Michael Anthony Adams Jr.'s Blog, page 2
December 1, 2023
The Story We All Hear
As the man said,
I didn’t get it then.
I was driving in my car.
A song came on the radio.
That was when I knew,
I wanted to tell his story.
It’s the same story we all hear.
It said:
Your whole life waited,
moment to moment,
seeing things you don’t see,
hearing things you don’t hear,
thinking things you don’t think,
dreaming things you can’t dream.
There are no nouns.
The world is verbs.
If only we could speak that way,
then feelings and thoughts
would float through our minds,
guided like a drunken pool cue.
From Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.’s collection of poetry The Tree Outside My Window.
July 27, 2023
New Story Collection: Spare Change
Washington, DC isn’t just the seat of American politics. It’s home to more than 700,000 people. Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.’s newest collection of short stories, Spare Change, takes readers onto the streets of this city to paint vivid pictures of what DC’s citizens experience on a daily basis.
With I Want to Talk to You, the collection opens on a tale of incarceration and insanity in the capital of the United States. As the stories in Spare Change continue to unfold, Adams explores the many divisions that split DC and the rest of the country across our deepest fault lines. This vision eventually culminates in And What Might Those Ideas Be?, an ode to dreams and possibilities.
Spare Change is more than a collection of stories about a single place: Washington, DC. It’s a collection of stories about people, their suffering and their desires—political, personal, and spiritual—everything that makes us human beings.
July 16, 2023
I Want to Talk to You
The opening story from my new collection, Spare Change. Now available here , or wherever you buy books .
“I want to talk to you about racism and gentrification,” was the first thing the man walking down the sidewalk said to Matthew on that summer day. The younger white man had stepped out on his stoop to enjoy the sunshine, and he’d just begun reading for his required classes starting that September. Now, it was December a year and a half later. If there was anything the year before had taught a law student like Matthew about December, it was one thing: stress. From exams and Christmas. His exams were taken care of for the moment. Matthew had left the Georgetown Law Library about 15 minutes earlier. He’d been sitting there since early that morning, trying to concentrate on the intricacies of Constitutional Law. Now, it was evening. Outside, the sky had already turned a dusky gray, but Matthew was inside walking through a crowd in the Metro station at Gallery Place, waiting for a green line train to take him back up to Columbia Heights. He wanted to pick up some cards for his family that night, and he figured the Target in his neighborhood might be a good place to start. Living off loans, he’d really stretched himself thin the year before when he’d tried to get presents for his parents and younger sisters. He didn’t want to do that again. Besides, this year he had a girlfriend.
As he descended an escalator to the station’s lowest level, his mind swam with contradictions about how one could interpret the foundations of the United States’ government. No god had delivered those rules inviolable throughout millennia. No tablets carried them writ in stone immutable through all the centuries. Laws depended upon human experience to create them. They needed human minds to understand them. They required human beings to enforce them. It was something Matthew had always known, but it wasn’t something always so translucently clear. Suddenly, the significance of his ability to form his own interpretations of the massive case law books in his backpack struck him with the force of a Metro train. The implications had never been so apparent. He would be one of an elite group of citizens responsible for the curation of those concepts passed down from generation to generation for more than two hundred years. He would argue ideas predicated upon how the past had understood those regulations for governing such a massive body politic as the United States of America. He would assist in determining how the future might elucidate those collections of complex sentences that could give or take life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness from any man or woman.
With such lofty thoughts swirling through his brain, Matthew reached the bottom of the escalator. He wasn’t paying much attention to the world beyond his own mind. So, he didn’t notice the man standing at the platform’s edge, staring over the ledge as if he wanted to jump. Then, the man came to life. With bloodshot eyes, he spun around. Matthew stumbled. But instead of accosting Matthew, the man approached a light-skinned black girl blocking the law student’s path. She started in place as the man said to her, “Trains sure take a long time, don’t they?” His lips curled with a coyote’s grin.
The girl stepped back a pace. “Yeah… yeah, they do,” she stuttered. The man was old enough to be her father.
Matthew didn’t want to look the situation head on. He recognized the man. He remembered a story his grandfather had told him about getting his shirt slashed as a young man in New York City simply because he’d interfered in an argument between a man and a woman in the subway. The man had pulled a knife on him. The woman had told the police there was no need for Matthew’s grandfather to interfere in their family squabble. So, Matthew righted himself and kept on walking. But out of the corner of his eye, he saw the man proffer a grizzled hand from out his oversized coat sleeve as he said to the girl, “I’m Larry.”
* * * *
Matthew would be starting law school in less than a month. He’d just moved to Washington, DC a few weeks earlier. Things felt fresh and invigorating. He’d never lived in a real city before. Moving into the top floor of a converted row house in a neighborhood called Columbia Heights, his roommates had told him to be careful crossing 13th Street at night. One of them had been mugged on the other side of the block. The young man’s phone had been taken. Living in the city was awfully different from State College, PA where Matthew had completed undergrad. It was even more different from the York, PA suburb he’d grown up in.
That particular day, a slight breeze swayed the lone tree beyond Matthew’s window. From the third floor, it looked a little cooler and maybe even a bit more overcast than DC had been in the previous few weeks, but it still didn’t look like rain. So, Matthew gathered up his books for Civil Procedure and Criminal Justice and headed down to the stoop outside to do some reading. He wanted to get a solid jump on his classes. He knew from family, friends, and reputation that soon there would be more work than he could handle, and he wanted to be prepared.
The building’s shadow sliced across his stoop. Matthew positioned himself beneath its shade. Even though it wasn’t as sunny as it had been, the day was still bright. Matthew put on his sunglasses. He felt like he cut quite a cool figure out there on his stoop with his books, in his shades with his shirt untucked.
Matthew wouldn’t have been able to tell you what specifically he’d been thinking about when the man approached. He hardly noticed him at all strutting down the sidewalk, his chest out, his arms flailing beside him. In jeans and a white tee shirt, with a flannel wrapped around his waist, the black man faded into the city’s backdrop, another piece of the urban landscape. He may not have been dressed quite right for the heat, but there was no reason to think he was completely out of place. Not after the things Matthew had already witnessed in his first couple weeks in Washington, DC. However, after mumbling to himself as he walked past Matthew sitting out on his stoop, the man abruptly turned around. He pointed one finger directly at Matthew. “I want to talk to you about racism and gentrification,” he said.
As if they’d known one another for years, the man immediately took his place leaning against the handrail leading up the side of Matthew’s stoop. Matthew swallowed hard. Not yet used to living in the city, he had no idea how to handle such a sharp statement concerning two things polite company would never discuss. Especially from someone of another race as himself. Matthew answered, “Okay…” But he was taking note of his options for a quick exit if the situation turned violent. There was nowhere he could run to other than back into his building, and that would require getting his key out and having to struggle with the knob on the door. The only real option might be to fight if it came down to it. The black man was smaller than Matthew, who stood a few inches above six feet, which usually gave him the courage to face almost any situation. But the way the man held himself, with his off-center eyes and his narrowed brow as he spoke out the corner of his mouth, gave him the appearance of being quite scrappy. Unlike how he’d always carried himself at college parties, Matthew felt inadequate to the situation. He glanced up and down the street to see if there was a policeman on patrol somewhere who might monitor the situation. There wasn’t.
