I'm cursed with memory. Rotten with it. Slice me open, and the stink of it gets underneath your mask and settles over every corner of the operating theatre. The gas turns to crystal when it hits your lungs and it burns like the air outside on a bright winter day.

A long time ago, probably in a galaxy far away, I shared some time with a girl. Her given name was Dorothy, and her friends bastardized it to Darkly, which was natural enough since she carried a gloom of epic proportions beneath her careful exterior. Then someone, probably me in a fit of drunken Runyonism, changed it to Darkly-Darkly. Finally, it was narrowed to D.D. and, inevitably, at the end, D.

The poet Patti Smith tells how she learned to walk from watching Bob Dylan in "Don't Look Back". D.D. learned to live by watching the rocker Patti Smith. She was cooler than coolest and it was only after a night that ended at her place, drinking vodka neat out of water glasses, that any of us would see otherwise. She was cooler than coolest to her fellow humans, but a reflexive adopter of stray cats - cats who were not always house-mannered, one of whom would foul my clothes during the long, restless night we finally slept together. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

D.D. had a round face, glowing robin's-egg blue eyes and didn't look at all like the existential queen she was in conversation. In fact, she looked like a model for J.Crew. A friend of mine would later write me, in love with her and long after she and I had flamed out, that the thing he loved most about her was watching her smile. And I knew exactly what he was talking about. D. had a mouth full of baby's teeth, each small and perfect and white, and making her smile was what I think parenthood might be like, to be a small god to a smaller believer.

I returned to town that fall, cowed and tail between my legs and raring to take up raving where I had left off. All of my friends were talking about Dorothy. What bothered me was they didn't talk about her like a new arrival to our gang, with sort of a hesitating acceptance, but like she had always belonged. Funny things I said, or tales I told them from my time away working as a male secretary for an old Jewish woman seemed always to remind them of something Dorothy had said or done, something funnier or sadder or more bizarre. Rather than wanting to meet her, I began to hope she would never come back from visiting her parents out east.

While we waited, I kept at the same spiral I had been on before I moved in with my folks to save money in the summer. I flattened it out a little, to give my liver a break, I joked. I wasn't really going anywhere or doing any less of the bad living I guessed was at the root of my deep sadness. I lived on the money I had saved from my time as a secretary, spending three dollars a day on two bottles of malt liquor and a box of macaroni-and-cheese. The worst times were the afternoons, when I woke up and realized that there will still a few hours of terrifying free time between me and the bars and laughing with my friends. I tried to write, but I just drank pots of coffee and paced the apartment.

I met Darkly-Darkly when she returned and moved into a two-flat with Abilene, another girl from our crowd.

When Bob Dylan moved east from the iron country of Minnesota, he reinvented himself as a roving troubadour in the guise of Woody Guthrie and Ramblin' Jack Elliot, inventing a rich and varied background as a hobo and struggling singer. Abilene had moved from the east to the Midwest and reinvented herself as some perfect tomboy combination of Lesley Gore and Kitty Wells. She had this tattoo, a snarling little creature that she had doodled on a diner napkin one day. She had a truck and an attitude like a truckstop waitress. She had her jaw perpetually set in starting to do something that somebody told her would be impossible, then she would look at me and wink, flash a grin and spit, and ask me if I want to have a little fun and come along.

In her past out east, there were debutante balls and finishing schools. Now, there was beer, country dancehalls, the open road and whatever passed for cowboys in the little Wisconsin town we lived in. Abilene was a substitute dispatcher for the city, and through that job and her assumed persona, she had pasted over her East coast accent with that flat deep midwestern twang that everybody who talks on a two-way radio gets. The job paid her bills - rent and beer were mighty cheap, which was a big reason we were all there. She talked of heading west, to homestead or marry a bachelor rancher or teach school in a one-room school house. We had been hearing about the plans for such a long time now that it seemed like she had already done those things, and was just telling us stories about her past.

Abilene called for a dinner party, a housewarming party. She had lived in the apartment for quite a while, but she told me on the phone "it's like a new place, now. Sometimes things change when you take things away, but they change when you add them, too."

I spent the day at the library reading the first lines of classic books I should have read in school. I would read the first page of a book five or six times, then realize I was too nervous to read any more and go get another from the shelves. At the early dusk, I walked to Abilene's house.

Abilene was trying to make Beef Wellington, maybe because she had once had it out east, or maybe because someone in town had told her they dreamed of one day going to Paris or New York and trying it because no one in our small town could ever make it right. Abilene had set out to prove them wrong, but it wasn't working very well, and the Beef Wellington was a soggy mess.

Dorothy was quiet, watching people but not saying much. I wondered if she had heard as much about me as I had about her, maybe felt the same way about me as I did about her - like she didn't really want to meet me. I didn't try to talk to her. Truth is, I was frightened. I was too afraid of being alone to risk making everybody hate me by alienating everybody's new favorite toy. I was afraid that Dorothy would meet me, instantly decide she didn't like me and turn everybody else from me. The terror that I felt now in the afternoons could grow to take up the whole day, and my stomach hurt at the thought of it.

We picked at the Beef Wellington, which seemed to lie on the plate like a limp protestor. We ate as little as politeness permitted, then, stomach hurting and feeling the need to take some comfort in some beer and country and western songs, I suggested we adjourn to the bar.

We walked down to the bar in loose groups. I made it a point to walk behind Dorothy while I talked with Abilene, so Dorothy could hear how witty and funny I was, so she would laugh and want to know me and like me. I do that whenever I meet new people. I'm too frightened to just start talking to them, so I talk around them and let them hear me. After a while, they either walk away or join in the conversation. Dorothy did neither, but just kept walking along with us.

