The Same River Twice: A Memoir

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Where I’m from, the foothills of southern Appalachia are humped like a kicked rug, full of steep furrows. Families live scattered among the ridges and hollows in tiny communities containing no formal elements save a post office. My hometown is a zip code with a creek. We used to have a store but the man who ran it died. Long before my birth, a union invalidated the company scrip, shut the mines, and left a few men dead. Two hundred people live there now.

Our hills are the most isolated area of America, the subject of countless doctoral theses. It’s an odd sensation to read about yourself as counterpart to the aborigine or Eskimo. If VISTA wasn’t bothering us, some clown was running around the hills with a tape recorder. Strangers told us we spoke Elizabethan English, that we were contemporary ancestors to everyone else. They told us the correct way to pronounce “Appalachia,” as if we didn’t know where we’d been living for the past three hundred years.

One social scientist proclaimed us criminal Scotch-Irish clansmen deemed unfit to live in Britain — our hills as precursor to Australia’s penal colony. Another book called us the heirs to errant Phoenicians shipwrecked long before Columbus seduced Isabella for tub fare. My favorite legend made us Melungeons, a mysterious batch of folk possessing ungodly woodskills. We can spot fleas hopping from dog to dog at a hundred yards; we can track a week-old snake trail across bare rock. If you don’t believe it, just ask the sociologist, who spent a season like a fungus in the hills.

The popular view of Appalachia is a land where every man is willing, at the drop of a proverbial overall strap, to shoot, fight, or fuck anything on hind legs. We’re men who buy half-pints of boot-legged liquor and throw the lids away in order to finish the whiskey in one laughing, brawling night, not caring where we wake or how far from home. Men alleged to eat spiders off the floor to display our strength, a downright ornery bunch.

The dirt truth is a hair different. The men of my generation live in the remnants of a world that still maintains a frontier mentality. Women accept and endure, holding the families tight. Mountain culture expects its males to undergo various rites of manhood, but genuine tribulation under fire no longer exists. We’ve had to create our own.

Once a week, Mom drove fifteen miles to town for groceries, accompanied by her children. We visited the interstate, which was creeping closer in tiny increments, bisecting hills and property, rerouting creeks. We called it the four-laner. It slithered in our direction like a giant snake. Mom said 1-64 ran clear to California, a meaningless distance since none of us had ever crossed the county line. The completed road linked the world to the hills, but failed to connect us to the world.

I never intended to quit high school, but like many of my peers, I simply lost the habit. Education was for fools. Girls went to college seeking a husband; boys went to work. The pool hall’s grimy floor, stained block walls, and furtive tension suited me well. The only requirement was adherence to an unspoken code of ethics, a complex paradigm that I still carry today, A rack of balls cost a dime, cheeseburgers a quarter. I ran the table three times in a row one day, and afterwards could not find a willing player. Inadvertently I had alienated myself from the only society that had ever tolerated me, a pattern that would continue for years.

After a week of shooting pool alone, I was ripe for an army recruiter who culled the pool hall like a pimp at Port Authority. I was under age but my parents gleefully signed the induction papers. The recruiter ferried me a hundred miles to Lexington, where I failed the physical examination.

“Albumin in the urine,” the doctor said. “No branch will take you.”

I felt weak. Tears cut lines down my face. My own body had trapped me in the hills, spirit pinioned by the flesh. I didn’t know which was worse, the shame of physical betrayal or the humiliation of having cried in front of a hundred eager men-to-be. They moved away from me to hide their own embarrassment. I was subsequently denied admittance to the Peace Corps, park rangers, — the ranks of firemen and police. I’d never know camaraderie, or test myself in sanctioned ways against other men.

That summer I began to steal and smoke dope, and in the fall I had no choice but to attend college. The only school within the mountains had recently become a university. After two years, I quit and announced my plans to become an actor in New York. Jennipher, the one girl I’d had the courage to love, had married a quarterback and moved far away. My sisters considered me a hopeless redneck. My brother refused to live with me, and my father and I hadn’t spoken civilly in upwards of thirty-eight months.

Mom fixed me a sack lunch the morning I left. We sat quietly at the completed highway, staring at the fresh, clean blacktop. Mom was trying not to cry. I felt bad for being the first to erode the family, though I’d already been at it for a while. The road stretched to the horizon like a wide creek and I thought of Daniel Boone questing for space. The road in had become a way out.

