Austin to New York.

-"Vacations are blinks."


We barreledl down to Austin from the cracking New York and one chap hailing from the UK, giving us a pinch of style and swagger that our working-class bones desperately needed. Yea, the plane was messy and cloudy and lasted the longest minutes. We experienced our separate encounters with fellow passengers. Man! These are the people we are risking our precious days with and the people we can plummet with and crash and melt into the sea with! I forgot my seat mates from Laguardia to Atlanta. Atlanta to Austin... me and this Cuban grandmother. She could've been forty years younger and 50 pounds slimmer and a lot less round and her hair not such a curly little disaster cropped on top of her head. We talked. She talked. Told me of her monies and her various apartments. The one in Midtown Manhattan. No, she doesn't rent it out, it is heavily guarded with security and dogs, twenty-four hours a day, and she and her little budding children's children spend a perfect miracle on 34th street christmas. They hit the shops and swing their bags and talk of their monies and spend their monies. Her children are genius entrepreneurs and so is she. She made the money by contracting and never lifting a hammer but sending out her crew. She laughs at the way they sleep during their lunch break under the biggest tree on the lawn. Her husband and son both teach at Yale and both teach philosophy and they all love their family's urban locations. They love the cement forest and the indigenous people. There is peace in the endless interactions and hierarchies depicted in every day scenes like hot dog stands and in front of office buildings smoking cigarettes passing passive comments...construction workers whistling and hollering and never getting a damn thing done.

I was finding peace out the window. Clear enough to see the lights of civilization. My poor left ear. Poor, because one: my ears take a devastating blow at these altitudes and two: it is the front line between myself and this hag. And God help me! My mind is crying but my mouth is a General, and knows a thing or two about control. It retreats at these times and places the brunt on my poor ears.

It seems I slept through the weekend in Austin. Back in New York on Monday morning sipping mud coffee and muffin crumbs stuck to my fingers. Austin could have been a therapy session, a dream a cloud a five day second and I woke hereafter with my insides crying. They all voted the liver out. She's en fuego and stinks like those nights ingesting concoctions and horse backed cops, sweet smiles and southern hospitality, the railway bums who take change then hug too close when they shouldn't be hugging at all but I let them because I am more them than the cowboy boys...broad-shouldered and superman jawlines perfect rowed teeth and those college (+) aged girls perfectly proportioned and too beautiful for my genes to ever mix. Every one of them showing me the race of Americans we've been patiently trying to make. Our country is safe in their hands. There, the culture is in its highest concentration and purest form and radiates out from this epicenter gradually dwindling into obscurity only flashing remnants as a sputtering basement light where it is darkness and endless. I know, I know! The culture of America is embracing all, and diversity and statues of liberties and all that, but that's NOT our culture that WAS us trying to establish one after the revolution and the northern aggression. America's originality shines down there with the cowboy boots and football tailgating and those hats! And the women and men are white but bronzed from the fair southern sun and their faces and bodies carry no traceable markings to their european fathers. They may never ask the boring conversation starter "What nationality are you?" because, damnit, they're american and I CAN NOT say the same with complete certainty. I've been concerned and burdened with my euroties, and fighting for, or running from, AMERICAN. Austin gives us all boasting rights but as days pass I'll slip back to this cultural-hole, new york city. Where all the cultures are every color in the spectrum and give the seeing-eye perfect blackness. Down there we are given but one culture and it offers the purest version of the color, which is us, or what WE work so hard for and THEY attain with much ease and naturalness.

