The Sacred and the Profane (Infested Part 2)

If you haven't read the previous entry "Infested" I suggest you do before reading this, it's sure to make what follows that much more cringe-inducing. Enjoy!

West End Road starts along highway 299 and veers down into a valley, dropping, somewhat abruptly into a swale of redwoods. When you’re on your bike, the green-toned shadow of the trees rises up to meet you as the road drops. Even though the ride is smooth, there is a toppling involved going down the hill. Moving under the heavy shade is like jumping into a sylvan lake. The heat of the day is overwhelmed by the layers of shadow which is dappled on the road in thick acrylic drips like a Pollock; some of them are so dark they look like pot holes. This effect is produced by the piling of the mixed coniferous and deciduous canopy. First there are the hefty ferns hanging palm-like in green bursts along the ground, there are the dappled oaks and their broad lobed leaves. Above those there are some tangled and mossy shore pines, knobby pine cones growing directly from the branches like sores, and above these, a few scattered redwoods. Each one of these trees throws its own shadow onto the street when the sun is overhead. In places where only the ferns or the oaks cover the sun, the shadow is lime or kelly green and it goes down the light spectrum with each overlap. Green becomes blue green and then blue gum and finally an inky midnight blue, each layer adding, also, a cooling effect. The deeper the shade, the cooler it feels. Imagine the opposite of a spotlight, a beam of cool dimness, now multiply it hundreds of times, but maintaining a fragility which is set to stirring even in the slightest breeze. On the street, while above ground, you simultaneously are at the bottom of an algal pond, drifting through kelp forests and under lily pads.

When you come out of the swale, the trees sweep out and reveal a golden valley of dry and sun-battered grasses. Grasshoppers can be seen flinging themselves up and catching the light of the sun like coins tossed into a summer afternoon fountain, flashing brightly before falling toward the water. There are frequently deer nosing through the grasses and no matter the time of day, there is always a just-before-evening quality to the light in the valley. Though the road passes a few homes, no one is ever out, if they are, they’re way back in the distant fields, so far you have to squint to see them. When you do, they seem to be waving. It’s hard to be sure, but, to be safe, you wave back anyway. A few farm animals nose the fences. Curious sheep and horses glance up from where they’re chewing, but seem too contended to bother about investigating you and your aimless waving arm.

Where the road comes to a fork, the Mad River sloshes through its gravely bed. In warm weather, whole families sit along its banks, children wading out into the stone-colored water and dogs swimming silently with their heads straining through the ripples and wavelets, dragging entire branches like beavers building a dam. There’s music playing, but it’s far enough away from the top of the bridge where you cross over this scene, the melody can barely be discerned, but the words have been worn away like the magnetic dust which eventually falls off videos and cassettes leaving only static and a watery beat.

At the end of the bridge the village of Blue Lake begins with it’s customary turn-of-the-century logging architecture, boxy, primary and half-covered in multi-paned windows of old, wobbly glass. There are no curtains up because in many of the buildings, there is nothing to see behind the windows but the afternoon darkness which, seen from the outside always reflects back as a sort of pewter. Downtown there’s a bar, a cafe which is permanently closed and gradually reverting to abandonment and a few large municipal-looking building that have been converted into community centers of various stripes with swollen doors and rusty locks which are shot back no more than once a week. The main street (I have no idea what’s it’s called), rises about a quarter block and levels out in a neighborhood so residential, it’s difficult to believe it could be anywhere near a bar or any place without a swing set in the backyard. There’s nothing to do in Blue Lake except look at the creaky Victorian houses and imagine living in them. Waking up with the perpetually evening sun shining in the windows, feeling the worn wood under your feet, listening to the gentle squeaks and pops of the stairs, coffee already brewing in a tiled kitchen that smells perpetually of drying dill and basil. The dull peaceful feeling of Saturday exuding from the place where the sun is shining on an old cat and an older rug.

But there’s no reason to keep going into Blue Lake and peering into people’s windows, cursing under my breath about the exorbitant housing market. Back by the river there’s a berm that sits slightly above a field, creating an embankment that looks out over the mountains to the north east, the field, wide and blank, acting like an earthen reflecting pool, a mantle spread out from the shoulders of the mountains. The bank is full with the spice of crushed and goldenrod grasses, deer urine and hay. A place to lean up against the afternoon and to study and memorize a moment of summer.