We got to Gib's, our bar for the evening, and settled in on stools at the center island. I sat across from Dorothy. Someone got pitchers of beer and a basket full of hard-boiled eggs and the party was on. Abilene and her boyfriend Kirk argued about the usefulness of sculpture. Kirk was a fiery short man who made giant obelisks out of clay. He had been brought up deeply religious and seemed to take his resentment about that out in his artwork. Abilene, a little tipsy on the red wine from her dinner party was loudly telling Kirk he should just make pots, that they would be more useful than the ten-foot high monuments he was making. Stan and Mike, the two guys who I spent the most time with after the bars closed, drinking our previously-bought forties of malt liquor and watching reruns of TV cop shows from the seventies, were talking wildly about some new band. Another group, led by Kirk's friend Gus, another crazy artist who had never settled down on one project long enough to finish anything had starting playing shuffleboard on Gib's beautiful shuffleboard table, dusting the long planks with magic powder and hurling the disks the length of the table with whoops and hollers.

This left Dorothy and I, looking across the bar, not at each other, but at each other's beers and at our hands as they nervously moved the glasses around and reflexively brought them up to our lips. I looked up at Dorothy once and caught her looking at me. We smiled, then we both started to make small talk at the same time. We paused to give each other space, then started again simultaneously. I took a long drink to give her time to start and we were talking.

"So Abilene says you were a secretary, huh?"

"Yeah, it was pretty funny. I was working for a bank vice-president for a while. She was a middle-aged woman, and I kept thinking about how ironic it would be if she would call me into her office sometime to chase me around the desk. I was in the secretarial pool, with the other girls, 'cause that's how I kept referring to myself, like I was one of the tough girl leads in some screwball comedy from the forties. I found out that the computers we worked on could print in Japanese, so I would convert memos into that for fun, then just put smatterings of English in, like 'wring the money out of them' or 'heads will roll'. Maybe that's part of the reason I got fired." I laughed at myself and looked for Dorothy's reaction, fearful that I wasn't entertaining her. I got a smile, drank some beer and went on. "In fact, the reason I got fired was for reading poetry at my desk whenever there wasn't something to for me to type. If I'd been writing poetry, the bosses wouldn't have known I wasn't working, and I wouldn't have gotten fired. Oh, well, I didn't really have the legs to be wear the short skirts the boss liked me in, anyway."

Dorothy laughed, and I began to loosen up. Maybe her arrival would be good. It's always fun to meet new people, I thought. I asked what she had learned from her travels through Europe.

"Oh, I dunno. I thought that people there would be smarter and better than they are over here, but it turns out they're just as stupid. I mean there are always people like these," and she gestured with both hands at the bar, like a farmer feeling a long-awaited rain. "I guess it was disappointing to find out that it's never more than about five percent of all people I feel like talking to."

"Yes! Yes! I know what you mean! That was the worst part about working in the bank. There were two women who I was fascinated by - one was one of the girls, she was middle-aged and divorced with a young child and she wore too much makeup and brought the Frederick's of Hollywood catalog in to look through during her lunch break, except for the lunch breaks that she spent necking with her boyfriend in the parking lot, and I really loved her for the sad way she kept trying to convince this guy to marry her so she could have a better life. But she didn't see that in herself at all, and I couldn't see myself trying to tell her all of that. The other girl was our age, and she wore a white blouse and dark skirt everyday, and she was trying to be prim and proper and fit into this career at the bank at the same time that I was wearing floral patterned shirts and writing memos in Japanese and trying not to fit in, but she always wore something that gave that façade away, like weird striped stockings, or hip earrings or something. She's the one I wanted to talk to most, but I was too afraid to get put down for not belonging to the banking world, even though I'm still almost a hundred percent sure that she would have loved it if I had taken the time to ask her out for coffee or to some show or something. It's like I guess being queer is, looking at people and falling in love with them and wondering if they're like you. It's hell. Gertrude Stein was right. Hell is other people."

I looked at Dorothy. She was groping for words. I had her, I thought, she thought the world of me. Then she spoke.

"Jean-Paul Sartre said that. And what the fuck do you know about being alone, anyway?"

"What do you mean? I just finished telling you..."

"You told me about how everything is all tied up in you without you once showing any compassion towards any of those people around you. You guessed that those women might be unhappy but you were too worried about being rejected to make even the slightest effort to be kind to them. Instead, you made up your own little world of Raoul-thoughts, thinking about how happy it would be if you were so kind as to give them any time at all, but you never made any contact with them. How can you be lonely if all you ever think about is yourself?"

I stopped. I thought about how it was going to be when Dorothy had let everyone know about old Raoul, the happy drunk who was really nowhere, and how I would be sitting around my apartment listening to blues records in the dark and drinking bourbon straight from the bottle because no one ever called me. I thought about Dorothy sitting at this bar with Stan and Mike, and Kirk and Gus and most of all Abilene, telling stories and laughing and having a great time, all without me because I was a selfish bastard.

