We are the soldiers of sustenance, well-versed in our individual roles and unified by a blanket sense of urgency. The in-room dining telephones are dueling for attention, the soundtrack for the apex of the morning. There’s at least an hour left of hard fighting before any kind of let-up. The line cooks are fully engaged with egg and flame, breaking yolks into vegetable oil and sizzling bacon on a massive griddle. Stewards shuffle around the back, pulverizing oranges and grapefruits into fresh juice. The expeditor is furiously wiping fingerprints off the perimeter of plated eggs benedicts and bowls of steel-cut oatmeal. I’m working the bread station, a blur of popping toast and flashing blades. In one moment I lead the fray, barking commands and stuffing croissants into folded linen. In the next, I am dragged off the floor for a word with Chef.

This office is devilishly comfortable, the luxury box of an abattoir. Two cozy armchairs face a heightened desk cluttered with paperwork in various stages of being processed and ignored. Two glass vessels sit adjacent to each other, each home to brilliantly colored betta fish. Also known as Siamese fighting fish, these creatures behave like starved pitbulls and look like tropical orchids. If dropped into a shared container they will instantly attack each other, relenting only when one is mortally wounded and swimming sideways to the surface in defeat. Somehow this captivity is worse; a bizarre purgatory. There, in plain view, your mortal enemy, starkly apparent but separated by an invincible pane of glass. Life is a constant state of tension, ever in fear of death at the hands of your opponent, ever enraged by his presence, naught to do but swim laps.

This is the HR director’s office. In the corporate universe, the humanity of the staff is always on trial, never more so in the kangaroo court of human resources. No need for a trial in this case. I’m guilty, having been self-sabotaging my position here for months. I can’t stand my supervisor, and I’m not at all quiet about it. She was promoted for the worst kind of reasons: smiling strategically and supplicating to our masters whenever they roll into the kitchen. She’s a corporate darling, never complaining about anything real, lending input only to address cosmetic, symptomatic issues. Regarding the philosophical and structural malignancies of our department she is either willfully ignorant or exceptionally blind to reality. Never mind she doesn’t know shit about food and is incapable of delegating any task. Never mind her club-footed managerial style. Never mind the questions she “axes.” Never mind her fitful relationship with the differences between “their,” “there,” “they’re,” “your,” “you’re,” et cetera. Never mind her skinsuit of tangible wrongness; she knows when to kneel, so by all means empower her over her talented, intelligent peers with their dangerous notions of free will and self-awareness.

I’m definitely out of strikes here. Third time in HR, same problem as the last time, which itself was awfully similar to the time before that. My neck is well acquainted with the chopping block at this point. The Chef-ecutioner sits to my right, the director throned behind the fish. It’s an emotional exchange. Both of these characters have fought for me in the past, trying to help me fit in. I’m a bucking bronco when they need me to be a goldfish. Can’t do it. Can’t fake it. Agony is, they know how good of a job I do. How much skin I lay down every day. I wish I could meet their expectations, just lower my shoulder and shut the fuck up enough to keep my job. I carry the staff most days, but my temper has recently worn down to the nub. Metal grinding on metal. Managers from other departments overheard me swearing. My mind is everywhere but work and I carry it on my face. I’ve been done here for a while. Selling $14 bowls of Raisin Bran to grouchy millionaires doesn’t satisfy the innermost desires of my heart. I’m challenged but not stimulated. Every morning is the same puzzle: How to be proactive; how to motivate the cooks; how to shuttle food up in a timely, accurate fashion; how to give a shit. Mining for meaning is the biggest challenge. I’m swimming around in this bowl, bumping against the glass, and all I want to do is fight.

The chef is worked up, but he’s wasting his time. I think he thinks I might try to save my job. The HR director is listening, responding, echoing his concerns, amplifying the depth of my transgressions, broadcasting in plain language how awful they think I am. This is so boring. I want to tell them the truth, that I know all this. I know what attitude you want me to have: You want me to be a good fish, to shut up and swim quietly like a good little pet. Can’t do it. Can’t fake it. So I’m suspended, pending investigation. Only one choice left, really. Do I want to be fired or quit? There are certainly benefits to being fired. (Unemployment, baby!) And if that’s what I want, I can easily bypass all that suspension shit right here. I could tell the truth for 30 seconds. That would be enough to get the boot right this moment. Or maybe I could tell them to go fuck themselves. It’s a barbaric thing to do, but it feels somehow appropriate anyway. The darker side of me yearns for such a release. Wouldn’t it be nice to get paid for doing nothing for six months? I could play Lego Harry Potter on X-box and eat Peanut Butter Cups. They don’t want that; I can see it on their faces. How expensive is it to get rid of James? Yeah, he’s a problem, but God is money, so let’s weigh our options.

