P) Purlieus Pabulum Pilgrim Power

Beware women grown old

who were never anything but young

-Charles Bukowski

I dated a citizen of the world once. I was in the eighth grade when it was announced that students who were interested in participating in a Shakespeare workshop with a group of thespians from Toronto should be excused from 5^th and 6^th periods and would they please report to the theatre. Jon and I were eager to never hear anything related to our Biology class ever again. Happiness was right around the corner.

She was a citizen of the world. Her father was black from Los Angeles; her mother was half Korean from New York. She had lived on both coasts. In Texas, and Puerto Rico, had been to three European countries and somewhere in Asia, once.

She had never been to Africa. But one night at a bar in Eau Claire I met a girl walking away from New York whose name was Mary and I kept after her until the cities collapsed all around us lying intertwined and pandering on the couch, and I found out that she had been to East Africa doing thesis work in Ethnic Women's Studies. Discouraged, I let myself out while she taught 6 or 7 languages to her roommate's cat.

Don't look up. That isn't meant to be important.

There is no way that things are supposed to be. She stopped writing to me when I stopped writing to her and she went back to Africa and got her doctorate and now she's married to some guy in Afghanistan who's neck is as big as my thigh and who killed a little guy just last week and has been feeling remorse about it ever since.

There's no way that things are supposed to be and we all get a little crazy, or at least a little lost. I was watching the sparrows peck at the snow around the great brick brewery stacks on a cloudy day in winter when the sun is an idea that hasn't yet been scrubbed through the veneer of reality. Searching for friends. I stood smoking cigarette after cigarette thinking about the citizen of the world I'd dated and wondering what became of her. Puffing out my breath and looking over my shoulder into the dark bar until it became the only light in the gathering dark night. The dark is cold and one swarms to the light.

“You ever spend a winter high up in the Northern Provinces, read Undaunted Courage. It's like taking three trips in one go. It'll help you settle down into your rocking chair and turn you into a man.” He took another shot and chased it with half his beer. “All men are dead. You can't really be a man until yer dead. Until then, you're just living, and that's not a man. That's pain.” We waited, baited, and I went back.

Oh the clicks and trips one hears in winter. Which way now?

Back and forth across the stage they prance in their tights and a tall-boots as we pilgrims stream in. This holy land in the abscess of the school auditorium where merry actor saints congregate to administer to us their Shakespeare. “Pair off into groups eh?” says the curly-haired wench while the thin-bearded knave dispenses sides to rehearse.

I am paired with her.

“Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.”

“Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too? So they’re talking about kissing each other right. Sort of dancing around it.” She spun around me. We turned in tandem like a tango while she read:

“Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.”

“O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;

They pray — grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.”

“Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake. What’s that mean?”

“When they’re talking about saints y’know, the only saints they would’ve known would’ve been carvings. Like statues of saints, which don’t move,” said the knave.

“Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.”

We ran through it a few times, getting the gist for the meter and the meaning. Beneath the little bright lights we demonstrated our parts for the observer who had ceased making his rounds as our parts were so well done. He reconvened the pairings and asked them all to watch us, we two bringing more to bear on the scene than any of the others. Her eyes open to mine, voice cracking as she offered “Then, have my lips. For the sin that they have took” and her long neck upturned to me.

“Sin from thy lips?” I felt guilty somehow and yet, here we were; “O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again.” Then we pretended to kiss and I blushed as she clenched my hand and we took a bow.

“That’s how it’s done y’know? You see the way they look into each others eyes?”

You learn about love by loving. You learn about death by dying.

I looked into Mary’s eyes in the photograph from her wedding in my mind while tapping my foot against the table leg, and signaling Jon over by the counter to get me another drink.

“She has eyes like green tart.” He says.

“Who does?”

“The bartender. I’m feeling an impulse to swoop back over there and say some more stupid things to her.”

“Stupid things?”

“Whatever comes into my failing mind.”

“Come with me,” she whispered as she took my hand. Our performance a few days earlier had simultaneously served the purpose of auditions for drama club, or “Players” as they were called, and now between rehearsals of our scenes, she led me around backstage. There were carvings on all the dark walls, dates, initials of actors, their characters and their shows. It was like entering a catacomb. We couldn’t make a noise. The red EXIT light illumined the stairwell where we found two pink chairs and pulled them close together. As we leaned in close I closed my eyes. Her lips were soft and cool, her tongue was warm and wet. I had never tasted inside anyone else’s mouth before. My tongue, with a whole new territory to explore, went a little wild. She pulled away and opened her eyes. Pulled me in closer and we did it again and again.

But kissing her in public was a whole different matter. True, she had just moved into town, but did that make it okay to start “going out” with her? She met me in the hall between classes and wanted me to hold her hand and walk her to class. Was that alright? Was that what people did? If it was then I didn’t want to be one of those people. This upset her. She called me that night and asked me to come over. The citizen of the world had run away from home and was staying with a friend only 45 blocks away. I ran the whole damn thing.

Are you still following me Owen? We only have each other. And the way.

Mary was walking away because her drunk friend had deserted. We searched all of downtown, back and forth until we’d wiped the streets clean. There were tremors then that only I could feel, some sense of everything being alright if we’d only stay in one place, which ended up being Mary’s single bed meant for singly sleeping. First we talked of every which way but empty topics, her father’s orchard or my dreams of seeing Turkey, hot and cold summers inside or the harbors of the heart and mind. She was too much woman, I was not enough man. She told me she hoped to go back to Africa. I yearned for a bigger bed.

Jon was hitting on the bartender who would later become his girlfriend, quickly and helplessly unraveling his soul before her smiling immortal self. The goddess, he would come to call her. Bones, breasts, breath and music to the rhythm of his heart. Jon’s a sentimentalist. I am a reminiscentalist.

45 blocks from home I arrived sweaty and out of breath to her open armed embrace. “Come with me,” she said as she took my tender hand. We had discussed already the impending summer vacation, how my Dad was taking me on a trip across the country, and she led me around back of the house where we sat on the roof of an old dog house in the shade. There were trees all around us, and we kissed again. Her breath tasted like cigarettes then, and beer. All of her was alive and I felt like I was dreaming.

I was dreaming. There was no way things were supposed to be, they just were. And it seems like we all get a little lost, or a little crazy. A little bit of both perhaps when I left New York with an old friend and ended up in a bar in Eau Claire where I’d been before, hoping not to run into a girl I’d met then, or her husband. It would be the death of me, to see anyone so happy.

She asked me to keep in touch, which I did more or less. But when the summer had ended I came home and found she’d moved again. She’d moved to New York. The leaves fell and gave way to snow and suffocation. I read Undaunted Courage and dreamed of going west and made it as far as Eau Claire. Eau Claire and Mary and memory. Mary married and was moving to New York.

The city was collapsing all around us, or was that snow? I was dead. I was a man. All the world was a show and all the players were pilgrims bound elsewhere. Pilgrims with thirsty lips and dirty hearts burning for the good clean certainty of the unknown.

Jon raised his glass: “Let's have a toast! To charity, wickedness, hope, and the day after tomorrow.” The Goddess smiled. Everyone smiled, and I smiled too. To being young and in love, I drank in to the future.