Even before I left, Kaye and I had talked about her coming up from Alabama to visit me. But she was paying for our two-bedroom apartment and her car on her own. She had too many expenses and I was too broke. It didn’t seem likely that I was going to see her anytime soon.
We also talked about her maybe coming up to live with me. She said she would but never sounded very certain. She still had school to finish and she was on a scholarship. But I wanted her to come up and at least see the city before she made her choice.
My dad ended up solving everything. He bought her some plane tickets. She would arrive in Philadelphia on Saturday morning and leave Sunday night. It was late June. I hadn’t seen Kaye in over three months.
It was a bright and hot morning when I picked her up from the airport. As I drove back to the Mad Poet’s place, we were mostly silent. She seemed to be smiling. But was she? No, just squinting the sunlight out of her eyes as it came through the car window.
I parked next to the sidewalk in front of the Mad Poet’s townhouse. Kaye got out of the car and looked around. She had heard me talk about the place plenty of times but she obviously wasn’t quite prepared for the reality of it. She was in the thick of a real East Coast slum, the smell of piss and booze all around her. She tried to take it all in, looking at the boarded-up ice cream shop across the street, then at the brown water running down the sidewalk and the broken forty-ounce beer bottles in front of the next door neighbor’s front steps. Kaye scrunched her nose and her glasses slid down a little. She tipped them back in place.
“You like it here?” she said.
“It’s not bad.” I said.
I must have seemed insane. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Kaye had asked who the fuck I was and what I had done with her husband. There’s nothing I could have said to soothe her.
We went inside and the Mad Poet met us in the hallway. He shook my hand and then hugged Kaye.
“Ah!” he said. “So this is who he’s been talking about all this time! You’re even prettier than he described.” I had barely told him anything about Kaye, but I was glad he had my back.
Kaye smiled and said hello. The Mad Poet gave her a great bearhug, picking her up and twirling her around a little.
“Well,” he said, “youse guys should be alone for a while.” He winked at me.
We went upstairs to my room. Besides my desk, my computer and the jumble of blankets that I used as a bed, there was nothing in the room except a few piles of books that I had bought while I was in Philly. And everything was layered in dust. Kaye bit her lip as she took it all in. She sat down on my computer chair. I sat down on my pile of blankets. Neither of us said anything for a while.
“Nice place,” she said, finally. “Looks like you’re doing well for yourself.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
“You really like it here?”
I nodded.
“Look,” Kaye said, “I’m not moving up here.”
“I’m not moving back to Alabama,” I said.
“I know. You don’t have to. But I have a year or so left of college and I don’t want to start over. Not now. Not with my scholarship. If I came up here, I’d never finish school.”
“Fuck college,” I said. “Just come live with me.”
“I’m gonna be the first person in my family to graduate,” she said. “I’m gonna finish.”
I shrugged. “I just don’t see what the big deal is. Wouldn’t you rather be with your husband?”
“I didn’t know I’d be forced to make a choice.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“A year’s a long time for married people to be apart,” I said.
“We’ll be all right.”
“Is it over?” I said.
“Not unless you want it to be,” Kaye said.
“I love you,” I said. And I did.
I crawled over to the chair and started to kiss her on the knee. Then I kissed her thigh. I stood up and kissed her lips. I took her by the hand and led her to my pile of blankets.
We got naked and fucked. The whole thing only lasted a few minutes. I quickly came inside her. Then it was over.
Afterward, I sat up against the wall and lit a cigarette.
“You’ve started smoking again?” she said.
“Old habits,” I said. “You know how it is.”
“Not really,” she said. “You seem like a child. It’s like you’re regressing or something.”
“It happens,” I said.
“I guess.”
“So what we just did, what did it mean?”
She paused for a second. “Neither of us has had sex in a while.” I was instantly deflated.
I finished my cigarette and put it out in an ashtray near the makeshift bed. Then I lay down with my head on her breasts. Eventually we both fell asleep and napped for a few hours.
When we woke up the Mad Poet was standing in the doorway.
“Youse guys wanna go get something to eat?” he said.
He took us to Gino’s, a pizza place on 40th Street that we both liked. We sat in a booth toward the back of the place, near a large window. There was a group of five hipsters outside, at a table on the patio, smoking and drinking cheap beer.
The Mad Poet doused his vegetarian pizza in parmesan and hot red peppers and smiled at Kaye. “So, how you like Philly so far?” he said.
“I haven’t seen much of it,” Kaye said.
“Yeah,” the Mad Poet said, “it ain’t a bad place. It’s a place for pirates. And artists.”