It’s ultimately a spiritual question. I read something brilliant recently in The Art of Fielding by a rookie novelist named Chad Harbach. Through the lips of his character Owen, he says, “A soul isn’t something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love.” Getting myself fired here is the same as writing myself a dozen checks. One sideways word to manipulate the tempers in this room and I get to skate free for half a trip around the sun. Let the government pay for my Pop Tarts for a while. Nothing is really free, though. Every decision has a cost, and in this case the price tag has a portion of my soul etched into the barcode. No sale.

So I resign, eschewing the ignoble luxury of unemployment checks. Keep your money, government. Use it to pay a fireman or something. I’ll hang on to my soul for now, for ever, and if you ever need help finding yours, I’m on Facebook.

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I can usually tell if a restaurant is going to be shit right away, but this place toed the line. The specials on the white board were spelled correctly, a goddamn miracle in modern times. There were Marlins on the wall but they were carved out of wood, a bizarre half-measure parody of the practice usually reserved for trophy space, Peta approved. The flighty hostess sprained her brain cell puzzling over the seating map. Her mind was stalling all over the road, spinning tires and coughing exhaust, struggling to wrangle the choke point of a tourist trap while scheming a life path that might lead to fucking the busboy - correction - that might lead to fucking the busboy again. The rest of her brainpan was occupied by an I-phone that was vaguely hidden under a copy of US weekly, the lesser of two evils running interference for her nasty facebook habit. It was a major victory to be sat by the window.

My silverware was splotched with water spots. It’s not something I really care about; water spots occur because the silver isn’t wiped dry after sanitizing in the Hobart machine. It’s hardly poison, but why didn’t they bother to clean it? Now I have doubts about their dairy. How long am I likely to be sentenced to the toilet?

My server’s name was Austin. A joyless incompetent, he carried himself awkwardly, behaving as if born in borrowed skin. His voice droned artlessly over the specials, subtext screaming, “I dont want to be here, I ought to be out looking for my real face.” I went with the cioppino.

Anemic with confidence, Austin painted the linen with broth before my plate touched the table. I didn’t care, not with this feast. It was fantastic. I considered announcing, “I am happy as a clam,” but took a closer look at the clams in my bowl and revisited the idiom’s meaning entirely. In addition to clams there were mussels, Dungeness crab, scallops and two golden wedges of toasted garlic bread. For these shellfish, life was not a comedy. They were plucked from the sea and boiled alive collectively, their bodies arranged artfully in an abattoir of saffron and tomato broth to be devoured by a superior humanoid life form. I washed them down to hell with a glass of delicately balanced Sauvignon Blanc.

Andy the Android checked me into Tides seafood restaurant on Foursquare, and he asked me if I would like to leave any helpful tips for the sociosphere. The restaurant was perched by the sea in Bodega Bay, California, the famous locale of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, so I warned future patrons to keep one eye on the sky lest the local wildlife take up arms. Also, try the barbecue oysters.

The Birds is one of my all-time favorites. The basic plot:

Pretty face meets handsome fella in San Francisco
Love story spills over into quaint sea town
Millions of birds form psychic alliance, viciously attack mankind

We deserve it, too. Birds have a robust list of grievances and a comprehensive blueprint for a bloody revolution. We took the dodo first, a completely defenseless creature neither swift nor clever. We whacked them off of the planet like so many golf balls into the sea. And didn’t stop there; a different avian species of sputters out of existence every day. Bald eagles are in trouble, condors are almost gone, and the Passenger Pigeon KIA. There are plenty of chickens around but they exist as tortured slaves, mutated by hormones to grow at alarming rates. Their breasts and legs swell with meat so efficiently that they lose the ability to walk, and their organs begin to fail. Antibiotics keep them healthy enough to remain edible, sustaining them as they bloat into caricatures of their true species, and then it’s off to the killing cones. Good night, sweet chicklings; soon we’ll liquify you into delicious Clown Food McNuggets. With the exception of a few free-range cousins, a chicken sold in America never tastes free air, never feels sunshine on her wings, never learns the loving embrace of a devoted rooster. Life for her is permanent midnight, illuminated only by the screams of her sisters. We, Man, deserve to be flayed alive by suddenly prescient, vengeful sparrows.