“I grew up in this neighborhood,” the man said. “Right around the corner over there is where my mom lived. I went to grade school across the street at that school there. And my aunt, she lived right around the corner, too. My grandma, she came from down the block. And in fact, she used to go to church right here,” the man said, pointing at the large, brick building bordering on Matthew’s building’s property. He’d known it was a church, but it had never really struck him that people might actually attend services there. Even though he’d heard singing coming out of it on the two Sunday mornings he’d lived in the city thus far. It simply didn’t seem like the kind of place where you might find spirituality. “This building you’re sitting in front of, this used to be the church offices.”
Matthew nodded like he already knew that, but in fact, he didn’t. “I live here now,” he quickly interjected as if that gave him some sort of legitimacy to claim over the stoop.
The black man narrowed his eyes. He cocked his head to the side, but he quickly kept right on talking, “But I haven’t been in this place in over 20 years, now. You see, I’ve been in prison. And things aren’t the same here.”
At that one word—prison—Matthew started in place. His stomach dropped a bit, and he felt a twinge of fear course through his limbs. Images of words he’d heard in gangster movies and rap songs filled his mind, words he’d laughed about with friends in high school and college, words like shank, hooch, broomstick, bitch, and rape. He tried not to look too shocked. He removed his sunglasses for a second and wiped his eyes. He felt a little sick, and he felt like he might cry.
“This used to be a black neighborhood,” the man said, and Matthew immediately felt even more uneasy than he had before. “But nowadays, you aren’t the only white person living in it. Hell, you aren’t even the only white person living on this block. In fact, I bet you aren’t even the only white person in that house. You see, I used to own this neighborhood. That’s why they had to put me away. I was making too much money. So, tell me this… Why is it that the Italians get to have the mafia? And the Jews get to help start Las Vegas? But a black man dealing drugs to his own people, building himself a nest egg for his family has to go to prison for 20 years?”
Even though all his muscles were tense from the man’s tone, Matthew shrugged as if this were a perfectly normal conversation to be having at this moment on this sunny Saturday afternoon.
“I’m not proud of what I did to my people, now,” the man continued. “But I was an entrepreneur. Just like the people who bulldozed all those blocks down there sometime while I was locked away and put up that Target and all those luxury high rises you and your white friends get to shop at and live in now. I was an entrepreneur.”
Finally, Matthew found his voice. “You sure were,” he nodded.
The black man looked at him askance. It was like he was reading Matthew’s intention from how he held himself on that stoop. Somehow sensing Matthew’s sincerity, he went on, “Now, all my people are gone. My mom, my aunt, my grandma, they’re all dead. I did 20 years. I got out yesterday. I came home, and I don’t have a home to go to anymore. All my people, they’re all gone, either dead or moved away. I just came out of prison, and now I’m all alone. You can’t take everything away from a man like that. It doesn’t matter what I did. That just isn’t right.”
“I’m really sorry to hear that,” Matthew said feeling genuine empathy for the man’s situation.
“I didn’t ask you to be sorry for me,” the man snapped, but at Matthew’s blanched expression, he softened his tone for the first time that afternoon, “but thank you for saying so.” The black man moved around and sat down at the bottom of the stoop as if he and Matthew were old friends reminiscing about their years together. “They diagnosed me bipolar in prison, you know. They said that’s why I did all those crazy things. But I don’t know about all that. This was a crazy place back then, and it was a crazy time. I did what I had to do to get mine.”
Matthew nodded like he had some sort of idea what the black man was talking about.
“What’s your name?” the black man suddenly asked from where he was squinting up at the bottom of Matthew’s stoop. He held his hand over his brow to shade his eyes from the sun.
“I’m Matthew,” Matthew answered honestly.
“Nice to meet you, Matthew. I’m Larry.”
* * * *
It was a few months later, when he was coming home after sharing a couple drinks with some of his new law school colleagues, that Matthew bumped into Larry again. In the distance, he could see a man approach a woman walking past him on the sidewalk. The woman started and paused. She held her hands close to her body before quickly shaking her head and starting off again. The man trundled back dejectedly to stand leaning against a fence, puffing off a cigarette. Matthew saw the thick smoke hanging in the air beneath a streetlight like warm breath on a cool night. Hoping to avoid this apparently homeless man who couldn’t be doing anything but spare changing, Matthew crossed the street. When he heard a shout, “Matthew! Matthew, right? It’s me, Larry.”
Just like the woman who’d been walking a short distance ahead of him, Matthew started in place. Larry bounded across the street after him. “I need help, man,” the man said as he slowed to approach Matthew standing slightly buzzed in the fall night.
Matthew didn’t extend his hand. Instead, he stiffened in place. He tried to smile. “What’s up, Larry?” he asked, hoping he sounded as cool and nonchalant as a man could.
“I need my medication. They’re telling me I need to pay fifty bucks for it down at the Dupont pharmacy. I didn’t have to do that last time, and I don’t have that kind of money. Look at me. I’m out on the streets. I’m hoping to start this job Monday laying concrete, but even then, I won’t get paid for another two weeks. Help me out, man. I need my medication tonight. I’ll get you back as soon as I get paid. I promise. Word is bond.”
Matthew leaned back and rested his hand on the fence behind him. “What’s the medication for?” he quite rationally queried as if still discussing the intricacies of case law with his associates back at the bar.
“It’s for my bipolar. If I don’t get it, I don’t know what’ll happen to me. I might go off. Who knows. I feel like I’m about to go off right now. I could do something that sends me right back to prison. I don’t know.”
Once again, it was that single word—prison—that Matthew heard loud and clear. Whether he heard that solitary word because of where Larry was afraid he might wind up or what the man might do to get back there, Matthew had no idea. He blinked. He took his hand off the fence behind him, and he stood back up straight. “What do you need from me, then?” he asked soberer even than before.
Larry tensed up. “What do you mean, what do I need from you? I’m asking if I can borrow some money.” He finished emphatically, “Now, can you help a brother out or not?”
Matthew stood up on his tiptoes. He fished around in his pocket. “I think I might have a five or so in here,” he whispered absentmindedly.
“Five dollars? What the fuck am I supposed to do with five dollars?” Larry pleaded. He narrowed his eyes and shook his head.
“Well, how much do you need?” Matthew asked.
“I told you, man. I need fifty dollars.”
“Oh, you need the whole amount, then?” Matthew asked as if he hadn’t heard the man the first time.