“I think you can be an artist anywhere,” Kaye said.
“Kaye’s a great photographer,” I said. “Remember those pictures she took at the Chicago reading?”
“I remember that,” he said. “Freakin’ great work, Kaye. I mean, just really inspired shit. There’s a lot of photographers here, of course. I’m tellin’ ya, this is an artist town.”
“Yeah,” Kaye said. “I guess.”
“Hey,” the Mad Poet said, “Youse guys wanna go to the Hydrojoinian Jungle house later? They’re having a cookout, I think. And practice, of course.”
“Sure,” Kaye said. “Sounds fun.”
Shit. I had told Kaye over the phone about the Hydrojonian Jungle but always made sure to downplay their insanity. Now she was going to see the whole scene in person. I knew Kaye wouldn’t be down with it.
The Hydrojonian Jungle was a band and a group of sideshow performers. They had fire breathers, sword swallowers and even a woman who ate crickets. They practiced Saturday nights in a spacious three-story house off Baltimore Street where most of them lived. The practices almost always turned into insane all-night parties. Jimmy Woosterfield, the lead singer and a sort of general director-in-chief of the group, was known for his outrageous Surrealist happenings, like the infamous “clown crawl” where a couple dozen people in makeup and clown clothes went from bar to bar on South Street, shocking certain patrons, amusing others. The clowns got rowdier as they got drunk. They capped the night with seven bare clown asses pressed against the window of a posh bourgeois restaurant, horrifying the patrons, especially the women, who were dining.
And the scene could turn violent. Just before I arrived in Philadelphia, Jimmy Woosterfield had punched the Mad Poet for no apparent reason. He just walked up to him, hit him in the face and then walked away. And Jimmy had once dressed as a female clown at band practice, complete with a dress and shaved legs. The wife of a popular West Philly poet was offended.
“You fucking sexist pig,” she said. “If you really want to know what it’s like to be a woman, then you’ll have to get raped.” And then she put her hands around his throat and tried to choke the life out of him. The other band members pulled her off of him but he had marks on his throat for days.
There was no way to prepare a good Catholic girl for a scene like that. So I didn’t say anything. I figured
that what will be will be. Or will be worse.
We got to the house around four in the afternoon and walked around to the backyard. The cookout was already in full swing. There were already about fifteen people in the backyard, lounging on the porch with a cheap can of beer or sitting in the grass talking. Mary Thumb was cooking veggie burgers on the grill. Then we saw a skinny gutter-punk kid stapling dollar bills into Axel Abel’s muscular chest. Axel was a performer renowned for his feats of pain endurance, like lying on a bed of nails or lifting stuff with his nipples. He loved the sight of blood, especially his own. Kaye cupped her hands over her eyes.
“Why is that man being abused?” she asked. “Doesn’t that hurt?”
“I imagine,” I said. “But after a while you get used to it. You can get used to just about anything.”
“I guess so,” she said.
Mary Thumb saw the two of us and waved. Then she came over and gave me a hug. She was a tall girl, over six feet, with greasy black hair. She was chunky in all the right places and I had wanted to get with her since I first met her. Unfortunately, she was hung up on someone else.
“Hey,” she said. “What’s been going on, you?”
“Hey, Mary,” I said. “This is my wife, Kaye.”
Mary shook Kaye’s hand. “Great to finally meetcha! Hey, I’ve got some chicken grilling for you carnivores. Come over and fix yourself a plate.”
I told her we would.
She walked away and then Jimmy Woosterfield came over. He was wearing his clown pants, green with black polka-dots. And a wifebeater. His thick black chest hair sprouted out from underneath the shirt. He handed me a beer and then started to hand one to Kaye.
“No thanks,” she said.
“This is my wife,” I said.
“Oh, wow, man! That’s cool. I didn’t even know you were married.”
“I guess I’m not important enough to mention,” Kaye said. A chill ran up my back.
I was sure I had mentioned my wife to Jimmy before. But not that often, and Jimmy was prone to forget things anyway since he was always either high or drunk. But saying what he said didn’t help my situation. How could it? I was right fucked.
The night went on. Kaye and I ate a little and talked. I drank my beers a little too quickly. Then we went inside to the living room and sat down on a sunken leather couch so that we could hear the band practice in a room across the hallway. The musicians started to tune their instruments.
“I want to leave,” Kaye said. “I don’t feel comfortable.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You’re safe. It’s cool.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“Nothing’s going to happen. Don’t worry, OK?”
