The New World

In the lead up to the New World, I took my show on the road. First, in the small revolution, I quit my job. I cleaned the bar one last time, I walked out in the middle of the night, and I dropped their jaws. I let my apartment to a complete stranger. Then I aimed to disappear. Then I did.

I hopped on the Amtrak to get from the city where my father was born to the city where my mother was born. Everything that passed between the two cities looked frozen -- the rivers, the trash along the tracks, the streaming huff of pedestrians, my synapses forbearing me against the New World -- somehow this seemed to fit.

I arrive in downtown Providence on a Saturday night. It's dead for a city much less a state capital. I walk with a backpacker's backpack up, a'hoist, thick, pulling my chest up like a chanteuse of madrigals, like a barrel, like a cameral dome. I ask a stranger near the bus station where I can buy something to eat and after some coaxing she says, don't you know it's dead here at night?

One day closer to the New World, Winslow Homer beckons from the end of the museum hall. He depicts a lee shore, which is a'rage with the tumult or whatever, the crests fallen, some blowup upon the rocks.

Someone in hallway yawns. I see Homer's ship beyond the lee shore on its odyssey, the mast is full in the distance weathering with purpose. I can no longer stifle my yawn. Out of Benefit Street I crunch the ice on the walks leading to some of the country's oldest houses; the houses that lasted anyway. Under a flag, I watch the sun set over Narrangesett Bay.

I fly to Las Vegas. I'm at Harrah's losing money to casino dealers; doubling down on another loss, Jack Daniels for solace, oxygen for docility. It's a bachelor party, there are tits everywhere. There are new principles to be had, she is on my lap, telling me about Cuba, asking me questions she doesn't care to know the answer to. I give her $20 to dance for me and from beneath four tits, the bachelor winks at me from across the room.

My friends dig in the fountains for quarters, we sleep two to a bed, we smoke what we can buy from an immigrant on the Strip, we embarrass ourselves in ways that the city is accustomed to. We sneak food out of the buffets, we antagonize strangers, we catcall women. We drink more Jack Daniels, we vomit into trash cans, we wish we had more money.

I mean to leave earlier, but my flight to D.C. is being held up. I have the choice of spending another night in Vegas or a night in Dallas. Because of an airline christened in the name of my country, I will miss the birth of the New World. I am too tired to celebrate it anyway. I vote for Nevada and I stay the night. Then I ask them to send me home to New York. They fly me first class.