I am singing Beatles songs out loud, walking in circles around 42nd Street ... got to get you into my life; hey, Dude; ...

When you get to the bottom you go back to the top of slide...

Blahblahblah. Beatles songs I kinda know the words to. Sung to tunes whose micro-tones and missed notes I can't quite duplicate, in such a way that I sound foolish, not market-wise off-pitch enough to be charismatic. Or vulnerable. Or worth more than, than ... than Bob Barker.

The Beatles and Elvis are rolling around on the mattress inside my head.

Sometime during late October, 1997, I am walking around New York City for the first time in 6 months. Can not quite get over that feeling, driving the cheap U-Haul from Atlanta through the nasty maze of the George Washington Bridge. Eight bucks toll. Welcome to New York.

I didn't care about the 8 bucks. It could have been 40. This was the moment of return. And I didn't know the George Washington Bridge from my asshole in the morning but tonight I remember every piece of it (the bridge) as it blasted me by.

Arrows and spray-paint-covered signs noisily pointing me to Route 9a. The West Side Highway. There might have been Christmas lights and choirs of the unemployed and neon "HAPPY BIRTHDAY JESUS" signs but for the season.

Careening that truck with most of my earthly possessions (and several spiritual ones) off the bridge and around the circular exit I knowingly glanced over my left shoulder and saw through those thick Northern Manhattan trees the very building in which I once lived.

177th Street. Spanish Harlem, it was sometimes called. 9 Cabrini, #3-C. $240 a month. Crack and weapons and kids and don't forget The Club.

In that split moment of distraction and hugging the road in front of me it all unraveled. The disappointment. The unexpressed anger. Those months of unemployment. Those weeks rolling around Fort Tryon Park in the dark of night. The Monday afternoon when I almost bought the gun, the nights I spent wishing I had it, and the shrill panic that takes me today any time I remember those days.

The hard liquor. The congested poetry. My sweaty hunger for party lines. The snot of life.

The truck lurched toward the curb and I snapped my head back to the road before me, righting the wrong way of the steering wheel and resuming my life of rectitude.

The pouring rain drowned everything, and before I could mutter any nonsense to myself I was home. I was in New York, where the West Side Highway flushed me back. The Hudson River to my right, the people to my left, the cars in front of and behind me. My fists beat at the steering wheel, I shouted right out loud and smiled and laughed and looked around and tasted the air and the rain roaring across my face through the open window. I tried to wipe it over myself like Water. I was alive and I was free. From my head down to my socks I writhed with life. I nearly steered into the cheap Cadillac that tried to pass me. My feet left the ground, they left the gas pedal, the brakes. They left this goddam planet right along with the rest of my body.

And I knew it would be this way. This trip, like the first time I moved to New York on October 20, 1990, was an escape from one of the many prisons I've made for myself.

The rain poured and poured and the drive from 177th Street to 21st Street is all in a cluster of delirium now. I exuberantly heaved my boxes and bags and nonsense into storage closets on West 21st Street. It was late in the afternoon and I had eaten nothing but coffee and apples since New Jersey that morning, but I knew I had to lose the truck. Had to see my friends, had to talk to their voicemails and tell them I was here.

My bag was heavy and my knees were weak, I just could barely stand upon my own two feet, I'm proud to say that she's my, buttercup, I'm in love ... {{thud}} ... I'm all shook up.

Unlike their counterparts down in Atlanta, the U-Haul Representatives in New York talked at me like I was a prisoner; the stink of grass saturated the West 23rd Street location, and one individual damn near punched me in the face just for showing up. Everyone there was pissed off and high and in an instant so was I.

I was commanded to "PUT THE GODDAM DOLLY OVER THERE!" Forcibly reminded to "DO IT! OVER THERE! DO IT NOW! PUT IT THERE!"

I don't remember the rest. Everyone was yelling, everyone was ignoring everyone else. Customers were angry and burping invective but the U-Haul employees were the ones in charge. Don't ever forget that, either.

After a full hour of standing in one place someone behind a counter handed me a 6-foot-long receipt and I got the fuck outta there.

