the hard look I gave my life, I remember its brevity

i went on vacation, adding somewhere between 800 and 1000 miles to the halfass SUV death trap I drive before spending some money on books: David Halberstam stuff, Michael Connelly mysteries, some newish fiction, and Pete Dexter’s collection of newspaper columns and other pieces. I think Mr Dexter makes the world more interesting.
Visiting a place of complicated personal significance gives a glisten to all perception’s edges. My abdominal muscles – I like that word a lot: abdominal – ache from all the laughter; other parts of the experience were like a Raymond Carver poem. I chewed on a bunch of memories and thought patterns and unspoken intimations about disappearing acts for eight hours today as I drove past mountain ranges and tributaries that served as an appropriately dramatic backdrop.
Always interesting, driving across a big state by yourself with the windows down all the way, a broken CD player, and enough nicorette gum to last twelve weeks. I am bone-weary and ready for normalcy.

Here is the last column from Mr. Dexter’s book, Paper Trails:

The kid was big, but he was a kid.
He was standing beside the drive-in window
at Church’s Fried Chicken on North Broad, asking the people who came by for
money. “Do you have some change so I could get somethin’ to eat,
sir?” He said it like it was memorized.
It was early last week, the
weather was catching up with the season. He had taken his arms out of his
shirtsleeves and put them underneath, trying to stay warm, so when he tapped on
the window I figured he had at least a machete under there.
“Get the fuck out
of here,” I said. I did that without thinking about it, the same way you
check for cars before you cross the street.
He looked at me, I looked at
him. He took his hand off the car and put it back underneath his
shirt. He began to shake, then he moved away. I turned the radio to
put the kid out of mind. If there is anything you have to know in a city,
it’s how to put things out of mind. If you can’t do it, you better not be
here.
I have been in Philadelphia more than six years. It took a
while, but I can do that now.
The kid moved back to the corner of the
building, stared at the car. I cold see him in the side mirror. He
looked like he was seventeen or eighteen, but you couldn’t tell. He looked
cold in ever way there is to be cold. I put him out of mind again, but
every time I looked in the mirror, he was standing there, black and cold and
angry, and he wouldn’t move away.
I don’t know exactly when it happened, but
somewhere along the line I got tired of victims in groups – women, blacks,
Puerto Ricans, gay, and all the self-promotional bullshit that went with it –
then I got tired of victims in person. I didn’t want to see the mother and
father nodded out on heroin at the Fox Theater Sunday afternoon while their
four-year-old kid tried to wake them up anymore.
I didn’t want to see
old people who had been mugged, or fourteen-year-old alcoholics or abused
children.
So, as much as you can in the city, I quit looking. At least
I tried to only look once. There is too much of it to carry around with
you. And to do that, you have forget that you have been hungry too.
The kid moved again, slowly across the parking lot to the garbage kin.
He began going through it a piece at a time.
I was a couple of years older
than this kid, but I went about a week once without anything to eat. In
Minneapolis, in the coldest winter, I was hungry enough to go through garbage,
but in the morning it had passed and what replaced it was just an empty, weak
feeling, and later on a dizziness when I stood up. And much later,
something inside that kept saying I was getting myself in serious trouble.
I
wondered if the kid had heard that too. If he knew what it meant. I
turned around and watched him a minute. He held the garbage close to his
face, then put it back in the bin. A piece of paper stuck to his hand, and
suddenly he was throwing things. Picking up cans and bags out of the bin
and throwing them back, over and over. A beat-up gray cat with milk in her
nipples jumped out of the other end of the bin.
He stopped and sat
down, exhausted. He put his face in his hands. I said it out loud,
so I could hear how it sounded. “Get the fuck out of here.”
I ordered
two chicken dinners and drove back around the lot to where the kid was
sitting. I don’t think he recognized me because he got up, tapped on the
window and asked for a quarter to buy something to eat. There was garbage
stuck to his chin.
I gave him one of the chicken dinners and said I was
sorry. “I didn’t see you were hungry,” I said. The kid was looking
at a two-dollar box of chicken with something close to love.
“Thank you,” he
said. “Thank you very much, thank you . . . “
“I’ve been in the city
too long.”
He studied me a minute. “Me too,” he said. Then he
took the chicken and walked over to his spot near the garbage and sat down to
eat it.
The cat came out of the weeds toward him, a step at a
time. The kid looked up and saw her. He tore a piece of meat off the
breast and stroked her coat while she ate.