01. Writer
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John Duffy

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02. Theme
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Work

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03. MUSIC INSPIRATION
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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds:
O’ Children From Abattoir Blues / Lyre of Orpheus

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04. WRITING
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What Work Is
A Story in Three Days 

You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.

–From “What Work Is,” Phil Levine

No doubt many readers will not believe the veracity of the author,
but I assure these doubting Thomases that every incident, as such, is true.

–Neal Cassidy, The First Third

I. The Connection

Curtis Brown’s ‘86 Cutlass is parked outside my window. It has a new paint job he calls “bass boat blue,” a metal flake coating that sparkles like nothing I’ve ever seen.  Curtis emerges from the driver’s side door, which floats upward, Lambo-style, toward the sky.  The day has begun. 

Curtis, like all the students here, has a past that no one knows about.  It’s a requirement to go to school here: you waive your rights to any kind of special services, including special ed.  The school you came from likely has an understaffed office, so even attempting to request paperwork on a student's academic history is futile.  We have a phone number and a home address.  Little else. But for a few hours each day, we meet in this cinder block building, and we attempt to talk about reading and writing.

There are no bells, so Ken hits the filing cabinet to get everyone’s attention.  It works. Today’s lesson involves elements of persuasive writing.  If you want to make a convincing argument, I say, you have to put the different components together in a certain way.  Students nod, a coping mechanism.  They’ve mastered this tactic from years of making it through systems that don’t see them or, worse, actively work against their interests.  If I’m being honest, this school is not much different.  But I have this new job and here we are, so let’s get on with it.

Ken smells like weed and raises his hand.  Yes, Ken, what’s up?

I’m not gonna lie, he says.  I just hit Curtis’ blunt and I’m high as hell. The class roars.  He gets his attention.  Ken is obviously high as hell. 

Ken, I ask.  When you go to someone else’s house, and their mom is there, do you reveal that you’re high as hell? 

No, he says with pride.  I ask him to consider this space ours, which means it’s also partially mine. 

I live here, I say.  I spend more time in this room than I do at my own house, which means I think of our space as more of a home than the place I sleep at night.  Out of respect for me and our shared space, I ask, can you take care of your business somewhere else? Ken thinks about this.  He looks to Curtis who looks back at him.  They nod.  Yeah, Mr. D___.  I can do that.  An arrangement.

I’m really good at this job, I think. I’m working. We continue.

Two men in suits appear in the doorway, accompanied by the assistant superintendent of our school district.  I learn that these men are real estate speculators who want to buy the building.  They plan to knock it down, build expensive single-family houses, and sell them for a lot of money.  This is development.  They, too, are at work.

Hey everyone! Don’t mind us! We’re just walking through! Hey, what are you guys learning about? Our assistant superintendent has arrived in a very noticeable business ensemble. She speaks to us, all of us, as though we are young children. This is a test, it seems, and I begin to sweat. The start of a professional career in education hinges on this one moment, and the only person I have to rely on, the only person on my fucking team who can make this shot is high-as-hell Ken Johnson. Don’t do it, Ken. Just say nothing, and she’ll leave. Ken, fucking shut up for the love of Christ.

Ken raises his hand with real enthusiasm and what happens next is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.  We’re learning about persuasive writing, Superintendent C___.  We’re talking about the importance of organizing your thinking to make the greatest impact.  Superintendent C___ is surprised. Not what she was thinking. Seeing an opportunity, Ken continues: We begin with a clear claim and then we arrange our evidence and our analysis.  We explore the implications at the end and then wrap up.  Ken leans back, grins slowly, stoned as fuck.  The class is stunned.  Ken and I lock eyes, his grin is ear to ear.  Superintendent C___ gives a glance to the real estate guys like it means something, and then she looks at me.  Like a parent too busy to care, she says in her most patronizing drawl: Very impressive! I can see that Mr. D___ is doing good work here.  Keep it up everyone!  Then she leaves.

We laugh for a very long time and kids jump out of their seats to high five each other.  I didn’t realize it until it was over, but this moment was some kind of communal action.  Ken, I ask.  How the hell did you pull that off?  Without missing a beat, Ken says: Easy, Mr. D___ I know what’s up.  And when you know what’s up, you do what you have to do. 

This was a big deal, I tell him.  You helped me out.  And then I thought, perhaps, that such help was to such an extent that Ken might not fully realize.  Why did you do that when you could have just told her you were high as hell? I asked.

Ken laughed.  Easy, Mr. D____.  You’re one of us.  You’re one of the brothers.

II. The Raid

The next day began the same way.  Curtis’ car is outside, kids in circles laughing, smoking, telling stories.  People slowly finish up and wander into the building.  Bill, the director of vocational ed whose office is down the hall from my room, comes by with a look on face.  No one can leave the room during the first period, he says.  Especially to go to the bathroom.  Good luck, he says, and walks away. This is the most he has ever said to me.  

Fifteen minutes into the lesson, everyone’s flip phones go off at once. Noticeable unease. What’s up? I ask.  We have a policy about no phones, and now no one seems to care about that, so what’s going on?

Curtis says the police are here. He asks to leave, to go to his car, the blue one.  I say that no one can leave our room until the police leave.  This is not received well.  Everyone’s back on their phones, and another student, Tatyana, who is taller and older than I am, says that she is most definitely leaving.

Tatyana, please.  Just don’t go outside right now, I beg.  I’m begging.  This is part of my job, to beg my students to comply with rules I didn’t create so that I can keep my job.

Emergency, Mr. D___. No choice. I’m going.

I can’t stop you from leaving, I say.  But I’m going to ask that you fucking please not go outside.

We had an agreement.  She knew that she was doing something that could cause me trouble, and I knew that–as a condition of my job–I was obligated to do something that was causing her trouble.  We were in a terrible bind that neither of us asked to be in.  We were beholden to powers beyond our control, powers that required we not have each other’s back.  I moved out of the doorway, and she stepped out.

There were cops in the hallway, of course.  They were armed with guns; nightsticks; mace; and zip-tie cuffs, the kind you see in riot footage.  Two men had German Shepherds (one each) who barked ferociously when they saw Tatyana.  

Like pretty much everyone on Earth, Tatyana was seriously afraid of big dogs.  The moment she saw the dogs barking at her, tightly leashed by a heavily armed police officer ordering her to freeze, she transformed.  Fight or flight.  At the same moment, another student, equally tall and older than Tatyana, came out of the neighboring classroom, also concerned about the situation that was unfolding. 