Larry nodded.
“Well, I’m sorry, then. I don’t have fifty dollars on me,” Matthew said.
“There’s an ATM right down the block. You could get that kind of money out of there now, couldn’t you?”
Matthew looked around. There wasn’t anybody else on the street. He and Larry were all alone. “I’m a student,” Matthew told him. “I can’t spare that kind of cash.”
“Please, man. Like I said, I should be starting work on Monday. I’ll get you back. I promise. If you can do it at all, help me out. You’re my only hope,” Larry pleaded.
Matthew looked around as if there were somebody there to help him make his decision. After nobody responded, he sighed. He asked, “You promise you’ll pay me back?”
Larry nodded.
“Because I need that money,” Matthew said, trying to judge Larry’s sincerity.
“I promise,” Larry told him. “I’ll keep the first fifty bucks I make right here in my pocket, and I’ll come right back here to this street every day where you live. As soon as I see you again, I’ll give it all back to you. Every last cent. I promise. I don’t want to be beholden to no man.”
Matthew shook his head. He really couldn’t believe he was about to do this. He was living off loans. He couldn’t afford to lose fifty dollars. “All right. Let’s go to that ATM,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
* * * *
Larry never did show up to pay Matthew back. By the time Matthew finally saw him again that spring, after a harsh winter, he had completely forgotten about the man and how he owed him money. The lost fifty dollars had never even come up, much less stressed Matthew out. But when he did finally see Larry again, instead of worrying about how the man could have survived that winter—what he must have had to live through: the cold, the snow, the shelters—Matthew simply remembered the money he was owed. But he didn’t want to bring that up with the homeless man. Instead, he simply wanted to walk right past him.
Scowling his best urban countenance, Matthew looked straight ahead as he approached where Larry was standing there on the sidewalk in the sun on Matthew’s way to the grocery store. Larry’s eyes were closed and his face was turned toward the sky. Light bathed his forehead and cheeks. He was wearing dark blue jeans and what looked to be the same flannel he’d had wrapped around his waist the day he and Matthew had met. His lips were moving, but he wasn’t speaking to anyone at all. In fact, he didn’t seem to be making a solitary sound. Matthew hoped he could sneak by completely unknown.
But right as he approached, as if sensing Matthew’s proximity, Larry’s bloodshot eyes opened. He looked straight at Matthew caught completely unaware. Larry smiled with yellowed teeth. It wasn’t a friendly smile. It was more like a coyote spotting prey. “I remember you,” Larry said.
Matthew nodded. “I remember you, too,” he responded nervously, suddenly hoping against hope that maybe Larry had his fifty dollars. “I loaned you that money a few months back,” he said. His palms started sweating from the potential confrontation.
Recognition dawned on Larry’s face. “That’s right. You sure did.” His countenance turned more severe. “That’s why I want to talk to you right now.” He stepped closer to Matthew and grabbed him by his shirt sleeve. “Come here,” Larry begged as he pulled Matthew back behind a blue dumpster some construction crew had set up on the edge of the street for the wreckage from the latest building they were demolishing on that block.
The two of them weren’t that far off the sidewalk, but they were hidden from the views of most passersby. “I need you to help me, man,” Larry said.
As Matthew blinked and braced himself for another financial request, Larry drew a long piece of sharpened metal from out the waistband of his jeans. The knife scintillated in the sunlight. Matthew wanted to cry for help, but all that issued from his throat was a vague squeak. He tried backing away from the grip that had moved from his sleeve to now hold his arm tight, but Larry was a lot stronger even than he looked.
Matthew’s stomach plummeted. He didn’t have the wherewithal to fight, which was something he’d always imagined himself completely ready to do when confronted by a situation like this. Moreover, he didn’t have the wherewithal for flight. All Matthew could do was stand completely still. Holding the blade inches from Matthew’s cheek—so the law student had a good look at its edge from the corner of his eye, Larry said, “I need you to throw this thing away for me.”
Matthew stuttered, “What?”
“I was just standing there praying when you walked up, man. I was begging the Lord not to make me do what I wanted to do, and then you showed up. And I remembered you. I remembered those times we talked. I remembered how you helped me. And I knew. I need you to throw this thing away for me.”
Matthew shook his head. “What’s it for?” he asked, not even wanting to know the answer, which on some level he felt like he already knew.
“I don’t want to admit to what I was thinking about doing with it,” Larry said. “Please, just throw it away for me before somebody gets hurt.” He held the knife by the handle and proffered it to Matthew, blade side first.
Matthew didn’t know where that knife had been. He didn’t know what Larry’s plans for it were. His mind was racing. Picturing past and future violence, he thought back to his Evidence class. He said to Larry, “There’s a dumpster right there. Why don’t you throw it in there right now if you want to get rid of it? I shouldn’t touch it.”
An almost childlike awe sounded in Larry’s voice. “Do you really think I can do that?” he asked. This was hardly the same man Matthew had met over the past summer. He had no idea what had happened to that man in the intervening months.
When Matthew didn’t respond, Larry wiped a non-existent tear from his own eye. As if reading something in Matthew’s face that the law student didn’t even know he could convey, Larry stared at his terrified countenance. Matthew couldn’t meet his gaze. Larry said, “You’re right. I should throw it away.” He tossed the knife up and into the dumpster.
As the knife landed, falling into the trash with a few slight pings, Larry laughed. His sudden gaiety sounded of immediate salvation. He wiped both his hands down his cheeks. “That was a close one,” he said, still smiling. “Thank you,” he added, and he turned around to walk away as quickly as he’d initially opened his eyes.
That was the last time Matthew had seen Larry before he bumped into him that day on the Metro platform as Matthew was heading home from the law library to pick up some Christmas cards at the Target in his neighborhood for his immediate family. Again, Matthew had never really thought of Larry in the intervening months, of which there had been many, something like eight or nine. He turned as the man said his own name, but he immediately wished he hadn’t. He thought Larry might have recognized him from his gaze.
If he did recognize him, though, Larry didn’t say anything this time. Matthew wanted to tell the girl Larry had accosted to step away from the man. He was certain he was probably insane, but Matthew was afraid if he did that he might look more like the one who was crazy. People didn’t just talk to people on Metro platforms for no reason, and Matthew was no good Samaritan. Plus, the last thing he wanted was any of Larry’s attention directed more sharply at him. The man left a pit draining all the feeling from Matthew’s stomach. He remembered how physically strong Larry had been and how intense his gaze had always felt. The best way to handle this situation was to keep on walking as if nothing were happening at all.
This story first appeared online in The Charles Carter on April 10, 2020.
To read more from Spare Change, click here.
May 24, 2023
All I Ever See
A sunrise crosses across the ocean,
casts golden mirrors of reflections in
endless waves stretching till they have no end.
Building white force, rushing up towards the shore,
they rear their heads to crash such a display:
the sea’s voice screams at waiting, silent sands.