Mom pressed a ten-dollar bill in my hand and dropped her head.

“Write when you get work,” she mumbled.

Birdsong spilled from the wooded hills. I began walking, the pack on my back angled like a cockeyed turtle shell. A pickup stopped and hauled me out of Kentucky. The hills relaxed their taut furls, billowing gently like sheets on a clothesline, I had a fresh haircut, two hundred dollars, and a grade school photograph of Jennipher. I was already homesick.

When I told drivers that I was heading for New York to be an actor, they grinned and shook their heads. A trucker pointed to the radio and told me to act like I was turning it on. I slept under a tree in Ohio and camped the next night behind a truck stop in Pennsylvania. On the third day, I entered the Holland Tunnel.

The world on the other side was so alien that my chief advantage was the ability to speak and read English. My accent’s raucous twang betrayed me. I vowed to eliminate the guttural tones, swallowed endings, and stretching of single-syllable words. Until then, I remained silent. Manhattan was filthy and loud but similar to the hills: packed with illiterate men, unattainable women, and threat of injury. I regarded avenues as ridges, and the cross streets as hollows. Alleys were creeks that trickled into the river of Broadway. New York wasn’t that big, just tall.

Like most groups of immigrants, Kentuckians abroad form a tight community that helps newcomers. Having left family and land, we could not quite rid ourselves of the clannish impulse dating back to the Celts. We still roved the civilized world, but no longer painted ourselves blue before the attack. I moved into an apartment on the Upper West Side with three natives of Kentucky. They were graduates of the college I’d quit, older students I vaguely knew, struggling actors. They let me sleep on the couch. The halls between apartments were so narrow that if two people met, both had to turn sideways for passage. More people lived in my building than on my home hill.

The city seemed predicated upon one’s innate ability to wait, a learned craft, routine as tying a shoe. You had to wait for a buzzer to enter a building, wait for the subway, wait for an elevator. I stood for two hours in a movie line only to learn that it was sold out and the line was for the next showing, two more hours away. Groups of people rushed down subway steps, then stood perfectly still. They rushed onto the train, and again became immobile until their stop, whereupon they’d rush out. The waiting was more exhausting than motion. People hurried, I decided, not because they were late but because they were sick of standing still.

The simple act of walking became a problem for me. I kept bumping into people, often tripping them or myself. I’d never had this problem before, possessing if not grace, at least a certain agility and physical awareness. It seemed as if people rushed into my path. One Saturday I sat on a bench at mid town and watched pedestrians, seeking insight. My error was a long, steady stride, necessary to cover the open ground of home. I simply set myself in motion and put my legs to work. New Yorkers took quick, short steps. They darted and danced, stopped short and sidestepped, constantly twisting their torsos and dipping their shoulders to dodge people. Since everyone was likewise engaged, the whole comedic street dance worked. I took a bus home and practiced in my room. As long as I concentrated, everything was jake, but the minute my attention wavered, my gait lengthened and someone’s legs entangled with mine.

I spent another two hours observing foot traffic and noticed that most New Yorkers possessed a morbid fear of automobiles. They assiduously avoided the curb, which left a narrow open lane at the edge of the sidewalk. I began walking as close to the gutter as possible.

My roommates were seldom home. To show appreciation for having been taken in, I decided to wash everyone’s laundry. The laundromat was a narrow chamber, very hot. I was the only white person and the only male. Conversation around me was incomprehensible. I’d read about black dialects of the inner city and was pleased in an odd way that I couldn’t understand what was being said. English had been melted and recast into their own tongue. It reminded me of being home. I wanted to tell the women that my native language was equally enigmatic to outsiders.

Folding laundry was a skill I lacked, and I started with the sheets, believing them to be easier. My arms weren’t long enough to span the sheet and it dragged the floor. I tried to fold it like a flag, draping one end over the table and working forward. The table didn’t provide enough tension and again the sheet slipped to the floor. I sorted a few socks while considering the problem.