I get off my bike and I go to sit down, but I find myself hesitating. The last time I sat here, a few months ago, it couldn’t have been a day later when my back started itching and became red and swollen. The swelling quickly moved up and down my body in tracks, bloody red dribbling things. Tunnels, apparently. The doctor at the walk-in clinic confirmed my internet-produced fear: scabies. I had to slather myself in Permethrin. My wife and daughter did the same. We bagged up everything, left it on the porch for a week and then put the Permethrin on again which, by the way, is slightly toxic. My daughter was 5 months old. The whole thing was a nightmare. I never figured out where the scabies came from, I assumed the bus, but, this field. I had sat here just before...No. That didn’t make sense. Scabies are pestilential. They swarm in warm, wet and dark areas, in fetid areas, dirty jackets, the kind of beanies one finds on the playground and kicks out of spite for the vermin they are surely infested with. Scabies, like lice or crabs live on people, secreted away on their persons somewhere like an embarrassing secret. They feel karmic. You get them, it’s accidental, it’s personal; unless you live in squalor you can’t help but to feel you did something to deserve them. Whatever they are, however I got them, it was not from this sunny, robust and healthy field. This place was quite possibly the exact opposite of a scabies breeding ground.

I ignore the sense of caution that feels so out of sync with the beautiful afternoon, sit down in the long grass and read “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” by DH Lawrence. In the story, a respectable middle class family of three brothers and a sister lose their means and must vacate the only home they’ve ever known. The brothers, somewhat assured a living, poor as it may be, are not much bothered by the imminent loss of their home. But the sister, Mabel—a name that must’ve translated better in England in 1922—is left to move in with a sister, forced into her employ. She is later seen from up on a hill by a friend of the family, a doctor, walking deliberately into a pond until she disappears under the water “in the dusk of the dead afternoon”. What a contrast to the gentle stirrings of the field, the unbroken cerulean sky, the summer warmth and the bright the trill of bugsong. I had been down to the bottom of the pond in the swale of trees on West End Road, but it had been a clean decent. There had been none of the muck, the “foul, earthy water” described in the story.

Mable is saved, or she saves the man who rescues her or they both fall prey to their baser instincts and deprive the heroic act of all validity or perhaps they both drowned after all. What else can happen to two people and a body of water? If it wasn’t one of these things, it was all of them.

After the story, I stay for a moment, comparing the view of the mountains to the stagnant English pond I’ve been reading about. Even on the warm, dry day, I feel like I’ve got a little murky water in my ears, a little of the rotten clay under my fingernails, some algae in my hair. The feeling makes me itch, but I ignore it, hop on my bike and take the cleansing ride back through the shade pools and sun baths along the road back home. It’s a classic summer afternoon, difficult to leave, but fading, very naturally, to quiet in the evening. That’s how all long summer days shake you off: When the sun finally sets, the warmth under your skin makes the sheets cool and sleep comes on so gently, it takes you by surprise, somewhat like finding yourself tossed up into the air and then, pop, you’re asleep, back under the cool weight of the evening.

I wake the next morning and I itch. I check in the mirror and the red patch on my lower back is there again, a large histaminic welt. I rake my fingernails over it and the sensory trill over the swollen patch is luxurious, but provides no relief. If anything, it only intensifies the desire to scratch. I curse myself for lying down in the same field, but, it doesn’t make sense, how could it happen again? Scabies can’t live in fields and last time, when I went to the walk-in clinic, I remember the doctor showing the intern the tracks on my body, the same as those coagulating under my skin again, and describing them as textbook scabies. Was I on to something? Had I discovered some new specie of scabie or were they another parasite that mimicked the action of scabies and, thus, had the same effect? Maybe it was chiggers? Or the mite that lives in hay? It had to be something like this because the Permethrin had effectively treated it. Therefore, it must’ve been something similar in body type and vulnerability to scabies, right?

I went off to work, found a routine in the summer again, rode around some more on my bike, but the rash was worsening, surpassing the point it had reached at its most extravagant the last time I’d had it. My ankles, thighs, the back of my knees, lower back, upper back, arms and chest were inflamed. In some places, like my lower back, the rash was total, a whole raised area of skin, like a red histaminic raft on a pale, sunless sea. In other places, like my arms, the rash was particulate, looking like dense clusters of chicken pox and along my wrists and in between my fingers it was swelling into clear, separate cysts. That seemed filled with the very fluid of itch. I had to avoid touching any part of my body for fear of setting off the itch which was of the maddening variety that made one want to rub against a loose nail or take a piece of sand paper and just burnish the maddeningly ticklish swelling away. If I began scratching, I couldn’t stop. I’d scratch until little pores would tear open and drops of blood would form on the skin. Even then, there was no relief. I wanted to savage the rash, raking my fingers over it until I’d removed most of the offensive feeling, leaving myself with a ripped and bleeding back, arm or leg.