I am grotesquely overstuffed. I shelved all principles of moderation for this meal in favor of abject gluttony. I’m on vacation, a foreign concept for me. My brain never truly allows respite. Working or not, my demons are always punched in and collecting overtime. The sole perk of self-loathing is the occasional synergy I have with said demons. They play nice when I bask in the glory of our triumph. We won, baby. We took over the planet, and thus I lean back in my chair and gaze out to sea. The bowl before me is a pile of subjugated shells. A pair of seals swims by the dock outside. Droplets of condensation glisten on the outside of my wine glass. I can’t find Austin for the check; he’s probably flustered by some bread stick problem or whatever. He played no role in our victory anyway.

Just outside the window two gulls perch on a life preserver and discuss gull-related concerns. I wish I could help them out; email them a PDF of Hitchcock’s masterpiece. Come on dudes, get your shit together. Man has a technological advantage, no doubt, but you have the numbers. What good are Navy Seals and stealth drones against 400 billion airborne insurgents? Maybe see if the shellfish are interested in joined the melee? It’s not going to happen, though. Evolution isn’t about justice, it’s about survival. We live, we breed, we die. If we miss step two and the music stops, then someday we’ll end up stuffed and studied in a natural history museum, puzzled over and largely forgotten by snot-nosed children of some other species; sentient, superior and unfamiliar to us.

I swirl the last of my wine. My credit card lies on the table in absence of subtlety. I am starting to grow concerned for Austin. The worst part of my imagination draws one possible fate: He is in the back, pouring sodas for a guest, when his manager instructs him to take the garbage out. He walks outside, mind occupied with home and hearth. A bag in each hand, oblivious to danger, he doesn’t notice the line of crows gathering atop the telephone pole, the osprey moving in to cut off his escape route or the Peregrine falcon circling overhead, homing in on his position, ready to draw first blood.

I was carving gouges on Avenue A, separating pedestrian and vehicular traffic with grace and precision, pedaling hard and spraying gravel, when some podunk land-locked Iowa tourist prick bastard fuck stepped out of his cab, trandsforming the open space stretched in front of me into an impassable wall. It’s called “Getting Doored,” and it’s just about the worst fear a cyclist has, because it can happen at any time and there’s damn near nothing you can do to prevent it. Most human beings don’t exit vehicles into traffic, but mankind has an extraordinary threshold for stupidity.

Fortunately the crash couldn’t have gone better. I popped off the seat like toast, spinning off the door and into the street. My forearms took the worst of the impact, suffering a few bloody brush strokes. I didn’t even leave my feet, sticking the landing and jogging a few extra steps to exhale the gravity of what could have been. Even My Therapist 10 speed was fine: no breakage, no dents, no scratches. This wasn’t an accident; it was a cosmic favor. I was moving too fast, both on the street and in my life, and it was starting to degrade the fidelity of my progress and affect everything I do.

Sustainability, sustainability, sustainability. That’s the key and the key and the key. Without it I'm cutting asinine corners, throwing elbows in front of umpires, weaving all over the highway and stepping on rakes all day. For disaster, just add water. All of my behavior grew strange. I even found a way to sleep at work. My technique is undetectable. In the room service office there is a POS system and two telephones with a printer under the desk. To sleep on the sly, I jam my feet on top of the printer, wedge my knees up against the bottom of the desk and press my forehead flush against the cabinet above the computer. It’s uncomfortable as shit and I don’t get any real rest, but I can close my eyes and shut down all the memory-hog applications that slow my brain’s operating capacity. Visually I appear to be awake, as I’m not slumped over the desk or sprawled out with my feet up. I even passed a field test, acting startled and disoriented but quite conscious when the overnight manager walked in. I’m sure he thought my behavior odd, but that’s a common conception at this point. When “Harmless Lunatic” is your modus operandi, people stop checking you for weapons.

