Anyone's Ghost

by August Thompson

When I googled those four insufferable words years later, I was struck by how confined Jake and I felt in America, on July Fourth, in the Live Free or Die state, under the watch of some Libertarian ripping us off in a hyperinflated free market of tickets and tokens. That there was something inherently suffocating about being how we were as boys—sensitive, soft, sweet, all the dance-around words mothers use—in that time, in our homeland. And I am struck, too, that the only person in the world who could confirm that Funspot was a part-time propaganda dispenser is now gone. That I can only insist, snickering and wine-drunk at a house party in a Red Hook loft, that the world’s largest arcade in the great state of New Hampshire asked me who John Galt was and that I was too stoned and laced and naive to answer. I tell it all with glee—what I leave out is the rest of it.