Pockets of Perfection

I return the dented car to AVIS in Stamford Connecticut today.
It takes me hours to get out of the apartment this morning.
I didn't sleep well last night because I have been thinking about that doctor who is suing me to pay for tests I never had. I am frightened and enraged.

I pick up the car in my garage and drive toward the George Washington Bridge. I fight with the doctor in court (in my mind). I don't pay attention and end up long into New Jersey.

I pay an $8 toll to get going the right way back on 95 north.

In Connecticut, I stop in Darien and go to the Thrift Shop.
Darien has changed so much. It used to be clapboard gift shops and rickety Vitorians.
They have been ripped down and replaced with a corporate Brooks Brothers mall.

But the Thrift shop is still there (with a new corporate sign)
I buy a kitchen clock for $4.

I return the car in Stamford and tell them about the dent.
"What's to be done with me?" I ask the surly Avis clerk.
The guy writes me off. He does. I have a limp and a weak voice.

"Once I fax the report, they'll contact you."

He answers me without even bothering to look at me, as he walks away, talking to a friend or fellow employee. And he is right. How could I raise a ruckus? How could I be indignant? I can barely speak or walk.

I sit outside of Avis. There is that eerie late summer, early fall, cricket sound.
The sunlight doen't seem quite right.

I don't know when the next train is but there is nothing on my schedule for...

the rest of my life.
So I stand there and lean against a wall in the early autumn light and sob.
I cry for my circumstances. I think, I would like to make plans to get out of here, away from CT away from New York. I am sick of this area. How did I end up stuck here?

And I sob because I can't really leave. I have to stay by people who can help me.
Unless I kill myself. And so I check myself, I scan my inner core to see if that's possible (yet).
Am I capable of it, (yet)?

I wander through the Stamford Train station. I buy coffee at Dunkin Doughnuts.

There is a smart young looking handsome man costumed in a tidy suit. He has a polished haircut and tan, and he would be marked as instantly gay by me because he is too perfect looking, but he wears a wedding ring.

I imagine that I look like a lost, sad, clumsy, tubby man.
I don't even register.

I ride the train and read the New Yorker. E L Doctorow's new book "Homer and Langley" (about those brothers who died in their own trash in New York) critiqued by Joyce Carol Oates.

She uses the word "lurid" a great word. I look it up on my iphone dictionary.

I also read a book by a man who's life was changed through Christian Science.

At Grand Central. I must hold on the side of the dirty train to get myself into the station, off the platform. My hands are black with soot. A conductor walks by and smiles (takes pity on me).

In the station I must use all of my focus to get across the grand room.
When someone makes me stop abruptly, I say aloud (like a crazy person) "Oh no, please no."
Because if I stop too quickly, I fall over without a wall to hang onto.

I get my camera out (my flip video camera) and film my staggering through the station.

I used to work in recording studio nearby. I imagine running into those guys.
What would I say? What could they say?

On 42nd Street, I decide to see if I can get the M42 bus, but it's too hard, so I get in a cab.
The cab driver wants to drop me off a block before my building (traffic is terrible) but I start to protest and he remembers my staggering limp and backs off. Even a New York taxi driver doesn't want to be cursed for betraying a gimp.

I eat fishsticks for dinner and bike to church.

Tonight's service is about not being the victim.

HA!

I listen to testimony. I believe. I feel relief.

I let Arc, a man in his fifties, a former anchor for CNBC, test my bike out on Wooster Street.

I bike home. the battery runs out and I cycle most of the way home. This is a nudge from G-d.

I want to leave NY sometimes. I really do. But where would I go? And the thing is, there are pockets of perfection here.
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