< 13 >

"I think maybe I should go home." I said. I was choking on the words. Variety was clearly disturbed by my behavior. "I think you should let someone drive you Tom." I kept on walking. I mumbled something about being all right and practically ran to my truck. In a near panic, I started the old Ford and drove away as fast as I could. Z Z top was on the tape deck. I think the tune was "Manic Mechanic" off the Deguello album.

There I sat, full of angst and raging, pinned like some still struggling insect to the bottom of the great collector's cigar box. I felt an incredible black sorrow welling up in my heart. One that wouldn't dissipate no matter how I cried, no matter how I screamed. When I closed my eyes, my reality dissolved. I was the starving Ethiopian child, numb from hunger and malnutrition. I was his mother, sick at heart with helplessness and frustration, watching her child slip away.

I was the little girl in Brooklyn watching her father sit in front of the TV and drink, knowing she would wake in the night to find him running his sweaty hands over her quaking body. I felt the drunken lust and the cold, black pain of her father. I was a little boy in Tucson hiding under the sheets listening to the screams of his mother and the dull slap of his father's fists, knowing sooner or late, it would be my turn. I felt the mindless, violent fury of his father and the terror and helplessness of his mother. I lay dying in my own feces in an institution in Romania...hollow, mindless, having never known a kind hand, a caring touch...life having less value than the next bowl of watery porridge.

Faces swam before me. Their anger and desperation swelled in my breast. I felt their anger but mostly I felt their resignation, their sorrow, their pain. Young or old, they were dissapointed children to whom life had told a horrible lie. They thought someone, somewhere was going to love them and hold them and keep them safe. If they could just hold on. If they could just make another day.