THE GET LUCKY TOUR DIARY
(May 1999, North America)

III. INVOKING THE REAL OZZY

We crossed the rest of Ohio and most of Pennsylvania in a long night and morning, and reached the industrial swamps of New Jersey by the next afternoon. The Ramones' "53rd & 3rd" was on the tape deck as we strained to catch our first glimpse of the jagged gray Manhattan skyline, which was like our promised Emerald City of Oz after all this rude weather.

Swinging low down the West Side Highway, I drove randomly, hungrily, by memory, through the stacked-up buildings to the Lower East Side. I think I was initially happy that my favorite city still seemed intact after several years of Mayor Giuliani's banal and evil desecrations. But then the changes started sinking in. There were definitely less homeless people on the streets, and entire neighborhoods that had once sheltered Puerto Rican and immigrant families, squatters, junkies and artists were now homogenous yuppie enclaves of chain stores and charmless coffeehouses. There were occasional new, bland, orange-brick boxy buildings trying to blend among the sooty, authentic, ancient, stylish older apartments, and the mad, mean-spirited mayor was trying to replace many of the Lower East Side's tiny community garden lots with generic condos. Most of my longtime NYC friends had either escaped to Brooklyn or somehow hung on to the little, flat, now impossibly expensive island of Manhattan, but all of the ones who'd stayed told distressing tales about increased police assaults and harassment, surging rents, and the demolitions of favorite buildings and landmarks. I couldn't believe that the city's notoriously feisty, opinionated, articulate and sometimes condescending denizens had so meekly and quickly acquiesced to the surgical dessication of New York's soul.

As usual, the first place we ended up in the city was the Odessa coffee shop across the street from Tompkins Square Park, and as usual, I celebrated our continental crossing by devouring potato pierogis and blueberry pancakes. We met up later with ex-Trains/Nymphs/Motorcycle Boy/Piss Factory guitarist Bobby Belltower, who, having recently graduated Columbia University, was finally starting to play music again, this time in a new band called $1.98 Beauty Show with wife Lizzie Avondet, the serene vocalist in Piss Factory and Emma Peel (whose PLAY EMMA FOR ME CD a few years back on Sympathy for the Record Industry was a supersonic, incantational, thundering/moody masterpiece, one of the best -- and most underrated -- heavy dream-rock albums of the '90s).

Eventually we all straggled over from Lizzie and Bobby's apartment south of Houston to the Continental on Third Avenue in time to see Honeyburst, although we missed opening band the Cash Registers. It was so nice to revel, at least temporarily, in the company of our long-lost New York friends, like Little Pork Chop singer Lazy Susan, whose radiant country-blue turns stole the show from collaborator Jerry Teel (ex-Honeymoon Killers/Chrome Cranks) on their recent, and also criminally underrated Sympathy CD, this one with a more garage-y roots-rock C&W warmth. Talk about your cowgirls in the sand and rubies in the dust; I can't think of a better place to hide a sweetheart of the rodeo like Susan than New York City.

We later ran into my childhood pal Skinny John McDermott (Reverb Motherfuckers, Von Lmo, Digitalis), one of about six people on Manhattan Island who were politically subversive and still trying to do the right things to save what's left of the city from Giuliani, like successfully protesting to keep the Sixth Street & Avenue B Garden open, fr'instance. "Join us," Skinny John intoned, like a zombie, then laughed. He's the best person you'll ever meet; not just because he played such wildly scrambling noodles of lead guitar on GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD, the Reverb Motherfuckers' unknown, unreleased, grand masterpiece, but because even in childhood I always noticed him taking unpopular and brave positions and not being afraid of the mob mentality. Plus, Skinny John was the first person there to dance the Funky Chicken.

I was surprised to see and happy to hang out with BIG TAKEOVER zine editor Jack Rabid (ex-Springhouse/Even Worse), an old friend (and onetime emergency Trains drummer on our first national tour in 1986) who hadn't seen us play in many years, and CARBON 14 writer Steve Halperin, who acted like a Deadhead by following us to shows in several other cities, which made us feel even more like rock stars. We were also entertained outside the Continental by exiled Austin rock critic/Hormones founder Tim Stegall, in spiky hair and leopard-print jacket, who declared, "I'm wearing more eye makeup these days than Falling James!" Tim also claimed to be single-handedly bringing back what he called "the ugly glam movement."

