Kyle

Kyle worked at a toll booth on the Ohio Turnpike in the far outskirts of Toledo. Most other kids did toll work as a summer job, older high school kids or college kids home for the summer. Kyle worked all year though, and since he really had no other major commitments, they liked to put him on the night shift, which wasn't really so bad except that he didn't get much time to see Megan, his girlfriend. She worked down the road at the Cinnabon in the service station, usually weekend shifts, as she was also going to school for nursing at the University of Toldeo. Kyle had decided not to go to college. He had done fine in high school, played on the hockey team, had a weekly column in the school paper, his counselors considered him a promising case. Something about the idea of college didn't suit Kyle, though. He was more content than most people thought to just sit alone all night, taking tolls, making jokes on the walkie-talkie to the other toll takers and writing stories.
Kyle was in the middle of one of these stories, around 2:15 in the morning, when Megan called. Strictly speaking, he wasn't supposed to spend a lot of time on the phone when he was on the job, but the liklihood of the authorities checking up on him at this hour was slim, and either way, he had mastered the art of swiveling his chair away from the security camera to make it look like he was just resting his hand on his temple and muttering to himself. Kyle turned away and answered the phone.
"Hiiiiiii, baaaby," Megan said loudly.
"Are you drunk or something?" Kyle said teasingly.
"Wellllll," she said, "Maybe a little. But I just wanted to call and see how you are, y'know....I love you sweeeeeetie! What are you up to?"
Kyle twiddled his pen thoughtfully. "Just writing a love poem for--"
"OhmyGod, Jessie! Sorry, my friend Jessie just showed up, hang on one second--okay, sorry, what?" Megan said absentmindedly.
"Just writing a love poem for you. Hey, I think someone is coming up the road, so I'm going to let you go. Take care babe, I'll call you tomorrow."
Kyle turned back toward the window. He hadn't been lying, a car was coming. After two years of toll booth work, Kyle could start to recognize some types of people driving out from Toledo in the middle of the night. The car revealed itself to be a Fiat driven by a frazzled-looking woman in a navy power suit. She rolled down the window.
"Hi...how much is the toll again?" she asked, her eyes darting around for the fare poster.
"Three dollars, ma'am," he said before she could find it.
"Oh, right. I see now." She fumbled in her pocketbook for singles. “Do you have change for a five?”
Kyle handed two dollars through the window in exchange for her five, and she drove off again.
Kyle decided she couldn’t have been a native Ohioan, or she would have known the toll. But she was in a power suit, so she was there for business. He couldn’t make himself curious enough to wonder more, so he turned back to the page he was writing.
He had been lying about the love poem, however. The story he was writing now had love in it, it was true, but the handsome lead was a Colombian drug lord who was usually more concerned about whose heads were flying in his backyard than about the dainty flamenco dancer who begged for his cold heart. Kyle knew it was ridiculous. He had spent the first year writing careful observations and drawing meaningful conclusions from the drivers who passed robotically along his window. He had a whole wealth of notes and dialogues and poems about the crying girl in the scarf, the teenagers with pot smoke rolling out their open windows, the man with the american flag tattoo and the rottweiler in the passenger seat, and the woman playing sexy in designer sunglasses. He’d seen so many, and now he knew that they could only be caricatures, no matter how important their lives seemed to them. So he tucked away his thoughts and notebooks and starting writing lurid, awful stories about characters who knew they were characters and stories where everybody dies for love.
Kyle’s walkie talkie fuzzed on and he heard Fiona’s voice from the one other open toll booth.
“Some lady just asked to borrow my chapstick. Do you think that’s weird?” she asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess that’s kind of weird,” Kyle replied after a pause. “Did you let her?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. Kind of weird,” Kyle said. “I’d throw it out if I were you.”
Fiona sighed. “You’re probably right. Damn.” The walkie talkie clicked off.
Fiona was all right, Kyle thought, as another car pulled up, an old gray Volvo in need of a new muffler. The driver cranked down the window by hand and extended a handful of coins and one dollar bill.
As Kyle counted out the coins, the man in the car smoothed back a head of grizzled, greasy hair.
“I bet you see a lot of strange people driving through here around this time, huh?” he said, chuckling.
“Sometimes, yeah,” Kyle said, as though he hadn’t heard it before.
“If I had your job, I bet I could write a book about all the characters you must run in to. Must be fascinating work,” he mused.
“It’s alright.”
The man seemed put off by Kyle’s lack of enthusiasm for the subject and started cranking his window back up, but stopped midway for one last comment.
“You know, you’re young though. You still have time to go and make something of yourself. You should think about going back to school.”
Kyle clenched his teeth briefly, then relaxed.
“Actually, I think I’m fine. Thanks though.”
The man drove off, and Kyle picked up his walkie talkie.
“Hey Fiona, some guy just told me I should make something of myself.”
“Fuckin’ asshole,” said Fiona.
“Yeah. Damn.”