An hour passed, Kaye and I mostly silent and listening to the music and watching the people around us get high. I had finished a six pack. Kaye was still complaining, saying she wasn’t having a good time, she was uncomfortable, she wanted to leave. But by then there was nothing doing. The Mad Poet’s apartment was a mile and a half away and I was afraid that I was drunk enough to get us lost if I tried to walk her home. And now the Mad Poet was so fucking high that he had become the Otter King.
“I am the Otter King!” he said, pointing at Kaye. Then he charged toward her and started to poke her on her sides and belly.
“Stop,” she said. “Just stop.”
The Mad Poet looked puzzled. But he backed off and went to the other side of the room and sat down on another couch next to a pretty blonde.
“What’s your sign?” he said.
We were going to have to wait for the Mad Poet to sober up before we could go home. And who the fuck knew when that would be?
So we sat in silence and listened to the Hydrojonian Jungle practice their jazz-rock. I kept drinking. But I wasn’t in the mood to party anymore. I was drinking so that I might forget that Kaye was sitting next to me.
It was nearly one in the morning before we climbed into the back seat of the Mad Poet’s old red Dodge Neon and started heading back to the townhouse.
Even when he was sober, the Mad Poet’s driving was frightening. He would sometimes get only an inch or so from a car’s bumper if he thought they were going too slow. He would make illegal turns. He would cut other cars off without hesitation if he thought he needed to be in another lane. In essence, he was a typical Philly driver. Now, as we made our way home, he was going nearly seventy miles an hour down a narrow two lane street. He was blatantly running red lights. He was making turns so sharp that they lifted the wheels off the ground. Kaye dug her fingernails into my jeans during the entire horrifying ride. But we made it home fine. The Mad Poet was an artist when it came to reckless driving.
We went upstairs to my bedroom and Kaye got under the covers without even taking off her shoes. She pulled the blankets up to her neck and held them there tightly, even though it was hot outside. I took my clothes off and lay next to her. I tried to put my arm around her but she turned away. So I rolled over the other way and tried to get some sleep. But sleep wouldn’t come for another few hours. I just lay there, depressed.
The next day was one of the strangest of my life. Even now I don’t totally know how to explain it. But I’ll try.
I woke up after what seemed like just a few hours of sleep. I was parched and severely hungover. My head ached like hell. I felt like puking. I didn’t want to get up. But the sun shone through the dusty window and I knew it was beautiful outside. I woke Kaye up.
“Hey,” I said, “You feel like going to the art museum today? Just me and you?”
“Just us?” she said.
“No one else. Just us.”
I knew Kaye would like it. She would like it because she was an artist. Sometimes. When she wanted to be. She had a passion for photography. And she was good at it. Once, when we were on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama, she snapped a picture of me as I stood near the ocean. It turned out to be a photo of my bare feet and my ankles and the wet sand underneath. It was such a simple picture and yet it said so much about the peacefulness, the harmony of the moment. It wasn’t brilliant but it came close. A lot of her photographs were like that. Almost inspired but not quite. She was good but she would never be great unless she totally gave herself to her art, like I was trying to do in Philadelphia. She needed some madness. But in order to do that, she had to push herself to a place that she wasn’t willing to go. She wanted safety, she wanted comfort, she wanted routine. She wanted these things before anything else, even her art. And it showed. She would never be a great artist. But she would be good. And that was fine with her.
Still, she loved looking at great art. And that’s why she was happy to walk a couple of miles in the stale summer heat to spend a little while at the museum. She also wanted to be alone with me. At least that’s what I wanted to think.
We spent three hours at the museum. Kaye was interested in everything, so we went from room to room, quietly checking everything out. Neither of us talked much, about the artwork or anything else. We held hands as we walked around the place and everything seemed right. There was no tension between us. Kaye smelled good and looked pretty and nerdy and vulnerable and tough. I ran my fingers through her hair. I kissed her on the cheek.
By the time we left the museum I felt so close to Kaye that I had decided that I never wanted to leave her again.
Once we were outside again, I bought her some ice cream from a vendor on the sidewalk. We sat on the steps, on a far side, out of the way of tourists and students and families with small children. Cars moved bumper to bumper on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, honking their horns and yelling out their windows. I pointed out City Hall in the distance, with its enormous bronze statue of William Penn on top. I put my arm around her shoulders. I knew that somewhere inside my dehydrated body was a terrible hangover. But I was so overwhelmed with desire that I could barely feel it. I knew I w
as supposed to be sick. But I was feeling good.