Our mostly rockin' set at the Continental was a little annoying and preachy, as I saw the concert as my chance to solve all of the world's problems at once. I complained that "all you New Yorkers" were ruining my favorite city, and that we Leaving Trains were going to boycott NYC until Giuliani left office, similar to how U2 used to refuse to play in Arizona until that the voters of that state finally, grudgingly accepted Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a holiday. And, of course I blamed everyone in the room for NATO's ongoing war. And the corrupt judging in recent international ice-dancing competitions. And the Yankees' unfair economic advantages in bidding for free agent baseball stars.

Because it was New York, because of all the miles we'd driven, we rumbled through our set at the Continental with extra desperation in front of a bigger and friendlier crowd than at our previous show two years ago in Manhattan, at the regrettable faux-punk emporium Coney Island High, which had called in the cops (!?!) to shut down our concert midset after ex-Nymph Inger Lorre jumped onstage and proceeded to destroy some mike stands and monitors because her boyfriend was being thrown out by the bouncers.

Despite my big mouth this time, I didn't think the Continental would cut the power on us like Coney Isle eventually did, although I did question the sanity of our old pal Mark Yevlov, the club's booker, who'd foolishly added a Black Sabbath cover band to close the bill.

Near the end of our set, the soundman spoke to us through the monitors onstage (usually the audience can't hear these asides), saying that we had time for only one more song because the Black Sabbath cover band had to go on after us. I never react well when being told I'm being cut off at the bar or when the party is ending, plus I have an extreme case of stage fright, which often causes me to start verbally lashing out with Tourette's syndrome at any and everyone around me. I'm not good at slinking offstage on command; in fact, when told that we have one more song, I perversely insist, usually, on giving a slow speech and then playing our longest song.

So it didn't seem right that I, the true illegitimate son of Ozzy Osbourne, whose dad used to clean the real Ozzy's pool, should have to vacate the stage for one of those damned, mercenary "tribute" bands.

Before leaving the stage, I told the audience that I was challenging Sabbra Cadabra (whose posters insisted that they were the nation's Number One Sabbath Tribute Band) to invoke the magic spirit of Ozzy by updating the words to "War Pigs" to protest the current bombing of Yugoslavia. I also defied Sabbra Cadaver to write and sing their own songs, which is what the real Black Sabbath would do. I also wondered why the world even needed a Sabbath tribute band when the real Black Sabbath was currently on tour! In the backstage room downstairs, the lovely gentlemen of Sabbra Candelabra surrounded me and grunted, "What's the matter? You don't like Black Sabbath?" And I said, "I love Black Sabbath." Then paused. "But who are YOU guys??" While Sabbra Cad droned onstage, we ended up on the sidewalk outside the club, where Miss Koko Puff interviewed our friends with the video camera. I was conversing with Elizabeth from New Jersey, who I loved listening to because she has such a thick Lorraine Bracco-type accent, which is like my favorite lilt, when Steve Halperin came outside to report that the petulant Sabbath clones were dissing us onstage! The Ozzy manqué was calling me a "faggot in a dress," which I found amusing since such a Black Sabbath expert apparently didn't know that the real Ozzy used to dress in drag! (Not that that's any excuse for me doing such a reprehensible thing.) The fake Ozzy also explained to the audience that the reason his Cadavers didn't write or play their own songs is because "new music sucks my cock!" I guess he also meant Sabbath's newer stuff when he said that.

I'd come to realize these unintentional jokers were a wee bit demented during my brief chat with them backstage. I'd gotten the distinct impression that they didn't even LIKE the real Black Sabbath, that they felt territorial and jealous that the real Black Sabbath was competing with them and stealing their fans. They seemed like bitter employees in a private Disneyland hell; trapped in suffocating Mickey Mouse costumes of their own re-creation. They had no idea how to recover their own personalities after faking it for so long as English rock gods. Musical lockjaw.

Later on, we went bar-hopping in the East Village, ending up at one point in a place run by the Dictators' Handsome Dick Manitoba. Everyone was having a hilarious time, though I felt like I was decompressing a little, still hurtling with road momentum. It felt good to sit down at a table, and feel the hard room and floor of an old city that wasn't moving. When I closed my eyes, I could still see the alluring green depths of the Pennsylvania forests rushing past. I felt tugged in many directions, by different places, by different people, by memories, bigger and faster. I was trying to soak up the feeling of one of my favorite cities in the world in the few hours I had left there, but I was also distracted, and wishing I were a few streets away, with a certain lost love of my life. I could cross a continent but I couldn't cross a few blocks.