years after wendy

peter, you don't know love
but i know you.
i can sew you pockets and iron out your shadow
and pretend you never cried;
you will give me wings for yourself
and smile your tiny teeth for the pirates.
you silly ass, you bird, you bliss:
the spires of london could prick your foot
while the stars scorch your feathered cap,
you won't know what's beneath.
in the cupboard you forgot
a part of adventure
not a mother you need, but me
to thimble your amnesia with the window always wide
and speak slow and breezy, telling the same story from now
until spring cleaning.

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

(i wrote this paper for a class, so references to authors which aren't credited are due to that fact) (also, all is true!!!)

nine o’clock in the morning and I’m taking an inventory check on the subway bench to distract from the pair of middle-aged sweatshirt men doing “the nod” at me and refusing to stop staring and grinning from across the track, also the one who walked past and did the up-down look and murmured, “nice, whatchu got on there.” and so this leads to the obvious question, why did I choose to wear a short lace dress and gold embroidered boots on a long train ride to a beach town, long island, montauk? the first of the WHY questions I ask myself and others ask me and I fail to answer. the best I can do is say that I always dress warm and sensible for the journeys and tend to fall asleep in my headphones, which does not lend itself to writing or observing. so I wear the dress to keep alert, but the real effect is that I feel idiotic and idiotically enraptured with my reflection across the train window and get the haughty mentality of a girl who is not taking the train to wander, but to go to her home in the hamptons and feed her purebred a nice carrot.

the feeling of digression comes naturally with the rhythm of the train; I am facing backwards and when I sink in my seat it gives the impression of the ground pulling out from under me. my thoughts are scattered and my notebook page is limited to one-line observations such as, “’Harold’ on the side of a building—why?” and “mounds and mounds of grey gravel in rows,” or “feeling of stuck, all these people trapped by the bottleneck of NYC.” I’m simultaneously trapped by the obligation to work and the real reason I enjoy long train rides: the feeling of being enclosed in the non-location of motion, and with the lack of location I feel a lack of responsibility.

in planning, I decided I was going to be like theroux: I was going to take a train as far as it would take me, through towns with exotic names (jamaica, babylon and SPEONK(!!!)), I was going to read books, drink liquor and talk to strange people. and maybe that’s the second answer to the WHY of the dress, if I’m busy being hannah in sweatpants or a shapeless t-shirt, it also means I am hannah who doesn’t know what to say to strangers and fears the law, and that would not do. I bring with me the food and pens I will need to sustain the journey, as well as a library copy of antonio skármeta’s novel, the postman, which serves to entertain as well as fire my loins embarrassingly and leaves its cloud hanging over the remainder of the day. also, gulliver’s travels, which I thought would be fun since, hey, we’re both travelling!, sadly, it was not.

getting back to (or beginning) the action, I leave my room at 8:45 a.m. feeling like christmas morning, grapple with subways for too long, and narrowly catch the 9:46 to montauk (transfer in jamaica). I note the constant alternating of the industry with idyllic stretches of lake, neatly mowed hampton lawns and fields of rusty beams. I glimpse people out the window and am thankful that I only see the pair of sweet nine-year-olds holding hands for 3 seconds because now they can stay that way forever; I never need to see them eating corn dogs or screaming at their mothers for buying the wrong kind of fruit snacks. I note what actually IS by the waters of babylon (a high school, several trees, a parking lot, the railroad station) and don’t really feel like weeping much.

three stops before montauk, two things happen: one—a group of noisy children board what was almost a silent train, two—I look between the gap of seat and window and see a hand (male, about my age) holding a camcorder. the kids shout about snacks and fishing, the hand puts the camera away and I observe that the hand belongs to a body with a head of thick black hair. I am instantly curious about the face behind the seat. I like to think I know better than to believe in train romance, but one too many times watching before sunrise has ruined me, and the skármeta I am digesting isn’t helping anything either. the kids are unbelievably annoying, and I stop trying to inwardly apologize for hating them. defiantly, I take my first swig of rum and coke, despite my intended rule to not start drinking before noon. it’s the difference between these kids and the couple out the window that makes me more aware of the elusive beauty of travel—it is far easier to love things briefly and ignorantly than to have them so close as to know all their faults.