Seen through the sidelight window of my classroom door, what played out next was like a 1950s rumble.  Caught in the middle of the two barking dogs, the young women saw each other not as allies but as enemies.  For reasons no one entirely understood, the two students elected to fight each other.  The other girl removed from her purse a medium-sized pocket knife and began to lunge toward Tatyana.  Not to be outdone, Tatyana reached into her loose-fitting boot and removed a metal box cutter, switching the blade all the way out and informing her opponent that she was about to face serious and permanent injury.

Utterly confused by what they were witnessing, the police moved to restrain the two students while the dogs were ordered to heel.  The girls struck each other with fists, pulled at each other’s hair, but the blades never made contact, fortunately. The dogs continued barking and ran toward the other girl’s purse.  One officer pulled out a small bag of weed, and by then the students were too tired to continue on with the brawl.  The police cuffed them both and escorted them out to the cars. 

I hadn’t realized that the class had been watching the whole drama play out through the hallway windows just as I had. They were firing off texts on their flip phones with unbelievable speed, making arrangements to be picked up, or to meet up after this wrapped up, or to do whatever else they felt like doing after school.

With nothing else to do in such a surreal moment, I wrote a letter to my future self as we waited for an all clear from our building principal.  Whatever you do and wherever you find yourself during the course of your professional life, I wrote, never ever let it get this fucked up again.  You can always run.  There has to be someplace else where shit like this doesn’t happen.  I signed my name and dated the paper.

After the hallway was fully cleared, everyone else knew they had no chance at making a run for it, so they sat quietly, played games, told stories, and waited for the police to pack up their shit. Any hope of continuing the lesson was lost, so students did their own thing and that was pretty much that.

The cops took significantly more time than anyone thought, so we all continued to wait, listening in the hallway as the dogs’ paws scratched along the linoleum.  Students saw them outside in the grass, too, like robots, sniffing the perimeter of our soon-to-be-sold building while patrol cars drifted by every so often. 

Bill came and knocked on the door.  In a whisper, he said that the raid had been a success, and that I could now let everyone out of my room.  I asked what happened to make it so successful.  And with a strange smile, he said that the two girls who were busted were returning to a juvenile detention center on the other side of town.  He was proud of this.  A student in the neighboring classroom, he said, had stashed a bag of pills and a couple joints in the math teacher’s closet.  When the dogs came in, the students insisted the drugs belonged to their teacher, and after no one fessed up, the principal had to let them all go.  Bill said that he knows who did it, but he’s working out another way to get them. With the most confidence I’d ever seen anyone exhibit, he smiled and simply said We’ll get ‘em.

I went to the front of the room to deliver the update.  What’s the word, Mr. D___? Are we all settled? Asked Ken.

Yeah, Ken.  We’re all good. Everyone can go after I take attendance.  With everything going down, I completely forgot to do that today. 

I sifted through the names and people signaled in their own way.  Halfway down the list and then I got to Curtis.  Where’s Curtis? I asked.  I could have sworn I saw him earlier today.  Ken? What’s up?  No one said a thing.  The window was conspicuously cracked open; Curtis had fled on foot.

III. The Next Day

The day begins like any other.  Curtis’ car is still outside, but a man in a vest is latching a chain to the back end and pulling it onto a flatbed truck.  Definitely impounded.  Ken was eager to tell the class what had happened. 

Curtis’ father had used the car to sell enormous amounts of weed.  The two bricks of weed that were in the trunk when the school day began yesterday had definitely been confiscated by the police.  Ken wasn’t sure if Curtis knew about the weed in the trunk.  Even if he did, Ken said, I sure as fuck wouldn’t tell any of you.  The class laughed again.  More attention for Ken.  We shift gears back to class, and Ken asks about our agenda.

We’re going to continue our work with persuasive writing, everyone.  Let’s take out our materials from a couple days ago and continue working through our drafts.  Back to work, I think.

A knock at the door. It’s Bill.

Hey, Bill. Can this wait? I’m—

With glee, Bill says it cannot wait.  They got him, he says. 

Who? The kid who put the pills in Dean’s closet? I ask.

Your kid, Curtis.  Turns out he escaped from the building when the cops weren’t looking.  He outran everyone.  Sargent P___ called me last night to tell me they were looking for him, on suspicion of all kinds of shit.  Turns out he ran down to that Burger King two blocks away and hid in the dumpster until the middle of the night! Can you believe these kids. My god.  One of the managers called the cops after they found him eating some of the leftover food.  I mean, can you believe that shit?

Damn, Bill. That sucks. Do you think he, like, has enough to eat? 

What? Bill was incredulous.  I scheduled this raid to get this element out of our building.  Thanks to Sargent P____, we know that Curtis was the ringleader. I hope they throw the book at him, frankly.

Wow, well… Thanks, Bill?  I add an upward inflection to make it sound like a question because I’m not sure what to say, and I don’t want to express any level of gratitude for Bill’s actions.  I turn around and see Ken working in a small group.  He’s taken it upon himself to instruct two of his classmates who are struggling to form their thesis statements.  Ken is helping out, and he’s also high as hell. 

I look at the clock and we’re only seven minutes into a 90 minute period.  Bill closes the door, supremely confident.  I look out the window as I hear the beeping of the tow truck, backing into a 3-point turn and getting ready to head toward the impound yard.  It leaves the parking lot and heads down the road. Curtis’ car gets smaller and smaller until it vanishes entirely.

01. Writer
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John Duffy

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02. Theme
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Resentment

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03. MUSIC INSPIRATION
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Gil-Scott Heron:
B-Movie

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04. WRITING
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Incident

But he died in darkness darker than   
his soul and everything tumbled blindly with him dying

down the stairs.   

We have no word
—From “Incident,” Amiri Baraka

Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.
—From “Incident,” Countee Cullen

Three years before he was killed by cops, Austin Ryan Thomas was a student in my class.  He was part of a group known as The Forty-Four: forty incoming freshmen who were identified as at risk of not graduating in four years. 

Before their arrival, our principal projected all forty names during our opening staff meeting.  He talked about the steps we would take, a new school-wide initiative, to engage and support them in every way we could.  Whatever service or support they needed, we would supply it. 

