I Don’t Want To Go To Chelsea

My brothers called me from California and said: “Hey, Elvis Costello is playing in a few weeks. If we sent you a plane ticket, would you come out?”

So I’m off to California.

Crossing the Third Brook

On the train to Chicago, there’s a woman in front of me traveling with her young granddaughter. When she gets on, the woman announces to everyone that she has claustrophobia. She then proceeds to punctuate the first two hours of the trip with “Oh my god, oh my god…” before, finally, medicated, she falls asleep.

The little girl is solicitous and nice and spends all of her time making sure her grandmother isn’t going to have a breakdown. The girl is perhaps eleven years old, maybe younger. She’s obviously excited by the trip and I reflect, for the umpteenth time in my life, that we owe it to our children to be strong enough that they can lean on us, and not the other way around.

Across the aisle from me, two college age girls curl up together in the seat and snuggle, intertwined, and fall asleep. They will sleep (and I will wonder) all the way to Chicago.

The conductor passes through the car from time to time, checking in on her and telling what I assume are jokes he’s told seven thousand times before.

I consider asking him if, on a train, it’s called the Mile Long Club.

I don’t.

In one of the car further up, there’s an old man selling sandwiches and candy bars and coffee. I buy a cup from him. I call him sir and he calls me sir and all is well in both our worlds. We talk for a couple of minutes. He’s very funny and polite and he obviously enjoys his job — so much so that I briefly consider a career change.

I take my coffee back to my seat and write, longhand, desperate to get two little kids out of the diner they’ve been sitting in. I struggle my way through, a green fountain pen helping me. I change the cartridge twice before I feel comfortable with where things are. Edgar’s put in an appearance and I know where the kids are headed (back into the kitchen to wash dishes with Gerry, for your information).

The ink in my book is very black and I am annoyed to find that the second cartridge is blue-black ink which, when dry, has a fuzzy grayish quality. I’ll just have to write more to get rid of it.

I head back for more coffee. The vendor has been replaced by a much younger, less polite, less happy version of his earlier self. I wonder what brought on the change and, somehow, I feel guilty for it.

I buy a cup of coffee and a ham sandwich, but it doesn’t help.

I go back to my seat, eat my sandwich, drink my coffee, and look out the window.

We drive through the backsides of neighborhoods — ramshackle shitbox houses with every kind of imaginable appliance rotting and rusting in the yard next to gleaming snowmobiles and state-of-the-art satellite dishes — and I reflect on money, and the strange things it does to us.

I see an old car parked out in the late winter trees. It looks as though someone lived out there, alone, near the rail line. But they’re not there anymore. The trees have surrounded the car, penned it in. You couldn’t get that car out now, not without a crew of lumberjacks.

The trees are tall and jagged, stripped bare and reaching to the sky. I make a note to myself about Edgar’s hair.

At one point, we pass what appears to be an abandoned Christmas tree farm. Perfectly spaced evergreens that have grown tall, too tall, for anyone’s livingroom.

I read for a bit. I have a book that I travel with, short stories and poems and little odd bits by one of my favorite writers. There’s old ashes in the pages, from cigarettes smoked late at night back when I was still married.

I throw away my empty cup and sandwich wrapper and start writing again. The ink is still blue-black and when it dries, it’s a watery grey, like the color of women’s eyes in old movies.

Elevation

The train crawls through the south side of Chicago and I consider taking my camera out, but I don’t. Firstly, I don’t want to look like a tourist. Secondly, we’re traveling through a landscape I know very well already from my dreams and stories. I don’t need any pictures of it.

But I wish I had taken a picture of the odd, inexplicable row of bee houses stuck among the dilapidated apartment blocks . . . Of the cluster of women, dressed in church clothes, beautiful and regal queens that will never let the ghetto touch them.

I love to travel. I love the feeling of being alone and quiet and observant, and the interesting things my mind does when I am that way.

From Union Station I walk three blocks to the Metro line on Quincy street.

In the crowd of people on the sidewalks, I feel the call to disappear, to vanish, to let myself be diluted and swallowed by it all. It’s easier in cities, I think, to hear that call . . . just slip away from everything and let the story take you where it will.

I wonder if it would be difficult to find work, a place to live, to build a new identity, how long you could drift around between the fringes of one old life and a new one before you had to choose.

I ride the El out to Midway, all of the street names are familiar — intersections and dramatic plot points from the first ‘Matrix’ movie.

Having been spoiled by the train, traveling by air proves to be excruciating. Fortunately I have messires Jack Daniels and Neil Gaiman to help me along.

Endless Summer

It’s eighty five degrees in California and I am very pale and out of shape.

I watch three Korean priests slide through the crowded airport, so sleek and cool in their black suits and overcoats . . . the first gods I have seen on this trip. They make me feel a little better about being here.

I go out to dinner with my most-excellent brother and his far-more-excellent wife. On the way there, my brother points at a strangely symmetrical evergreen growing by the side of the freeway. It’s a cell tower, camouflaged to look like a tree because the environmentalists were complaining about encroaching on nature.

I look at the houses and roads gouged into the hills, I look at the miles of freeways, the billboards, the power lines, the gas stations and fast food and strip malls . . . and I slowly shake my head.

California.

At dinner, surrounded by Old Rich Bastards, I realize that the chief reason I hate California is not the heat, the crowds, the expensive everything, or even the through-the-looking-glass politics . . . In the Midwest, I feel cool and interesting; in California, I’m just another jerk in a black t-shirt.