I Don’t Belong Where the Good People Are

I Don’t Belong Where the Good People Are

By Robert Benn

            I think I understand now why The Doctor keeps the Tardis broken.  Making the plan destroys the mystery.  Knowing what to expect!  Well then why go if you know what’s there?  People, I watch them from overpriced cafes sometimes, my favorite is St. Mark’s square.  I like the children chasing the birds.  I feel hopeful in their astonishment and glee.  I sit there all day sometimes watching their parents ponder over maps, what used to be accordions of paper- the geometry mystifying them.  Then I would sip away, with truly mediocre coffee, the great wave of sadness knowing these people would have once chased pigeons too and some day the children will ponder over maps and agonize over seconds lost to inefficiency.  You may think the loss of accordion maps makes them less interesting to watch.  Oh the opposite.  Watching a spouse take the other’s phone, that is where the magic lives.  The look of panic, the utter frustration, the rage at seeing their phone being used incorrectly, but that’s tourists.

            If you want to see paradise, it is still Venice, just at night.  Sometimes I pick a cafe and a chair in the square and wait for the week to come around and meet me again.  Sometimes I avoid the tourism completely.  I still pick a cafe and a chair, but on a road where I only see a dozen people in the few hours it takes to enjoy a coffee.  Sometimes I rent a boat and drift from island to island where even fewer people amble about on what they consider scorching hot days.  After all the tourists’ money had been collected, the streets light up with ancient bulbs casting yellow light.  Children run after sometimes tattered, sometimes new balls, bouncing them off wells and benches scurrying from one side of the community courtyard to the other.  Then, at some irregular point, there is a crack in the wall just big enough for a person.  It is a road.  After a few feet, the children playing in the cool of midnight are gone from your world.  Silent, dark, winding both forward in as much as Venice has such a thing, and upward as the buildings topple at a glacial pace.  After a few turns, another courtyard with children chasing a ball from one side to the other and their elders sipping from tiny porcelain cups as though it were mid afternoon.  I never go there.  I never go anywhere.  When I find myself near, I swerve.

            I go days without speaking anything except a few words asking for one thing or another and then thank you.  I don’t know how many languages I can do that in.  Just that little bit is all you need to be polite. Don’t even need that to be there.  Still, it is just a question when you hear new words.  The longer I roamed, the quieter I became, the less people took note of me.  Sometimes I wondered if I weren’t imaginary.  Can something imaginary imagine itself?

            It is all starting to blend.  Rather, I am losing the interest in keeping it from blending.  Travel long enough.  Shoot, do anything long enough, and the details begin to wash away.  Yes.  You can snap into focus when you need to and take in the nuances necessary.  Save for a reason to, it all merges.  I have worked at hundreds of places.  A staggering number of them were pizza.  It doesn’t matter the country.  It doesn’t matter the language.  It doesn’t matter the continent.  Pizza is there.  And most of it is sold by people just scraping by with a couple of chairs behind a large glass pane looking in from the street.  Vagabond’s pro tip: Pizza.  It’s cheap.  It’s everywhere.  And they are almost always willing to take on someone, under the table, who knows what they are doing.  

            I have made pizza possibly every way.  I haven’t been to the far east yet.  I was on my way when I got distracted.  After all those pizzas.  With all the ways I know to make them.  When I want one, it’s Margarita.  Just a plane cheese pizza.  Steven King was right.  The whole world is right there in Maine.  It is right there wherever you are when you see past the toppings.  

            Maybe reincarnation is real.  Maybe, though, it isn’t about karma.  Maybe it is when you have been here so long you can’t tell the differences anymore and just stop playing, at least for a while.

            A while ago I rolled the dice, and I surrendered to it ever since.  I have never known “when” I am in the grander sense.  I rarely know what day it is.  I have no earthly idea how old I am.  Until this trip, I always knew where I was.  I swore I’d never go back to knowing where I was again.  

            When I say I rolled the dice, I mean I rolled an eight.  I traveled by train for eight days.  I’d ride for a while, get off, wander a bit, maybe find a hostel, maybe sit at the station until the next interesting train showed up.  Until the eighth day.  Vagabond pro tip:  When you sleep at the train station or a thirty monies hostel, the first class EuroRail pass is worth the money.  Unlimited or twenty day per month.  I prefer the unlimited as I don’t track time; except for this time.  