The gesture seemed very much in line with the work we had been doing for years, and everyone nodded along in agreement.  The labor required to make this happen was a no-brainer because the payoff was so big: kids get to experience success; they become models, mentors, and tutors for younger peers in similar situations; the school earns a higher graduation rate; the community gets to work with educated people who are connected to networks of resources.  Parents can brag about their children’s achievements.  School workers can brag about them, too.  

Austin’s name appeared next to mine on the big screen facing us in the meeting.  He was in my first hour class, and I met him the next week.  He sat in the back, slumped down in his chair, and wore big clothes.  He was frequently tired and did everything he could to make himself invisible.  His mom frequently sent him to class with granola bars because snacks helped him to stay awake.  He had opinions about Lenny from Of Mice and Men, though, and when we talked about Lenny as a sympathetic character, Austin came to life.  Lenny is a character for whom the world cannot account, we decided.  Always at the will of his impulses, he makes serious mistakes that eventually cost him his life.  This detail caught Austin’s ear, I remember. Perhaps this was the universe doing its best to sound an alarm, a grave warning from a world beyond our own.  The best laid plans, indeed. 

Austin didn’t pass the class, but he did make it through summer school.  I never heard from him after that, which was unsurprising.  Like so many students, he found a way to move through the next few years on a path that attracted as little attention as possible.  

Three years later, another staff meeting, our principal was talking about testing practices when another teacher mentioned the group of students, The Forty-Four.  Oh yeah, he said.  One of them died, I think.  I just read about it in the paper.  The news shocked us, of course, but so did its flippant delivery.  The words came like trash from the window of a moving car.  The principal said Austin’s name and then pivoted back to the testing practices, a gut punch.  The room became brighter, almost total white, and my face felt molton hot.  Back to my room, I Googled Austin’s name and read the reports in the local papers.  He had been killed by cops a mile away from the school. 
  . . .

Years before I began working in education, my friend Cody shared a story about a chance encounter with the police. He was working at an industrial supply warehouse when a man buzzed the front door.  Cody’s employer shipped large wholesale orders, so walk-in customers were rare.  When Cody answered the door, the man pulled a gun and demanded to be let in.  Cody was the only person there that day, so he did as the man asked.  The man took as many items as he could carry: power tools, a jacket, some work pants, a mop bucket.  Then he was gone.

Cody called the cops.  Two hours later, another buzz at the door.  To Cody’s amazement, it was the same guy from before.  Cody met him at the door again, this time with a shotgun.  The man said he had left some items inside and that he had come back to retrieve them. Cody racked his 12 gauge and told him that this was the last time they were going to see each other.  If the man ever came back, he was dead.  The man left.

Curious, Cody went back into the warehouse to search for the man’s belongings.  Tucked underneath a tipped-over pile of workshirts was a brown pocket folder with some papers inside.  Cody leafed through them and quickly sensed what was up: the man had used the folder for job interviews.  It contained a resume with his name, phone number, current address, and employment history.  He was stealing the equipment he needed to work a custodial job.

Two hours later, another buzz at the door.  This time it was the cops, two guys, both white.  Cody told them what had happened—the gun, the theft, the guy’s return, the papers.  He gave them the man’s belongings and even told them how to get to the address on the resume.  Cody confessed that he was close to shooting the man when he returned, too, because the police had not arrived. 

The cops laughed. Cody asked what was so funny, and one cop said that it wouldn’t have mattered that much.  When shit like this happens and we’re not around, he said, just make sure there’s only one story by the time we show up.  The cops laughed again.  In an act of feigned solidarity, Cody did too. 
  . . .

Acting as a “multijurisdictional narcotics team” (with the cinematic acronym N.E.T.), seventeen officers tracked and eventually killed Austin Ryan Thomas.  In a prepared statement following the incident, Oakland County Undersheriff Mike McCabe alleged that Austin was selling drugs to an undercover officer and that the officer had purchased drugs from him “at least two times.” When the officer set up a third meetup, they got together at a condo complex down the road from our school.  Austin allegedly entered the officer’s car, pulled a gun, and pointed it at the officer’s head, attempting to rob him.  McCabe then describes the final moments with sterile detachment: “The officer pulled his gun and was able to fire shots that struck the suspect.”

Even with so little detail, the story is tragically familiar.  We recognize the plot from centuries of accounts of Black people killed by police with no one else around to see it, film it, or refute the official story.  We don’t know how many shots were fired in the car.  We don’t know how the officer managed to unholster his gun, aim it, and fire multiple shots before Austin could pull the trigger of his own gun, which was allegedly already at the officer’s temple.  McCabe’s story urges us not to question it because it’s one we already know, a quickdraw contest where the hero saves the day.  Variations of this story endlessly circulate in the flaccid Hollywood action films we’ve seen for decades: cop as John Wayne, cop as Clint Eastwood, cop as Stallone, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris.  The hero wins and the villain is vanquished, never to be seen again.  Order is restored.  Townspeople cheer. Safety returns.   

But this tragedy isn’t just about the loss of life and how we narrate it.  It contains multitudes.  Just as tragic is what we are invited to believe in order to see the outcome of this incident as just:  the police are honorable. Their work is always in the service of public safety.  Justice was served.  Youth drug offenses are criminal matters, not matters of public health.  Maintaining the perception of safety is worth paying a high price, even when that price is a child’s life. The undercover officer did the right thing; we believe him when he says that his own life was at risk.  The prize of capturing Austin on a greater charge was more valuable than deescalation, than intervening earlier, than lessening the danger.  The lack of transparency is justified because police work is dangerous.  Children who commit crimes that adults commit should be treated as adults, even if that means being killed by cops.  Killing children absolves the police of the need to be accountable for destabilizing communities, endangering citizens, and eroding public trust in their organization.  
  . . .

The official story of Austin’s final moments is a work of fiction.  We’ll never know what happened in the car, and we live with that.  The person who pulled the trigger is still out there, likely policing predominantly Black neighborhoods.  We don’t know who he is, and we live with that.  An internal investigation committee determined that the narcotics team acted appropriately, that there was no purpose in looking into this incident any further. We live with that.  Austin was a young Black man—a child—who was shot multiple times in the car of an undercover cop, and his family, friends, and loved ones will always live with the burden of not knowing what really happened. 