Last time the rash had the civility to stop below my neck, this time, when I took a shower—which really brought out the itch—I could feel it in patches on my neck, nose and even on my eye. I stood under the hot water with the rash glowing like an anemone flush with sea water at high tide, feeling itch everywhere. This comparison made me think back to the story and Mable walking into the cold and sepulchral horse pond. The kind of place you imagine full of goose shit and the gassy stink of decaying willow leaves. It felt as if in reading of it, I’d been down to the bottom of the pond, too and had come up covered in the scabrous muck that caused the itch. It was like there was something psychosomatic to it.

Surely this wasn’t scabies again. I couldn’t have gotten it from a field (or even an imaginary pond). It wasn’t chiggers. It wasn’t mites. Dammit. It had to be some kind of plant. Poison oak, maybe? It would make sense. After all, there had been plenty of plants on the berm that I’d lain in. We didn’t have poison oak where I grew up, so I wasn’t really accustomed to looking for it. Had I really lain down in a patch of it? Was it possible I had been so stupid?

Yes. Emphatically yes. The next day, I took Gina who was better at identifying rash-inducing plants to Blue Lake. She hadn’t even gotten out of the car when she declared, “Oh my GOD that’s a whole patch of poison oak! I can see it from here! Some me where you laid down.” and I pointed to the middle, the dead center of the patch. Gina repeated what was by now becoming her mantra “OH MY GOD!”

By this point, I could only think this funny, really hilarious. Twice now, I had come and pretty much rolled around in a largish patch of poison oak. When I went to the walk-in clinic last time, they’d told me I had scabies. They told me I needed to coat not only myself but my wife and daughter in Permethrin. We had to put everything in bags. We had to vacuum, rub everything down in bleach. We had to induce compulsive-level cleaning and rabidly rub mildly toxic medicine all over ourselves. I drove myself crazy thinking about the little bugs burrowing under my skin. I was manic trying to figure out where I’d gotten them (scabies, after all, is not an ‘it’ but a ‘them’) from and too paranoid to touch my baby daughter for weeks for fear I should infect her (if she wasn’t already). For nothing. All for nothing. I’d never had scabies. The first time, like this time, I’d had poison oak. I tried to muster some kind of anger toward the walk-in clinic, but it hadn’t been their fault. If I’d gone in declaring that I thought I had poison oak, I’m sure the harassed doctor would’ve just as easily agreed with that prognosis as she had with the scabies I’d suggested. Too bad about that intern, though. She was going to be calling poison oak rashes scabies for the foreseeable future. I could only hope that others would be more savvy and avoid the doctor altogether, opting for th traditional at-home treatment.

I went and bought a bottle of calamine and antihistamine pills, but the rash was spread so thick, neither really did anything and I spent another week or so waking up periodically in the night to itch, rub more lotion into the rash and press burning cold ice packs against my skin, but this time, it went away without the Permethrin and now at least, I have some idea what poison oak looks like, but I’m not going to take any chances. From now on, I’ll stay on my bike, drifting up and down West End Road, sinking through its shade-flooded valleys and rolling along its susurrating golden afternoon fields without exposing myself to the “foul, earthy water”. The rash may have not been produced by a neurotic reaction to the DH Lawrence story, but I still felt Mabel’s story embodied the poisonous side of nature. When I thought of myself, laying in a path of poison oak and reading about the horrors of drowning in a cold, stagnant pond, it seems as if there’s some connection to what nature can do and what it was doing as I lay there oblivious to its ravaging. Even the brightest, most innocuous landscape has the potential to become a gray English pond of rotting leaves and cold rain and even July sunbathing can come to feel like drowning, provided there are enough poisonous plants around.

At least I can say I never really had scabies now, but I don’t know that’s it much better to say that I got poison oak twice from the same place.

Infested

I was trying to make sure everyone understood their assignment, crossing the room, leaning over shoulders, checking in and generally making a nuisance of myself, but my mind was on my back which has started to itch in this severe, crispy way that made me want to rake my fingers over it or, better yet, to pull off my shirt, lay down in the parking lot and ask someone to slowly drag me over the roughest patch of concrete. But, in front of the class, I could only give myself an occasional furtive pat which did nothing but send the itch signals stampeding through my mind.