"Look. Wait. No. That's not it." I stopped and took a ragged breath while tears welled up in my eyes. I wasn't sure if they were real or forced, if I was making this emotion up to save face or if it was something real sneaking out. I took a gulp of beer and plunged on. "The fact is that I am alone. I'm sitting here in a bar with a bunch of people who I call my friends, but the thing is, they can't be my friends because I can never give enough of myself away, even what I'm telling you now is something no one knows. I'm always Raoul, the cynical and old-before-his-time drunk, always saying something smart-assed and biting, always letting the girls cry on his shoulder. Meantime, I cry on nobody's shoulder but the porn girls I look at back at my apartment after I'm sure my roommate is deep asleep. Meantime, I wake up at noon with nothing to do and no place to go until all of these people can go back out to the bars again. How can I know what it's like to be alone? The same thing you're accusing me of, of being too wrapped up in myself is what makes me so fucking alone." I finished and sort of left myself for a minute and came back and realizing I was giving her the same fierce gaze I got from my dad when I did something wrong, so I grabbed the pitcher and topped off my beer. I wiped my eyes and took a drink and finally dared to look at Dorothy.

And she was looking at me like I was a kitten, and smiling, and reaching across the bar to put her cold hand on top of mine as it circled my glass. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life and I felt like I wasn't there any longer. We looked at each other for a long time without speaking, then she finished her beer and said, "C'mon, I'm sleepy. Let's go."

So we walked back to her new place, her and Abilene's place, and I was incredibly nervous because I'd only ever kissed two or three girls in real-life before. I wasn't sure what was going to happen and I kept up a stream of nervous yapping. But I guess Dorothy was nervous, too, because we walked three blocks past her house and had to walk back to her door.

(((

I woke up early the next morning and slipped quietly from underneath the covers. It was bright outside and I had a queer tingling feeling, you know, the kind you get when you're up the first one up in a house full of kids on Christmas morning, waiting for someone else to wake up, so you can get on with it.

I felt like all of my limbs were asleep. Too much beer and too little sleep. All night long, sleeping next to her, feeling her cold, cold arms hooked over my stomach, I drifted in and out of sleep, talking to many people in my dreams and seeing them in the doorway when I was awake.

At one point, I was participating in a dream game show, still in bed, still in my boxers, still entangled with Dorothy, and, omigod!, a big woody poking through my fly.

The host of the show remained unperturbed by my erectitude, though, and kept asking me questions like "What sexual act do you most want to perform on her, Raoul?", pointing at the still snoozing Dorothy.

"Wait, it's not like that, we're just friends, good, good frie---"

"Excellent, excellent, we all know what that's about, don't we?", the host said, leering at the audience for effect. "What do you see as the future of this little, er, shall we say fling?"

"It's not, uh, a fling, you see, we just like each other a whole lot, and..."

"All right, all right, I can see you're a man with a lot on the ball! Heh heh heh. All right, now for the big finale..."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute, I don't think you get it, you see..."

Abilene walked in then and stood in the dark doorway. The game show host evaporated and dream Abilene asks me more questions about the future. "Do you love my roommate?"

"Wait, um, I mean-"

"Why are you so nervous?"

"Well, uh, I, um, I rarely end up on a, um, game show when I, uh, y'know, uh, go home with someone, haha, um, y'know? I mean, uh, I mean, this is, uh -"

"You two look very nice together like that, sleeping with the moon pouring over you."

"Thanks, uh, that's nice of you to say, uh-" She disappears too, leaving me, DD and the kittens, sleeping and purring in the V of the covers, between our thighs.

I reach down to pet one. Awakened, it nips at my fingers, so I pick it up and put it on my chest, calm it back into sleep and lay petting it for a long, long time before I think I am asleep again.

I woke up early that morning and slipped quietly from underneath the covers. It was bright outside. I gathered my clothes from the clutter on the floor, found my glasses and gently kissed Dorothy on the forehead. I walked out the front door and onto the street, running my hand through my hair and trying for all the world not to look like I am dressed in the same clothes I was yesterday but didn't sleep in the same bed.

I got to my house and undressed again and headed for the shower. It was the first time in a long time I had woken up before noon. I spent a long time in the shower, trying to put events of the night before into two categories: dream and reality, strange and stranger.

I dried off and dressed, pulling necessary items from the pockets of the pants I had worn yesterday. A notebook felt damp, and, without thinking, I put it to my nose and smelled, inhaling deeply...

...and my head shot back, the smell of ammonia was that strong. One of the kittens had peed on my pants while Dorothy and I slept, some kind of territorial thing, I guess.

I saw her later that day while I was walking across the campus to steal some new books of poetry from the bookstore. Shy smiles all around. "Hey, DD"

"." She nodded.

"Um, I wanted to tell you something...I woke up this morning..."

"Yeah, right, whatever." She finishes her part of the conversation, and tries to get by, into a classroom.

"No, wait, um, and one of the kittens had, ha, peed on my pants."

"Haha," a forced laugh, and she walked past. And I was suddenly the saddest boy on Earth.

I didn't bother continuing on to the bookstore. I turned around and went home and drew the shades and put on a John Lee Hooker record and opened my roommate's bottle of bourbon. I held the bottle over the glass for a while, but I didn't pour. I held the bottle over the glass for three whole songs. "Boom Boom". "In The Mood". "Crawling King Snake". Then I put the bottle down and recapped it and put it back in its place. I opened the shades and got a poetry anthology. I looked up Emily Dickinson. I grabbed a postcard I had gotten somewhere of Ray Charles singing with some of the Raelettes and I copied on the back:

Then I walked to Dorothy and Abilene's by way of our town's old and crumbling graveyard and I picked some wildflowers from the edges of the grounds and I dropped posies and poesy in the mailbox at their flat. Then I packed a bag and drove to another town.