When I think about Austin, the memory of his face begins to fade.  This is where I leave him: a 14-year-old in my 1st hour English class, bleary-eyed, hungry, and ready to entertain new ideas. I see his face, his hair braided in neat rows, his oversized orange shirt, his shoes.  But I wonder if this is really him. Perhaps what I’m seeing is a composite, a collage of the other 1,300 students who have occupied this room since he left.  Then I think of his final moments in that car.  What was said.  What he thought.  How it escalated.  His heartbeat thundering in his ears.  How it played out, like in a movie.  And I return to the liminal present: a time where any of my students who look like Austin could die like him too.  I sense the edges of my story beginning to warp and fade.  A search online warrants very little: the photo from an obituary website, some message board prayers from loved ones—the remaining evidence of his brief time with us.  How many of us have been Austin Ryan Thomas?  How many will be?  As my memory goes, I worry that I’ll lose him entirely and that the cops will win: by the time someone else shows up, there will only be one story left.

01. Writer
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John Duffy

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02. Theme
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Elevation

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03. MUSIC INSPIRATION
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Ben Folds Five:
Army

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04. WRITING
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Freedom Isn’t

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring. /…How privileged you are, to be still passionately / clinging to what you love; the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you. / This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us. / Surely it is a privilege to approach the end / still believing in something.
—Louise Glück

No intelligent radical can fail to realize the need of the rational education of the young. …Only by freeing education from compulsion and restraint can we create the environment for the manifestation of the spontaneous interest and inner incentives on the part of the child. ...It will produce men and women capable, in the words of Francisco Ferrer, “of evolving without stopping, of destroying and renewing their environment without cessation; of renewing themselves also; always ready to accept what is best, happy in the triumph of new ideas, aspiring to live multiple lives in one life.”  
—Alexander Berkman

It’s lunchtime and the military’s back.  Their operation is bigger than before. There’s a chin-up bar with streamers on it.  A crowd has formed. Only 10 minutes until 5th hour. A woman in an army uniform is directing traffic.  The medals she’s wearing suggest that she’s seen active combat, one kid says. Behind her, a middle-aged man eyes potential candidates.  He’s wearing a grey suit and a light blue tie. His hands are crossed in front of him and his nose is in the air. He looks like a TV mob boss.

One kid signals that he’s ready to participate.  He writes his name on the sign-up list. The challenge requires it.  If you win, you get a water bottle emblazoned with a military logo. Lose, and the crowd will laugh at you.  No water bottle. But your name remains on the list.

The kid wins and the crowd cheers.  The girls in front take pictures and shout in excitement.  The line of hopeful boys now stretches all the way to the bathroom doors.  Two other Marines step in to man the desk. An unsure boy asks one of the Marines about his gun.  They start a conversation, and the Marine urges the boy to sign the list. I’d rather not, the boy says.  I can’t do a chin-up. Don’t worry, the Marine says. We’ll give you a call and maybe we can talk guns or something.  The boy beams. A connection.

The spectacle continues.  TV mob guy whispers to the woman in uniform.  He saw two boys who looked interested but who then walked away.  Her pursuit lasts less than a minute. Have you considered the challenge, she asks.  The boys look at each other and shrug. She points back to the crowd, to the girls, to the water bottles.  The boys are quietly escorted to the front of the line. They sign their names, compete, and win. Water bottles for them, too.

01. Writer
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John Duffy

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02. Theme
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Balance

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03. MUSIC INSPIRATION
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Alex Cameron:
Politics of Love

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04. WRITING
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White Knight

A PLAY IN ONE ACT

 

Before long children will see
what their parents have hidden in them.

History won’t wait a hundred years to settle accounts,
and the poor will descend on your cities
to satisfy their hungers.

Then I want to see you, amigos of progress.

                                                                                          —Arqueles Morales
                                                                                                                                                                    

CHARACTERS

Michael Marvash - 35
Bill Marvash - Michael’s father, business owner, 65

SCENE— A nondescript restaurant. Downstage center is a table with two chairs. Michael and Bill are enjoying beers.

______

MICHAEL-So any family news?

BILL-Oh, shit. Well, not family news but personal news, I guess. You know that girl I wanted to adopt?

MICHAEL-Yeah, the one whose mom was having trouble?

BILL-Yeah, we were giving the mom propane cause she didn’t have any heat and her trailer park wasn’t doing shit. So, I kinda fudged some info with the county to get her $4000 and we’ve been supplying her with free heat for a while. Anyway, she come in a while back, responding to an ad we placed in the newspaper for the apartment above the office.

MICHAEL-You guys rent that out? I thought it was just like two small rooms and a bathroom?

BILL-Yeah, it is, but we figured, shit, let’s rent it. So this gal come in and I’m like, hey, you’re Heaven’s mom, right? That’s her daughter’s name, Heaven. And she was like yeah, that’s right. I’m here about the room. So we rented it to her and she was up there for probably six months. Anyway— think you know where this is going.

MICHAEL-Oh, god. Lemme guess. Things didn’t work out.

BILL-Well Child Protective Services was on her ass something terrible, so we hooked her up with all sorts of dishes and stuff from Target. Things seemed cool and CPS cooled down, so we figured everything was OK. But then money started going missing downstairs and we were like, shit, Who’s the thief?  Brandon, my yard guy, found out about these cameras that you can use with your phone, so we set one up and sure enough, she was breaking in downstairs in the middle of the night and fuckin stealing everything out of the cash drawer! Shit, we lost a lot of money.

MICHAEL-So, what happened? You kicked her out? So what?

BILL-We kicked her out, but… [beat]I wanted to do everything I could to get her to stay with her daughter. That kid of hers was the sweetest kid. Debbie and I were gonna adopt her, too. Shit, we were actually gonna adopt her and take her home with us so the mom could get herself together and have a stable place. Deb even said it might strengthen our marriage.  You know, help us to refocus or something.

MICHAEL-OK, but what happened after she got kicked out?

BILL-Well, I’ve kinda been supporting her for a while.

MICHAEL-Like, how long?

BILL-A while...

MICHAEL-OK, so where is she now?

BILL-Well, she was living in some other apartment nearby, and things got to be pretty good. I always wondered about her friends—you know, some of them were pretty rough. But she managed to get a car somehow. Someone else musta helped her, and she managed to get some furniture and some of the shit you need when CPS workers come through to make sure that you’ve got a stable place. So they came through and this gal was ready. Everything looked good and she got to keep Heaven.

MICHAEL-If her friends were kinda shady, how did she manage to get a car and furniture for the apartment?