I was huddling near the juke box when I noticed a man standing next to me, and I thought, that guy looks a little like Matt Dillon, but not as famous. I leaned over to tell this to Miss Koko Puff and Melanie, and they recognized the film star immediately, getting very excited. Handsome Dick Manitoba kept yelling at Dillon to move his car, and the actor yelled back that it wasn't his car. Dillon went across the street into another bar, followed not very subtly (I thought) by Miss Koko and Fred. Handsome Dick went outside to yell at Matt D. some more, and it all seemed so surreal to me. Maybe those infernal parallel universes were starting to intersect.

I always have a hard time leaving New York, and stalled the next morning for as long as I could. I borrowed the video camera to take furtive shots of this public garden or that magically looming building, like the haunted stone faces in the Physical Graffiti building, in case they were torn down by Giuliani's thugs before the next time I made it back. Eventually, after tracing our own crop circles on various toll road clover leafs in fabled New Jersey, we were on our way back across the forests and mountains of Pennsylvania for a show in Pittsburgh, Honeyburst's hometown. It was a hard, tiring drive, having to focus a lot of attention and trying to cut corners after such a late start. It was vulgar how many mountains and rivers we sailed blindly over. I needed to stop more, and untangle the shapes of the leaves from their blur of trees.

By the time we reached Pittsburgh, we realized that we didn't even know the name of the club where we were playing (Honeyburst's Michael K. had forgotten to give us the information, as it was one of the few shows Eric Stone hadn't booked on the tour). It was getting pretty late when Fred found a newspaper that listed the show's address, and eventually we made our way through town to the Polish Hill section, where the bar Gooski's was crouched across the street from an impressively domed, giant, old church.

We pretty much missed Honeyburst's set, and barely had time to get pretty in the van, slap on makeup furtively in the dark, pull up our stockings, then rush inside the crowded bar with our equipment. I was greeted just inside the entrance by the always lovely and striking Jennifer Nail, a dark-haired feline who'd worked at Get Hip records when that Pittsburgh label had released our split 7-inch ("I'm 5 Years Ahead of My Time") with Cobra Verde ("For My Woman") a few years ago. She complimented me on how I looked, which was so sweet and wonderful to hear after several weeks of getting stares and rude comments all across this great and free country, although she did beseech me to next time please wear the deep blue velvet dress I'd worn in Pittsburgh years earlier when we'd played with the Cynics. That is indeed my best dress.

Then I got tangled up in the excitement of getting ready and going onstage in a rush, and I don't even remember much about our show, I just recall that most of us, except for Jennifer, ended up later at some party a few doors down the street, which was a nice, convenient place to unwind, with its giant Kiss dolls and kind hostess. Melanie, Koko Puff and Honeyburst bassist Smith Hutching all drove off to eat at a late-night diner, where they said we missed meeting one of the real characters of the tour, a goofy waitress refilling the ketchup bottles, who they said was funnier than most comedians. I stayed at the party, desperate to smoke some pot. Fred seemed to be hitting it off with Hopita, who, like Fred, also worked doing special effects in the film industry. Hopita had her blonde hair pinned up like a "Swiss Miss Gone Awry" (or was it "Swiss Miss on Rye"??), as Smith waggishly described her. Everyone was given nicknames that night by the saucy rock musicians. A foxy girl named Maria (Koko and the rest of the band called her "Fancy Pants" because of her tacky jeans) seemed to be flirting with me, even to the point of taking a hit of pot and then pressing her lips against mine and blowing the smoke into my mouth, which is always a great way to get my attention. Honeyburst singer Michael even took me aside and seemed convinced that Fancy Pants was hot for me, and I said, "Do you think so?" But it turned out she was really interested in Michael, despite all the subterfuge. We ended up at Michael's well appointed, clean house, where Fancy Pants stopped feigning interest in me and ended up in Michael's room. I was so stupid! I felt tricked and started to hate everyone in the world again. Just when I thought someone was actually attracted to a "faggot in a dress," I realized that such things were obviously impossible. I was a freak, for sure, and there wasn't enough pot to console me. Well, like Ozzy says, "Never say die." Or say it all you want, just try not to do it.

I woke up feeling better the next afternoon, and we eventually straggled out of Pittsburgh after driving downtown through its ponderous architecture of giant bank vault buildings with thick Roman colums and severe, sharp, foreboding angles, with so many buildings topped by dark, ominous statues that looked like gargoyles and looming, winged human vultures ready to fly off these roofs at any moment.

