The headlights were what bothered me the most. Exhaustion stretching up the back of my legs, sweat clotting on my eyelashes, a wrench of pain in my chest and a question mark controlling my spine--none of it was as bad as the headlights from cars turning left toward me onto Fifty-Seventh Avenue, revealing far too much of me and nothing of the men and women behind them, me looking like Jack Kerouac without the excuse of weed, whites, wine and talent, them looking like cones of ivory heat jutting out from the terror squeals of nocturnal indigestion. It's late August in Phoenix, Arizona, born in a coma, what does it matter, la dee dah, la dee dah, and thank you, Hoyt Axton. The temperature gauge in my mind says it must be over one hundred, even though the watch on my wrist says it's after midnight and by the way why aren't all the people who own these headlights in bed, don't these people have to work tomorrow and if they don't then why exactly is it that they think they can afford to drive up and down this street or avenue or boulevard as if they had all the money in the world while all I really want to do is find a nice comfortable place to fall down and sleep until the sun wakes me up or a cop runs me in or a pedestrian steps on my face and says, "Oh, dear me, lad. Didn't see you sleeping there. Terribly sorry, don't you know"?
This is the delirium I found myself experiencing that hot August night, in a rush of eternity, with no place to go, no one to call, no telephone if I had, and a positive-negative zero sum-remainder of prospects, whatever the word prospects might mean as I slid on what was left of cold tennis shoes up and down the sidewalk beside a construction site fenced off from the rest of Fifty-Seventh Avenue as headlights roamed in pairs and packs, seeking out some refuge from the night.
Can a man feel this cold inside when the temperature is this hot? Is that a fever or more delirium? Have I at short-last tipped my hat to the Joker's Jailhouse and bid ado to all sanity or are my reactions appropriate to my condition? Do I even know what my condition is? Granted, I have been in this situation once before, four years earlier, but I was at least twenty years younger then and far stronger. Tonight, this night, I am far more weak and out of shape, cursed with friendships I cannot reach because of embarrassment. Those friendships torture me almost as much as the horrid headlights cutting through the black and piercing my eyes like daggers of the mind--thanks, Macbeth--because the last time out I would have traded my future for just one hour with the least of those friends and this night I will bargain with God not to let even one of those friends see me as I am, hungry, jagged, and red, even though the one hundred degree temperature out here is cold as space.
I fell face down onto a small pile of saw dust, my arms out in front of me, my legs backing off from the tiredness, my mind in the hands of some malignant being. If only those headlights don't interrupt me, maybe I can catch just enough rest here, I thought, enough rest to get back up and get the hell out of here and on my way someplace else. But of course that was just the fantasy of a lunatic because within seconds six cars followed one another left onto Fifty-Seventh Avenue as if some benign deity had sent Her minions out to find me and bring me back. I hid beneath my palms and wanted to cry, the tears just as stubborn as everything else this hot and cold night, refusing to cooperate with the weakest man alive.
I used the sudden break in the traffic to lift my head and squint through the dark at my surroundings. The hurricane fence--why'd they call it that? In Arizona?--the sawdust, the mounds of earth stacked neat beside some concrete building that would never be used for anything of value, muffled laughter from somewhere, cans bouncing across the street in the same heavy winds that had robbed my cap, leaving me one piece of clothing closer to nakedness.
A city park was somewhere nearby. I could tell from the smell of dog feces. I could tell because I could hear the sprinklers. I could tell because of some faint memory. So I pulled one aching leg out from beneath another and found myself standing more or less erect, spinning around in horrible sobriety, willing to confess to sins I hadn't committed, at least not yet, not for the escape route from this hell but simply for some explanation, lie or truth, it didn't really matter. I knew there were junkies and alkies and thieves and wife beaters out there inside those homes in the distance, and here was I, just escaped from three and a half years of cab driving without one day off and only in this situation because it was summertime in Phoenix and there wasn't much business for a self-employed taxi driver in the hottest cold city in America in August and so I had had to move out of the hotel where I'd slept for those three years, I'd had to sell my dog Roscoe to a nice guy for food money, I'd had to abandon the car I'd driven and couldn't afford new tires for, I'd had to leave my few possessions in the trunk of that car, I'd had to smile as I watched the tow truck pull off with the car I'd been sleeping in for the past week or so, wondering where the hell I was going to live now, what with the seventeen cents in pennies in my pocket not being much kind of a down payment on new digs.
I got out of it. One always does, somehow or other. It wasn't dramatic or even melodramatic. It was just as stupid as I felt and it might not have happened if the damned headlights that had blinded me seconds earlier hadn't fallen on just what I needed. I didn't steal and I didn't beg and I didn't lie and I didn't hurt anyone. I just crawled and hopped and limped until in an instant I looked back and came upon a folded and rusty twenty dollar bill beneath that stinking pile of saw dust I'd fallen face down in, just as I was looking back at it to make sure nothing had fallen out of my pants pocket, the one with the seventeen cents in it. I probably wouldn't have seen it had it not been for the headlights, the ones I had cursed through dried lips only seconds earlier. That twenty bought me cold food--Spam, pack of tuna, pork and beans, peanut butter--which gave me strength to do day labor which bought me shoes so I could walk into the University with everything I owned wrapped in a pillow case and say to the friendly man with the graying beard that I wanted a job as an instructor, a job I received almost instantly and from which I have seldom taken the time to look back.
So now every smell, every trace of light, every instant of every day screams its peaceful magic at me. I can only with rare exceptions find anger at the world within myself because I treasure moments much more than the future and certainly rethink the past in terms of happiness rather than reality.
The stupidity of all this is not lost on me. I have no religion. I have only appreciation for the value of existence, in whatever condition. Thank you, morning. And please remember to dim the lights. The sun is up.
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