BILL-I dunno...

MICHAEL-OK, you obviously bought it all for her. Why did you do that?

BILL-I may have had something to do with it. But anyway, this gal was in trouble and she needed some serious help. 

MICHAEL- Oh my god, but you—

BILL-You know those funds you see on TV? Give to this place and they’ll help people? That’s all bullshit. Total fucking scam. I figure, just reach out to people individually and help out, you know? Reach them directly. So I helped this gal, and things were looking pretty good.

MICHAEL-So where is she now?

BILL-Well, my buddy who's a Flint cop called a few weeks ago, middle of the night. Ugh! He said, man, I hate to do this to ya, but this gal’s seven months pregnant and she’s sleeping on bare concrete tonight. We picked her up and she needs some help. The apartment’s in your name, so is there anything you can do? I said shit, called my bail bonds guy, got her outta there. Cost me about $1500 bucks.

MICHAEL-Holy shit, what? You bailed this woman out of jail? You have a bail bonds guy?!

BILL-I know. I know! It looks bad, but she’s seven months pregnant and she’s in fuckin jail. I mean, Christ, what are you gonna do? You’re able to help someone, you help ‘em. So she got out, and she settled back into her place. Few months later she had her kid. His name was AJ.

MICHAEL-Was CPS involved? I mean it seems like they would be.

BILL-Well, she had a tough relationship with them. She said she’d never let them come and take her kid and sure enough, she was dropping dirty and they knocked on her door one night. She was fuckin dropping dirty and she’d been droppin dirty for a while. That means she wasn’t passing her drug tests.

MICHAEL-I gathered that, yeah.

BILL-I mean she had to give regular samples to the state and she was dropping dirty, so they came. And before they could get to the point where they were gonna take the kid, she packed her shit up and went to Alabama.

MICHAEL-Wait, what? she just fuckin uprooted everything and moved to fucking Alabama? Does she have family down there or something?

BILL-Family, friends, yeah, I guess. Someone down there was helping her out. It was tough for her. Her son is, eh, Afro-American, and she was trying to get away from the baby daddy as much as CPS, so Alabama seemed like a good bet. But she was only there for a few weeks. On my way home from Florida last week, she called me out of the blue, wanted to know if I wanted to take the long way back to Flint, drive through Alabama and meet up.

MICHAEL-Jesus, I bet you actually did that, too.

BILL-No way, couldn’t take things that far. Anyway, by the time I was loading the truck up to drive back home, she called me again and said she was back in Michigan. Real erratic sounding, too, like something was wrong. I told her we’d meet up when I got back and we set up a time to sort things out. She said she was worried about CPS and that she’d kill anyone who ever took her kids from her. Anyone who even tried to take her kids away, she’d kill em. She said it just like that. That’s when I said, whoa, I don’t know about this program. I gotta get off a this porch, if you know what I mean. So I said we’d meet up in Michigan, but I wasn’t really cool with this new thing about killing people, you know? Something was up.

MICHAEL- So is she back in the apartment now?

BILL- I got a call… [long pause] from a state cop. Monday night. He said the landlord of the apartments called him, said someone had kicked the door in. It was the baby daddy. He’d come by, and… [struggling]

MICHAEL-And what?

BILL-She’s dead.

MICHAEL-Jesus, what!? You just learned about all of this three nights ago?

BILL-[crying now] She’s dead. Guy killed her. Apparently the neighbors heard everything going down. He went in there, evening time, and around 3am someone finally called the cops. Neighbors said they thought it was some kinda fuck fest thing going on, but this guy raped the shit out of her and killed her before taking off. Cops said there was heroin all over the place, stains on the walls, everything.

MICHAEL-Oh my god, I’m so sorry. Do you think—

BILL-So, I called Brandon, got him and his helper buddy Zach to go over there and replace the door. They had to replace some louver doors inside, too. Landlord was real cool about it, didn’t say anything and let us get out of the lease. We still had seven months left on it too, but they were like, just pay us for the rest of the month and get the fuck out of here. I just threw down bills, glad they were willing to work with us. Brandon’s carpentry work was great, but he told his gal friend who just so happens to be Debbie’s sister. Shit! I was like, to Zach when we were at work, I was like Zach, I gotta bone to pick with your boss. How the hell did he tell Debbie’s sister about the apartment? Zach was like, Shit man, Brandon said: Hey, Bill’s got me over at that murdered woman’s apartment changing out doors’ and then she was like, ‘What?’ And then he told her. So that’s how it went. Debbie knew, so it wasn’t like—I mean she knew about this gal, she just didn’t know about the apartment and everything else.

MICHAEL-She knew that you were supporting this person but she didn’t know the extent to which you were supporting her?

BILL-The extent, yeah. She didn’t know, but she’s a very understanding person and she was cool with it. She just said, damn Billy, I just hope that kid of hers doesn’t look like you! Ha! Can you believe it? After all that.

MICHAEL- Eek. So this whole thing just played out over the last few days? Where are her children? Where’s the boyfriend?

BILL-They’re with foster care. The guy’s on the run. [beat] I went over there, to the apartment, when Brandon and Zach were finishing up, and I looked around, looked at how they were living. It was awful. Shit everywhere. They even had bills that they’d rolled up, like, for narcotics and shit. [imitates what he believes is doing narcotics] I took one that was rolled up with a rubber band and I put it in my desk drawer at home—

MICHAEL-Why the hell would you do that!? You touched it? The coke bill? Isn’t that, like, something the police have to catalogue or something?

BILL-I kept it as a reminder. I gotta stop helping people. I gotta stop this shit. I gotta get balanced out. Kill this white knight shit. Kill the horse. Sell the armor. I’m not helping anyone anymore. I can’t do this. Only family.

MICHAEL-Well, I think—

BILL-Only family, everyone else, fuck ‘em. You’re on your own.

MICHAEL-Look, you remember that time that that rock band from California came through town? They were in that RV and they came by because they had a propane leak and another three weeks on the road. Their fridge, cooktop, none of that worked. You remember? You worked underneath that RV for two hours to fix a ruptured hose, you refilled their tank, and you only charged them cost on the propane. It was like six bucks. For better or worse, this is what you do. You help people in trouble.  To give that up because of this whole thing would be a mistake. Plus, no one in your family needs the kind of help you’re talking about. We should be thankful for that, if anything.