Controlling the four corners of the sheet was essential, which led to a plan of theoretic elegance. I doubled the sheet and held two of its corners. I spread my legs, mentally counted to three, and threw the sheet into the air, snapping my wrists. The sheet unfurled and arced back. I caught one corner but missed the other. Encouraged, I took a deep breath and concentrated, knowing that I needed a slight correction in toss and grab. As I threw the sheet, someone entered the laundromat, producing a strong draft. The sheet blew over my head and shoulders. I dropped one corner. Unable to see, I stepped forward, placed my foot on the sheet and not so much fell as actually pulled myself to my knees, I jerked the sheet off my head. Above the cacophony of washers and dryers came the pearly sound of women laughing.

They walked past me and started folding my laundry. Perfect columns of T-shirts began to rise on the table. With an unerring sense of size, the women sorted the pants into stacks corresponding to my roommates and me. They refused my assistance and talked among themselves, I listened carefully, trying to isolate a word or phrase, but they spoke too fast for me to follow. They moved to their own chores without looking at me, as if embarrassed by their benevolence. I approached the nearest woman and thanked her. She nodded.

“I’m from Kentucky,” I said. “It’s not like New York.”

“Nothing is.”

“How did you learn to fold clothes so well?”

“My mother taught me.”

“In Harlem?”

Her eyes widened and her lips drew tight across her teeth, I realized the stupidity of assuming that all blacks grew up in Harlem, like thinking all Kentuckians came from Lexington or Louisville. She bent to her work, her face furious.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe not Harlem.”

“No! Not Harlem.”

“Where, then?”

“Puerto Rico. I am Puerto Rico!” She lifted her arms to include everyone in the laundromat. “Puerto Rico!”

“Puerto Rico,” I said.

“Sí.”

I leaned against the table, absolutely clobbered by an awareness that they’d been speaking Spanish, During the next few days, I wandered the blocks near my building. It was not a black neighborhood as I’d previously thought. Everyone was of Hispanic descent, but I felt more comfortable here than among the white people. My culture had much in common with the Latin — loyalty to a family that was often large, respect for the elderly and for children, a sharp delineation between genders. The men were governed by a sense of machismo similar to that which ruled in the hills. There was one quite obvious drawback — to them I was just another white man.

The random progress of a nose-down dog dropped me into a job on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Belched from the subway each morning, I strolled the Bowery past dozens of men dirty as miners. Many could not speak. Each payday, I gave away two packs’ worth of cigarettes, one at a time.

For six months I worked at a warehouse in the neighborhood, the first full-time job of my life. I collected clothing orders for a professional shipping clerk with forty years’ experience. His passive numbness frightened me. I was a gatherer of shirts and slacks; he was a hunter of numbers. The day’s highlight was staring at a Polaroid of a nude woman I’d found on the street. Ancient priests of South America used fake knives and animal blood to save the sacrificial virgins for themselves. Up north I just wanted a goddess to worship.

After work, I saw a tall woman with a huge jaw being harassed by a junkie. I chased the junkie away. The woman smiled and led me to an abandoned subway station with a boarded entrance. A pink dress hung loose on her lanky frame. She pried three planks free and slipped in, motioning down the steps to a bare mattress. She wasn’t attractive, but no one else had shown me the least bit of attention. I followed her. A musty breeze from the bowels of the earth fluttered trash along the floor. I felt snug and primal in the dank urban temple. I would become an albino, a blind white harlot in service to Ishtar.

She asked for a match. When I lit her cigarette, she caressed my face and grabbed my crotch, lashing my tongue with hers. I slid my hand down her stomach and between her legs. My fingers hit something hard tucked low against her abdomen. I was accustomed to people carrying guns and it seemed natural for a woman alone in the city to be armed. The only feasible option was to gain control of the pistol.

I ran my hand up her dress, wrapped my fingers around the barrel, and gave a quick tug. She moaned low and very deep. I pulled again and suddenly realized the gun was made of flesh. My entire body trembled in a fury of incomprehension. I stood, unable to speak. She threw her purse at me and laughed a taunting cackle that echoed in the tunnel. I ran up the stairs, plunged through the opening, and fell on the sidewalk. Two men holding hands stepped off the curb to avoid me.