            I don’t know the name of the town nor do I want to.  You don’t use names in a one night stand.  I didn’t track my direction or any local foods as I wandered.  I keep a routine of cold cuts and regional baguette.  It’s cheap.  I can get it from any store.  It lets me people watch in their natural habitat.  In the freezer section, tuna on a pizza tends to mean more central and southern Europe.  Corn on that same pizza, Germany.  Onion topped churches, as far south as you can go before the Alps.  I hadn’t seen either of those at all often at first and less so to not at all by the eighth day.  Spires.  Love me a spire.  

            That morning, I did the best I could to not notice the name of the major hub station.  I rolled the dice again and got seven.  Seventh stop on the regional line. There were a few.  I just picked one.  Time was just arriving in a new town filled me with anticipation so much so that I bounded onto the platform eager to see all the nuances.  I saw Europe as “what if” time travel.  Little differences.  It suited me to puzzle out where the divergence may have happened to make this place instead of another.  Perhaps that began my slide into malaise until everything became a deviation from the core taco.

            Oh, sorry.  The core taco theorem.  Every culture has a specialty, on the go, hand held, or originally so, delicacy consisting of some form of flat or flattened bread, meat, seasoning, and garnishment.  The core and best example of this is the taco.  Donner: Pita sliced open stuffed with seasoned meat and garnishment.  Indian food?  The best Indian food is in the Costa del Sol.  I don’t quite remember where.  It was in a strip of storefronts that bridge the cities there.  I’d say strip mall, but they lack organization.  The same depth of dishevelment is there, otherwise what’s the point?  However, they lack the baked in sand and water stained rust that mark a true strip mall.  I said I wanted my dinner so hot the cooks were laughing.  That usually got me something with some kick.  When I saw four heads poked around the corner stacked atop each other like a Stooges skit, I knew I had something special.  Even that: Naan, meat, seasoning, garnishment.  I have an extensibly depressing list, so I will just move on.

            I pulled up to a yellow building trimmed in white.  Picture a train station.  No, one from the aether, the average of all the nostalgia that ever seeped in through waking from a nap on a sunny day to the Sunday matinee coming back from commercial.  Every steampunk fantasy but in its original form.  Look again at a building kept so clean you can see the empty fields and horses that surrounded it a hundred or more years ago.  That, I decided, needed to be my stop.  

            You would think the sky is the same everywhere.  People are the same everywhere making their variations on a taco.  The sky, the water, the world is vividly different everywhere I go.  I don’t know how long I’ve been gone since that first night when I took that first road to see where it went and kept on with the roads they brought me to.  I know I like flat bright spaces with big domed skies.  Except for Paris I am not a fan of cities.  I like to smell the breeze coming from just the one direction in sync with the clouds.  I love a town with crunchy dirt roads.  The blue and yellow train, oddly pristine for a regional line, pulled away.  I marveled at the building but didn’t dare go inside to find modern people drudging through modern things in grey modern spaces.

            The same breeze that carried the clouds rushed around me.  If I closed my eyes I could swear I was back home in the bow of the boat drifting through the creek.  There must be water nearby.  The air is cool, and denser than air that’s just rushing over fields.  I saw two stone paths leading away from the platform. One led to what I assumed was the city properly and from where the air carried the denseness I craved, which made me ashamed that I’d run from something that calls to me wherever it finds me.  How far I’d run never to fully escape it. 

            The other led across the tracks.  I do like the remnants of older Europe when I find them.  Life so slow and dedicated to the few well defined tasks of the day.  Obviously the stone path across the several rain lines is all we need.  I started across the tracks.  No gates, no warnings, no need.  Vagabond pro tip: when in a new city or town in Europe, spot the tallest church and head there.  This town didn’t have anything so flashy.  Between the breeze, the flatness, the silence, and the dirt crunching under my feet of the first road I found, I could have easily imagined I had docked the boat up river.  

            I noticed I bounced off the balls of my feet, even spinning to take in everything in this one spot then a little further up, again.  I passed a young woman I could have passed anywhere.  She glanced me over, gave a polite smile, and walked on.  She wore the loose pants women into yoga used to wear.  Her curly blond lightly frizzled hair had been collected like hay and bound at the back.  I noticed her AirPods most and uselessly.  Not more than a half mile into the sprawling vacant suburb I came to a house both falling in on itself and boarded up and patched in ways that showed someone very much meant to get to it.  You get a sense of these things after a while.  It was the house that owned the land on this side of the tracks long ago.  It alone remains of the estate.  Soon the last caretaker would pass on passing it on to someone who will raze it and pocket what can be gotten.  