“Yes, that’s it; can’t you see?” My mind was trying to communicate to my hands. “Scratch at this! Scratch at this for all you’re worth!” Must’ve been the new detergent. I ignored it and it subsided. It didn’t, however, go away.

When I got home, after scratching a bit on the bus, shimmying around in the seat—probably how I got this itch in the first place—I hiked up my shirt in front of the bathroom mirror. My lower back was an involuted mass of histamine swelling, like my body had decided to grow another brain just above my ass.

“Gina!” I yelled, hoping a second opinion would be less worrying, because, with my head turned around looking into the mirror everything looked worse, or so I hoped.

“Ohh that’s bad” she said, before she’d even gotten through the bathroom door. Together we marveled at how red and swollen it looked. “Something just irritated it.” Gina said and, to show her solidarity with my pain, she rubbed some lotion on the rash for me and, to stand by her point that the rash was some slight irritation and nothing more, she rubbed the leftover lotion onto her face, physically addressing the tacit question of whether this might not be something worse, something contagious and disgusting.

“Wait!” I started to yell, and then dropped my voice—Esme, our six month-old daughter, was asleep in the other room. “What if it’s contagious!” Gina waved away my concerns as unfounded. As usual, I was overreacting. She rubbed the leftover lotion vigorously into her face, smiling. Nothing to worry about.

...

Friday, I woke up, not itching, but still swollen, still red and with a ticklish feeling. I took a bike ride and picked up some hydrocortizone almost as an after thought—even that didn’t really seem necessary. I’d use it once or twice, like that Nyquil I bought the last time I had the ‘flu and then it’d get forgotten under the bathroom sink. I was surprised when I got home and put it on and it didn’t seem to do anything. “Hmm, still itches.” I said scratching the cream into the inflammation, hoping the intense contact with the cream would result in something.

Saturday, working for the bakery, out doing deliveries, I noticed I had a slightly different rash breaking out across the tops of my hands. Rather than being a single red plateau, these were islands, blistery islands, almost like zits, but less opaque, like a cyst. In one place there was something that looked like an inflamed scratch, a jagged line only, like everything else, it itched. I drove and scratched at the back of my hands. Muttering about the allergic reaction I was having. Clearly, the itch, the inflammation, the infection or whatever was spreading, but how the hell did it spread from my lower back to the top of my hands and the inside of my wrist? Was it poison oak? I hadn’t been near the woods in a week. Was it all the flour from work? Had a year of close contact with bread resulted in a gluten intolerance? I was grasping at straws, but I had nothing else. But even with this horrific rash breaking out all over, I figured I just needed to put some more cream on it and maybe get some rest.

Getting older brings so many maladies with it, I scarcely pay attention to the individual ones anymore. I had woken up at 3:30 to get to the bakery. I felt lousy all over. My eyelids were dried and felt jammed like rusted storefront shutters. My ears had a slight ringing that sounds like a distant alarm when you don’t get enough sleep and drink too much coffee and I was farting like crazy. I felt like an old scabrous dog: itching and farting. The itching, I reasoned on my way home from work, was just a specific symptom of a more generalized decay. I mentioned this to Gina by way of my usual Saturday afternoon ‘how do you stand me?’ monologue. Something about waking up too early on Saturday makes me feel particularly vile and hideous by the afternoon. As we talked, I scratched myself and whined piteously.

“It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t feel like a damn dog scratching like this.” Gina laughed at this and reminded me that I’d been scratching myself nearly since we’d met.

“Remember Argentina?” She laughed. “My boss when I was babysitting didn’t even want me coming in after I told her about your itching. She was convinced you had scabies or something.”

At this, a dull lightbulb flared, not the strong incandescent kind that come with a good idea but a naked bulb hanging in a basement, illuminating something awful lurking in the shadows. Scabies, that was something I’d hadn’t considered. By this point in my itching, I’d Googled all kinds of word combinations that seemed to encompass my symptoms. I’d played Scrabble on the internet with words like ‘rash, inflammation, hands, causes, treatments, blisters, swelling, redness, allergy, psoriasis and dermatitis’ all of which yielded those ‘top ten’ lists of common skin aliments, common treatments, common causes, etc. They had names like:

• 7 Worst Rashes!
• 4 Things You Don’t Want to Infect You!
• 5 Reasons you Itch like a Damn Dog!
• 6 and ¾ Symptoms of Psoriasis!