BILL-[Lost in thought] A gal came in the other day looking for a storage unit. I was like, OK. She got one. I gave her a deal. Then she said her chimney was collapsing, needed a guy. So I called Brandon, and he went out to her place and said it’d be like five grand. So she came back in and said she needed help moving her furniture. I was like, sorry, honey, I don’t know anyone. Maybe you can call your friends. I mean shit, can you believe it? I can’t help ‘em, man. I can’t help ‘em. None of ‘em.  Next day I told Brandon about her wanting help, and you know what? He congratulated me for saying no. Said if she wanted stuff, she could get a job like the rest of us. Make an honest living, that kind of thing.

MICHAEL-How did that make you feel?

BILL-Good. It was good. I paid him a little extra for his trouble, which he seemed to appreciate. He’s almost done paying off that piece of shit truck I sold him, too. You know I made a grand on that deal? Spiffed it up, sold him the note and he’s making payments. Said I shoulda charged him more! Seriously? Can you believe it? I’m not too concerned, anyway. I’ll get it out of him. I’ll get it out of him.

[Fade out. Curtain falls.]

01. Writer
–

John Duffy

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02. Theme
–

Disappear

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03. MUSIC INSPIRATION
–

Chumbawumba: 
Tubthumping

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04. WRITING
–

Long Voyage Home

Before we all left Outback Steakhouse, my uncle signaled that he had to go to the bathroom. Otherwise, he said, he’d piss himself on the way home. My dad and I laughed. Do people actually do that? Piss themselves while driving?

Look, when it comes to road pissing, I’ve been in a lot of tight situations. Pee bottles, window blasters, pinch and holds, yellow submarines—I’ve been around, which is why I wasn’t that worried when, 10 minutes into my hour-long commute back home, I realized that I had to piss.

You may not know this, but your piss calculus changes a lot when you’re on the road.  I had about 50 minutes left.  Worst case, I’d pull into a gas station or a rest area. Or I could do literally one million other things to relieve myself. Same goes for the 40 minute mark, the 30 minute, and so on. A million choices. No big deal. 

But then something happens. The piss urges occur more frequently, each with a fury exponentially greater than the last. It may not be so bad right now, but when you’re barreling down the highway in a Honda subcompact and it circles back around, you’re gonna sweat a little—I promise you.

With 20 minutes to go, I realized that something serious needed to happen or I was completely hosed.  With my eyes on the road, I poked around on the floor looking for wide-mouth bottles, fast food containers—really, anything that could house the piss. At this stage, pissing into an old Chalupa wrapper actually seemed like a good idea. 

Ask any long-haul trucker and they’ll tell you the same thing: when you finally hit CODE RED status, the millions of choices you used to have actually dwindle to, like, two or three. That’s when you have to commit to something, and those two or three choices are usually 100% terrible. 

I was moving at 80mph and it was full-on raining. Concrete jungle, no major exits, no pee bottles, no choice. It was going to happen, so I needed a plan.

I remembered that my ill-fitting floor mats—designed for a completely different type of vehicle—were produced by Weather Tech, that company that advertises on TV. You see a guy with snow boots, and all the shit that he tracks into the car melts away and conveniently pools in the center of the mat.  They say they’re, like, designed by lasers or something. Fuck it, I thought. I’ll just turn on cruise control, unzip, and hope for a miracle. Worst case, I’d hit the steering column and it would splash back. (Or, I’d straight up crash the car and die.) Best case, the piss stream would form an arc that would land surgically into the floor mat’s laser-contoured moisture receptacle.

With no time to think it through, I blasted straight forward and pinched off. The relief lasted about three minutes until the urge came back, ripping through my shit so hard that I had no choice but to full-pressure-fire-hose it again. This time, I had managed to stop on an exit ramp near my house. The incline was steep and I could hear the piss pool sloshing around next to my foot. It hit the rear barrier of the mat, splashed over, and absorbed into the carpet. 

By the time the last blast hit—the most intense of them all—my confidence was shattered: I would not be able to hold it until I made it back. With no choice left, I fully surrendered to the piss urge. My day, my week, my life, everything was worth fuck all because tonight I’m pissing in my car. I let it rip and did what had to be done, right there, doors closed, windows up, with just a block to go before I was home.

When I pulled into the driveway, I could hear the piss pool splash over the side of the Weather Tech mat again. I got out, folded it like a taco, and emptied it onto the lawn. I’ll be god damned, I thought. Aside from the piss that absorbed into the seat and the surrounding carpet, that floor mat actually worked! 

I ended up spraying the affected areas with Windex and patting them down with a piece of paper towel.  No telling if it would do anything, but it seemed like a good idea. Then I went back inside.

Long day. Long year, in fact. I set my alarm and went to sleep. Fuck it, I thought. It’ll probably disappear.

01. Writer
–

John Duffy

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02. Theme
–

Mathematics

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03. MUSIC INSPIRATION
–

Goo Goo Dolls:
Slide

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04. WRITING
–

Everything is Pretend

What you feel is what you are/ And what you are is beautiful
-Johnny Reznick

Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.
-Richard Rorty

Televised presidential debates are filled with all kinds of linguistic oddities: toothless insults, regrettable gaffes, non sequiturs galore. As a younger viewer, what resonated with me most were worn out metaphors, the direct comparison between two things—a referent and a policy or whatever—that never seemed to jive. Nowhere was this more vivid than the run up to the 2000 election when Al Gore famously insisted that he was going to place social security in an “iron-clad lock box,” and Bush countered that Gore’s calculation to secure the program’s funding amounted to little more than “fuzzy math.” Worse, Bush chuckled like a drunken gremlin every time he said it. 

Though seemingly benign, these metaphors took on a life of their own within my group of friends. For weeks following that broadcast, everyone I knew—smartass 17-year-olds who couldn’t even vote in the upcoming election—used these terms as pejoratives to denounce just about anything that came up in casual conversation. Worse, the less sense we made, the more emboldened we became. 

“Hey, you try that new cold cut combo from Subway?”

“How about you put your appetite in an iron-clad lock box, dickhead!”

“Hey, you check out the new drill sheets at marching band practice yesterday?”

“Yeah, those formations look like a bunch of fuzzy math.”

That sort of shit. 

We had accidentally appropriated some of the most dominant language of the national political conversation leading up to the 2000 election, and we had turned it into something else, something really stupid. We attached and reattached the words in myriad ways, knowing that such work meant nothing because the signifiers themselves were worthless—empty referents that never fully illuminated the political ideas they were designed to explain. So the jokes continued. 