            I do like the way Europeans repurpose their older homes.  Like a lot of houses I would see later that day and everywhere poverty is beginning to burn off like morning fog, this house had large blocks, like cinder blocks back home, just lighter, squarer, and easier to cut- filling spaces that had been the entry door or a window.  When a town is doing well, you see the frame, usually nicely adorned, and where the bricks have replaced the opening, plaster covers them with paint to match the home.  In Croatia, a man explained to me that inflation raged so out of control that any money you could scrape together, it needed to be put into your house immediately.  In places whose grandparents remember hard times, you see the bricks.  I’m quite sure in twenty years it will be stylish to leave them exposed.  

            This house caught my attention for more than that.  They were misshapen, mismatched colors, and haphazardly stacked like an ancient Peruvian temple built by “them aliens.”  The broken out window beside the bricked up one had been covered over in two sheets of OSB, flimsy and old when they were put up I am quite sure.  Put up, by the way vastly out of level.  However, now the individual chips of the sheets had become outlined in black growth.  My favorite part of this house beyond the red brick pillars that had been the posts of an elegant, at least in the builder’s mind, fence with every pipe railing rusted out of them, is the four different skins and cladding.  In some places a nice white brick facade reached for the corners of the foundation and sometimes even rounded them inconsistently.  In other places it had the same bricks as were supposed to be in the window.  These matched each other in their regular shape and color.  A section on the upper floor seemed to be pallets nailed to the wall speckled with the remains of plastic stapled to them.  Finally, it had the same plastic siding my grandfather put on his home so long ago because the man on the commercial, “just hosed that dirt right off.”  I didn’t like this house anymore and kept walking.

            I know I am somewhere east.  The telephone poles are A-frame and the street names have the same accented z as Polish and Czech.  They don’t sound the same though.  I am loving the new take on the A-frame.  A square cement post erupting from the sandy grass.  Another close by it.  Neither straight.  To each of these pillars rising up about ten feet are bolted green telephone posts with with bolts protruding almost a hand’s width of threaded metal flaking off in graduals of rust.         

            Not too long later I came to a Top!  You don’t need me to tell you what it is.  You can guess.  It is the most freshly painted building in the area and also just a little bigger than the others too.  Above double glass sliding doors in crisp red letters against a white background Top! pops and snaps your attention.  Also there are massive photos of the fresh fruits and pastries awaiting you.  

            As a kid I dreamed of the world out there.  All the ways people were out there doing things so very differently.  The imaginations of billions of people all churning out unique ways of trying things.  Inside the Top! my heart deflated.  There just where I left it as a kid sat the register with its conveyer belt the right size.  You didn’t remember they used to be smaller.  Slight trim of stainless steel, and slapped on the side the most glorious sheet of white, originally white anyway, formica still holding on.  I walked over to it forgetting all about the baguette and cold cuts I find everywhere.  I ran my finger along the black line of the edge of the formica sheet.  I loved that line when I waited for my mother to pay.  I ran my fingers along it then too, exploring the fibers. 

            The farthest I have ever been and still nothing new.  I am looking for something I’ve lost.  Maybe reincarnation is really real and I lost it in another life.  I have a hard time blaming my mother too.  Silence is just as evil.  

            I left the store.  I meandered in a haze.  I found a well groomed open field.  Just to the side of center, a platform with lights and a band.  Every region has ooompah music.  Sometimes it is polka.  Sometimes it is a fiddlin’ tune.  They all sound the same anymore.  I found the beer table, asked for "one" so I would get the standard, usually local kind.  Children, young elementary school children, squealed and screamed and spun each other in small and giant circles in the fading light.  It was a good town with good happy people.  

            Before I left my childhood home, developers had bulldozed over every sacred space.  My home is gone, obliterated for tourists to complain about the weather.

            I know when a place is too beautiful to stay untouched.  A shame similar to the last one rose in me again.  I didn’t want to remember anything more about these people.  I never want to find them again and see what of their paradise has been obliterated the way my Florida home had been.  I didn’t finish my drink.  I set it on the nearest table and walked back to the station.  The less of these people I carried with me the less I would wonder how they were knowing the developers were coming.  I remember feeling like if I could leave quickly enough I could keep them like this, at least in my mind.  So long as I never look back and never find them again, they will stay one perfect place.