The following day, I called in sick to the warehouse and stayed in the tub all day. When the water cooled, I refilled it, still hearing that laughter throbbing in my head. I was sure I’d found a circus freak, a hermaphrodite, the only one in the city and perhaps the entire country. At nineteen, it was beyond my understanding that a grown man would impersonate a female. Not all transvestites are gay, I later learned, but mine was. This seemed a crucial difference between the city and the hills — Appalachian men could acceptably fornicate with daughters, sisters, and livestock, but carnal knowledge of a man was a hanging offense.

I ate lunch daily at a diner on Great Jones Street. The joint was a showcase of deformity — goiters swelled throats, and tumors jutted from bodies, stretching gray skin. Hair sprouted in odd places. The owner kept a sawed-off shotgun close at hand. One day a stray woman appeared in a booth. She was short and dark, wearing tight pants which I studied closely for a telltale bulge. She noticed my observation and I quickly looked away. She moved near.

“Are you a mechanic?” she said. “My car needs work.”

“No. I’m an actor. Are you a girl?”

“Everybody I know is bisexual now.”

“Not me,” I said. “Want to go to the museum on Saturday?”

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Just can’t. Why don’t you visit me in Brooklyn on Sunday.”

“Where’s Brooklyn?”

She laughed and spoke loudly to all. “He wants to know where Brooklyn is!”

The simple purity of Jahi’s directions enthralled me: Take the Flatbush train to the end and get out. Walk down the street and go left. Ring the second bell. Finding a place at home involved landmarks such as the creek, the big tree, or the third hollow past the wide place in the road. After the quantum mechanics of lower Manhattan, Brooklyn sounded like simple geometry. I bought a new shirt for the date. That she was black didn’t matter — she was female and I was lonely. We were both at the bottom of our republic’s fabled melting pot.

Noisy people thronged the streets of Flatbush Avenue. Tattoos covered the men like subway graffiti. Women wore neon skirts drawn so tight that their thighs brushed audibly at every step. The stores were barred by padlocked gates that reminded me of ramparts under siege.

Jahi’s apartment was absolutely bare save for a couch, a table, two chairs, and a bed. We drank wine and passed a joint. After four hours she seduced me because, she later told me, I had not pounced on her all afternoon. She considered me a southern gentleman. I didn’t mention the white trash truth — every country boy knew city women would breed quicker than a striking snake. Expecting sex as urban custom, I was in no hurry. Plus I didn’t know much about it.

When the time came, I pounded into her, spurted, and rolled away. She raised her eyebrows and blinked several times.

“Are you a virgin?” she said.

“How could I be?”

“You don’t have to use your whole body. Just your hips.”

“I know,” I said quickly.

“Look, nobody knows until they learn.”

“I’ve read about it plenty.”

“I’m not saying anything against you, Chris. Everybody’s different and you may as well learn about me.”

She stood on the bed and told me to look at her body very carefully. I’d never seen a woman fully nude before. Jahi had a peculiar frame — strongly muscled dancer’s legs, a delightful bottom, and the dark torso of a young girl. Her small breasts sported enormous nipples, ebon pegs an inch long, hard as clay. A few black hairs surrounded them, reminding me of crippled spiders.

She lay beside me and invited me to touch her everywhere, methodic as a surveyor, covering every square inch. Next she explained the complex labyrinth of her plumbing. From its nook she retrieved her clitoris and demonstrated the proper action for maximum pleasure. She counseled me on the rising barometer of orgasm and cued me to a steady drilling until the dam broke. I received a cursory lecture on the soft crest where buttock met leg, the inner thigh, and lastly the anus. I balked, believing this too advanced. With time, she assured me, even that arena would be old hat.

Two hours later I was a sweaty scholar eager to matriculate. Jahi rolled on her back and aimed her heels at the ceiling while I wriggled down the graduation aisle. Propping my weight on knees and elbows allowed her some maneuvering room. The prescribed circular motion reminded me of sharpening a knife on an oily whetstone: apply pressure on the upstroke and ease away, alternating sides for a balanced edge.

To forestall ejaculation, she had suggested I concentrate on baseball. I thought about Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine, squirmed my hips correctly, and remembered how the manager always hopped over the sprinkled white baseline to avoid bad luck. The summer I turned twelve, VISTA bused a load of hill boys to Crosley Field for a game. In the parking lot I was astounded to see a black kid, the first I’d ever seen. He was my size and wore clothes identical to mine — jeans and T-shirt. I stared at him so hard that I walked into a streetlight, which didn’t exist in the hills either. The VISTA man made me sit beside him the whole game.