“Listen,” I said, “let’s forget about your plane. Let me take you home.”
“You want to come home?” Kaye said. “To stay?”
“Yes.”
“But you love it here.”
“I want to make things better. I want to be with you.”
“OK,” she said. “Then let’s go home.”
And so we started on our way back to the Mad Poet’s townhouse, crossing the bridge over the Schuylkill and then making our way down Spring Garden Street, and into a poor residential area. The neglected apartment buildings with barred windows and broken tenants who sat on the front porches drinking forty-ounce beers had always seemed beautiful to me, but now they held a certain radiance about them, a glow. Trees seemed to dance for me. It was a private show, something that only I could see. It seemed vaguely erotic. The vision felt like an acid trip. Now I was a shaman, now I was a visionary, now I was a poet. Everything was good. I was losing my mind with love.
We got to the Mad Poet’s place around three in the afternoon. He was sitting on his couch in the living room, watching a ballet program on PBS.
“Hey, man,” I said. “I’m leaving. I’m going to take Kaye back to Alabama.”
The Mad Poet stood up. “Are ya sure?”
“Yeah.”
“But what about Cleveland?” the Mad Poet said. Cleveland. Shit. I had completely forgotten. The Mad Poet and I had been invited to read at a small literary festival in a few weeks.
“I’ll make it up to Cleveland,” I said. But I wasn’t sure I was telling the truth.
“OK,” he said. “I’ll see youse in Cleveland, then.”
And that was it. Kaye and I spent about an hour loading my books and computer in the car and then cleaning my room.
With Kaye sitting in the passenger side of my car, I stood on the sidewalk and said goodbye to the Mad Poet.
“Cleveland,” he said. “Don’t forget.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“So youse got everything?”
“I think so,” I said. “But if I left anything, it’s no big deal.” The truth was that I had searched all over my room but had been unable to find my wedding ring.
“It was great having you here,” he said. “Really great. I’m gonna miss ya, man.”
“I’m gonna miss you too,” I said.
There wasn’t much else to say. We shook hands and then hugged. Was the Mad Poet about to cry? It looked as if he was trying to fight back some tears. But I couldn’t be sure. He did look sad, though, and for the first time, looked his age. He was in his mid-fifties, old enough to be my father. But he always looked younger in his wizard goatee and dreadlocked ponytail. He had a youthful innocence about him.
Kaye and I were soon on the road and I started to feel the familiar half-mad anticipation that comes to me just before an all-night drive. It was the exact feeling I had when I left Kaye in the middle of the night nearly three months before.
But the feeling didn’t last very long. I missed the onramp once, then circled around and missed it again. I got frustrated and pounded on my steering wheel.
“Fuck!” I said.
“It’s all right,” Kaye said. “Just calm down.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe this is a fucking sign or something.”
“You can go back,” Kaye said. “My plane doesn’t leave for a couple hours yet.”
“No,” I said. “I want to do this. I just hate fucking driving in this city. Fucking makes me nervous. Fuck it. I’m not gonna miss the exit next time.”
And I didn’t. We were heading south. In fourteen hours, we would be back in Alabama.
I drove most of the way. After we stopped for gas in Maryland, Kaye took over. But she only burned half a tank before she got tired and I had to take over again. Once in the passenger seat, she quickly fell asleep. She slept through the night and I ended up driving the rest of the way. It was a lonely drive, over half of it through Virginia, where the cops are always looking to give out a speeding ticket. I drove the speed limit or below through the state, over five hundred miles. And all the while, thinking. Thinking. Thinking. What the fuck was I doing? Why had I left Alabama in the first place if only to come back three months later? Was this giving up? Was it quitting? Am I meant to fail at everything I try? What would I do for a job? Would I go back to college? Would I keep in touch with my friends in Philadelphia? Would Kaye really move up to Philly after she graduated?
The more I thought about the last question, the more I became convinced that she wouldn’t. Most of her family lived in Alabama. She didn’t hate the place like I did. In fact, she liked it. Fuck knows why. It would be even harder to get her to leave after she graduated. There would be talk of starting a family, of settling down, of finances. I could see her lecturing me about how the living was cheap down there, how we could get more house for our dollar down there.
It suddenly occurred to me how hopeless the situation was. And I started to remember clearly why I had left in the first place.
I loved Kaye to death. But it seemed as if the Fates hadn’t planned on us staying together. There were things that neither of us wanted to give up.
