For the Benefit of

We were driving back from Albuquerque on the first night of June, and just as I was dozing off, we almost drove off of a bridge. What a way to welcome the summer. Hello heat! Freedom! Baseball! Oh what a season to be born in, my mother sure picked the best one for me indeed!

Anyway, a day’s worth of music and adventure left us dog-tired. Our young eyes were begging for some sort of darkness, a rest from color and sensation. Soon after the bridge incident, we pulled over and took a night-long nap in the desert.

We were sure that where we had been was just like home, only a bit misplaced on the map. Certain incidents exemplified the miscalculated physical and cultural topography. Josh showed us the hospital he went to after he had been held up at gun point (and he has the scar to prove it). Our pocketbooks refused to pay so much money to explore the mountains that should have been free to us. We ate New Mexican food and then took our full stomachs to an aquarium.

For a while we, searched for a dolphin that wasn’t even there – instead we found two seagulls yelling at each other and at us on the rocks overlooking a deadly pool of stingrays. One fish was terribly afraid of the artificial waves in his tanks and we felt sorry for the little fella. We were walking underwater with our mouths wide open, pointing up at eels in leopard skins and cooing over tiny sea horses fluttering past us.

Just a few days before that I was in Brooklyn, sweating out the roughest fever of my life. On a rooftop one night, we listened to local bands at surreal estate. I looked over the ledge and counted the number of cop cars waiting for us to get rowdy or wild or vicious- but we never did. We smoked cigarettes and flicked our ashes down at them. Tiny little specks of grey disappeared into the black night.
The couch surfer from Belgium asked me if I lived in an area of Texas full of Mexican gangsters.

“At the hostel I was at before I went to stay with Alison (my friend, the couch surfer-host) there were so many of them there. I was so fucking scared.  Never had I ever seen so many chulos,” he said and took a swig of his rum and coke.
I laughed, holding my beer with one hand and holding the other’s palm flat across my forehead. I explained that the word he meant to use was cholo and what he was actually saying was that he had shared a room with a bunch of cute guys.

He shook his head and laughed at himself, “No! Thats definitely not what I meant at all!”
Later, the cops finally told us all to go home, like always.

Just before leaving New York, literally the morning my flight left, some friends and I had breakfast at Mike’s Coffee Shop around the corner.There’s nothing like strong coffee in a plain white mug. The best home fries in New York are made at Mike’s, currency from all over the world stuck on the walls and a jar of mints sits by the cash register for you to stick your grubby little paw into and grab as many as you can.

When I first walked in I saw Sophie and Robert sitting at the counter. Our arms flew up in excitement and we hugged and chatted for a while. Its always interesting to run into someone you know in New York. Especially when its someone you know and like.

“Its so easy to just fall back into New York. Brooklyn is always exactly how you left it, if only you look hard enough,” Johannah had said to me one night over wine and stale bagels.
Pratt was exactly as I had left it the month before – the grass green, sculptures tall and proud. My friends still drank as often as possible, setting aside unnecessary work for walks across the East River and dancing to African drums. The men in Bed-Stuy still had endless catcalls – one always called Lily his “sexy china doll” anytime she passed his stoop – and the rats on Bedford and Lafayette hopped on the sidewalks with pieces of fried chicken in their mouths.

My coffee and eggs that morning, before leaving, were so much more delicious knowing that I really did exist in two completely different places. Out of nothing I had established a life in the east, and still I had so much love and excitement growing and waiting in the sand back down south and just a bit to the west. Oh, how latitude and longitude intrigue me so. Geography thrives inside my veins, blood pumps anytime someone asks me to name a state’s capital. Knowing I had roots in two contrasting regions made my skin feel thick, accomplished.

By all means, I felt much like the 26 year old Kangaroo Communique from Murakami’s short story:
“My wish, if anything, is rather unassuming. I don’t want to be ruler of the world, nor do I want to be an artist of genius. I merely want to exist in two places simultaneously. Got it? Not three, not four, only two. I want to be roller-skating while I’m listening to an orchestra at a concert hall. I want to be a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder and still be a clerk in the product control section of a department store. I want to sleep with you and be sleeping with my girlfriend all the while. I want to lead a general existence and yet be a distinct, separate entity.”

One particularly lazy Sunday afternoon in El Paso, I applied sunblock on my face and walked to the park. I read under the shade of a tree and watched cars drive by. All the drivers had somewhere to go, and they went on so determined to reach their final destinations. I sat and went nowhere, instead just watching them zoom right past me.
The literature on my lap felt heavy, and I felt my legs sinking into the green grass, absorbing the moisture from the black dirt beneath the immaculate lawn. I began to wonder about life and outer space and state-wide high school exit testings and learning how to swim.

This summer, I’m ready to learn.

Two weeks ago, I watched a video of a walrus masturbating. I read about two ducks murdering and raping the carcass of the third duck. Two male giraffes had sex with each other. The true nature of the animal kingdom was revealed to me in one single museum exhibit. I felt naive and silly for blushing at something so natural. How much more information is waiting to be learned, witnessed, shared? So much.

I got up from my patch of grass at the park, eventually, and started to walk back home. I passed by a man with his two daughters lying on a picnic table, he on the top table part and his two girls strewn along the seats at either side of him. They were looking up at the sky, pointing at clouds.

“There’s the bear Daddy!” They all gasped and agreed that there was in fact a bear the sky, so I decided to look for myself. Their interest and happiness was contagious. However, I saw nothing. I could still hear them giggling even after I was a block away so I decided to take one last look up there, just in case. I stopped walking, turned completely around to see the sky behind me, shading my eyes from the sun.

Still, I saw nothing.