(((

I am forever going on long drives through the country. First with my original unrequited college love, Ursa, now with anyone I can rope in. My roommate once wrote a short story about one such drive in which I looked like a beat hero to him, spouting great ideas and playing wild music.

Maybe it was like that to him. I don't know. I used to harbor the dream of being the Neal Cassady of my generation but I always thought that I would end up tangled in a horrible car wreck instead and be forced to piss my own pants while I waited to die or to be extricated by the jaws of life. But the thing was, when I drove, I didn't have the same worries that paralyzed me in my apartment. I could look around at the hills and the cows and the clouds and the old Chevy Nova that was once the pride of some farmer's youth but now was rusting on blocks by the edge of his barn. I made up little stories for myself, like about how the farmer kept looking at the car and feeling a tugging inside until one day he went to the auto parts store and bought the things he needed to gussy the old girl up and moved her into the barn and fixed her up at night and one day set the cows free and drove off in the car. I never wrote down any of these stories, and I didn't really share them with anyone. They just happened.

In the car, I sang along with the songs on the radio, and made up my own songs and sometimes just repeated words or phrases over and over again in counterpoint to the tires of the car hitting the expansion joints in the highway. I stopped at truck stops and sat at the counter and had huge heart-clogging meals of biscuits and gravy and acrid coffee while I listened to the truckers sass the waitresses and waitresses sass the truckers back and I thought I was experiencing some great American moment. But then I thought that every college-educated wannabe writer had probably felt the same thing and I paid my bill and left, because the same thoughts that would make me crazy in my apartment would catch up with me whenever I stood still long enough.

I don't know where I got the courage to go for long drives like that when I could barely get the courage up to call my friends for fear that they would not able to go out with me that night and I would be sent into the spinning terror of aloneness. But I did.

That day I drove west, along the Illinois-Wisconsin border. I didn't have a plan, other than to follow the Mississippi north along Highway 61 into the Twin Cities. I had grown up there, and had some friends who would put a happy-sad young-old drunk up for a couple of days.

After a day or two in Minneapolis, drinking beers in ancient bars with bullet holes in the backbar portraits and sleeping on floors, I called back to my apartment. My roommate had a girlfriend in Illinois, so he hadn't spent too much time there lately, and he wasn't there now. I pushed the buttons on the phone to make the answering machine play back any messages. There were six dial-toned hang-ups, and then I heard Dorothy's voice. "Rah-OOOL. Where the fuck ARE you?"

I said my goodbyes in Minneapolis and headed back to town.

(((

Once I got back, Dorothy and I were inseparable. We spent all of our time together in the apartment she shared with Abilene, her reading Russian literature, me playing with the cats and playing records on her stereo. At about eight o'clock, we'd go down to Gib's and drink until closing time, playing the same scratchy Hank Williams 45s on the jukebox and telling each other all about our previous lives. Around closing time, she'd say "Would you like a nightcap?" like we'd never done this before and we'd go back to her place and each drink a water glass of vodka straight and without ice and retire to her bedroom.

Dorothy told me about her adventures in Europe, about the elderly German woman who wouldn't let her sleep in a room with Hans, blocking the way through the door and saying "Nein, nein, fraulein. Nicht schlafen hier!" I told her about playing in a rock and roll band and made up funny stories from the dreams I had.

We called each other all sorts of pet names like "Honey" and "Dear" and "Slinky-boo" and such and it was the first time I'd ever been comfortable with that sort of thing. In fact, the only other girlfriend I'd had up until that point had written a poem about me after we broke up that talked about how she was always sewing these buttons onto a dress that were always too big for the buttonholes and that I said to her "Listen, baby, it's gonna be all right" and I cornered her in a bar after I read that and screamed at her that the rest might be okay, given poetic license and all, but that I had never called her "Baby".

Some nights I'd fry huge bachelor-life messes for Dorothy, filled with cheese and potatoes and eggs and corn and whatever else was around, and sometimes she'd make tomato soup and cabbage soup for me. We were always touching each other, not in any kind of let's-play-doctor way, but just reassuring little grabs and squeezes and pats, like when she reached across the bar at Gib's and first touched my hand.

We never discussed the future. Sometimes I would take vague shots at it, asking questions like "Where in the world do you most want to live?" The questions never got answered, though.

(((

One day I ran into Gus and Kirk and we fell over to the bar, even though it was afternoon and still bright and sunny out. They had been reading a lot about performance art and confrontational theatre and were eager to try their theories on me.

"What the hell are you doing with Darkly-Darkly, Raoul? You know she's still in love with James, don't you?"

James was an architect who Dorothy had furiously dated before she left for Europe. We never talked about him, and I didn't really care much about him. He didn't seem like he was part of the picture to me, and I said so.

"Jesus, Raoul, you're an idiot. She's going to take you for a ride and leave you fucked up and bloody at the end of it."

I was getting tired of being the subject of their art and I decided to end it by being unflappable and pleasant like what I thought Buddha might be like, but then I got angry about having to deal with someone else's art in my life.

"That may happen, but it won't matter. All life is suffering. Nothing matters but the moment. Besides, who's to say that I won't enjoy the ride? Maybe this is all the path that I have to take, like you two need to be assholes to follow your path."

"Hey, wait a minute. Don't get mad, c'mon, we're just kidding."

"Yeah, don't worry, man. We're just trying to look out for you. Here, let's have some more beer. I'll buy."

(((

We passed the long winter and the holidays without much change. Dorothy and I continued on our blissful and ignorant way. I started to feel healthier because I was drinking less and eating more, not like the malt liquor days when I would be dizzy all of the time and pale and my pulse would move along like a freight train.