montauk draws near with the necessary pomp; I watch out the window as the land gets narrower and ocean and bay are on both sides. this development is loudly documented by the children and it reminds me of the thornberry character on theroux’s journey (“aha! another connection to class,” I think). the pull into the station is slower and more deliberate than any of the other stations, as if to tell us that this is truly the end. I find satisfaction in stepping over the actual end of the track that began so long ago.

and then I finally see the face of the black haired camcorder boy and decide it is good. we realize we are the only former passengers eschewing the taxI services, so we walk the mile road into town together. he (paul) also has no answer to the WHY of montauk, and his camcorder, like my notebook, is probably just an excuse to be a stranger in a distant place. this story doesn’t end in a crazy makeout scene or the exchange of numbers, but instead in a quiet lunch in a circular diner, followed by a friendly parting. I realize with relief that my great adventure is not destined to become a romance that would no doubt be the product of people feeling the need to fall in love on a train because movies have told us that is how it goes. so we part, and I change my shoes.

in flip-flops, I go to the montauk chamber of commerce and meet a petite woman who is a fount of energy and enthusiasm for montauk tourism. pamphlets are thrust into my arms, she wails concern that such a beautiful girl is here ALL ALONE! and she’s from MICHIGAN! and ohhhhh, those are such LOVELY boots! and so, with my maps and sailing information, I excuse myself from her aunt-like fluttering. “to the beach,” I think. at the beach there is the mandatory toe-dip in the ocean, the pacing around and feeling poetic, the sipping of my drink. I sit down on the sand even though i’m shivering and read and write until I notice I have nothing to say, so I get up and walk. I look at the tourist map and see that just a short jog down the montauk highway is a lighthouse, and at the lighthouse, The End. my mind is made up: to the lighthouse.

incidentally, “to the lighthouse” is not only a virginia woolf novel I have never read, it is a song by patrick wolf that I happened to listen to while putting on my dress and anticipating montauk around 8:15 that morning. as I walk down the shoulder of the road, I sing the refrain in the loopy voice I use when nobody is around. I mark landmarks on the map, but they seem farther apart than they look. after a mile of walking, I see in the corner, “map not drawn to scale.” but patrick wolf is telling me to go to the lighthouse, there cannot even be a question, to the lighthouse my friend, we must go, we must go! with this and my rum and coke as the beat of my steps, I decide: I can’t go back now, but to go forward could take hours. my solution is hitchhiking.

yes, hitchhiking. my boots strung over my shoulder and goosebumps on my bare legs, I hold out my thumb tentatively (never having done this before) and worry that someone will stop. eventually, someone does, a man in a pickup truck with a shovel in the back. fantastic! so of course I hop inside, his name is dennis and he has a daughter about my age. he thinks i’m stupid, with good reason, and kind of crazy, but of course he means hannah of the dress is crazy, not me. he tells of his own hitching days and actually uses the phrase “walkabout,” to which I want to yell, “CHATWIN, son!” but wisely don’t. his friendliness compels him to not only take me to the lighthouse, but take my picture and drive me back into town. ah, eastern hospitality.

the winding down of montauk day is progressively less glorious, with the exception of some fried shrimp which I eat because montauk is a seaside town and it seems proper. I miss the train out and make two more trips in and out of downtown to get ticket money. three hours of train riding turn to four, the fourth hour due to the possibility that the train may have hit somebody. the darkness outside the window inhibits my outdoor observation, and left with no desireable reading, the last 4 hours of my trip are vainly spent observing how nice my legs look in reflection across the aisle. the hannah in dress clothes persona has become a veritable narcissus, and the last pages of my notebook are a wasteland of sexual energy the day-to-day me would never have dared to write.