Suddenly Jahi was squirming like an epileptic, thrashing her legs and ripping my back. Convinced I’d made a mistake, I slowed the rhythm to a bullpen warm-up. The manager’s hand signals blurred to gibberish and she began screaming.

“Fuck me, you white motherfucker!”

Appalled, I pistoned my hips until the dugout began moving across the floor. I went to my fastball right down the old piperino. Hum, baby, hum. I fiddled and diddled, kicked and delivered.

“Give it to me,” she grunted.

“I am, I am!”

“Talk dirty.”

“What?”

“Talk dirty!”

“Well, hell,” I said. “You’re a horse’s ass.”

She clicked into automatic pilot, writhing and moaning, cursing and shrieking. “You like this!” she bellowed. “You like fucking me!”

I loosened my tongue for locker room talk. “Batter up, batter down, who’s that monkey on the mound?”

“I’m coming!”

“She’s coming around third. Here’s the throw. It’s in the dirt, safe at home!”

My body twitched, heat surging from my feet and skull to join at the crotch and erupt. The fans shrieked my name. They were leaping from the stands, peeling the artificial turf, ripping bases out of the ground. Pooled sweat like celebration champagne swirled down my side as I rolled over.

“That was great, Jahi!”

“Yeah, you’re a natural.”

She gave me a postgame pep talk on how to talk dirty in bed. I nodded and thanked her and she sent me out for pizza, her scent covering me like infield dust. I relived the game in my mind, conjuring instant replays of the best parts.

During the next few weeks, Jahi commandeered my urban safari to Coney Island, Times Square, Radio City, and a hundred bars in between. On the Staten Island Ferry she climbed over the railing to dangle by her arms. The murky water whirlpooled below, filled with plastic tampon tubes and toxic fish, Jahi grinned at me and kicked the side of the boat.

“Don’t jump,” she yelled. “Hang on, Chris. Hang on!”

After the crew hauled her up, she began hurling life preservers overboard. “I can’t swim,” she explained. “I have to save myself.”

The angry captain assigned us a guard, whom Jahi charmed through subtle exposure of her chest. He leaned to the port for a glimpse down her shirt. The boat rocked in the wake of a tug and he stumbled, face red, and banned her from the ferry.

“Starting when?” she said.

“Now.”

“Stop the boat!” she yelled. “Take me back.” She slapped him across the face. “That nutball grabbed my ass. Help, help!”

Passengers turned away in a slack-eyed city manner, but a couple of burly men advanced. Jahi grabbed them by their belt buckles, one in each tiny hand.

“He’s the one,” she said, her voice sliding into the plaintive tone of a child. “He’s the one who touched me down there.”

One of her saviors had two tears tattooed below his right eye. At the base of his hairline were the letters H.A.N.Y.C. The taller one had a subway token embedded in his ear hole, the flesh grown around it like a board nailed to a tree.

“Which one,” the tall guy said.

“Don’t know,” Jahi said. “Can’t remember.”

“Stomp both,” said the other one.

“It was him.” The boat guard pointed at me. “He’s the freak.”

“Rat knows its own hole,” the tall one said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Smeller’s the feller.”

The hard guys looked at me and I realized that I’d pulled their focus from the uniform.

“You two are big bullies,” Jahi said.

She spread her legs and arched her back, tipping her head to look up at them. Her voice came hard and mean.

“Nervous without your hogs. I’d half-and-half you on the spot if you took a shower. Don’t dime me on this fucking tub, boys. Here’s the front. The citizen’s with me but he’s cherry for a mule. The boat heat’s a cowboy looking for a notch. You clippers cross the wise and it’s a hard down, with no help from your brothers. They took their taste last night in the Alphabet.”

The bikers stiffened beneath her onslaught, eyes turning reptile-flat. The tall one eased backwards, disappearing among the passengers, his friend following. The boat guard tracked them at a coward’s distance. Jahi wiped a sheen of sweat from each temple.

“What was all that?” I asked. “I didn’t understand a word you said.”

“They did.” She brushed her knuckles against my crotch. “You understand this, right?”