The rain had stopped and I walked east toward Queens, north toward 9 Cabrini, west toward nowhere, north again toward Fort Tryon Park, south (just for the hell of it) toward Macy's, back north toward nowhere, east on 42nd toward The Square, north, west, east, south, up, down, left and right, outside, inside, pins, needles, beer, wine, naked ladies, Roman-Catholic propaganda, not-fresh peanut butter cups, hands to shake, assholes to ignore, spinning around to do, spinning and throwing things and waiting for the rain to come again and smiling and bringing my fists to my chest and looking back again. To the left. To the left. Lower. No, not that low, that's my asshole. Higher. To the left. Over your shoulder.

It has to be this way. It is always there. The danger. The gun. The knife. The Easy Answer. The way to stop busting up into obviousness any time someone lets me talk too long without interrupting.

I reached 50th Street and saw the place where I shall work for the next period of corporate oblivion. Unlike past years, I pretty much ignored the place this time, and headed south.

Crossing 47th Street an angry, red-eyed black woman grabbed my arm and shouted "EXCUSE ME. I NEED A WHITE MAN TO HAIL ME A CAB." She was angry as hell but I ignored her, wrenching my arm from the tight clutch of her palm (which felt erotic).

My head still reeled from the stink of marijuana back at the U-Haul place, my body still wrecked itself from not eating that day.

I reached the three-way intersection of Broadway, Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street. A feisty young man in an apron with pockets full of paper thrust a flyer at me. He was an employee of the Kit-Kat Club, a drab strip club in midtown where boobs taste like garbage.

I ignored him, and walked out a little way into 42nd Street. A moment later I turned to my left, and he was standing beside me in the street, the man from the Kit-Kat Club wearing the apron with the clip-art naked ladies. He locked his eyes into mine and, right there on the "Crossroads of the World," he asked me:

"ARE YOU SORAB-HEE?"

I shot him a hard, short chuckle and replied "Who's asking?"

To which he said, straightening up and then throwing both arms out of his apron "My name is *not* Matthew."

He looked maniacal. He unintentionally tossed a few dozen Kit-Kat flyers to his left, and a few dozen more to his right. He scrambled to pick some of them up. My mind flashed back to 1991 and the job at Tower Records at Lincoln Center. For weeks all any of us there could talk about was the hot job opening listed in the Village Voice.

For 7 bucks an hour you could stand out on the corner of 72nd Street and Broadway dressed as a carrot handing out health food flyers.

Dressed as a carrot. As I am right now.

And in those days 7 bucks sounded like the salary you could build a future on.

I turned my shoulder toward the desperate, lonely guy, cocked my left eyebrow and walked all the way out into 42nd street toward the subway, leaving Kit-Kat Matthew chasing after hundreds of naked lady flyers and thrusting his ass up at everyone.

For the next several minutes I threaded my body through the N and R subway platforms and felt the thrill of hundreds and thousands of bodies pouring over me.

In retrospect being recognized like that at such a location should have made me happy. Instead I panicked. Eyeballs everywhere. Everyone who looked at me, everyone who made eye contact, everyone who decided not to shove me onto the subway tracks -- it felt like everyone recognized me, everyone knew the stories, everyone must want more, must spend nights raping me and holding me and kicking me and leaving me somewhere in the park.

And I don't remember any "Matthew."

Now I am sitting here at home and I have to ask: Why this place? Why New York? Why does this place feel so much like home? Why New York City? Why not Florida, where I grew up? Why not The Sahara, the place of my earliest living memory? Why not Bangkok, Vientiane, Brussels, London? Why not your city, your corner bar, your car home, your bedroom, your mouth? Why not somewhere in that space between the site of a years-ago lover and the dry clenching of my chest?

I can't even tell you, there are not words sweet enough, there are not sentences perfect enough. There is the air around me. The blankets on top of me. The beautiful sounds of the night that hug and hold my naked ass and gnaw on the rest of me sleeping through the night and waking to this fabulous hard-on. The feeling of life, the feeling of the hundreds of lives that lived in these walls, in this apartment, 10,000 lives lived in this building, a million lives lived in all the buildings I can see from here, 20,000,000 lives came and went through these very streets in my lifetime, and here am I at the march of time, stamping my feet across the raging rapid of the United States of America, spinning foolishly in these streets and gasping at the air I mistakenly and outright stupidly chose not to breathe.