In some inlet of the atlantic coast we passed over a few small unknown (to me) islands then entered back into New York by way of Coney Island. It must've been Coney Island. The board walk and beach were general clues, though I may have been mistaken. Brooklyn and Queens are endless and flat. Buildings are short and stacked...discolored white. Homes and workplaces of peasants. Reminds me of snapshots of Arabian low-class slum cities surrounding golden castles. Streets are not visible. The structures are, again, so stacked that the earth must indented from the weight. Where is Manhattan? Why can't I see Manhattan? Ah! The view is on the left side of the plane. All passengers marvel over this human masterpiece. Brilliance of technology and advancement of civilization. A pinch in my neck turns my head back to Brooklyn. The porthole window is cold and damp against my temple. My breath fogs a patch on the glass. Stinks of the packs I smoked. And I'm no smoker. Stinks of the booze. God it was only six hours ago we had our final drinks at roughly five a.m. Or maybe we weren't even drinking then. But possibly drunk enough to spill back into the hotel lobby. Foolish, impolite, laughing at anything...everything. "Hey! Hey! Gooooood Evening! We've got our luggage in that back room there." "You held it for us." We were all saying in thick New York twangs, except the Brit, of course, who brought a flair all of his own. The security who handled us the past few nights were pleased we were almost out, ecstatic we weren't spending the night, making their final push against their only disturbance of the week (us) and all they had to do was focus on getting us into a cab, any cab, and on on plane out of Austin, never to return. Until the next batch of blood-sucking life suckers come aboard. Ellis, poor, Ellis. Black and big and authoritative. Her eyes too big for her head and her lower body too big for her upper body and her ass too big for her legs. She seemed to waddle towards us. Reprimanding our foolishness with each step. Not even ten minutes into our first night at La Quinta Hotel, we were nearly evicted.

Bums and beggars in all cities. Austin is bums and professionals and college kids. We weren't any of those. But, we smelt. We were constantly drunk. We were rude and obnoxious in public. We harassed people in the streets. For all intents and purposes, we were temporary bums. The four of us shared beds and ate one meal a day. We were given rides by strangers...
Marty met a girl, a nut. She scooped us up on our first night after hellish air transportation when we were at our pinnacle and carouselled us about the city and the surrounding areas.
Her back seat was a jungle gym and Casey sat in a baby seat. We punched and shoved each other in drunken sillyness. Casey was hoisted up and took the hill. He was rubber and landed soft punches against I and Jake, the Brit. Pains in my side the following morning, ailed with caffeine rushes. I waited all night and slept, dreamed, for streams of false energy, concentration injected into my bloodstream. I think about coffee before I go to bed and only drink one cup a day. I punish my body and tease my senses with a limited addiction. I find no greater satisfaction than withholding vices until the point of explosion. That first sip, no no no the first roasted smell jitters my limbs. I can feel quakes infesting my capillaries. All this, bouncing in the back seat of Maria's car. She was drunker than us. I can remember her stopping short in the middle of an intersection, reversing back behind the line. Some electronic-club-babbling beat and I can feel it in the back of my throat.

New York does damage to the soul. Weeks fly from the Austin weekend and the wind is colder and the rains keep me indoors. Maybe it's not so much damage, but sharpening. New York keeps things sharp. (Throat sound in disgust)...(Rumbling gargle of throat cleared)...Cold returned...I believed in the chains that held the cold away from Austin. Strapped against the southern belly. Forged and squirmed between the hands of a vice. I'm reminded of my childhood and rust in the tool shed...coating metal fixtures and dripping down the handles. The smell is wet and I can see that green tool box hidden under the stairs, belonged to my father, he would tear down the ceilings and knock down the walls. The smell, yes, is wet and reminds me of metal decaying but is more like rotten tomatoes. The green tool-box was more like a forest in black and white, or brown and cream. I can see it brand new. In it's original packaging. On display. Shined clean and brilliant.
This scarf I wear is a truck on the back of my neck. Tons of cloth stuff and I can see and remember the open shirt and toe thongs painted with the orange of the summer sun. I would press my back against the chair and sip on something cold. Now I huddle to the table-push away the forks and knives...fumes are hot and sweat droplets form beneath my nostrils. It breaks up the mucus lining my sinuses. I breath a little easier, but my body wishes for heat and I'm only given this false sense of warmth, concentrated and steaming from a two-inch diameter of a coffee cup. Outside the cafe, people hurry in from the cold and the wind slams the door behind them.
I could flip this table with the condiments tossed in the air. The ketchup would crash and the shining-red paste would splatter across my face, I would scream and tear down the shelves...The cash register--straight out the window.
It's Thursday and tomorrow is the weekend. I'll dress up, make jokes, lose friends...walk miles and grow mad.