I am well aware I should not be sleeping at work. I own a bed and need to use it. Chalk it up to plan-design failure. I never should have volunteered for the graveyard shift; it was a critical error. The corporate masters pay 89 cents more on the hour for employees who work dusk to dawn, a moderate compensation for sacrificing a normal lifestyle. I’d fallen victim to the classic Tortoise and the Hare parable: the goal was to get healthy and pay off debt, something that can’t be done by grasping for short-term gains. Now I sleep until 3 p.m., eat eggs mid-afternoon and bid “Good Morning!” to neighbors returning home from work. That’s not a tongue slip; I do it on purpose. Why should I alter my reality to make other people feel more comfortable?

And then I hit the door. Hard. There were no serious injuries, but the experience was painful and scary enough to imbue me with an otherwise foreign notion: wisdom. I would need -- and use -- it from there on out.

The worst thing about battling debt is coping with despair, the knowledge that it is not foe but merely fog. If only it were something I could fight. To quote Arnold in Predator, “If it bleeds, we can kill it.” Not this time. No blood and no pulse, just intangible numbers, ethereal in form, untouchable yet crushing. So I learn patience. I stop sleeping at work. I talk to HR and admit that the overnight is killing me. I stop charging what I can’t afford. I admit that this is a marathon and not a sprint. Every beach can’t be Normandy.

I’m back on mornings now: up at 4 a.m., skipping to the train at 5. Booze is out of my life except for special occasions in which I’m playing hockey on the Xbox. Carbs are benched, protein bats lead off and cleanup, and the rest of the lineup is filled with greens and beans. Rest is a priority, and wouldn't you know, sanity has started poking around the tent: a warming and welcome deja vu. I’m not looking so far ahead now, but keeping my eyes on the pavement directly in front of me. And yes, I’m still riding the bike, meeting with My Therapist whenever January lightens up enough for me to get in a few miles. But sometimes if I squint as I pedal, I can almost see the finish line up ahead, winking back in the sun.

Life went bad there for a bit, and had to be placed on blocks in the garage. The gas tank was always full but the oil was too thick; my brakes got sticky and the ignition turned only against its will. With elbow grease, a sharp eye and plenty of protein I’ve been putting it all back together.

The road back is daunting but finite - so long as my will can bear it. It takes good, clean fuel to be a distance-running philosopher/warrior, so I cook, and I cook well.

There is a ruthless efficiency to tonight’s dinner: one chicken breast and a neat pile of steamed broccoli uncorrupted by cream, butter, cheese or seasoning of any kind. I’m not going to doll this sustenance up like a prostitute just to appease the hedonism of my taste buds. If I took their marching orders my plate would be a circus of empty carbohydrates and high-fructose escapism, they would have me lying on the ground like a fat dog, addicted to sugar and white flour, disinterested in life or love, waiting only for the fleeting respite of my next meal. In order to progress, the weakest parts of myself must be heavily mitigated for the war effort.

It’s a good spread, both healthy and ethical. Free-range poultry, certified Organic vegetables and a large glass of filtered water mixed with Mexican Chia seeds. On the side I’ve got my horse pills: St. John’s Wort, fish oil, milk thistle and a multi-vitamin. I’m recharging after a brutal home workout. Four max-rep sets of pull-ups, sit-ups, push-ups and air squats followed by a fore-foot jog across the Triborough Bridge. On the Randall’s Island side of the water there’s a nice staircase perfect for metabolic training and stair sprints.

This marks the end of another good day. Anyone can have one good day; I’m celebrating because I’ve managed to string a few of them together. I spear a flower of broccoli with my fork and chew pensively. Friends is coming on. I never miss an episode, shoehorning time into my schedule for every single airing with the sense of urgency of a diabetic managing his insulin levels. It’s not that I like the show per se. I don’t. I don’t even like most of the the characters. I could give a cold, loveless fuck for anyone but Chandler and Monica. Ross is a risk-averse dullard with a terrific sense of entitlement and no ability to follow through for anyone but himself. Joey is a womanizing narcissist, and Phoebe desperately needs therapy for her chopped salad of psychological issues.

Worst of all is Rachel the flat-stomached and voluptuous human void. She’s a ghoul, the walking dead, a vampire, California good looks plastered over the dead tissue beneath her skin mask, a Decepticon that transforms into a bitch. Her spectacular debut into the cultural Zeitgeist was volcanic. Men lusted over her and women championed her hairstyle as the paragon of the Nineties. The rich girl slumming it in her $4000 New York apartment, condescending to struggle but always walking the tight rope falsely, gainfully aware of the safety netting below. I can’t respect a gambler placing bets with borrowed money.