One day, I dropped by Abilene and Dorothy's place and could see that Dorothy was upset about something. She didn't look me in the eye and puttered around in the kitchen, rearranging things.

"C'mon, Darkly, let's go get a drink."

"No...look, Raoul, I'm not going to be able to see you much this weekend."

My heart had dropped down into my shoes at the first part of this sentence, when I thought I was about to get the big kiss-off, so that when I realized that it was just for the weekend, I was positively relieved. "Sure, no problem. How come?"

"I got a call from James, and he wants to come visit."

"Sure, but why have me be scarce for the whole weekend? I mean, is he going to be uncomfortable with me around?"

Dorothy got a tired look on her face. "No, but he has to sleep somewhere."

I was shocked. Dorothy and I weren't lovers, but we were something, and now some other guy was going to be in our bed. Somebody who she had once been a lover with. I started getting angry and Dorothy walked into the living room. I calmed myself down. Look, Raoul, you need to be more selfless, you need to be less hung up about your own problems and be more aware of what's going on. James is probably still shook up about Dorothy, and what's not to be shook up about? She's the greatest thing in the world, and it's not like you own her, and you definitely don't own her sex and so what if James and she go at it like bunnies? You and she are still you and she.

I walked into the living room and said, "Okay, no problem. Just don't go to the bar this weekend and you and James would never know that I'm making my way through this same sad granite planet we're all on. Okay? Okay. Now, let's go get us some drinks, Darkly."

But that weekend, she and James did come to the bar. I saw them enter and walked over to their table and sat down.

"Howdy, Darkly. This must be James." We shook hands and I poured myself some of their beer. "So what's being an architect like?"

James looked distinctly uncomfortable and I wondered if he knew that Dorothy and I were sleeping together. I wondered if they had made love before they came down to Gib's. I wondered so much that I never heard James's answer to my question. There was a long pause after that. I couldn't say anything because I hadn't heard what James had said, and James and Darkly weren't saying anything.

Finally I got up. "Thanks for the beer, nice meeting you, James. See you later, Darkly-Darkly." I walked over to the island, where Gus and Stan were making plans to go to Europe later that summer. They wanted to drop acid and stare up at the ceilings of the great cathedrals until God came down and spoke to them and told them what to do. I told them that I wanted to go to Memphis and drop acid and stare at the grave of Elvis Presley until Colonel Tom came out and told me to get the hell off of his lawn. We kept making outrageous new plans all night, while I kept sneaking glances at James and Dorothy, huddled together at their corner table, talking about who-knows-what and reminding myself that I was like the Buddha, or Gandhi or something. I watched them leave at eleven, hours before bar time and then I started doing shots of bourbon and then I don't remember much else.

(((

I woke up on Stan's couch with a start. By the looks of the sky, I guessed it was about five o'clock in the morning and I was still pretty drunk. I got up and started walking back to my house. On the way, I normally had to pass Abilene and Dorothy's flat, but this time I walked a different direction, the route that Dorothy and I took the night that we had first left the bar together. I wondered if James and she had made the same mistake. "Stop it," I said out loud. "Look, you've got to let it go. There's no commitment. You've never said you'll spend the rest of your life with Dorothy, she's never said that she'd do the same. It seems like you might, but it's not set in stone. If you're going to learn to live with people, you've got to learn to live without them." I kept walking to my apartment, up the stairs and into my bed.

I woke up again that afternoon feeling awful, so hungover that I couldn't stay in bed, but I couldn't get up either. I walked slowly to the bathroom and shook out four aspirin, filled a glass with water and swallowed them all down. Almost immediately, I threw them up along with the last shots of bourbon from last night back into the sink. I stood sweating for a moment, then realized that I felt much better, and, in fact, I was ravenously hungry. I cleaned up my sick and walked over to the diner, whistling a song.

(((

I have always loved diners. Sometimes I have fallen in with evil body and mind huggers who encourage me to meditate, to focus on a peaceful place as I let tension free from my limbs. They always suggest a glade in the woods, or a path to a mountain stream, and I always picture a diner on a hill in a small town where wedges of raisin pie rest on paper doilies under plastic domes and coffee is always brewing. Counters are scuffed and covered with formica and the stools are perched on chrome stands that have seen better days. The cole slaw is always homemade and phenomenal and the waitresses are like the counters and stools - they have seen better days but with a little polish and elbow grease, they'd look as good as new.

Good diners in Wisconsin always have an indigenous dish for breakfast - a Mess, a Garbage Plate, a Scramble. They're all based on scrambled eggs and sausage or peppers or onions or whatever else the proprietor likes or needs to move off the shelves, and they all take on legendary qualities for fighting off hangovers among locals.

I've never found one I loved as much as a bar, but that might be more because I hate mornings and the regulars at a diner tend to love them. An insidious cheerful optimism is everywhere, mixed with the grease from millions of other people's breakfasts. "Have a nice day" is the beginning and end of all lanquage. Still, I go, and still, like everyone else who goes to church, I come away with a lighter spirit and a brighter soul.

I ordered a Plate and some coffee and I began to see hope again. Even through the fogged windows, I could see the sun shining brightly off the drifts of snow outside. It was Sunday afternoon now. James would be leaving soon and I wondered what plans Dorothy had for the evening.