I was exhausted. Between the thinking and the long hours on the road, I began to succumb to road-lunacy. The coffee and sodas only did so much to keep me awake. I moved my eyes in rapid motions, bouncing from spot to spot on the highway, so that I wouldn’t focus too much on one thing for too long and begin to fall asleep. I slapped my face, I turned the radio up. I turned the air-conditioning up to freezing.
When we finally did make it to our apartment in Montevallo, I left my stuff in the car and went straight to bed. I just flopped down and fell almost instantly to sleep, with all my clothes on. Kaye took my shoes off and covered me up. Then she left to run some errands and see her parents.
I’m not sure how long I slept, but it wasn’t long. Five hours at the most. But my phone was ringing loud and I tried to ignore it but whoever was trying to get in touch with me kept calling back. By the sixth or seventh time, I figured it might be important and forced myself to open my eyes and see who it was.
It turned out to be Rass.
“Where the hell are you?” he said.
Shit. I had totally forgotten about work.
“Hey, man,” I said. “I’m really sorry but my wife missed her plane. I had to drive her back to Alabama.”
“You should have call,” he said. “I have things to do. I can’t be at the newsstand all day. I should fire you. You know this. You are totally unreliable. So when you be back anyway?”
“Wednesday,” I said. “I’ll be back on Wednesday.”
“OK. This not good, man. I’ll not forget this. But you come in on Wednesday. Noon.”
“OK,” I said. “I’ll be there.”
And so it went. I was going to be back at work on Wednesday. I had thought about going back to Philly a lot on the drive down, but hadn’t made a decision. Not until Rass called. And that settled it. Of course, I had no idea what I was doing, and only a vague idea that I had made a mistake in coming back to Alabama. Leaving once was one thing. Leaving again, just hours after getting back was another, totally insane, thing. What was I doing? Where was I headed? I had no idea. All I knew was that I was going back to Philadelphia. I was going back and it was going to be the last time I would see Kaye. There was no way our relationship could survive my leaving a second time. But it was happening. I had made my decision. I didn’t know left from right. But I didn’t care anymore. I had submitted to the insanity. I was off my rocker, a total lunatic. But I didn’t care anymore.
Later that night Kaye came home. She was smiling, happier than I had seen her in a long time. I was sitting on the couch, reading a book. She put some groceries on the kitchen counter and sat down next to me. She put her arm around
my shoulders.
“Bad news,” I said. She took her arm off my shoulder and laid her hands in her lap.
“You’re leaving again,” she said. She sighed and swore underneath her breath.
“This place doesn’t feel right. I don’t think I should have come back. I think I made a mistake.”
“You made a mistake?” she said.
“I think so.”
“OK. You do what you have to do. I don’t care anymore.”
“Come with me,” I said. “Please.”
“And what? Stay with that friend of yours?”
“Why not?” I said. “Just for a little while. Until we can find our own place.”
“No,” Kaye said. “I can’t. I told you, I’m finishing school. Here. If you want to go, that’s fine. But I can’t come with you. I told you that.”
“I shouldn’t have come back here in the first place. It’s not right.”
“What’s not right about it? I’ve been through a lot because of you. And I’m still willing to be with you. That should say a lot.”
“It does,” I said.
“You can’t take the car,” Kaye said.
I laughed. I thought she was joking at first. Then I realized she was serious.
“I pay for that car. It’s mine.”
“It’s in my dad’s name. He didn’t want you to take it the first time. He was thinking of getting a lawyer to get it back. But I convinced him not to. I’m not going to let you take it again.”
I stood up and began pacing about the living room. “Fuck!” I said. “You’re being totally unfair. How am I supposed to get back? I’m stuck here without that car. You’re trying to get me to stay. Why? Why do you want me to stay when you know I’d be miserable?”
“Miserable? Look, Just calm down, OK? Yeah, you can use the car if you stay. But my dad is going to be pissed if you take it again. And I’m not going to defend you this time.”
“Un-fucking-believable,” I said. “You’re just going to use whatever you can to keep me here. I’m trapped here without that car. I’m completely at your mercy.”
“You’re not taking the car.”
You’re not taking the car.
You’re not taking me.
You can’t have me.
Not anymore.
You’re lost.
Lost.
There’s no sense in going any further with this. The conversation went on for over an hour. We yelled at each other. We let everything out. I can’t go any further. The details are lost anyway. And I don’t want to remember them. Not even two years later. Not even at twenty eight years old. It’s too much. I am a creature of crisis.
I did end up leaving Alabama, early the next morning. My dad bailed me out again, buying me a one-way plane ticket back to Philadelphia. I never saw Kaye after that.
Transition (or Treason)