Bryan Charles - Theres a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came from: A Memoir

THERES A ROAD TO EVERYWHERE EXCEPT WHERE YOU CAME FROM

A MEMOIR BY

BRYAN CHARLES

Copyright 2010 by Bryan Charles

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part, in any form.

An excerpt of this book previously appeared in Open City.

Printed in the United States of America

Book and cover design by Nick Stone

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010935516

eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9614-9

OPEN CITY BOOKS
270 Lafayette Street
New York, NY 10012
www.opencity.org

For

Paul Bayer

Trish Chappell

Karla Wozniak

This book begins on 10/1/98 and ends on 1/14/02. It was written with the aid of contemporaneous personal journals. Many names have been changed. Dialogue was written as closely as I could remember it and in some cases consists of composite conversations. Chronology was rendered as close to the actual sequence of events as I could recall.

something
is working toward you
right now, and
I mean you
and nobody but
you.

Charles Bukowski

I arrived in New York after a twenty-five-hour train ride carrying two bags of clothes and a bankers box full of papers. Erin met me at Penn Station and led me through the crush of people and out to the street. We got in a cab and headed uptown. The cab cut through traffic going what felt like eighty miles an hour. Blocks blurred by. Neighborhoods changed. She lived in a sublet on the Upper West Side. We pulled off on a pretty street lined with trees and old brownstones. Inside I called my parents and told them Id arrived safely. I cleaned myself up a bit and Erin took me to get dinnertwo slices at Famous Original Rays.

Back at the apartment we watched TV. Id barely slept on the train and faded quickly. We got into bed. For a moment I was on one side and Erin was on the other. Then we slid over into each others arms. She ran a hand up my back and gripped the back of my neck.

Were gonna kiss now, she said.

The next day we met Craig at a diner in Midtown for lunch. He and Erin caught up a bit. They talked about city life.

We finished eating and walked to Craigs office, a minimalist space with bare concrete walls and desks out in the open on a bare concrete floor with a few offices to the side. Everyone wore street clothes and worked on Macs. They sat low in their seats staring blankly at big monitors, clicking at boxes and shapes on the screen. Craig started writing out directions to the place. I tried to follow what he was saying but grew confused. I admitted I was scared to take the subway alone. It was decided Id come back after he got out of work and wed go into Brooklyn together.

I returned that evening around six and stood on a corner in Times Square loaded down with my bags, clutching the bankers box. Hundreds of people streamed past me and their faces all blurred. I began to feel dizzy. I was relieved to see Craig. He grabbed one of my bags. We went into the subway.

It was a railroad apartment in Greenpoint consisting of a large kitchen, a living room, and two open back rooms with no wall or even a sheet between them. The floors of the living room and middle room were covered with worn brown carpet. The floor in the back room was covered with old salmon-colored carpet and there was a pink sponged paint pattern on a jutting section of the wall. In the living room was a futon couch, a small blue chair, and a large closet with plastic doors on runners. Inside the closet a TV sat on two Huber Bock beer boxes, clothes hanging on either side of it. Paul had rigged an antennae and pinned it up with one of his old Kmart nametags. On the wall was an inflatable bulls eye with velcro strips, three or four balls stuck to the velcro. On the floor under the bulls eye was a plastic cactus in a plastic pot with fake scrub brush. The lower half of the kitchen walls were wood-paneled. Over the sink were copper-colored tiles with images of mushrooms stamped on them. Paul had made a counter from a piece of wood and a large cardboard box. Hed glued the wood to the top of the box and covered the whole thing with an old blue sheet. On the counter next to a coffee maker was a magazine photo of a croissant, steaming coffee, fruit, and juice. The photo had been placed in a gold plastic frame. There was no sink in the tiny bathroom.

Craig slept in the middle room on a twin mattress on the floor. Also in the room were his stereo, some records, his desk and computer. Ten feet away on the floor under one of two windows was a full-size mattress. It belonged to Paul but he was away till November working a temp-labor gig at a nuclear power plant and so it was temporarily mine. I fell asleep fully clothed that first night under an open window, listening to cars pass on the street three floors below.

Rent was nine hundred dollars split three ways. I wrote Craig a check for Octobers rent, which left me with roughly twelve hundred bucks. I figured this would carry me a while. I decided to get to know the city rather than look for a job right away. Every day Id take the train to Manhattan and walk for hours. Often Id stop and see Erin at work. She worked at a comedy club in the west twenties. She sat at a desk in a basement office, reading newspapers, smoking, and answering the phone. The club was on its last legs. The phone didnt ring much. Wed sit for a long time shooting the breeze. There was a New York Post editorial cartoon on the walla deranged Bill Clinton on St. Patricks Day saying Where is this Erin with no bra?

Id tell her what Id seen and done that day. Erin would recommend things to add to my list. I went to Harlem, Times Square, Central Park. I went to a taping of the Ricki Lake show. I went to an appearance by Jennifer Love Hewitt at an HMV store in Midtown. I had a thing for JLH, dug I Know What You Did Last Summer.

I went to the top of the Empire State building and looked out at the city. It was a clear day and I could see to the end of the island. This may have been the first time I saw the World Trade Center in person. I went down there a few days later. I stood on the plaza between the two towers, tilted my head, and looked straight up. A feeling of vertigo came over me. I almost fell down.

A similar sensation began to afflict me on my city walks generally, an odd dislocation, as if my head were a balloon floating twenty feet in the air, connected to my body by a thin string. This balloon head had camera eyes that would record the action and play it back to me. I seemed not to be experiencing events firsthand. This feeling could last an hour or more. I told Paul about it one night over the phone. He said he knew the feeling and described a few times it had happened to him. We gave it a name: the Condition.

Erin took me to a comedy show at the Roseland Ballroom. One of the people on the bill was her ex-boyfriend Stephen. Id heard a lot about Stephen over the last couple years. Erin had moved to New York with him in the late summer of 96, just a few months after she and I split up. She always said she thought Stephen and I would get along. I didnt doubt her exactly but felt threatened by Stephen, by their history together and now his success. Others had told me how great he wastalented, funny, destined to hit it big. I was prepared to dislike him on principle.

We watched his set and had a beer with him later. It was clear within seconds I couldnt hate him, he truly was a good guy. We rapped about Kalamazoo and some of our mutual friends. We rapped about the Yankees and Chuck Knoblauchs boneheaded move in the ALCS a couple weeks ago, arguing with the umpire while the ball was still in play as Indians base runners advanced and a run scored. Stephen had been at the game.