(((

On a day in the phony season between winter and spring, when the snow melts and you can smell last year's manure coming up off the farmer's fields, but it's still too cold to stand outside and talk, we piled into Abilene's truck to drive to another small restaurant in another small town. Hungover, we left too late and the restaurant was closed by the time we get there, so we drove on, aimlessly, through the rolling hills of south-central Wisconsin.

We stopped at a small bar, attractively named after some pop-culture novel. The name is a mistake, I'm sure, or a trap, and we are doomed to be horribly beaten as hippies by a group of twisted Vietnam vets who have become failing farmers and are thusly doubly angry at society in general but at no one more than a bunch of rich white college kids the minute we enter the door, but instead we entered and found a jukebox loaded with songs by the Grateful Dead and a menu mostly featuring different sorts of cheese, fresh and deep-fried.

Breakfast became a distant memory as we ordered the curds'n' beer special and sat at a wood table beneath a mounted map of the United States.

The map was topographical after a fashion, and I was sitting under the darker greens of the Appalachians, against the wall, facing Abilene, who was beneath the tans of Death Valley and the deep browns of the Rockies.

"I've never been further west than Denver," I say, the truth, "and I was only eight. We should go."

"We should," says Abilene. A friend of ours is studying photography in Flagstaff and ripe for visiting, she reminds me.

For the rest of the day, Abilene and I animatedly discuss the wondrous possibilities of a trip such as this - a marriage at a roadside chapel in Nevada, performed by an Elvis impersonator followed by a cheap Mexican divorce. Camping in the desert under the stars and moon, with only the howling coyotes and slithering rattlesnakes to keep us company. Square dancing in the honky-tonks of New Mexico.

I don't guess either of us notice Dorothy's silence.

I don't think about it until a few weeks later, when I was on the phone with Abilene, planning our improbable trip. "Darkly wants to know if she can come along."

"Huh? Wasn't she with us when we planned it? Of course she can come along!" I laughed. "I thought the invitation was implicit."

(((

The trip took place, as planned as it ever was.

Let me tell you a secret. I was scared shitless about this trip. I liked driving, but now I was going to be letting someone else drive and I was going to be trapped with three other people in a car. I was frightened that we'd run out of money and run out of luck in some small Southern town (even though we were driving to the mountains in the west then the desert in the southwest - in my paranoid visions, there was always a fat bigot of a Southern sheriff hassling me when I traveled, beating me in the kidneys with his billy club, letting his toothless deputies take their frustrations out on me). I was frightened that I'd get left behind somewhere when everyone realized that I wasn't the Neal Cassady of my own beat generation, that I was really just a schmendrick who had a hard time leaving his own house. I was afraid of the long car ride and my strange relationship with Dorothy. A friend once told me that the best way to fall in love was to take a long car ride with someone. Somehow, I didn't think that was going to happen.

The first thing we wanted to do was get to Colorado. Liza, a friend of Abilene's was staying there, housesitting for a rich couple she knew until they could come out and enjoy the mountain life away from the corporate canyons they lived in for a week or two.

Liza was a painter, or she was trying to be, or she liked to hang around with them. It was never clear. The couple liked to let her stay at the cabin because it kept the house safe from the scruffy young men with amphetamine habits who break into empty houses and live there, scattering spent matches and burnt spoons and worn-out titty magazines and it made them feel like big shots for supporting the arts. Liza liked it because she could make believe it was her own house. She hadn't tickled a canvas since she got out there, I don't think. But she invited all of her friends to drive west and spend a week in her borrowed luxury.

We drove twenty-four hours straight, south through Illinois to pick up Liam, a poesy-writing carpenter Abilene knew from somewhere who had been included in our plans because he happened to call Abilene as she was getting things together. Then we drove west as the sun set in our faces through Iowa to Nebraska. We put a mattress in the back of the truck, and Abilene and I stretched out under the camper top of her pickup, singing country and seventies hits loudly and in different keys, laughing at songs and roller rinks long forgotten, at the words we bent out of shape to make private jokes about our friends and acquaintances. Liam and Dorothy sat in the pickup cab and didn't seem to be having as much fun. I kept looking forward to stretching out in the back with D.D., necking and enjoying the trip, but at our rest stops we always seem to climb back in to different parts of the truck.

In Omaha at midnight, we called an old friend of Liam's, someone he had been a choirboy with, back in Catholic school days and hadn't talked to in years. Despite the hour, he welcomed us and offered a meal of burned frozen pizza and warm cola.

After Omaha, Liam and I shared the cab and drove into the western plains of Nebraska. I had met him a time or two before this trip, at parties, and had never been very impressed with him, but as we drove through the dark night, we talked about fear and loneliness and I grew to like him. He spoke in a quiet voice that became animated when we talked about plans and the great art we would all create someday. I told him the story of D.D. and I and how we came to be on this trip. He told me about painting houses for college professors and stealing money from their change jars for cigarettes and beer. When I look back into the bed of the pickup, I saw Abilene and Dorothy, spooning against the chill air in the unheated bed and I saw Dorothy kiss the crown of Abilene's head and I fell totally in love with them both, at the sight of the tenderness between the two of them curled up in sleeping bags.