I nodded and when the ferry docked across the bay, we crawled into one of the emergency rowboats lashed to the side and frolicked in the bow.

The following Saturday she took me to the nude area of Rock-away Beach, where fat voyeurs trailed ugly women. Men with perfect hair trooped naked in pairs. I remembered my grandmother’s opinion of a Playgirl magazine my sister showed her one Christmas. “They’re just like on the farm,” Grandmaw had said. “All those old-fashioned pumps with the handles hanging down.”

Jahi chose a few square yards of dirty sand amid condoms and cigarette butts. I’ve always hated the beach except in winter. The sun’s too hot, the sea’s too cold, and the presence of humanity spoils any natural beauty still lurking in the sand. Jahi refused to disrobe on the grounds that she was brown enough. We’d never discussed her heritage and I didn’t want to embarrass myself with the stupidity of asking if she tanned. She insisted that I undress. Since I would not lie on my stomach and proffer myself to the steady parade of men, I lay on my back. The sun scorched my testicles within five minutes.

Jahi teased me for days. In the subway she cocked her head, voice loud to draw attention.

“Are your balls still sunburnt, Chris? They must itch like fire.” She addressed the nearest stranger. “Burnt to cinders at the beach. If he’s not bragging, he’s complaining.”

Our public time was a constant duel designed to make me angry, jealous, or embarrassed. As she ran low on ammo against my nonchalance, her improvisations became more outrageous. While waiting for a train, she asked a stranger’s opinion of my eyes. Soon she had him leaning close to inspect my face. He agreed that my eyes were slightly crossed, especially the left one. “Yes,” she said. “That one has got to go. Do you have a knife? You take it out. You, you, you!”

We rode the subway for hours per day, Jahi’s method of rehearsing for her stage career with myriad strangers as her audience. She considered her antics a necessary corrective to my rural background. In the middle of mischief, she’d grin my way, eager for approval. She once stole a ream of paper and opened the bundle on a windy sidewalk. “Oh my God!” she shrieked. “My manuscript!” We watched twelve Samaritans chase blank pages down the avenue. At a topless bar she removed her shirt to bus tables, piling empty glasses on the lap of a drunk who’d been pawing the dancers. A bouncer with shoulders like a picnic table came our way. I stayed in my chair, aware that standing would get my head thumped, trusting Jahi to avert trouble.

“Hey, sugar,” the bouncer said to her. “You need a job? We could use your kind of spunk.”

“I got a job,” she said, pointing to me. “I watch out for him. He’s a famous actor.”

The bouncer helped Jahi with her coat, then turned to me. “You’re a lucky man, my friend.”

That evening we lounged in her apartment while twilight pollution streaked orange across the sky. Construction noise had ceased at the nearby condo site where future dwellers would pay extra for the fetid river breeze. Jahi had spent the day trying unsuccessfully to make me jealous on the street. Angry at herself, she told me my acting career was a joke. I spent too much time merely watching, writing in my journal.

I’d never told her about my single audition, crammed into a hot room with sixty guys, each of whom clutched a satchel of résumés. Everyone seemed to know each other, like members of a club. They sparred and parried in dirty verbal fighting until a slow response brought on a death jab. The winner smiled and wished the loser luck.

When my name was called, I stepped through a door and crossed the dark stage to an oval swatch of light. Someone thrust a typed page into my hand. A nasal voice whined from the darkness: “Start at the red arrow.”

Twenty seconds later the same voice interrupted to thank me. Confused, I nodded and continued reading.

“I said thank you,” the voice said. “Can someone please…”

A hand took my arm while another retrieved the script. They led me away like an entry at the county fair, a recalcitrant steer who’d balked before the judging stand. I decided to become a movie actor, and skip fooling around with the legitimate theater.

Jahi had surreptitiously removed her underwear from beneath her dress. The thin cloth dangled from her foot. She kicked and her panties arched neatly onto my head.

“Do you write about me?” she said.

“Maybe.”

“You should.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m alive.”

“So am I, Jahi.”

“Without me, you weren’t. You were young, dumb, and full of come. Now you’re just young.”

“I’m glad you don’t think I’m dumb anymore.”

“Oh you are, Chris. I made you smart enough to know you are, that’s all. Write that in your little notebook.”