So I don’t watch to keep tabs on Ross and Rachel. They should both die alone, empty husks who never learned how to see past their own reflection. I don’t watch to see Phoebe spiral further and further from mental health, and I don’t watch to see who Joey gives his HPV to next. I don’t care about Rachel’s fashion career, or why they bought a chicken and a duck, and I don’t want to know about Gunther, Central Perk or Ugly Naked Guy across the street, either. I watch for Chandler Bing and Monica Geller, the only characters on the show with the capacity to feel.

Monica is a good egg, the fat girl from high school who got it together. She learned how to mix vegetables into her diet from time to time and get 20 minutes of exercise a day - a completely logical and 100% effective approach to losing weight. She now runs upon the food and beverage treadmill, a life of endless toil in the service of Americans who can’t stop eating. Then there is Chandler, my hero. My heart beats double time for this man. Known to the group and the fans as “the funny one,” that’s not who I see. I see a terribly sad soul, lost in the wind and rain, standing desperately against the storm, parrying blows artfully with sarcasm and cynicism, keeping his feet despite his compounded shortcomings. Chandler is miscast professionally as a statistical analyst. This man was born with the soul of a writer, asphyxiated and left for dead long ago by vacant parents and compromised love. These “Friends” can’t help him; wouldn’t know where to start if they tried. No, they lean on him, taking advantage of his empathy and his generosity, turning to him at every turn for comic relief when he needs help the most. Then there is his obvious struggle with addiction. He battles tobacco, falling in and out of love with Janice, he pads around his apartment enrobed and slipper-shod, and his weight fluctuates dramatically. In season three he ballooned up maybe 30 pounds, binge eating while the girls across the hall bake him cookies and let him slip away.

This show isn’t about friendship; it’s a parody of what friendship has become. Co-dependant escapists indulging in the shallowest of their desires, ignoring the derelict engines in their own hearts as they stray from broken relationship to broken relationship. Not me, brother. I ain’t going out like that. I’m going to do my calisthenics, hard boil my eggs and hike onwards against all manner of resistance. Broke, indebted, overweight, undernourished and lonely, the river runs dry but its bed is gilded with faith, compounding daily, enough to carry me to whatever end so long as I’m willing to take each step under my own power, sun setting at my back.

Why am I awake? Confronted directly, the darkness answers back with more darkness. It’s 2 o’clock in the morning and I have stumbled into consciousness for no detectable reason or purpose. I don’t have to be up yet, and Andy the Android is silent. If it were wake-up time he’d be vibrating all over the desk and singing his alarm for me, whining for attention like a puppy with a full bladder. Instead he lays silently on his back, snoring softly through a green charge-indicator light, suckling the USB cable from my Macbook.

Confounded, I listen carefully for the crackle of gunfire. My roommate wakes me up sometimes in the middle of a firefight, trading hot lead with South American drug cartels on the X-box in the next room. Tonight there is no sound, and yet I lie awake, pissed. I need to be asleep. I need to hit something.

This is hell week, eight straight work days in the hotel. It’s a scheduling anomaly, the bi-product from honoring the time-off requests of co-workers. Ours is a 24-hour operation, open for business 100% of every passing moment in the year. We are constructs of brick and beams, holding up the same tower. If one of us takes vacation, someone else has to reach up and keep the roof affixed snugly to the walls. I’m happy to do it - but not without my sleep.

I can’t face those faces, goddammit, not without rest. It’s not so much the work itself. Boiling coffee into a pot and wheeling Eggs Benedicts into a bedroom isn’t much of a calorie burner. It’s the mask we have to wear; the all-day lie I’m telling. Therein lies the struggle. One example: my corporate masters have a completely absurd prejudice against facial hair. If I would like to continue working for the company, I am required to participate in a daily ritual that rages against my lifestyle.

Every morning I stand in the bathroom for those bastards, scraping hot razors against the grain of my skin to meet an arbitrary “grooming standard” that didn’t apply to such bearded legends as Jim Henson, 16th President Abraham Lincoln, Aragorn son of Arathorn, and Lord and Savior/Jew Carpenter Jesus H. Christ of Nazareth. I suppose the residents of my hotel would prefer to own slaves in a Muppet-less universe ruled by the dark lord Sauron, unaware of whose name to scream in vain over a stubbed toe.