The highways of Nebraska are long and straight and unexciting. Every fifty miles or so, we'd see a giant coffee pot outlined in red neon, the sign for some truck stop chain, and Liam and I began watching the horizon for them, anticipating them to fight off sleep. We talked about how great it would be to climb into the giant pots, as if they had dimension and functionality, and swim in the steaming coffee. Each time we saw one, we'd pull over and climb out of the truck and run giggling three times around it, to stay awake. When we saw a sign shortly before dawn, Liam stripped as we ran around the truck, and completed his last lap naked as a jaybird. I stopped, uncertain, wanting to join him in his inspired lunacy but unable to for fear. Fear of what? No cars drove by us at that late hour in the dark plains, we went nearly an hour without seeing one going either way. Dorothy's face sleepily looked out the camper top window and her eyes widened at Liam's naked body and then dropped back out of sight. I could only grin madly, half-certain that this was where I was supposed to be, half-certain that I would eternally regret this adventure.

Finally, we arrived at Liza's adopted home. It was an overcast dawn, and the snow had melted from the fields on the hills surrounding the valley that the cabin was set in. Liza and Abilene shrieked at seeing each other again, Dorothy and I stood apart, Liam jumped in, asking questions in the Liam way, quickly assessing things and saying exactly the right things to make Liza fall in love with him.

"Come on, let's go for a hike, you've got to see the mountains!" Liza said, so we all went, despite our lack of any real and uninterrupted sleep for the last day. We were wired on coffee and the sudden reality that our long-planned trip was on it's way and we were settling down to have adventures at last.

The snow started to fall as we walked back. As soon as we entered the house again, we realized we had been up for over a day and fell about to take naps. As I drifted off, I saw that Liam and Abilene had entwined in a warm huddle in one corner of the room and I smiled to myself. When I lifted my head and opened my eyes and saw huge white flakes falling to the already-covered ground outside. The others had long been awake in front of the fire in the living room. Everybody was enjoying the wealth of the stocked liquor cabinets left behind by Liza's benefactors. Liam had a kitchen counter covered with bottles and a bartender's guide open to the A's. I accepted a rainbow-colored drink from him and sat on the couch next to Dorothy. She lightly put her hand on my thigh, then took it off.

We talked about nature and the things we had seen already today and about where we'd like to be in ten years. We talked about the things we wanted to do, the paintings Liza wanted to make, the stories I wanted to write. We talked about who among our friends was sleeping with each other, who wasn't and who should.

We entered the B's. The conversation turned to plane crashes and soccer teams in the Andes. We agreed that there were other people we should have invited along to be stranded with. Some we wished to have for their conversational skills, others because we suspected they would prove to be nicely marbled pieces of steak.

The night moved on, and we made our way well into the C's before bed. Liza showed D.D. to a bedroom and I followed. Dorothy stopped at the door and blocked my entrance. She looked at me. "Nein, nein, fraulein", she said with a tiny smile, "nicht schlafen hier." I smiled too. I thought she was joking and I tried to walk past her. "No, Raoul," she said and held her ground, "I'm afraid that's not possible. I'm sorry."

I was sorry too, but I didn't really believe it. I had been living something happily unreal for months and now it was over, so simply. I felt a little dizzy, like my legs were made of rubber. I walked back to the living room and went to sleep on the couch with a bottle for a blanket. I drank as much as I could as quickly as I could and thought as little as I could.

(((

Dawn came and the sun hit me through the sizable picture windows. I rolled off the couch, rose to my knees and massaged my throbbing temples. I slowly walked to the kitchen and started making coffee before I remembered what had happened last night. I turned the coffee out and walked onto the porch and sat on in the snow covering a deck chair in the chill air. I watched the clouds my breath made for a long time, feeling the liquor still swirling around in my body. The morning was quiet, no one else was up yet. The air outside was crisp and still. I wanted to walk away from the cabin, walk to the highway and hitchhike anywhere that was away, but that wasn't possible, either. There was four feet of snow on the ground. The truck was covered to the top of the camper top. The road we had driven in on was a memory.

I sat outside until I heard someone rustling inside and I shambled inside, shivering as I realized how cold it really was outside. It was Abilene and she finished making the coffee.

(((

That day was blurred with events. We melted water in pots on the stove and broke into the big freezer in the basement for cuts of meat for dinner. We made the smallest tasks into vital parts of our fight for survival, even though the liquor cabinet was still largely stocked and there was enough food in the cabin to last us a month. It would have been a fine adventure but all I could think of was Dorothy. I watched her carefully. I wanted to see remorse on her face, pain of some sort, but I wanted equally to not let her see me twisting.

I had no luck on either count. She laughed with everyone else as Liam pantomimed and bellowed in the kitchen while turning out a gourmet dinner. She offered a haiku as a toast for dinner. She never frowned. I sat sullenly, drinking wine and filling everybody's glass as soon as it neared halfway. I wanted to be as drunk as I could be, and I didn't want to be alone there.

Dinner ended and Liza and Abilene cleared the dishes and Liam walked into the kitchen to keep them company. Dorothy and I sat across from each other at the table, looking at our glasses.

"So," I said.

"So," she said.

"What's up?"

"Well, Raoul, I've recently been snowed in during a fun-filled vacation. Now I'm part of a struggle to survive. How about you?"

"No. I mean what's up with you? With me? With us?"

"Raoul, there is no us. You knew that."

"No. No, I didn't. You never said that."

"Raoul, I didn't say there was, either."

"Look, what do I have to do? Obviously I did something wrong...how can I fix it?"

"There's nothing broke here. Let it go."

Liam walked in and sat with us. He poured himself a glass of wine and started talking about a fantastic plan for tunneling our way into town, where we could loot at will. Dorothy watched him and smiled and laughed. I watched Dorothy miserably and kept drinking.

I slept that night on the couch again. The next morning, I woke up, a little more numb about Dorothy and a little less hungover. If the liquor cabinet held out for another month and the snow didn't melt, I figured I might get past this thing.