I forgot to mention that rain was predicted for this day. in the one show of proper preparation, I brought an umbrella, which of course guaranteed clear skies until finally, 1:25 in the morning, as I am walking the last block before home, it starts to sprinkle. this insignificant fact somehow justified my WHYs of the day—the umbrella was there to match the dress, to keep me awake, to make me ready for adventure, to hitchhike, to cover my legs in cold sand, and the best train ride moment where I look across and instead of seeing my full reflection, the darkness of my dress fades into the shadow and all I see are my head and legs which seem to be perched in a white floral bush. I am wearing white flowers, motionless, and the new me of the dress is now another new me of the bush. I realize that these versions of me can keep duplicating forever, as long as I am a stranger.

greyhound: a love ode

this tendency to misunderstand the bus
its need for so many wheels
and the forbidding cargo hold of sardine suitcases
happens to the people who think planes are normal
that feeling of anti-motion
of air pressed around like fingers in the ear and throat chewing gum
totally unbirdlike, stale where it ought to soar.
a bus sunrise is unmatched in welcomeness
the old hour where you can no longer bear to see your face
layered in reflections on top of the trees too hard to see at night.
the switching on and off of the reading spotlight ceases
as pink to yellow to blue to unnamed colors sharpen the window dust into shards.
and if its not a wailing baby
usually someone is drunk, uncomfortably by the mennonites and grandmothers.
in this way, stories become tied to seat space
steinbeck seeming so relevant to the stiff knees,
hardy to the soldier doing the disappearing egg magic trick
a page is a turn of the wheel and the story is
the feeling of the pod casing falling open
and peas, rolling into the dawn on wheels that know the way home.

BSD and The Magic Word

So I don't know what I did to deserve this, but I am now newly listed as an allied blog on Blast Shields Down (a blog with actual substance that real people read). Maybe I'm just a fortunate casualty in some fight/war/jokefight/jokewar that I have no idea about, or maybe those two noble gents, Matt and Caleb, deemed my blog worthy of its own merit. Either way, I think I need to write something legit now, even though I still feel like an alien in this crazy land of BLOG. But the world is watching, so without further ado:
PASSWORDS.

Passwords then:
When young, passwords were part of games. Bedrooms would have passwords (sometimes known under the alternate name of "Magic Words," a moniker that sends chills up your spine if you think about it too much...Magic!), "treehouses" had passwords, basically anything you could enclose a space around could have a password. Our house even had a password. Afternoons I might come back from the pool or a friend's house and park my bike in the driveway with the kickstand (I was that type of kid) and run up the porch, open the mail slot and yell "Open Sesame!" maybe a less imaginative password than I would choose today, but serviceable. Now I like to imagine my parents, doing whatever adult things they did that young me never noticed or cared about and suddenly hearing this little squealy voice come through the door, summoning them to open the garage for me. Also, I imagine a really cunning burglar, perhaps hoping to steal our lawnmower, masking his voice to sound like mine and shouting the Magic Word though the door, and my parents instinctively welcoming him in, here, have some orange juice and cinnamon-sugar toast. These days, Open Sesame is a family joke and a thing my dad likes to recall when he plays "you kids used to be so cute," with us, not that I can blame him, parents' hearts are made to break, I think.

Passwords now:
Passwords are for websites and security and meant for typing, not saying. I don't think it's fair that this should mean they stop being a game, however. My college email makes me change my password yearly, and choosing a new one is the game I play now. Dictionaries are toys to me anyway, and so I play the game where I close my eyes and open to any page and point to a word. I make a list of words and pick the best one as my word-of-honor. This year's runners up include: corniche, spelunk and oblique--all very fine words, but if I could tell you the winner, I'm sure you'd have to approve. And there's the trap of a really fun password: not telling. For this past year, I've been typing the word "medulla" nearly every day and the only person who knows it is my sister. I remember one time at a sit-down Chinese restaurant with friends, we started talking about passwords. It's so strange to hear somebody tell you what their password is, like they're telling you something meant to be truly secret but so trivial a word. So over egg drop soup in quiet solemnity, a friend told me her password was "froggy," and I had to laugh because the idea of froggy having secret meaning and possibly unlocking bank accounts and private emails is completely crazy. So medulla2!, I say goodbye, and welcome in the new year of *******0!

urchin

: sea urchin on a dark sea street
a coral colored cup for sand dollars
the still sub-sheen of ocean
reflecting things we have names for :

I Hum For You

thrumming of life
oh heartbeat of urban earth
oh dictation of vibrant breath
your rhythm is the synchronization of footsteps
in spots of hereness and thereness
your manmadeness makes long lines
exact change and perfect thirds
revolving doors on a revolving planet
and my manufactured jeans are a lizard skin
i shed at night
and boots are for puddles
and pendulums are for clocks
and cuckoos are for fairy tale forests.
i feel like hatching
cracking and peeling me
hard-boiled or bubbly and strong
put in a mug at sunrise
and drained at taps.

see, its easier to look out
to take with my eyes and expel with my lips
and carry joy on the surface of my skin
of a non-porous variety
oh world, you belong to me as certainly as i to you.