That’s just the frosting of the fallacy, not yet part of the cake. One guest from a major hip-hop label abandoned all street cred by throwing a fit when we brought him Tropicana instead of juice squeezed to order. Insane. Our species doesn’t eat regionally anymore; we don’t even know what “squeezed to order” would mean. Oranges don’t grow in winter. Nothing does except kale and roots. Produce doesn’t keep well either, unless you put it in a can. Your best hope for freshness, if you aren’t smuggling shipments up from Chile, is to keep crates of apples in cold storage. Desiring fresh, imported orange juice is acceptable. Demanding it is despicable. I have to smile at these people through sinewy hatred, apologizing for unjustified reasons against my will.

So why the hell am I awake? The answer comes from my skin: I’m on fire. I itch everywhere, and my face is covered with welts. This is bad.

A lot can go wrong living in New York. You can lose track of your dreams; get your heart broken. You can lose your faith in God or fall on the subway tracks, barbecuing your organs on the third rail. Some folks get mugged walking home from the bar, or clipped by a cab driver distracted by his cell phone. Others get their credit card numbers “borrowed” for strange overseas purchases. You can also get bed bugs, Cimex Lectularius, a near microscopic cunt of a species that lives in wood and feeds on human flesh. The little bastards are resistant to pesticides and can survive up to a year without eating. Getting rid of bed bugs is a simple two-step process: first you throw away all of your possessions, and then you give up. If I had bed bugs, then this New York adventure was ready to sing its death rattle.

Then I heard him, my ancient foe - a mosquito - whittling away the silence with his signature whine. I have never been so happy to cross paths with a hated nemesis. Mosquitoes are real bastards to me. I grew up in New England as their own personal chain restaurant. Parky: the Cheesecake Factory of mosquito casual dining. I attract them in droves, and my skin likes to react by erupting into nasty golf-ball-sized welts. I hate mosquitoes, but at least this meant I wasn’t facing bed bugs. This was good; I could roll with this. Sometimes you just need someone to kill.


Combat! Coursing with adrenaline, I assumed an attack stance, leaping to my feet on top of the bed, my body nude and pulled taught, ready to spring. I sleep naked, my skin is an organ and it needs to breathe. I flattened my hands, fingers clenched tight against each other, fashioning two lethal paddles. I was hunting a microscopic predator, but my stance was appropriate for battle with a much larger beast, a wyvern or a basilisk.

My walls were blank, nowhere to hide, a stark wasteland and there he was, bold as the weather, perched just over my pillow like a fat kid vulturing the chicken-wing table at prom, drunk with blood, hiding in the open. It seemed a shame to kill him, an otherwise worthy adversary caught in a moment of anomalous weakness. Normally a stealthy predator, he was caught sleeping off a food coma on the sofa. It would be like gunning down a Nazi Stormtrooper mid-shit.

I cocked my wrist back like the hammer on a pistol, bug wings line up in my sights. Then I paused, pangs of guilt and empathy staying my blow, cream and stock, the base ingredients of hesitation bisque. What would his last thoughts be? Weekend plans? Maybe he’d house hunt for a stagnant puddle, settle down and raise a family of millions. This bastard had earned my respect. It’s December, after all. He survived long past his season and somehow permeated a sealed windowsill to snack on my flesh. Who am I to halt the course of his life? Perhaps the best thing would be to grant amnesty and usher him out of the apartment?

Enraged yet pensive, enemy’s head on the block, I gazed into the bedroom window, my reflection gazing back. The nude executioner, axe raised, nostrils flaring as the appointed priest solemnly delivers last rites to this death row inmate, dead bug walking. There I was, strung tight, glazed with stress, swarmed with anticipation of the pending kill strike or a last second stay of execution from the governor of my conscience. And there, in the center of my reflection’s forehead, a fresh welt blossomed on a hairless scalp. He got me good. I saw red, my mouth tasted like batteries, my toes curled in rage. No. Fucking. Way. This son of a bitch sat on my face like it was a bar stool, running a tab on stolen credit, drinking heavy and tipping light.