You know, I waited up all the past night,
needing a glimpse, a peak at true beauty,
and now that day has finally arrived,
my soul is left feeling unsatisfied.
A small clearing lives inside this forest;
one where light sheds shadows of dancing leaves.
There’s peace, protection as my body sits,
reclining, resting on these fallen trees.
Missing the branches crackling underfoot
as I walked here, silent, I contemplate.
Staring at such nature as surrounds me,
I realize all this hides beauty’s face.
It’s the world itself that distracts my mind.
Bodies keep me from what my heart can find.
And then, upon a summer, Southern night,
while I sat there amid the thickening dew,
looking across the darkening of the world
(the violining crickets start anew –
so tired, their tugging tunes upon my soul),
I felt myself beginning to lose my grasp
upon this slowly fading illusion.
My mind fought on harder, trying to clasp
this world that I, yet barely, blearily,
continued contemplating dreamily.
And there, inside a corner of my mind,
beneath shores of reality, a place
only my heart could ever hope to find,
I saw a dreaming halo round your face.
My mind had searched for years to see this sight,
to see beauty so bright it is the sun.
But I have always turned from blinding light
to see the night. In darkness, you won.
Somehow, somewhere, you pulled my soul from me
to see what I could never see before.
What is the truest beauty man can see?
It’s only that blinding forever more.
And you are all that I will ever see
for it is your beauty that blinded me.
From Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.’s poetry collection, At the Side of the Road, available here.
March 24, 2023
Like a Snake Tripping on LSD
The conundrum we faced as freshmen in college in 1996 was that on the same April weekend Morphine was playing in Philadelphia while Fugazi was playing in Richmond. Each city was about the same distance away from us in Maryland, and a group of us wanted to see both shows. Since we had a free place to stay in Richmond at my mom’s home, I convinced our little group to make the trek south for Fugazi. However, my main motivation wasn’t ease or comfort. It was that Fugazi was my favorite band, and I’d never seen them live.
They’d only played in Richmond once before since I’d started listening to them in high school, and I’d been visiting my dad in California at the time. Mark, the drummer for the band I played in, told me this story. Apparently, during the show some kid got up on top of the crowd. It was the nineties. Everybody wanted to crowd surf. Fugazi, however, was famous for stopping their shows whenever slam dancing started. They claimed it was too dangerous, and they didn’t approve of the tough guy posturing. But before the band could admonish the kid for taking such a dangerous leap, security threw him out.
Ian MacKaye, Fugazi’s founder, shouted at the security guards, “Hey! That kid didn’t come here to see you. He came to see us. And we didn’t ask him to leave. Why don’t you go outside and kindly ask him to come back in?” When security refused, Ian said, “Oh, you don’t want to? Okay, I’ll do it myself, then.”
The singer set his guitar aside. He went outside, brought the kid back, stepped on stage and announced, “Normally, we don’t condone this at our shows, but tonight, why don’t you all just go ahead and…” He made hardcore punk’s famous “circle pit” motion with his index finger. The band launched into one of their wildest pieces. My friends and the other kids tore that club apart. They’d been waiting for forever to let loose to Fugazi’s carefully curated rage. Three songs in, the club manager pulled the plug on the show.
The afternoon of that Fugazi show I saw was a beautiful spring day. The band was playing outside at Shafer Court in the heart of VCU’s burgeoning campus. This was before the university bought up all of West Grace Street in Richmond. There were only a few buildings surrounding Shafer Court at the time and a little raised brick stage where some shows would take place throughout the spring and summer.
My high school friends were happy to see me, and I was happy to see them. Innocence still united us. I introduced them to the kids I’d brought down from Maryland. We all found a spot not too far back in the crowd with a good view of the stage.
One of the opening bands, the Young Pioneers, were a punk rock supergroup composed of members from Born Against and other nineties hardcore acts. That they’d formed in Richmond proved what one of my college friends eventually said to me about the city I grew up in, “Richmond is where punk rockers go to die.” My college friends thought the Young Pioneers were great. They kept chattering on and on about them. I enjoyed the show, but I couldn’t see what they were talking about yet. In some ways, I was deliberately naive.
When Fugazi started playing, I was enraptured. The band began by hammering a cacophonous symphony from out their instruments. With a quick roll off the snare, the noise rapidly transformed into the lead track of their most recent album. I swayed in place, tapped my hands against my chest and sang along to the lyrics I already knew. The day was bright. The light was right. Ian MacKaye leaped and moved as if he were a skater skimming across the surface of an empty concrete swimming pool. Guy Picciotto, Fugazi’s other vocalist/guitarist, glided in place like a snake tripping on LSD. I realized this group of men formed my all-time favorite band. And I lost myself in the moment.
The air was perfect. I was staring at the brick edge of a building in the distance behind the band when they started playing their song Suggestion. Mouthing the lyrics, I moved along with the subtle groove. There was a blonde woman standing on stage behind the group. Somebody told me later she’d been the singer of the band Spitboy once upon a time. As the music plodded onward, on stage-right, Ian motioned to the woman behind them as if inviting her to come up to the microphone and sing the next verse’s lyrics. She shook her head, No, a few times. But when Ian himself finally started to sing himself, the woman walked to the front of the stage with purpose. She took the mic from Fugazi’s singer, and she finished the line with a shout.
Her rage coupled with Fugazi’s lyrics woke me in a way I’d never been awakened before. My mind floated off my neck and out my head to hover in the air above the rest of the showgoers. I saw the world more clearly than I’d ever seen it before. Colors were crisp and bright. The air’s oxygen felt real to me. My whole body was breathing.
When the show finished, as my college friends and I were walking back to our cars down the block from Shafer Court, I still didn’t want to set my feet back on the ground. I wanted to feel that way for forever. Every word directed at me was a command pulling me back to the earth. I’d been searching for that sensation for years. I wouldn’t let it go. I was reading a lot of Zen texts back then, and I was certain what I’d discovered was the same thing the monks felt when they became enlightened.
~ ~ ~
I’d been kicked out my first semester of college for drugs, but the school had allowed me to return in the spring. I took summer courses full-time to catch up with my class. It turned out I wound up doing four straight semesters that way with no real break. I didn’t think about it much at the time, but over the years, I’ve felt I may have overdone it. I don’t think I handled the stress very well. By the end of my sophomore year, I was a wreck.
That first summer there, though, I spent so much time in my dorm room writing, studying and making a single mixtape. The overall concept of the mix was one of physical dissolution leading to spiritual redemption. It was based on the acid trip that had led to me being removed from school the previous fall, but it would have been told conceptually. Even though, I had a concrete storyline built out of old blues tunes, Bob Dylan albums, some Elton John songs and even The Moody Blues. It was the story of a young man’s bitter heartbreak leading to homelessness and eventually, enlightenment.