During the weeks leading up to the election, my first sense of national politics changed from an old man’s sport to something greater, a source of personal amusement. The gaffes, the hazy bullshit, the dying metaphors, the cult of personality—it all seemed like a joke that everyone else was in on. We later learned the painful lesson that this was not the case. 

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bush v. Gore destroyed the idea that we were simply ridiculing a universally recognizable theater of the absurd. Instead we learned that folks actually understood this language of lock boxes and fuzzy math as sincere, instructional even. Other hard lessons followed: language mattered; caring about things mattered, which meant that sincerity mattered; how we talked about the things we cared about mattered; creating spaces for people to tell the truth mattered, and finding and nurturing those spaces was difficult. 

Of course, we had no way of knowing any of this at the time. All we wanted to do was make fun of stuff that seemed so obviously unworthy of sincere engagement. Before we would learn any of this, though—before we would come out the other end as different people with different sensibilities—we would first have to dwell in a space where our thinking was wrong. We would first have to watch as everything around us became a straight-up horror show. 

_____

In need of a long-term project to take up as much class time as possible, my high school civics teacher asked us to go to a political event and write about our experiences. We received no real instruction beyond that. How fortunate, then, that Al Gore had recently announced a campaign event in Flint, a brief rally in the parking lot across the street from the Local. I could complete the assignment and expel minimal effort.   

The day came and I parked my van in a nearby alley before walking to the event site. The stage was modestly decorated with red, white, and blue streamers, and there were signs announcing the opening entertainment: the Goo Goo Dolls. 

Close to the entrance, I saw a couple of white dudes with pro-life signs—the really gnarly ones with images of barely discernible fetuses and scripture from Revelations. Because this was a rally for a major presidential candidate, there were a lot of people, and many of them were not happy about the signs. The discomfort began with whispers from people around me, but then I heard full-on shouting from 20 feet back. 

“Hey! You! You! Hey!” It was a woman’s voice trying to get the dudes’ attention. They didn’t look, so she persisted.

“You! Hey! You motherfucker! I’m talking to you, you motherfucking prick!”

She had their attention now. Another woman standing behind me joined in.

“Hey, you motherfucker! Let me ask you a question! Can you actually give birth? Are you able to give birth, motherfucker?!”

The dude ringleader looked at her blankly. It was like in Ghostbusters when Gozer the Gozerian asks Ray if he’s a god, and he’s like, obviously no, I’m not a god. Why would you even ask such a thing? That’s what this was like; the dude was like, obviously, I can’t have kids. 

The women looked at him and responded in unison: “Then FUCK YOU!”

Clearly not their first rodeo. 

We got inside and waited by the front of the stage. Johnny Reznick came out and gave an underwhelming speech about the political situation in America.  He mentioned jobs and then said something about opportunity. He clenched his fists as he spoke to crowd between songs, and after playing a short set of hits he urged us to “keep the faith” and then disappeared into the hospitality tent. It wasn’t clear if the faith that Reznick referenced was the same brand that was practiced by the men outside the event, but no one really seemed to care.

Gore took the stage 90 minutes later and he was visibly ill. He delivered a boilerplate stump speech about taxes and social programs and again used the term “lock box” to talk about his interest in preserving social security. The crowd roared, and I clapped along and laughed out loud like Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons. I used the laugh to signal a rift between what was going on and what I thought it meant.  Everyone else cheered. When the event was over, more songs from the Goo Goo Dolls played over the PA system and we all left. 

My understanding of the event, like the language I used in school, was ironic. I assumed that what had happened was a kind of theater, that everyone was there to better understand the world behind the show, behind the script, behind the production. I assumed that when Gore said “lock box,” he was really speaking in code; when he said “welfare reform,” he was really talking about something else. What surprised me most, then, was that Gore appeared to believe what he was saying as though it weren’t all just a game. To the crowd the words read as sincere, too. I overheard people say how impressed they were that Gore “spoke the truth,” and that he could “change the country.”    

What excited me most about the event was that I could use swear words in my civics essay (because they were direct quotes from the women in line, so it was OK) and that I could use it as yet another opportunity to say stupid shit about lock boxes with my friends. The language was still meaningless, we thought, even if other people didn’t seem to get the joke.
_____

The next week I was working at the Flint Local when a Green Party worker gave me a flyer for an event at a nearby auditorium. Ralph Nader was coming to speak, and he would be introduced by Michael Moore and Phil Donahue. It was free and open to the public, and I got extra credit for going to another political event, so I checked it out.

Unlike the Gore rally, there were no protestors, no metal detectors. The crowd was noticeably different. To my left was an aging crust punk—a guy in a black leather jacket and an anarchy backpatch.  He was wearing a latex skull mask, and he had torn off mouth area so that he could wear it for longer periods of time without his skin becoming irritated from the moisture of his breath. To my right was a woman who worked as an accountant. Her husband wore a suit.

Michael Moore and Phil Donahue told personal stories about the effects of deindustrialization, about Flint, and about what needs to happen as we move forward. Nader continued the conversation to address what was wrong with the direction of the country and what he was planning to do to fix it. People were enthusiastic. Before leaving, he made it a point to address two issues that he said major party candidates would never discuss: single-payer healthcare and prison reform. He asked everyone in the crowd to do what they could to bring these items to the forefront. He specifically requested that the crowd ask politicians about these topics knowing that these people would skirt the issues or pivot to address something else. They would deliberately obfuscate and then refocus on safer terrain. He talked about duty, and then he left. 

The idea of duty is what caught me off guard. Though indirectly, Nader’s speech crystalized the idea that irony can have a caustic effect on political discourse. In order to do the work he asked of the crowd, everyone would have to have the same understanding of the political metaphors that were circulating around. These weren’t neutral, meaningless words that we could mangle for fun; they were weapons designed to deceive people into voting against their interests. They were tools to preserve the power of a cultural and economic elite. Nader left us with a silver lining, too: just as it can be used to divert attention, language can be used to cut through the smokescreen, to clarify, to hold people accountable.