I know how he saw me - nude, bald, pale - a hulking monster, talking food. I saw him right back, the part time predator, a hack foe, incapable of originality or self love, dangerous but hardly insurmountable. My hand swung free and true, flat and deadly I slapped the wall with excessive force, hard enough to kill a dog - because fuck him anyway, that’s why. In that last moment, before his body lost dimension, before I smeared my blood from his distended belly across the drywall, I swear to god, I think he asked me to shave.

You were bolt of lightning. For a time I held you in my fist, crackling around my knuckles, snapping at my belt buckle with your forked tongue, vibrating the fillings in my teeth, fusing the change in my pockets. But I let you go, and with you went a seared chunk of myself. Now you are forever lost. The stars are banished from the sky; if I had the strength to gaze above, there would be nothing but an errant jetliner. The faucets pour sand, fixtures cast more shadow than light, fresh produce turns to chalk in my mouth.

My darling, though we had driven through so much together, I failed you. Our collective miles traced the seam of the ocean, the hem of the mountains, melted into sunsets together. We visited the ghettos of hell and came home with souvenirs. It was all my fault; was I who gave up on you. We may have run out of road, but there was gas left in the tank - I know there was! - I could hear you purring until I turned the key and threw you in park forever.

I’ll never forget you, nor the day we met. I was a hot-shot intern in professional baseball and you were a Japanese blade, silver and glittering in the California sunshine as you rolled off the lot. We drove together to Modesto, high on petrol, in the CD player. We had swagger, potential, determination and little else. We didn’t need it, and we didn’t care. We were together. You followed me to Seattle when I asked you to, then sat in the rain waiting for lights to bleed from red to green. For five years we made it work, and for most of it we didn’t even have to try. It was our journey. We were a Fellowship of two.

You followed me further to New York. The trip itself was a song; you carried me as you always have. Six cylinders humming along, breathing the miles, oblivious to the uncertainty of the future even as clouds gathered. But New York couldn’t work; wouldn’t work. Too many people and too few streets. There was nowhere for you to park, and I just didn’t need you anymore. Not like before.

Can you ever forgive me? I now have the train, a 24-hour operation with comprehensive service and consistent reliability. No insurance, no gas, no DUIs. Surely you understand; surely you remember that close call when we faced fate together and nearly lost everything.

We were driving home from that show in September. I was the comedian, the thoughtless one, following the officer’s flashlight with my eyes, touching my nose with my finger, trying to walk a straight line, fumbling the alphabet in reverse. You hugged the road so tight, idling nervously on the shoulder while I kissed the breathalyzer. I blew zeroes and you blew sighs opaque brown cloud from from the muffler. The first sign of trouble.

I couldn’t hold on even though I wanted to. The restaurant fired me; didn’t even give me a reason. I loved that place, a quaint neighborhood spot with great food, and the guests loved me in return. But it was the wrong fit. Management even offered to recommend me somewhere else, but it didn’t ease the pain, and it certainly didn’t cover the rent. I needed the money, and you were a $4,000 car. Everyone said so but the buyers. They saw your scars, where I scraped the dumpster and some asshole clipped us at McDonald’s. They saw your breath rasping out of the exhaust pipe. Worst of all, they saw the service light when I turned your key. I refused to believe it when they said you were dying inside. I denied it. I defied it. “This is a great car!” I would thunder. “I just drove her across the country with no problems!” They didn’t care. Mechanics and risk-averse shoppers don’t look at engines and see heart. They didn’t know how you hugged the road on tight curves, or how you started right up even when frost had your throat in its icy grip. They don’t know what I knew about you. They couldn’t love you like I did, like I still do. A second opinion, and a third, and a fourth, and I sold you out for half your Blue Book value. A couple months’ rent and a few trips to the deli. I fucked up, and I can never get you back.

I got a new job selling steaks in Midtown soon enough after the firing. It was the first of many before I found the hotel gig. I’m doing better now, still riding the train, but I miss you dearly. The streets are lined with strangers. Some Jeep asshole keeps parking in your spot. I hope you are well, that your tires are full, that your new owner knows not to ride the brakes and to keep you several car lengths behind the vehicle in front of you. I hope your airbags are undeployed and your CD player is functioning properly and Bieber-free. Maybe I will see you again some day, idling at a stop sign or sipping gas at the Sunoco. And if I don’t see you on the roads, I’ll remember you in those passing moments, when the clock strikes ten and two, and any time when I have somewhere to be and no one to take me there. Goodbye, my love.