I sat alone studying day and night. For, unlike so many of my peers who were happily discovering it all for the first time, I’d already given up drinking and drugs for what I prayed would be the rest of my life. It wasn’t, but that’s another story entirely. I listened to drafts of my mix over and over again, and I began writing my first short story. I never intended it to be, but that story wound up being my first exploration of the unconscious mind. It took over two years to complete. With it, I developed a style where I removed all the definite articles to create something resembling a surrealist painting. As I drew linguistic frames of solitary pictures, I imagined the world flowing around and melting into itself. Panes of images crashed into one another as my imaginary existence came to be out of nothing.
Even though I’d been influenced by Salvador Dali’s paintings, the exploration of my own unconscious mind came to be haphazardly. There were no outside influences other than the eternal presence of suggestion. An older friend of mine in Richmond had first introduced me to the ideas of Carl Jung. He mentioned there were theoretical divisions of the mind unable to be registered in waking life. That intrigued me. I believed I’d accessed those regions in sleep, meditation and perhaps even dream-like attempts at poetry. Art immediately became the visible key for unlocking secret mental doors, a vehicle for sailing into uncharted spiritual territory. I unhitched the cleat and delved deeper into hidden realities.
~ ~ ~
When I returned to school for my senior year, I had nowhere to live. I’d never bothered finding an apartment before I left, and I hadn’t been back long enough to get a place at the end of the summer. All my friends had already moved in together, and nobody had saved a space for me. I hadn’t expected them to. It was the first time I’d ever been responsible for my own housing, and I’d failed at the task. I wound up discovering two guys on the edge of my social circle who had an open room in their place. I took it. It wound up being the living room, separated from the rest of the house by a sheet hanging in the doorway, but it worked out perfectly for me that year.
There was no landline in that house, and since this was a year or two before cell phones took off, I had to use a payphone down the block for any calls I wanted to make. As far as getting ahold of me went, you had to leave a message with the switchboard at school. I didn’t mind. I figured nobody needed to reach me anyway. Although, I didn’t know Rob and Jon, the guys I moved in with, all that well at the time, they wound up being two of the four people I moved up to Boston with a year later.
We threw parties every few months. Even though I wasn’t drinking, my bedroom became the de facto dance floor. I’d throw my mattress up against the wall, move the speakers from my old high school stereo system in from the kitchen, and our school would rage and rage to the Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest until everybody passed out. Most nights, we cooked family-style dinners together in the kitchen while listening to Charles Mingus or the Velvet Underground. We’d sit on the decrepit living room couch and eat our pasta while discussing philosophy and literature.
Even though we were all scheduled to graduate at the end of that year, Rob and Jon were both older than me. Rob only by a year. Jon, on the other hand, had taken time off before joining us at that school. He’d lived out west during those years, somewhere like Arizona maybe. At 21, his 23 years of age still sounded like they were light years away from where I was at.
I still remember eating dinner with the two of them that first night I moved in. It was warm out. Instead of sitting on the living room couch, we sat on the back porch. Since the house was on a corner, the back porch was nothing more than a small, fenced-in enclosure surrounded on three sides by sidewalk and street. That little patio was where I listened to Black Sabbath’s Paranoid on vinyl one afternoon, and I realized how much deeper a record’s grooves sounded than a CD’s laser scan. That first night we ate dinner out there, we were reminiscing about the few times we’d met over our years at that school. Jon said, “You know, Michael, you were still a kid the last time you and I really hung out. Sometime over the past couple years, you’ve turned into a man.”
We were out on that patio as well when I brought this freshman girl, Maria, over for dinner one night. All four of us were studying philosophy—Jon, Rob, Maria and me. Maria started talking about her belief in the Trinity and Jesus. Jon rolled his eyes. “Are you sure you want to do this then?” he asked. “You know, philosophy corrupts the youth,” he said.
Maria stole a quick glance in what I thought was my general direction. “Well, I wouldn’t mind a little corruption of the flesh,” she said.
But Jon leaned in closer to the three of us sitting still at that little table. He put his hand on Maria’s arm, and he said, “Oh, I wasn’t talking about your flesh, my dear.” Maria shivered. Her face blanched. She drew back from Jon as if he were a snake. I laughed.
I often stayed up all night that year. I’d write through the darkest hours. As the sun rose cool and crisp, I’d walk down to the docks. Purple turned to gold, and I’d watch the world come to life. Shop owners swept up in front of their stores. Deliveries were made. Businessmen drank their coffees.
I sat down in a spot where a plaque told me Alex Haley’s Kunta Kinte had landed. Roots had affected me considerably as a child. I’d watched the masters try to break Kunta Kinte’s spirit on ABC. They tried convincing him his name was Toby, and I cried. With boats dotting the horizon, the Chesapeake Bay stretched out before me. That was when I came up with the idea that I wanted to sail around the world. I had an older friend in town who had done that same thing. He inspired me.
When I graduated, I got a job in a used boat parts store where I hoped somebody would teach me the basics of sailing. There were people willing to teach me, but I never learned. I wound up ripping a hernia into my groin lifting a sail onto the racks over my head. I believed that hernia was a symbol. It was my struggle with the angels. I hadn’t been able to keep myself out of the strip clubs in Baltimore from the moment I’d graduated college. Their siren song sang to me every day and all through the night. I was sober, but I couldn’t control myself. I’d sit around reading Kant to keep my mind on the sublime, but once darkness fell, I’d wind up in my car driving 45 minutes to spend every dime I had. I had to get as far away from Baltimore as I could. Like when the Biblical patriarch, Jacob, had spent all night wrestling the angel only to have the angel reach out and touch his inner thigh so he couldn’t lift him anymore, my hernia represented that struggle with myself.
From Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.’s memoir, Disorder, available here.
March 2, 2023
Catatonia
The figure embodied does not love but itself; time running backwards makes a lot more sense. He repositioned himself on the pillow on the floor on which he was sitting and continued contemplating his notions of mind. A story’s reality is not the trajectory. Rather, the trajectory is our reality. He cocked his head at an angle and stared out the café window. The woman sitting beside him on the floor stifled a mild laugh at the book she was reading. His book was set aside. How did he know that woman?
There’d been a time, not too long before, when they’d made love. He was certain of it. They’d shared a bed. She’d nestled her head into his shoulder and rib cage, and she’d felt so perfect there. As far as he’d been concerned, they could have slept that way for forever. But time is not so kind. They hadn’t slept in that comfortable position for quite a while. In the interim – eternities, perhaps – others had been nestled into his enclaves, and she’d nestled into others. Or had that all happened before? Such is the way of the modern world, and even that term had finally changed. Future shock: nothing remained the same for longer than a day… the question was: How does one define the length of a day?
Oh sure, we think it’s the amount of time it takes for the earth to rotate on its axis so that we see sun then moon then sun again. But there are other dimensions, other worlds where a day might not be defined in such a way. He’d traveled to some of those other worlds. They were fascinating places.
