Dan White's Defense
I shit you not, I was starving, hungry for things I have never in my life been hungry for: candy corn, cheese curls, cotton candy, caramel corn. I had to think hard, to rummage some for the hunger I could not even name: circus peanuts.
They are not peanuts at all, you who are fools to their virtues, but something else entirely. I admit this to God: they are barely food, they have no purpose whatsoever in this world, their creator was a sick man, but --I was moon drunk, I was so lonely-- I ate the whole bag. I ate them all. I ate them as a man possessed. The moon was so far away. I swear to God, the moon has never seemed so far away. I have never felt so small. I have never known such a hunger.
Sleep Is No Safe Harbor
He shivers and hunches instinctively away, lost and unprotected in nightmare. Then, a gasp, pitiful, really a whinny, his eyes rolling wildly beneath the lids, his lips (do dogs have lips? yes, close enough) jerking like a fish on a wet dock. What can I do but hold him, and whisper him gently back to this world? And wonder that there are so many nightmares that some of them, muttering and weary and downtrodden, must spend another night riding the buses in nightmare's bush leagues.
Somewhere Out In The World
It was warm and darkness was traveling very slowly up that dirt road somewhere out in the world. Green was unheard of. Anything moving moved through dust and the dust hung heavy on the land and gave the twilight a nice texture, like a summer dusk seen through a screen door.
The little houses tossed here and there along the road were lit like nightmares. I waited for headlights; everyone driving along that road was likely dangerous, had murder in their hearts.
I saw two nuns then, coming along in silence and practically skiing along that dirt road in their sandals. They were taking turns carrying a tiny coffin on their backs, bringing some child --and this I could only guess-- home.
Where Are They Now?
Miff Mole was born in Long Island, and had music in his blood. He grew up to be a revolutionary trombonist, and played with everyone from Red Nichols (check out "Miff and Red's Stompers" some time) to Benny Goodman. Late in his life his health went bad and he walked with a cane and sold pretzels in the New York subway.
It was an accident they say, but Charles "Hoss" Radbourn shot himself in the face and spent his last years drinking and infected with syphilis, sulking in the shadows and smoke of a pool hall in Bloomington, Illinois. He died at forty-two, but for a long time before that he was a major league ballplayer, and pitched as often and as well as anyone ever has.
Dan Brouthers was a rare thing, a 19th century slugger, a then big man who could mash the dead ball and drive in runs and hit for average. He played first base on some good teams, and was elected to the Hall of Fame after he was dead. He spent his last years as a night watchman at the Polo Grounds, wandering through the empty seats and dark concourses, staring out at the almost radiant relief of the infield against those green fields gone to black.
In The Christian Rooming House, Mariposa Ave., Orlando, Florida
You sit there out of the rain, looking at photographs of flayed crocodiles and Islamic architecture. Downstairs someone is screwing open another can of soup. From your open window you can hear a radio playing on the front porch, and the laughter of the old manslaughterer rattling with laughter in his wheelchair. Later the young man who is too heavy to be the dancer he dreams and who is a pirate at Disney World will peel the old man drunk from his chair and put him to bed for the night. The temp pool van driver sleeps in his clothes with a loaded pistol on the bedstand, and every day prays for a chess player to turn up in his world. He fully realizes this is a tall order.
Each afternoon you go to the Orlando public library and steal all the books your bag will hold.
Take Your Pick
Dirigible. Zeppelin. Blimp.
They are all such fine names, lucky thing.
One Night
If those are angels in my backyard, I remember thinking, they look like nothing so much as hungry farmers, angry, gaunt, squinting out of the dusty world of a Dorthea Lange photograph, come from a long ways away to convey their disappointment.
They looked like they wanted to ask me for a drink of water, but they didn't.
Instead they blindfolded me and drove me clean out of my life in the backseat of a rented Peugeot. The three of them were huddled in the front seat, smoking little cigars and arguing in what sounded like Portuguese.
3:02:15 PM 
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