We crossed the vast expanse of Pennsylvania one more time on our way back to Sunday's show in Philadelphia. We saw occasional deer, and the thick forests were so inviting and beautiful to us permanent desert creatures, so lush and magical. At one point in our frequent cross-stitchings of the state, I was driving at dawn through a remote area as everyone else in the van slept. The forest was broken up with many ponds and small lakes, a swampy expanse, and everywhere there were these insidious little coils of fog tethered to the water by little ropes of steam. Each pond had its own miniature, distinct cloud hovering above the water; the steam looked almost like a white chiffon veil, delicate and hanging so lightly in the air, like the water couldn't really decide if it wanted to be liquid or steam. I wanted to take a picture, but everyone else was sleeping and I didn't want to stop, and now there's no proof it really happened. I realized that we were sliding through the land of a thousand natural witches' kettles, all simmering and brewing up the ingredients to another day, before the sunlight seared through the mystic mist and dissolved the tiny clouds like so many puffs of breath.

We sliced the mighty Alleghenys via tunnels, cleaving the guts of Blue Mountain, and Tuscarora and Kittatinny. The shrouds of the thick forest looked innocent and pretty, though probably still leaking radiation from Three Mile Island.

We saw our last deer standing like a sentinel on a steep, rocky hill at the edge of Philadelphia, and then we sailed through the city before landing on Second Street at Upstairs at Nick's. I don't know which plague killed everyone in the area, but what had once been a lucky and lively spot for the Leaving Trains was now a non-rock & roll ghost town. We heard that even the legendary Hugh Cornwell of the Stranglers and groups like the Gaza Strippers had drawn only a handful of customers to Nick's. So it wasn't just our fault. Every previous show on the tour had been well-attended, which was an unexpected surprise, considering that Honeyburst was still a largely unknown new group and because the Leaving Trains hadn't toured consistently in the past decade. This happy success everywhere else didn't prepare us for the small turnout at Nick's, and we played our sloppiest and most half-hearted show of the tour. Still, it was fun to hang out with Steve Halperin again, and also Dave Panic and Sparkle Plenty of the 440s, one of my all-time fave spitfire-hellcat Philly bands.

But our set was lame. At one point, I was too bitchy and impatient when I yelled at Koko Puff to turn down her bass, so she played the next song with her volume completely off, just to spite me.

This led to our second full-blown argument of the tour, sitting in the van as we were getting ready to leave after loading up our equipment. I was embarrassed that we had sucked so much, and maybe just depressed in a post-New York kind of way. I think I was also perplexed that the club had turned off the Shaquille O'Neal pinball game upstairs before I'd had a chance to play it, which meant I was a seething mess of unrequited sexual frustration, since pinball is a decent replacement for lust. I was ready to quit the band -- again -- although maybe I was just tired. But I was in one of those moods where we had to solve this problem now, if not sooner, because we owed it to our fans to try our best, and if we weren't going to try, then we should turn right around and head back to L.A.

I think I just panicked. I'd suddenly decided that my songs sucked and was paranoid that Melanie and Miss Koko were going to quit the band any second, and if that was the case, I wanted to get it over with NOW, not later, because maybe if we hurried, we could still get back to L.A. in a few days, where I could at least go to the beach and use up the rest of my rapidly diminishing precious vacation time that I'd saved up for two boring years. Because I really needed to relax.

I was screaming these threats to Koko Puff when I turned around from the driver's seat and noticed that she was filming my tirade with that damned video camera! I yelled at her to stop filming, but she wouldn't turn it off. That's when I went Sean Penn on her, reaching into the back seat to shove the camera away from me.

But before I could swat the camera, Melanie kicked me in the ribs with all the power of a colt, and then we all yelled at each other. Koko and Melanie ended up going in Honeyburst's van to the next city, Washington, D.C. Since we all had a day off before the show, Allen, Fred and I drove back to Bobby and Lizzie's apartment in New York.

Or at least we tried to. I think the three of us realized immediately that we were doing the wrong thing by splitting up the band and going in different directions, and sure enough, karma whacked us in the head with her typical come-uppance, which in this case was yet another variation of extreme weather.