The journal was my combat arena, the final refuge of privacy in a city of eight million. Each day I saw perhaps two thousand different faces, an enjoyable fact until I realized that my face was one of the two thousand each of them saw too. My math collapsed from the exponential strain. Jahi wasn’t in my journal. Those pages were filled with me. Some of the pages held my full name and place of birth on every line to remind me that I lived.

“Write down everything I say,” she said. “Make me live forever.”

“Come on, Jahi. I don’t even write good letters.”

“You don’t know it but you will. You’ll reach a point where you have no choice.”

“Yeah, and I can be president too.”

“You can do anything you want. You’re a white American man.”

“Right.”

“And I’m a nigger bitch who sleeps with Whitey.”

“Goddamn it, Jahi!”

“See,” she muttered through a smile. “I knew I could get to you.”

I stomped the floor. “I don’t care what you pull on the street. Go naked! Start trouble! You’re the only friend I’ve got, remember. There’s maybe fifty people who know me at home. Everybody in Brooklyn knows you, and half of Manhattan. I’m the nobody, not you!”

“Not forever.” Her voice dulled to a monotone, “I traveled your dreams.”

She stiffened to catatonia, eyes glazed, her fingers twined in her lap. She tensed her jaw to stop the chattering of her teeth.

“You will make gold from, lead, flowers from ash. Cut the scabs and stab them. Cut the scabs—”

“Stop it, Jahi.”

I considered slapping her, but had never hit a female and wasn’t sure if it was different from hitting a man. Her droning halted before I found out. Jahi slid from the couch to the floor, limbs pliant as rope. The pulse in her neck throbbed very fast. She opened her eyes and rubbed her face with the back of her fists, looking around as if lost.

“Has that happened before?” I said.

“Many times,” she said. “You never asked about my family.”

“So what. You didn’t ask about mine.”

She moved across the floor to my feet, gently stroking my leg. Her eyes were very old. I noticed gray in her hair.

“I didn’t know my father,” she said. “My mother was an Obeah woman from the mountains. She died before I learned to control what she taught. I went to Kingston and hustled money. I came to Brooklyn when I was sixteen, too old for work down there. I can’t help what I am.”

“What?”

“They said I was a witch bastard whore in Jamaica. Here they just say I’m crazy.”

She sighed and tipped her face to mine.

“I feel the new gray hair,” she said. “Pluck it.”

I obeyed. She flicked it with her fingers and the hair whipped, taut as wire.

“Strong,” she muttered. “I see strong tonight.”

She leaned against my legs and closed her eyes. Through the window and over the tenement roofs, the full moon gleamed like the top of a skull. No doubt she was a tad nutty, but I hadn’t met anyone in the city who wasn’t. New York appeared to be a voluntary asylum where all the cranks and sociopaths escaped from their small towns; nobody I knew had been born and raised there. Half the population was crazy and the rest were therapists.

The moon disappeared into the neon glare. Jahi faded into sleep. I moved to the couch and opened my journal. It had begun as proof of my identity, but under Jahi’s onslaught, it began a transformation as I tentatively set my goal to be an actual writer. The standard rule was to write what you know, but I did not believe I knew anything worthwhile. The only thing I could write with any confidence was a considered record of daily events.

Jahi found me on the couch, fully clothed. She was giddy with a plan to ride horses the following Saturday. When the unicorn came for her, she wanted to be ready. I bragged outrageously at my ability to ride. After two months of tagging behind her in the city, I was eager for a familiar undertaking.

We rode the train to Prospect Park. Jahi wore a pair of brand-new jodhpurs given to her by her sugar daddy, a phrase I didn’t understand. We found a bunch of kids on ancient mares with cracked saddles. The guy in charge was a weight lifter named Tony, dressed in boots, Stetson, and fringed shirt. When I asked where he was from, he said, “Roun’ de co’nuh.”

Tony led his motley posse along a dirt path through the park. The horses walked a lazy single file. Half an hour later they still strolled with heads down, performing their function like machines. I was embarrassed for the animals, domesticated to disgrace.

