me, fuck you. But then he mouthed the words “I’m sorry.” Chinese guy. Delivering for some Chinatown business, a pawn shop, a restaurant.

“Be careful!!” I screamed again, my voice rasping and breaking.

Again he said “I’m sorry.” Gave a little smile. I’m sorry.

The young man thrust his hand between the closing doors of the subway car. Now his forearm was gripped tight by the black rubber gaskets. He made no effort to withdraw. His fingers clenched and curled as though they might summon the rest of his body through somehow. Then his hand wilted and dangled in midair. It was in the car and he was out. What would happen next? No one cared or even seemed to notice. But something was bound to happen. The doors opened again.

A couple fighting on Seventh Avenue. He’s approaching the door to their car as she follows a few steps behind. He says:

“You can go back in time and fix it!”

When I lifted the cutting board away from the faucet the wet wood emitted a striking odor—musty, winy—that immediately took me back to my childhood. But I didn’t know what it was it reminded me of. I was eight or nine, in our house in Storrs. What was it that smelled like that? Probably our wet cutting board.

On TV the race cars were under full-course caution because a cheap canopy and poles had blown onto the track. They type that always shade a table with credit card applications. There it lay crumpled on the edge of a corner as cars steered clear and a marshall waved his red and yellow flag.

On the first day of spring it’s been snowing all day and it’ll snow most of the night too. I like to be surprised by the weather but I decided to look. Here’s what the hourly forecast says for tomorrow: Mostly Cloudy, Mostly Cloudy, Mostly Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Mostly Cloudy, Cloudy, Mostly Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Mostly Cloudy, Partly Cloudy.

In the end there’s no way to really avoid surprises.

TROOPS

“You and the kids want a come stay with me?”

The beginning of a sports season is a celebration of renewal, of anything possible, of life. I always think this and make a mental note to mark it in writing, at the beginning of September for football for example. I want to recognize it and savor it. Then suddenly it’s Week 7, Week 8. I’ve been helpless against the current of time. But in a few days Formula One starts again, and here we are.

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.