The Rambling Bard

A lot of bible thumpers raise their crosses here. God fearing people... that's something you'll often hear sung about this region of America; Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Presbyterians, all 31 flavors of Christian, Jehovah's Witness claims a few now and again through door to door sales, so as not to seem lagging in the brackets. In some small pockets you'll find the odd Buddhist, Muslim, or Jew. There is no fear of religion here. Welcome one, welcome all. Just don't try to convert anybody, please. Population is dwindling as it is.

Agnostics and Atheists are rare; I should know, being of the former persuasion. I'll never say the creator isn't up there, but I will say that if I get up there and find God never existed I plan not to be too put out about the matter. If he does exist it will be a pleasant discovery that of all the seemingly magical figures introduced to me in my childhood- the Easter Bunny, Santa Clause, the honest politician- at least one will have proved to be alive and smiting the wicked.

Outside again; this time for good, I pull the collar on my jacket up around my neck wishing I'd grabbed a scarf or a hat to keep the wind from whistling around my exposed flesh. Lawrence at 2 a.m. is like a ghost-town with neon and streetlights. Occasionally the silence is shattered by the tinkling crash of a bottle thrown against a distant wall by a disembodied angry voice, but for the most part it is night and the howling of the wind through the abandoned alleyways whispers people to their cars and homes.

Lucy is from Chicago and tells me often how lucky I am to be in such a small town where the stars are visible even in the heart of downtown. I grew up under the stars. I watched them watching me from the earliest post-natal moments of my life. That type of exposure to anything can be numbing.

The cold is familiar too; a cold without snow, a cold without color that kills the prairie grass and seals up the trees from late September to mid-March. We have no need for snow in Kansas, save to sparingly irrigate the soil. No mountains, few hills... skiing is twelve hours west by bus. All snow does here is cover the ground for a few days eventually turning a dirty brownish gray at the edges of parking lots and in the ditches beside roads.

In my life, I've only built one good snowman; large and intimidating like St. Michael the archangel, armed with a snow shovel and crowned with a crumbling panama my father bought on a cruise. I was probably seven or eight, still living on the east side of Wichita. It was the only year I remember it snowing on Christmas. All the neighborhood children joined in the project, a few parents too.

We rolled two gigantic snowboulders and stacked them together, using pebbles from one neighbors dormant front garden for the eyes, nose and smiling mouth. I often go back to that day and wonder if it might have been better to make the snowman look angry or perplexed. What did he think of us, the creators? He probably thought most of us were small and puny... squashable.

Lights flash yellow cautionary gleams from the deserted intersections. When I first moved to Lawrence I imagined that the corners or 8th and Massachusetts Streets were a place to meet the Devil at 3 a.m. any given weeknight.

With all the religion in Kansas, the old gentleman, Asmodai, has to have a staked claim. I imagine him being simply dressed smelling of good aftershave and cheap pussy. He'll be the kind to offer to buy you a drink when you need one the most, or spot you some change for the cigarette machine. Nice guy, huh?

I'm not tired. It's a horrible state of affairs when you're sleepless in a town where legitimate businesses close down with the lapse of sunshine and the businesses of questionable repute retire seconds after last call.

Down the alley, an eighth of a mile, a coffee shop promises to stay open until 4 a.m.; a boring place, a basement with cheesy artwork on the walls and on the people. The coffee will only make the night last longer. How I wish there was some activity to occupy the hours between 2 and 5 a.m. It can be morally reprehensible as long as it's mildly entertaining and light on the wallet.

How I long for a 24 hour bookstore, a 24 hour pool room of smoke and grunted challenges. From what little I gleaned from The Hustler, pool sharks detest light; between 2 and 5 they wouldn't be bothered by it.

There is a 24 hour bakery on the other side of town but that's out of the question; I work there. Why go to work when you're not going to work?

I check the time, 2:12 a.m. time moves so Goddamn slowly at night. The roommate is probably asleep now, the smell long evaporated. But returning home would be an admission of defeat. I cruise left 2 blocks and up another 3... There's a park with a steam locomotive plopped down in the middle of it; painted black every decade by the municipality. There is nothing overtly fascinating about it, its just a lifeless hulk of metal that once carried people from Kansas City to Topeka through to all points south and west until Colorado.

Lucy and I fooled around in it a few weeks ago. Her idea, not mine. I'm tall and broad, not at all made for the small spaces of the confined engineer's cab. I hit my head twice and spent half the time trying not to notice that a large iron rivet from the boiler was digging into my lower back.

Lucy's creative when it comes to erotic adventures. She's Anais Nin only instead of writing her ideas down on paper she recruits me and drags me away to perform the act in reality, depriving the world of what might prove to be arousing, if not entirely humorous prose about balling. I have considered telling her to write down her experiences and save them to paste together in a collection of "confidential letters," but I think it seems pretentious on my part to think that what we do is worthy of chronicle.

I stare at the numbers on the side of the locomotive, 312, they add up to 6, they probably meant something to some office somewhere once upon a time. Now they're dressing on a lump of lifeless iron, plopped in the middle of a deserted park.

I look at my watch, 2:31.

She's defiantly asleep by now. A good girl, she's knocks off around 10 p.m. so that she's fresh for a morning jog before class. She never gets sick, never seems to cry, never calls with needs, and never asks me to tell her I love her. We don't need love, we don't need sex; we don't need each other. We just like the novelty of being together in a not at all serious liaison of sex, dinner dates, and exploratory adventures into the rustic world surrounding the city.

Once we drove to Kansas City, we had Thai food and then hot tea at a frou-frou coffee store. She's still a minor, so a bar for a quiet drink is out of the question. When we do drink together it is at parties where her friends twitter and chirp about how nice a guy I seem: funny and intelligent if for the occasional lapse in timing or the ability to converse logically and with purpose.

I seem to put my foot in my mouth a bit too often. So far Lucy has been forgiving, choosing to view my discombobulated quirks as character traits instead of character flaws. "At times," she says, 'it seems like you're the only one who knows what you're talking about."

She also continues to point out the things about me that annoy her. My over use of certain words and phrases such as "seriously," or "let me put it another way." She talks about my impulse to fill silence with conversation when she would rather have it filled with comfortable silence. She seems to think silence can say things.

It's the kind of conversation in the kind of relationship that won't last because it's a relationship of lists and not of passion.