Tony left the path for a wide paved road that curved around a pond. The horses began a brief trot. Following instinct, I snapped the reins across the horse’s neck and hunkered down. A gallop was much easier to ride. The old mare lifted her head and, for the first time since retiring to Brooklyn, heaved into a run. Her hooves sounded odd pounding the tar. I guided her to the outside and around the others. Jahi whooped behind me.

Tony shouted for me to stop, his face red and snarling, finally looking as if he was from the neighborhood instead of Montana. I floated above the pavement, well seated and moving with the mare’s rhythm, I looked for Jahi and saw a horse following at full speed. Someone screamed. I reined in and a horse shot past me, its rider slowly tilting sideways like a centaur splitting at the seam. The horse swerved toward the edge of the road. The rider slid from the saddle. His head slammed against a streetlight, spinning his body in a pinwheel, slinging blood that spattered the street.

A few hundred people formed a tight circle around the kid. Teenage boys dared each other to step in the blood. An ambulance arrived. Tony was mad and wanted to fight but Jahi pulled me away, screaming that she’d sue. She held very tightly to my arm, pushing her groin against my leg. Her palms were hot.

We took a cab to her apartment. She hurried upstairs and when I walked in, she was waiting, bent over the back of the couch with the jodhpurs at her ankles.

“Please, Chris,” begged her disembodied voice.

Mechanically I unbuckled my pants. As I lowered them, I heard again the sound of the boy’s head hitting the steel pole, like a boot dropped into a fifty-gallon drum. Swallowing bile, I turned and ran down the steps. The public sacrifice had been too great, too unexpected. I was unable to merge with the priestess for recovery of life.

I wandered Flatbush in a muddled stupor. The day’s event unfurled in my head at varying speeds. I watched the scene from above in slow motion, seeing myself on a tiny horse. I became the kid sliding for miles from the saddle, waiting for impact. I became Tony, drop-jawed and aghast, primed for a fight. I was the horse; I was Jahi; I was the bored medic. I was anyone but myself.

I missed work for a week, staying in bed like a hog wrapped in the warm, wet mud of misery. When I finally went to the warehouse, Jahi called, petulant and forgiving. I hung up on her laughter and never saw her again.

A week later, on my twentieth birthday, I joined some guys playing football in Riverside Park. Quick and lean with good hands, I made a spectacular catch on a thirty-yard pass. The ball was spiraling high, thrown too hard and over my head. I leaped, twisting in the air to snag it from the sky, seeing at my zenith the New Jersey smokestacks reflected in the river’s glare. My left foot landed one way while my momentum carried me the other. A tackier smashed me a third direction altogether.

The next day I limped to a hospital and emerged with my left leg encased in plaster. The knee ligaments were destroyed but I was happy. The cast gave me a legitimate reason for going home. I rode an airplane for the first time and my mother picked me up in Lexington. She drove me two hours into the eastern hills, where the community accepted my return as a wounded hero. My family’s attitude was one of justice having been done; the cosmos had exacted its price for the sheer audacity of leaving the land. Dad and I drank beer together, a rite we’d never performed before. He repeated again and again, “They shoot horses in your shape.”

The cast was due for removal in eight weeks but took ten because the local doctor had to import a special cutting tool. He was so impressed with the New York cast that he asked to keep it. My leg revealed itself pale, withered, and hairless. Every evening, I filled a purse with rocks, fastened it to my ankle, and lifted it from a sitting position. Between repetitions I plucked ticks from the dogs, watching night arrive. The black air seeped down the hills to fuse land and sky in a darkness absent from the city.

My acting career had failed but I had been to all the museums, and many galleries. The paintings overpowered me. I often sat for hours before a single canvas, studying each nuance of brushstroke, seeking to understand not the painting, but the painter. Galleries had the effect of a swift cold shower. Museums left me exhausted. Limping in the womb of the hills, I decided to become a painter without ever having applied brush to canvas. First, I needed a job to finance the supplies. Second, I needed unusual clothes. Third and most important, I needed inspiration.

I thought of Jahi offering herself as reward for violence. I had shunned the ritual as a petrifact. Becoming a grownup had to mean more than sex, needed to be independent of women. The traditional arena of sports had left me with a leg unable to tolerate the required pivots. I could stay at home and cut trees, dig the earth, and kill animals, but using nature as my testing ground would prove nothing. The woods were full of damaged men. Nature always won.