There was one world where the sun never shone once. He’d spent the entire time in an airport waiting room, days and days and days spent waiting to fly away. Staring out the window, walking in circles, a multitude of others waited along with him. One guy would leave every once in a while, but he always came back. He said he couldn’t find anything. Was that him? Still, the plane never arrived. Instead, our hero walked to the edge of the universe and jumped off. Somehow, he’d landed smack dab in the middle of this body in the middle of this café in the middle of… where the hell was he?
But he had memories. Even though he’d never been there before, he had memories. He remembered this woman with long, blonde hair sitting beside him who was stifling her mellow laugh. She had long legs that wrapped around his waist and neck in such a pleasant way. Too bad those were only memories. He wished he’d actually experienced that… He thought as he caught a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye.
Did they know each other? Did she have a name that he could call to mind? Did he have a name that she could call to mind? Did he have a mind that he could call a name? Did she have a… Things were really getting quite complicated. It was time to take another sip of tea. Maybe, that would do.
The tea wasn’t liquor, though, and liquor was what he really wanted. Maybe, he should stand up, step outside that café, and go to a bar. Did that strange place have bars? Was alcohol legal there? He might have stumbled into prohibition. There’d been a club named that in his hometown, and a Star Trek episode where something like that had actually happened. How did he remember all that? This town certainly was not a club (there was no strobe light hanging down from the sky, and the sun’s mood lighting was all off for dancing), and he definitely didn’t believe in science fiction. Life was too much like fantasy, and fantasy was reality, which was certainly science but definitely not fiction. He didn’t think.
Fiction had too many rules, too many opinions and theories for him to take them seriously. A plot should progress from this point to that along a certain conceptual arc with definite points along the line where events of immense significance happen. But life was more like mathematics than that. Waiting only to be designated with any sort of significance, there were an infinite number of points along any given line. Art couldn’t be written. It could only be lived. So why was there a notebook open in front of him? Why were there words on that page? What the hell had he been writing?
Maybe it was a mathematical equation, something algebraic with variables, something about time and existence symbolically represented as a short story. A short story… being one level of a building, a level less than ten feet tall, something that a giant may have to duck to get into. He didn’t want to write things that giants had to duck to get into. He wanted to write things that giants could comfortably stretch out in, take off their shoes, and wiggle their toes through the carpet of. He wanted to write something that could accommodate a thousand giants, something like a second, which encompasses all eternity. What the hell was he writing? He’d lost his train of thought. The train of his brain, a brain trained… Wasn’t that what they’d been trying to do to him, train his brain?
He’d always waited for the caboose as a child. Was that in this existence or another one entirely? In whichever existence, he and his mother had played a game where one of them had to guess the color. The one who won got… well, the one who won didn’t get anything. They were just playing. But that was certainly a feat of some sort of mental gymnastics: to assume what might be based on past experiences that somehow had happened, that somehow were still contained within the brain. What was the brain? It had a physical location. It could be pointed to with Cartesian coordinates, but did its thoughts exist physically or… What else was there beyond the physical, he thought as he glanced again at the long-legged woman sitting beside him.
One day, eventually, the train game he’d played with his mother had gotten boring because all the cabooses were green even though his story books told him they were red. Who had lied to him? Was his brain seeing what was red as green, or had they actually changed the color? Which was true, the story or what he saw? According to science, the story had to accord with reality. Could a giant really stretch out in something like that? If life rearranged the story, then the story became the history of science and life became the present of science, and the present of science was sometimes studied by philosophy. A philosophy of science itself had evolved nonetheless. He didn’t believe in the philosophy of anything. It had nothing to do with the word’s etymology. Nobody paid attention to etymology anymore… if they ever had – besides Joyce, of course. But he might have just been playing a game, an etymological game. Could one play a game with something as abstract as language? Was English malleable enough to still be childlike and play, or had it developed along with the stiff upper lip of its progenitors into an adult’s post-industrial, post-colonial, postmodern poster child nightmare?
Did they even speak English here? What if he opened his mouth and all that came out was gibberish that only he understood… That’s all that ever came out anyways, or so he thought. Then, he realized that everybody could understand whatever he said whatever world he was in. English was the universal language, just like French and German and Sanskrit and Chinese, but English was what he understood when he spoke it. He was the universe. That solved the problem most definitely. What need was there to be understood so long as he knew what he was saying? Did communication ever extend beyond the individual, the universe…
He turned, with a lovely smile, to wonder of the blonde sitting beside him, “What’s so funny?”
From Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.’s collection of stories, Psychedelicizations.
February 28, 2023
Spin the World
Spin the world, DJ –
How can one man
produce so much noise?
The lights melt
my ears/my soul.
My feet fly with
messenger’s wings.
Spin the world, DJ:
How can one circle
imply so many memories?
(The liquor lights
my throat/my groin.
My hands twirl lapis
wands: summoning.)
The world spins, DJ;
forever patient,
the watcher watches.
[I jumped up on the speaker,
felt the bass pump my soul. But
in my ecstasy, I didn’t notice
the thumb caught in my corner
pocket. Amid thoughts of St.
Annie, bones snapped, never to
heal/feel/breath/death/hell’s/bells.]
The watcher waits,
forever repentant;
the world spins, DJ.
Spin the world, DJ:
How can the bass
create such feeding frenzy?
(The nicotine burns
my tongue/my mind.
My toes tingle as
mere phantom limbs.)
Spin the world, DJ –
How can I still hear
through the restroom’s door?
White is the source of
my thoughts/my madness.
My psychosis is this
spinning world, DJ.
From Michael Anthony Adams, Jr’s collection of poetry, Recipe for a Future Theogony.
February 25, 2023
Who Asked:
Will you ever see the real me?
There’s no real me to be seen.
I am a figment of my own imagination.
But still, my actions hurt. How can
what does not exist produce
real results? Results…
Were those results even
real? That night, as you left, you
were crying. Next thing I knew, I cried,
too – in my guts, in my soul, in my heart,
everywhere but in my mind because
in my mind, I didn’t exist.
Will you ever see the real me?
Which me is real is the question I’ll
return to you: this me or that me or another
me I haven’t even met yet? Let me turn
one more question around on you:
Will you ever see the real you?
From my poetry collection Indigo Glow.
January 20, 2023
Take Care of Yourself, Brother
A couple weeks after 9/11, on the day that the jet crashed in Far Rockaway, Rich sent an article to James from The Nation via email. The article was about Afghanistan. James had just started his third day in a row without a cigarette. He’d made up his mind the week before that he didn’t want to be responsible for his own death. He wanted to live.