We weren't on Interstate 95 for very long, heading north toward New Jersey, before we were caught in a wicked fog bank that was so thick that we literally couldn't see five feet in front of us. We noticed that almost no one else was on the highway, and we drove slowly like an old man who's lost his glasses and is fumbling around in the dark looking for them. We kept thinking at any moment we would rear-end some other vehicle stopped on the highway ahead of us. Or vice versa. Eventually we pulled off at an exit, but it was so foggy we couldn't find a motel or rest area and instead parked in resignation outside a 7-11, where I sulked some more and tried to convince Allen and Fred how right I was and how wrong the Cackling Witches were, and they insincerely agreed with me so I wouldn't yell at them, too. Then we tried to sleep in the humid van as dawn crashed on top of us.

After a few fitful hours of little sleep, we saw that the fog had lifted, and got back on I-95 and headed back to New York, where Lizzie Avondet was crestfallen that we'd returned without Koko Puff and Melanie, since she had planned on doing some girl-bonding and going shopping with them. Instead she and Bobby were stuck with three grumpy rockers who weren't sure if we were even going to finish the tour or just go back home in utter defeat.

I consoled myself by walking around the streets of the Lower East Side. Someone had painted a trail of green footprints on the sidewalk, and I followed them as they went in a large loop around Tompkins Square Park and up and down the nearby streets. I kept hoping I'd suddenly find a job, or that the stenciled footprints would lead me to an inexplicably cheap apartment, or that I'd fall in love with somebody amazing, just by walking around. It didn't seem fair that all of these interesting and diverse people got to live on this little communal island together, while I had to exist in L.A. for decades, staring at the ceiling for hours, unable to sleep, thinking I naturally belonged in a different time zone, a place where there were green trees and rivers and people who stayed up all night walking the streets of the little, condensed village; the illusion of never being alone because there were always people frequenting the bodegas, or wandering the square grid of streets; it was life, it was an imitation of life; its attempted imitation of compressed life was in itself a sign of life, just by trying, just by not giving up and going to bed like people in every other city and small town in America. It was a city where you were allowed to honk your horn; it was considered just another an expected, natural form of communication.

New York was a metropolis whose denizens didn't get upset if you refused to say "Have a nice day" or took it personally if you disagreed with them; people here, like Bobby Belltower, understood the fine art of debating, of staying up all night being contrary, of being the devil's advocate, of talking things out, of trying on ideas for size like they were dresses. In L.A., people asked you how you were doing, with the implicit, unstated assumption that you were supposed to always be okay or fine, and that in any event you weren't expected to give a detailed answer. If you were depressed or serious, it was better to keep such a disease to yourself, before it spread to the other insecure happy faces like a wildfire, before the whole false, enforced California social structure collapsed from too much unrequested/unrequited sincerity.

I walked by myself for a long time, usually ending up back at Tompkins Square. I hung on to a black railing and stared like a hungry lion at the never-ending parade of pedestrians. I seethed with invisible jealousy as a vaguely goth-looking guy marched by arm in arm with a gorgeous brunette wearing artfully ashy makeup, her silken and booted long legs cleaving through the slit in her long black skirt with each confident, determined, unintentionally devastating step, each clack of her boot on the pavement counting out their mutual happiness, that they had somewhere cool and interesting to go, and that even if they didn't have somewhere to go, they still had each other, beautiful and intelligent and bohemian; they were unwittingly imperious, they were better than losers like me, a victim of natural selection and the inability to fight back, to save myself.

I'd always be permanently trapped under Sylvia Plath's mobile, invisible, clear bell jar of depression and loneliness, emanating wounded vibes that warned the other healthy animals in the park to stay away, my sickening blood only attracting vampires and other predators. Perhaps I could go swimming and be eaten whole by a shark, which would at least disguise my flawed body inside the sleek revisionist perfection of a shark; maybe I could start all over, my flesh refueling the earth like fertilizer. I'd never be able to go up to a girl I liked and make conversation and act like a confident rake. I'd never trust my instincts enough to save myself with words; it would always be easier to yell at the backs of my retreating friends than to dare to say something complimentary to someone I longed for. I wanted to be beautiful, I wanted to be a native New Yorker, part of this we're-all-in-it-together experiment, stuck on an island with several million other writers and models and creators and musicians and actors . . .

I started to resent Valerie Malone, the van that had magically brought me out of my Silver Lake rut (where I often didn't even leave the block except to go to work, trudging up and down to the nearby 7-11, waiting for redemption, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be told that my perceptions counted, that someone out there -- since no one, of course, was up there -- was noticing); that someone out there had the ability to notice, even, since most people seemed to be only barely able to watch themselves, much less gaze helpfully over the savanna looking for clawed up zebras to repair.

