Pierced.
Orlando, January 1999.
Warm moist green heat dawn. A breeze carries the scent of oleander and chlorine from the hotel pool and I can feel the light rising from behind the buildings on the resort’s campus. I am sitting on a concrete front step surrounded by tropical plants covered in heavy dew, fragrant lawns and winding crushed stone pathways. I’m waiting for a car to take me away and I am tired beyond tired; I wear my weariness like a shroud, a shroud that shrouds not only my movements but my entire outlook.

There is no future and the past is a sleepy blur of 24 hours of shepherding corporate clients from event to meeting to meal and fixing things, always fixing things.
Big grey leather bench seat in a Lincoln Town Car on a freeway. Palms skim by like monstrous artichokes, billboards scream theme park messages and my shroud has settled around me as silence. The big car accelerates toward the airport. With an intensity of relief beyond necessity I sank into the big silvery seat, letting the driver handle the bags and saying nothing. Just watching a sunrise over a place and a day I was exiting. Thrilling glow over concrete estuaries, golden rimmed car rental signs, green ponds threading along high overpasses, swimming through traffic like thick liquid.
Standing on a train traveling a few hundred feet from parking garage to airport. Below are grottos, palms, lush life, above are planes rising into the misty blue. The train slithers to a halt and the doors silently slide open. I wheel my bags out and begin the trek to the gate.
I sleep on the plane and only wake when we begin our descent. We are engulfed in clouds filled with blowing wet snow and all is grey. We finally drop below the clouds and the ground looms alarmingly as we touch down. Home again, whatever that means.

Another jet flying over the desolation of the west. Great stricken plains crossed by threads, patchworks of perfect green circles, stony valleys, high pine covered hills. Bracken. Spittle. Slag. Copper sulfate blue lakes smeared with gassy color. The Grand Canyon, suddenly.
Descent into LA. The blue of the ocean, the white sprawl of the Getty (all destroyed by torrential rains, followed by firestorms like great tidal waves of flame, charred bodies of cars, empty pools, roadways erupting with weeds, skater punks and surfers, slathered in white sun block, spf 120.)

A concert in downtown LA, ‘04. The Philharmonic is doing a recent orchestral arrangement of You Can’t Always Get What You Want with chorus, solo singers and African drummers. Bored, I wander into the lobby for a drink. A wan blond is sitting spinning a swizzle stick in a glass and humming to herself as I order a martini and watch her in the mirror behind the bar. She looks directly into my eyes and 10 hours later I wake next to her in a hotel in Westwood. Now, eleven years later, I remember little except that sex with her was thrilling in a way I’d never experienced and that I almost threw away my return ticket and disappeared from my life back east. Her name was Mary L. which she wrote on a napkin with a number before walking out of the café that morning. I never called.

Standing in a snowstorm at dusk sweating from shoveling. Watching the enormous flock of crows fly by as they do every evening and thinking about plane crashes and how low the clouds are. By morning the snow has turned to warm rain and I do not remember snow again. The crows still fly over at dusk but their numbers are greatly reduced- from perhaps fifty thousand to five thousand. That house is under water and I picture it’s beautiful plaster Victorian ceilings falling in snowy flakes to the warped parquet floors.