After reading the article Rich sent to him, James wrote back:
Rich –
Who is the person who wrote this article, and how do they know any more than what I know? Yes, I know about the “humanitarian crisis”, but it is also the case, as far as I have read in various international publications, that members of the Taliban are as responsible for the fact that no aid is being delivered since they will not allow UN workers into parts of the country, since they seize warehouses and have shot at aid workers, since they have banned cell phones that coordinate relief efforts, and since they have been known before to imprison relief workers on charges of preaching Christianity (although in my most cynical moments these days, I often think that the promulgation of any religion should be a crime worthy of imprisonment, perhaps even death because of the detriment religion presents to society and mankind in general). None of that information came solely from the US media, either. It has also been reported in British as well as English-speaking Middle Eastern papers. Maybe in Arabic speaking papers, but I can’t read Arabic no matter how bad I wish I could, so I don’t know. There is also the fact that Friday, al-Jazeera played a new bin Laden tape in which he called the UN and all UN workers “viable” targets (It’s kind of like the US being held responsible for Iraq’s starving. I don’t understand why nobody mentions the fact that Iraq’s leaders are some of the wealthiest men in the world. They trade oil for everything, and you know what, the embargoes might work if other countries would stop doing business with Hussein so that he was starving along with his country, but he’s not. So he doesn’t care. Those in power in Iraq simply don’t give the money, the food, anything to their citizens. It’s not so different than if there were a smallpox epidemic in NYC tomorrow. I probably wouldn’t get vaccinated. George Bush would, Giuliani would, Bloomberg would, but I wouldn’t because I don’t matter. That’s not a rationalization. It’s just me wondering why I have to shoulder all the responsibility for everything. I’m not that important.)
There’s a war going on. I’m not one of those people who justifies horrible things because it is war, but I am certain that so many horrible things are happening and are going to happen that I really don’t know what to say and what to think about any of it. All I try to do is keep myself from killing myself in some sort of misguided inability to make sense out of the current state of the world. Lots of people will die in Afghanistan. Lots of people will probably die in whatever country we invade next, and over the course of it, lots of people are probably going to die here and in other countries that support what the US does as the enemies of the United States learn better and more effective ways to kill lots and lots of people.
Violence does not stop violence, but peace doesn’t either. Violence and suffering are unstoppable. They always have been a part of life, and they always will be. What the US is most guilty of is the belief that suffering should not occur. I simply remain grateful for every day that I have been able to stay alive and relatively happy. I don’t want anybody anywhere to starve, to die, anything… But that has always been a part of life, a part of life that intellect and compassion are not so willing to accept, but a part of life that is as unavoidable for the intellect as falling in love and having dreams.
I am not responsible, not for anything. I am responsible for myself, and that is it. I refuse to even accept responsibility for the welfare of my family and friends. They are responsible for themselves. I will support them in what I believe is right, and I will censure them when I think they are wrong, and I will help them as much as I can, and I will try to avoid hurting them whenever that is possible, but I am not responsible. I will simply remain baffled by the inexplicable in life.
I’m sick of conservatives and liberals. I’m sick of terrorists and politicians. I’m sick of bombing and starvation. I don’t really care anymore. I don’t believe that any amount of kindness or self-loathing or gut-wrenching guilt will keep most of the world from despising me. No conscience cleaning self-deprecation will make anybody feel any more compassion for me. Do I deserve compassion? I don’t think so. My life’s been hard, but no harder than anyone else’s, so nobody cares. Why should they? I am a citizen of the world’s wealthiest country, living my meager, but still first-world life with my first-world concerns and my first-world happiness and my first-world problems. And I’m grateful for those first-world problems because it was the luck of the draw. If I am sentenced to a very painful, soon-to-be-coming death by disease or radiation or any other sort of terrorist activity because of that as well, then what can I do? My whole life, whether I knew it or not, I’ve just been waiting to die.
I never asked the world to forgive me for anything, and there is nothing that my government does that I need to be forgiven for. I am not responsible. My actions are my own, and I perpetrate those actions within my own limited sphere because I’m just trying to live just like everybody else. And it’s hard enough for me to take care of myself. Seven million Afghanis are going to die… That’s the wrong way to say it. Seven million people are going to die. The whole world is going to hate me for this even though I don’t want anybody to die anywhere, ever. Okay, tell me what to do!!! I’ll do it. But if there’s nothing I can do, then I just don’t care anymore. I don’t want to hear about horror just for its own sake. I don’t care about something that I can’t do anything to prevent. And there’s nothing I can do to prevent this. There is absolutely no way the government will stop bombing, and as much as I hate bombing, I don’t have any other solutions. I’m all out of ideas. And I don’t think there’s any more that I can do for the people who are going to die in Afghanistan than I could have done for anybody jumping out of the WTC on September 11th, anybody who happened to have to go wherever that plane was going today, anybody whose home is in Far Rockaway, anybody who happens to live in Baghdad, than I could have done for any Jew who was in a Nazi concentration camp, than I could do for anybody who happened to be living in Hiroshima in 1945, than I could do for any marine who was forced to march to Bataan, than I could do for the residents of Dresden in 1945, than I could do for the young women of China during the Japanese occupation, than I could do for the residents of Pompeii or even of Atlantis for that matter, than I could do for the male babies of Bethlehem in December, 1 AD, than I could do for the first-born sons of Egypt who didn’t even know who Moses was, than I could do for Job. Life hurts, and I don’t care.
-James
It was awfully early in the morning for James to have that sort of conversation, but the day had already been pretty long. Five phone calls from family members who didn’t live in New York, who didn’t know how far away Far Rockaway was from where James lived in Carroll Gardens, all before ten AM, all asking him whether or not he lived anywhere near where the plane crashed, whether or not he knew anything, whether or not he thought this latest attack was terrorists…
“I don’t know. I have to go to work,” he’d told them.
And then, after he’d braved the fear of explosions causing the subway tunnels to collapse, put aside all of his memories of what he’d seen on September 11th, what he’d felt when he’d had the bomb threats called in to his building all day on September 13th, and made it into Midtown, there’d been this article waiting in his e-mailbox, waiting for him to hear about more people who were going to die when he still wasn’t quite sure whether or not he was going to have to spend another day, just like all those days right after September 11th, worrying about whether or not he was going to die, right then, not in some abstract future moment, but right there, all alone on the island of Manhattan, surrounded by concrete and buildings and people who he knew only by drinking with them after work.
He certainly didn’t care about humanitarian crises. He’d had too much to think about on his own.
That was it. James needed a cigarette. He pulled the emergency pack (that he had put there a week ago when he decided he was going to quit smoking) out of his desk drawer. He checked to make sure that nobody in his department needed him, that it was okay for him to leave his cubicle, and he walked out of the room, past the receptionist, and to the elevator so that he could go downstairs and outside for a smoke.
There was a man standing next to the elevator, a man in a thick coat, with very little hair and even less teeth. His pants were streaked with dirt. His shoes were held together by tape. He smelled bad, and his face was grimy. He smiled at James.