I started to resent Valerie because I knew that, despite her obvious transcontinental powers, she was going to drag me against my will out of the only city that made sense to me, again. My instincts told me, I'm here now, I should stay now, while I'm here. My half-hearted logic argued back that this was only a taste, an inspiration, that I'd remember how this affinity for New York felt, so much that when I returned to my L.A. hometown that I would be burning with a new purpose, a real fire, all so that I would only stay in L.A. long enough to tie up the remaining loose threads, and then return to New York, where I belonged. And yet I knew that once I was mired again in the literal tar pits of La Brea that I would never leave L.A., or anywhere. I was too scared. I was terrible at leaving, even though I always was attracted to the thought of evacuations. I was the cat that didn't land on her feet. I was frozen by headlights into paralysis, sleepwalking on the highway. I was stuck in a tree, too terrified to come back down.

I stared up into the giant canopies of the trees in Tompkins Park, with their leafy, consoling cloaks, forming hollow shrouds in the shapes of porous churches, with walls made out of rippling, bowing branches and windows fused with stained-glass air. It had just rained and everything was still wet, and I couldn't help but follow, from a great distance, a young woman who walked through the park by herself, not marching like everyone else in some purposeful straight line. Instead I was attracted by the curves and gratuitous detours of her path; she didn't look like she was in any big hurry. She seemed to be going out of her way especially to splash with her rain boots in the mirror faces of big puddles on the pavement. And I vicariously enjoyed her private game, making sure that she see me, as I trailed lazily behind. When she finally ran out of puddles to decimate and started up the street, I dared to walk by her, hoping some of her happiness or magic would rub off on me. I wasn't really attracted to her, although with her pale skin and unkempt light Northern Sea hair, she seemed cute, bundled up in an oversize coat. We drifted south down Avenue B, until I was afraid she'd see me, so I ducked into a bodega and bought some apples and bananas for the upcoming drive.

I should've headed back to Lizzie and Bobby's apartment to meet up with everyone, to find out if Koko and Melanie had called to let us know if they were going to still finish the tour, but I knew once I was in the van I would be disconsolate, looking backward, when I should be concentrating on Washington, D.C., and the other cities down the road apiece. I wasn't ready to leave. My mind was blocks away again, and several streets away in New York can be another world.

So I kept following the painted footsteps on the sidewalk, until I was led away from the main avenues onto some quieter streets, and I ended up in one of those tiny public gardens, no bigger than the lot for a single apartment building, with ivy and flowers and stones laid into a small path. This wasn't like the blank, timeless vast expanse of nature I was used to from the California deserts or mountains; Manhattan's little oases of nature were more like an outdoor confessional; one could pause in them for a few moments, alone, before some other nerve-wracked New Yorker would intrude; there was always the unwritten assumption that everything was shared on this island; we were all breathing the same air; sitting elbow to elbow in cramped restaurants and bars. You couldn't dwell too long on one thing at one time in the city because someone else would come along and move you off the spot; you had to seek out these mobile interludes of calm, drink them up deeply and quickly, before moving on.

Just as I was walking out through the tiny walkway back to the street of looming apartment faces, thinking, "Do I really belong here?," two sparrows swam through the air toward me, in a perfect flourish of weaving circles, synchronized fluttering with a grand sweep, landing near my feet, as if to say, "Yes, you do, and don't forget us."

That gesture of intertwined flight paths gave me the energy and the inspiration to start trudging back to Bobby and Lizzie's, not with resignation, and not with hope either, but with motion and nothing else, because movement was good enough for the birds, so I thought there must be a sign or a secret hidden somewhere in it for me.

As I crossed Houston and headed down Clinton to the apartment, I saw a wild-haired hippie-ish girl walking down the street toward me, looking right at me, so deliberately that I realized I wasn't imagining it. When she came up to me, we both stopped and she asked me how I was doing, and we started talking for a few moments as if we already knew each other. She was a feral, tattooed, grungy-looking girl who smelled like she needed a bath, like maybe she'd been living on the street or had been up for days. I don't even remember what we talked about, but it was almost like she had been divinely sent to tell me not to give up, that there were other people like me out there, somewhere . . . here. I'd like to believe that she just psychically sensed my depression, my revulsion over leaving New York -- again! -- with no clear plan of coming back, and it was like she wanted me not to feel too bad. It was the sign I was hanging around for, and it made it possible for me to finally get in the van and head toward Washington, D.C.