(((

The next morning Liam and I hatched a plan. He and I would ski up to the county road, hitchhike into town and rent a car to get us home or at least further along. Abilene's truck would be snowed in until spring, but we didn't have to be. We left at noon.

As we hiked out of the valley, I told Liam the whole story. He listened, then told me how he and Abilene had fallen into bed together on the first night.

"Raoul, I'm more than a little scared. I don't know that I have time for this, and Abilene's too good of a girl for a half-assed boy like me. I might be okay for this in a couple of years but there's too much going on right now."

"What are you going to do?"

"You know how at the end of one of those Huck Finn books, Huck says he's gonna light out and see the rest of the territory? That's what I'm gonna do. We'll get into town, then I'm gonna keep going. You get the girls home."

"Thanks, Liam, but no thanks. Do you think I'm looking forward to driving back two days with Dorothy, just so I can feel like a dipshit some more?"

"Look, Raoul, either you do it, or they stay there. I've gotta get going."

We got a ride into town with a local search-and-rescue team member named Dennis. He told us about helicoptering people's broken bodies from rock ledges hundreds of feet up cliffs and dropped us off at a hotel bar next to the town's only car rental agency. It was evening, and we would be staying until morning.

At the hotel bar, Liam and I drank toasts to every girl we'd ever known, ending up with slurred tributes to Dorothy and Abilene and we walked to our room.

While we lay in our beds in the dark, I made him pledge to stick with us for the trip back and we went to sleep.

And when I woke up in the morning, he was gone and there was a twenty on the dresser with the word 'Sorry' printed across Jackson's face.

(((

I got the car and drove back. I parked on the side of the road and hiked back to the cabin. Abilene quickly asked where Liam was, and her face fell when I told her I woke up in the morning and he was gone. I skipped telling her what he had said about them, I instead said he had called home to his mother and appeared to have gotten some bad news so he went ahead.

The next morning we hiked back up to the rental car with backpacks full of what we could carry from the truck. Liza planned to stay until the melt, and there was more than enough food to keep her.

We drove in silence for a long time, dirty and tired. Abilene was obviously hurting about Liam, her strong jaw seemed to dissolve into puddles of flesh whenever I stole a glance at her. Dorothy sat in the back seat and looked out the window without an expression.

One of the neon coffee pot signs appeared on the horizon, and we stopped. Inside was a traveler's paradise, maps and skill cranes and comfortable chairs to stretch out on and a carpeted lobby and banks of phones. There were showers with clean towels and TVs in a special room for truckers. I could have moved in.

At the table, we all ordered coffee and breakfast. No words were spoken while we waited for the food and no one showed much of an appetite when the food arrived.

"I've got to pee," I said, getting up. Abilene and Dorothy looked up and didn't say anything.

I walked into the cavernous men's room, aware of someone following me almost all of the way from the table. I stood at a urinal and waited nervously for someone to touch my ass, but an old man moved to the urinal next to mine and spoke while he was unzipping.

"This is a big place," he smiled, "I didn't think I was going to find it. Ever since I lost my sight, this has been the hardest part."

I sighed and felt like the stupidest man on earth. I had been so wrapped up in my own troubles that I assumed everyone on the planet was bad. This was just a friendly blind old man making his way the best he could, just like the rest of us.

"I bet it is, sir," I said, zipping up. "Can I give you a hand getting back?"

"Oh, no, young man, I like the challenge of doing it myself. Keeps me sharp."

I couldn't wait to get back to the table to share this revelation with Abilene and Dorothy. Somehow, the old man had made all of my problems small and the world a big exciting place again.

When I got back to the table, Abilene and Dorothy were gone. I figured they had gone to the bathroom until the waitress came to the table and gave me a napkin with Abilene's hurried writing on it.

(((

So this is where the story ends, I guess. I'd like to tell you that I flirted with a sassy waitress at the truck stop and that she took me in and we lived together for a while. But really what happened is I called and had my father wire me enough money for a bus ticket home.

When Abilene came back a few days later, with Liam and without Dorothy, we didn't talk about it right away. She and Liam packed Dorothy's books and records and clothes into boxes and I helped her move them into the basement. We went out for beers andd told louad and laughing stories about it, but we never really talked with each other about our great road and wilderness adventure. After a few beers, I didn't feel as crushing a weight of sadness on top of me. After a few more, I could even make small jokes. After even more, I could go to sleep without crying.

Liam told me that they had found him hitchhiking west, towards San Francisco. They started driving back, he and Abilene arguing heatedly in front seat while Dorothy looked listlessly out the window in the back. When they got to Omaha, they checked into a motel in near the bluffs and in the morning Dorothy was gone. Liam said she had left a note on the mirror which was short. "Good luck, kids" was all it said.

Liam and Abilene had been back a couple of months when they announced that they were leaving for Czechlosovakia and did I want to go? I had no money and no way of getting any so I wished them luck and saw them off one gray summer morning.

At their car, Liam and I shook hands and clapped each other on the shoulders and then finally hugged. Abilene and I hugged tightly and looked at each other for a long time without speaking. "I'm not going to say goodbye," she said, "because I know we'll be seeing each other again." Then they got into the car and drove to the airport. I stood at the curb watching the car get smaller until it finally disappeared. Then I started walking to the bar.

But a funny thing happpened. As I passed the diner, I stopped, and without thinking, I walked in and sat at the counter.

"Cup of coffee and a Plate," I said. "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, you know."