James smiled back. He didn’t really mind that somebody who looked like that was in his office building. He just couldn’t figure out what the guy was doing there. Dressed like that, he looked so weird underneath the fluorescent lights. The guy kept staring at James. James shifted around a little bit, and he said, “These damn elevators take forever, huh?”
The man laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s the skyscrapers, you know. Too many floors for them to get through.”
James smiled. The guy seemed nice enough. Maybe he was related to somebody who worked there, one of the mailroom guys or the receptionists. Maybe he looked homeless but was really just out of work and had been sitting around his apartment all day. Lots of people were sitting around their apartments those days.
“Just think,” the man told James. “Just think how long it takes those elevators in the World Trade Center. How many stories are those buildings again?”
James felt a jolt of some weird emotion, a new emotion that he’d never felt before the past month or so, shoot through his stomach and spine to choke him a bit. He swallowed the emotion back down, and he said, “They aren’t any stories anymore, man. They’re not there.”
“Right, right,” the man said “But how long do the elevators take?”
“They don’t take any time. There’s no building for them to go through.” What’s wrong with this guy? James thought.
“Yeah, but I bet those elevators still take a long time. It’s something over a hundred stories, you know.”
James didn’t know what else to say, but he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Yeah, something like that,” he mumbled.
The elevator dinged. The doors opened. The man waved James in in front of him. James was a little nervous. The man was obviously crazy. For Christ’s sake, he still thought there was a World Trade Center, but James figured the easiest way not to cause a scene would be just to go ahead and step into the elevator first and not upset the insane, homeless guy who was simply wandering into random office buildings.
God, I need that cigarette, James thought. For all he knew, this homeless guy could go crazy in that elevator when he realized there was no World Trade Center left. Maybe he was really a terrorist testing and teasing James with his questions, digging into his heart, his psyche, pretending like those buildings and all the people in them were still there… Bastard, James thought.
And the man spoke: “You know, I don’t understand what everybody’s so unhappy about. There’s too much in life to be unhappy about. There’s no point bothering with it, you know. I just take care of me and my brothers and that’s it, you know.”
“Yeah,” James said. He nodded, but he still didn’t trust that bastard not to flip out or scream some crap about Holy War and reveal the bomb strapped to his chest and the gun slung under his coat, under his armpit. James needed a cigarette bad.
“I figure if everybody just took care of themselves and their brothers, then we wouldn’t have all these people hurting each other, you know. Like those kids who beat that guy with the baseball bat a couple weeks ago. People don’t think I hear about things like that, but I do, you know. I want to know what they were thinking. That’s what I want to know.”
“Yeah,” James said. Every sentence made him more uncomfortable. Could the man really be that oblivious that he had no idea what was going on in the world? Or was he just teasing James, the guy in the tie who looks like he has a bunch of money but really can’t even afford to go out most weekends?
The elevator dinged again. They’d made it down to the first floor. The man motioned James off the elevator first. Again, James obeyed.
“Take care of yourself,” the man said as James started walking away. “Take care of your brothers, too.”
James wasn’t listening to him at all anymore. He stepped out the double, glass doors, pulled the cigarettes out of his pocket, took one out, stuck it between his lips, and lit it. God, it tasted good. James leaned back against the brick wall outside his building. He let the smoke fill his lungs and clear away the sensations in his mind.
It sure felt good to be smoking again. The stress from the morning, the stress from the email, the stress from the homeless guy, all of it was dissipating.
What the hell was that guy talking about? What the hell was I thinking? Jesus, this world needs to calm down. I really can’t deal with it anymore. Maybe I was a little harsh with Rich. It’s not like he meant to make things any more difficult for me today. I don’t know. I mean, the day can’t be going too well for him either.
And the man was standing in front of him again, on the sidewalk, staring at James smoking his cigarette. The man smiled his nearly toothless smile. He put two fingers to his lips to mimic James’s smoking act.
James was nervous. “Sure, sure,” he mumbled, and he fumbled through his pocket for the pack. He flipped the lid back and held the cigarettes out to the man.
The man grimaced, “You think I want a cigarette? I was just showing you what you look like. You wanna help me? Why don’t you give me a dollar or something.”
James flipped the lid of his cigarettes back down. “I don’t have a dollar,” he said.
“Figures. Keep on killing yourself,” the man said. He was still smiling, and he walked away. James turned to watch the man stroll down Park Avenue. By the time he finished his cigarette, the man had rounded the corner and was gone.
“Goddamnit,” James mumbled as he crushed his cigarette beneath his dress shoe. “Goddamnit,” he said again. He reached in his pocket, pulled out his wallet, flipped through the twenties, grabbed two one dollar bills, and started walking in the direction the man had gone.
He crossed the street, and he started walking faster. He crossed the next street, started walking even faster. By the time he got to the corner the man had turned around. He was running, running with his tie trailing behind him in the wind.
He couldn’t see the homeless guy anywhere. How hard could it be to find a homeless guy? Jesus, was it even possible to find a single, random person in New York’s ocean of ten million people?
Pretty soon, James wasn’t running anymore. The two dollar bills were getting sticky in his sweating palm. He was breathing heavily from the exertion. His forehead was a little damp. He ran his hand through his hair. He really needed to quit smoking. Goddamnit, why did he smoke that cigarette? Goddamnit, why hadn’t he just given the money to the man when he was still in front of him?
He was standing near the public library, doubled over, coughing, with his hands on his knees, the two green dollar bills were in one fist. There was no way he’d find that guy by running through the streets of New York City. James stood up. He wiped his mouth and straightened his tie. He decided to put the two dollars in his fist towards his lunch. There really wasn’t anything else for him to do.
From Michael Anthony Adams Jr.’s collection of stories, The Cars Behind, Beside Us, available here.
January 17, 2023
I Was Wondering…
He was hanging out inside some bum,
driving the poor guy insane.
When he fell the first time,
he met his blessed mother.
Veronica wiped his face.
Simon helped him carry his cross.
He spoke to the women of Jerusalem
when he fell the second time.
I stepped out of the church.
The sun shined on my notepad.
I couldn’t believe I was still alive.
I was certain God would strike me dead.
English is written backwards.
Hebrew is written forwards.
Do you think this would all make sense
if you read it in reverse order,
do you think this would all make sense?
Hebrew is written forwards.
English is written backwards.
I was certain God would strike me dead.
I couldn’t believe I was still alive.
The sun shined on my notepad.
I stepped out of the church.
When he fell the second time,
he spoke to the women of Jerusalem.
Simon helped him carry his cross.
Veronica wiped his face.
He met his blessed mother
when he fell the first time.
Driving the poor guy insane,
he was hanging out inside some bum.
I was wondering…
Click here to hear Ursprung Collective’s interpretation of this poem.
From the poetry collection, The Tree Outside My Window, by Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.
