A Cold, Dark Place

What do you know of loneliness? How familiar are you with the hollow emptiness that holds hands with abandonment, of that crippling ache as numbing as the chill that seeps through the thin windows, that causes the bubble-wrap insulation to crinkle with each frosty breath of December? The beer cans line the wall of the cracked closet in which I now huddle in the far corner; crouched like Gollum, my precious, my nocturnal eyes like saucers in this mineshaft that spans the length of the bedroom without a bed, my radar ears attuned to all foreign vibration: the crinkle of that plastic on the windows, the tree limbs scraping and tapping the roof, the whistle of the wintry wind through the eroded strata of this closet that insulates my frozen shell from the reality of what I’ve become. I wrap my arms around my shins and pull my knees to my chin and I shiver beneath the stiff mover’s blanket. Through the unevenness of the door and the floor I see the full-moon light that shimmers in through the thin, crystallized windowpanes of the echoing bedroom that has at no time been the sanctuary held in my childhood haven in Buffalo,

           where I would lie on the carpet in the afternoon sun that filtered in through the thin, crystallized panes of the transplanted country house, closing my eyes and feeling my gooseflesh rise. That country house, perfect for memories: the one with the trapdoor for the basement; the one with the radiator heating, the tall baseboards, the window shutters that actually shuttered. The one that buffeted the snow drifts in such a fashion that I could sled out of my bedroom window, right into the side of the neighbor’s house, but I (like most) was a pliable child who only whined when he was told to stop tracking snow into the house, what do you think this is, an amusement park? so I’d resort, then, to climbing out my other bedroom window, to roll across the sun-room roof, to then “parachute” into the snow mounds not three feet below. You’re still tracking snow into the house can you please just (not be a kid) grow up? so a couple of premature years later I grew up: I tried beer, and I liked it. I liked it so much that, one snowy night, I uncapped three of my step-father’s Genesee Cream Ales and rubber-banded the tops with cellophane and planted them in the snow, right below the sunroof from where I “parachuted.” I was going to parachute that night, get good and drunk in the snow, like an adult. Fortunately, I fell asleep before realizing that ill-fated plan,

           where these days, there is no falling asleep, not with this perpetual chill in this perpetually dim icebox of a house that seems to retain the temperatures, like a Yeti if I could afford a top-shelf tumbler, though alternative drinking vessels are for the privileged anyhow, like those who are allowed options. My options are decreasing, but I need more beer, and with the snow it’s been only beer. When I was a kid, bicycling was for recreation, even in the winter: we’d take our bikes to Delaware Park and strap on the bike skis and careen down that slope wanting to crash, for that was the hilarity of the thing. My bicycle today is a ten-speed-“anonymous donation” and I am twenty-five-years older, which makes the crashes far less hilarious; and today, bicycling is for necessity, and the liquor store is too far. Beer in the winter is like soup in the summer, but again: options,

           like those I had when I was a kid, sitting a foot away from the bunny-eared television, hoping the aluminum foil around the antennae did its job while I waited, waited for the B’s to roll back around on the chyron, CLOSED: BUFFALO PUBLIC SCHOOLS, hoping they’d announce it early enough so that I could still sleep over at Tristan’s. His parents were still married and they laughed together, and (I think?) they let us go out after dark to (throw snowballs at cars) make snow angels but I could just be making that up

           as I shake in my mineshaft, drifting in and out of the reverie of ago, when everything was simple and very little was serious, when snow was an exciting incidental and not a debilitating inconvenience, like this memory: it was the onset of the Blizzard of ’77, and we were stuck at school until well after sundown —teachers too, of course— but oh what fun it was, getting to hang out with my best friends even longer, flirting with the girls by calling them names, listening to the (cooler) teachers tell stories of when they were young. Mr. Rundell even said shit, which was awesome, though my mother didn’t take kindly to it,

           at all, in fact, when I told her the judge found no probable cause for that DUI pull back in the winter of ‘95, the one where I’d blown a .18 and I spent the night in jail because none of my mates at the rugby house was sober enough to pick me up. It was a quiet ride to the station, that night, in the back of the cruiser: there was a beautiful, silent snow fall; Christmas lights were twinkling on bush tops and roof gutters and, as we passed my own house, I saw with self-loathing the light still illuminated in my own bedroom, the light I’d purposefully left on should I have made it home too wasted. Despite the high blow and the first DUI exactly a year prior, my lawyer “convinced” the judge of no probable cause. “But you were drunk,” my mother said. “This makes no sense.” I hung up on my mother then. Thanks for the support, you bitch,

           though now, as I emerge from my lair on all fours, detritus of winter yearning to breathe free, I know that bitch was right: then, I was drunk; today, I am a drunk, the drunk, the one you see trying to navigate the car grooves in the filthy urban snow on his Schwinn Continental, locomotive clouds chugging from exasperated lungs. It is December and there are many who have already checked out in anticipation of the holidays: emails go unanswered, meetings get missed, postponements are made. “This sounds like an after-Christmas problem.” Many have options; they can do these things, “job security” I suppose. Me? I must layer, and hoping my tires are not flat I must strap on my backpack and ride the two miles to Nagi’s for beer and a dusty can of something to eat. These are my options.

Nagi’s will be a well-lighted place and not at all clean; there will be incense and toothless smiles and the twangy sound of sitar. The tiled floor will be damp from street snow that will have puddled around the men playing arcade gambling machines and smoking from pipes and hookahs and yelling at each other in unintelligible tongues. Nagi’s, like the cantina in Star Wars on this bitter cold night in December: you’d think those men were derelicts, the night walkers. Yet, there were their cars, right there in the parking lot; in framed pictures above Nagi’s head, there were their faces: smiling, toothlessly but together, with children and many, many relatives.

Together.

           As I straddle my bicycle, Nagi comes out and says, “Hey, you. Merry Christmas, yes?” He hands me a bag of boiled peanuts. The steam melts the frost that had already begun to form, again, on my eyebrows. As a kid in Buffalo, we would (literally) roast chestnuts over an open fire. The peanuts smell much better. I decide that I will lock my bike at Nagi’s and walk back to the house so I can cradle the warm bag, to crawl into my cave with much warmer hands.