The day after the Nader event, a guy came into our civics class who was running for a US House seat, apparently at the invitation of one of my classmates. (I was spaced out most of the time, so his arrival may not have been as sudden as I recall.) A local reporter walked in with a notepad, then a professional photographer, then some kind of political handler, and then the guy.  He looked like a typical politician: tall, white, short hair, unnaturally white teeth. He wore a basic suit and sounded like Troy McClure. He introduced himself as Mike Rogers and then proceeded to give us his stump speech. He shared a series of disconnected ideas, the kinds of things you’d see printed on posters in the framed art isle at the grocery store, stuff like freedom isn’t free and hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. That sort of shit.  It was like listening to my friends talk about fuzzy math and lock boxes: he just used a bunch of loosely-connected buzzwords to make it seem like he had a handle on what was going on. 

He wrapped up with a few minutes left in the class period, so I said fuck it and decided to test Nader’s theory. I raised my hand and asked why he didn’t work to do away with jail time for non-violent offenders. I didn’t even know what I was asking, really. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

Rogers seemed visibly caught off guard and pivoted to a completely fucking made-up story about a girl “about our age” who was taking a Greyhound bus to see her grandmother. All of a sudden, he said, she met a guy who got her hooked on crack and then sold her into a network of sex slavery. 

Rogers looked at me with laser precision. “Technically, he’s a nonviolent offender, right?  So you’re saying he shouldn’t go to jail?”

I didn’t know if he actually wanted to argue or if these were rhetorical questions. I was just doing what Nader wanted me to do. I was 17 and knew next to nothing about what jail was like or who ended up there.  My classmates listened to Rogers’ story and they nodded in agreement. The logic seemed simple, and so did the lesson: if you do terrible shit like get girls hooked on crack and then enslave them, that is A) a non-violent offense and B) still worthy of incarceration. The implications of Rogers’ thinking also seemed simple: everyone in jail is there because they committed an offense as egregious as the man in the story, so why bother questioning it? To do so would put you on the side of people who hook children on drugs and enslave them. To do so would be terrible, unAmerican. To do so would sound like fuzzy math, or fuzzy logic, or fuzzy whatever-the-hell.

Rogers lectured us on violence having already accepted $21,400 in campaign contributions from the National Rifle Association. He went on to serve as US Rep to the 8th congressional district in 2006, eventually serving as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.  During his tenure, he oversaw an expansion of governmental surveillance, appropriating an undisclosed amount of taxpayer dollars to NSA efforts via the Intelligence Authorization Act before retiring in 2015. The exact amount is classified, but files leaked by Edward Snowden suggest it to be close to $50 billion dollars. Ironic, then, that an ambiguous understanding of violence ended up serving him so well.

A week after his visit, photos of my class appeared in Newsweek Magazine. We never consented to any of it—the talk, the photos being taken, their use in a national magazine.  But we were told that “it was an honor” to be associated with such a “powerful figure.” Power.  Honor. Fuzzy Math. Lock Box. Cold Cut Combo. Cavefe.

In truth, I didn’t give a fuck about the photo, and I certainly didn’t give a fuck about Rogers. He seemed like a True Believer, someone who had played the game for so long that there was no longer separation between the mask and the face underneath. The only lesson I learned from the whole thing was that Nader’s prediction had come true and that Rogers’ story masked a reality far more complicated than girls on busses. If there had been any ambiguity about which side made sense and which side was complete bullshit, it had now vanished.
_____

The assignment deadline came and I turned in an essay that talked about the difference between the two rallies. I didn’t say much about Rogers, about how he seemed like a complete ass stain. I didn’t explain the difference as some symbolic ideological chasm. The difference between the two rallies, I wrote, was the difference between someone telling the truth and someone who convinced you of a kind of truth in order to further his own goals. For me, the difference was between those who would use language for good, and those who would make it into some self-serving bullshit.

We couldn’t know it at the time, but perhaps we weren’t on the right side by appropriating political metaphors and making them into something equally stupid. Perhaps we shouldn’t have participated in that weird symbolic economy by giving attention to the language that would later help to elect George W. Bush. Or, perhaps our time could have been better spent taking direct action, or sincerely engaging a debate against opponents who simply traded in buzzwords, invaded high school civics classrooms, and then got to decide how much money went to the NSA. Maybe we should have done something else.  But we didn’t. 

If there is a lesson in any of this, it’s that the 2000 election revealed that the people who are least likely to win a general election have the greatest ability to tell the truth and the smallest platform to do it. Those with greater chances of victory resort to a strange game of pretend where words and phrases become situated within a larger cultural imagination, a kind of dreamspace that encourages people to attend rallies, clap wildly, and find political inspiration in the music of the Goo Goo Dolls. 

After Bush won the first time, I became skeptical of this process. It seemed like a trick. It seemed that what major party candidates were saying wasn’t true and that their campaign rhetoric, instead, was just a constellation of empty symbols. It seemed that nothing was as it appeared. It seemed that speechwriters used their power to shape political discourse and alter public attitudes, all to keep their masters in power. It seemed that all of this work was done to benefit the people who were currently in office and perhaps the organizations whose interests they represented. As a young person, these ideas seemed fantastic, far-fetched, even conspiratorial. We are 17 years past that election, and I’ve seen little to convince me otherwise.
_____

The sun was setting as the Gore rally wrapped up. Parents got back into their cars and the protestors had gone home.  The busses were gone and the workers began to disassemble the stage rigging. I walked back down Second Street toward the alley where I’d parked, and I walked through Beans & Leaves Café to get around the barricades. I bought a soda from the clerk and walked toward the rear exit when the bathroom door opened and Johnny Reznick came out.  He had just changed is clothes.

I said I thought it was cool that they played this event. I was lying, but it seemed like the polite thing to say.  We made small talk for a while and walked out back. When we got to the corner, about to part ways, I suddenly remembered that they were headed out on tour with Sheryl Crow.

“So, you guys are going out with Sheryl Crow pretty soon. That’s cool,” I lied again.

“Yeah, we’ll see. We’re all pretty tired, but that’s how it goes, you know? Rock and roll. Tour life. Way of the road. Lots to do.”

Fuzzy math. Lock box. Cold cut combo.

“Where are you headed to next?” I asked.

He paused in such a way as to suggest that what he was about to say had real weight, like we were both in a movie and that he was about to reveal the final lesson in some heart-wrenching drama. The pregnant pause was his way of expressing a need for the moment to read as some kind of metaphor. 

“You know, honestly, I don’t even know,” he said.  Then he walked down First Street into the sun. The bus door opened and he turned around to wave before taking off to the next show.