Comparing my rash to the pictures on the internet was profoundly depressing. I was beginning to resemble the inflamed bastards with their expressions of quiet sufferng, but no matter what diagnosis I gave myself, the problem persisted. The itch defied categorization. It only looked vaguely like anything I’d seen on the internet and usually only had about 3/4ths of the associated symptoms. After Gina mentioned it, I decided to type in ‘scabies’. It was going out on a limb, but it was something else I hoped I could rule out.

The images of scabies looked slightly worse that what I had. Inhabitants of the ninth circle of hell stared back at me from the screen, covered with oozing pustules and rouged and swollen burrows, like wiggly track marks. Just looking at the poor bastards made me itch, but this time there was something sympathetic about the reaction. As I read about the symptoms, I felt myself becoming more and more desperate, which was a sure indication that I had what I was looking at. When previously reading about the symptoms of psoriasis and eczema, I found myself overextending to try and make my symptoms match what I was reading, with the scabies this wasn’t necessary. I had everything it said I would have, everything, that is that indicated a ‘highly contagious infestation’ for which Web MD recommended cleaning every kind of fabric the afflicted had come into contact with. As I read I looked around the room. The carpet floor, my daughter’s blanket, the rugs, the clothes, the fabric of the couch. It was impossible not to imagine the scabrous bastards crawling all over everything. If it was scabies. I was screwed, worse yet, my family was screwed.

Gina was still laughing remembering how her former employer thought I had scabies when I motioned her over to show her the picture I’d found of them that looked very much like what was on my wrist. As she looked at it, I raised my wrist alongside the monitor, in an awful display of similarity. She stopped laughing and, she too started looking around the room, in particular at where our daughter was playing, surrounded as she was by the potentially infested fabric of her baby blanket.

“Oh my God,” she said, showing dismay for the first time, “after I touched your back that time, I rubbed my face!”

“Wait,” I said, interrupting her and my own thoughts which were racing ahead to all kinds of awful quarantine scenarios. I began to read the screen. “There’s a test, rub a marker…. alcohol.” I didn’t bother reading it, but left the details to Gina and ran off to get the makeshift scabies test components.

When I came back, she told me what to do. Rub the marker over the sores and then use rubbing alcohol to wipe it away. If there’s a dot of ink that won’t be wiped away, you’ve got scabies. We conducted the test twice, but each time, the result wasn’t clear. Some ink remained, but it didn’t seem like enough to be of consequence. “Besides,” I argued. “That’s just where the skin is broken from scratching. Of course it’ll leave a mark there.

Don’t ask me how we did it, but despite all the evidence to the contrary, we mutually convinced ourselves, I didn’t have scabies and went for a walk! Not just a little stroll but a rollicking Saturday afternoon walk, downtown and back. And worse still, I carried our daughter in the carrier, where her tender skin would be pressed right up against mine for hours! Looking back now, I want to scream at this lunacy, but my protests go unheeded and that foolhardy couple goes walking out the door, wanting to think themselves safe so badly did they ignored even that most faithful of Cassandras, the internet.

...

I think it possible that the news was just too overwhelming. The diagnosis too severe. Scabies? Who gets scabies? Sure I was not the cleanest of individuals, but it’s not like I was sleeping on couches found discarded in alleys with suspicious stains and faint noisome odors. It’s not like I’d been staying in an abandoned house, sleeping on a pile of mattresses found in the basement. I hadn’t been in any dumpsters lately. What made the scabies so impossible was that I’d never gotten them before when I’d been doing all the things I’ve listed. I used to eat from the trash, spend excessive amount of time in squalid settings and go for days, even weeks without bathing while wearing the same clothes I slept in. When I was in 8^th grade. I wore my Operation Ivy shirt every day of the school year and I don’t think I ever washed it. In 9^th grade, because I had to get up early, I took to sleeping in my clothes. In college, the trend continued, but now so far from my mom’s free laundry service, I eschewed the entire practice of washing. In short, I used to be filthy and I’d never gotten scabies. Now I woke up and showered almost every day. I changed my clothes. I wore shirts with collars. How the hell was it that only now I got scabies? Had they lain dormant, waiting until I’d had a family they could infest as well? All the websites said they were usually transmitted through skin-to-skin contact. Whose skin had I contacted? Show me where and when. It just wasn’t possible, but the more I thought about it, it was.

It’s not the most common scenario, but scabies can be transmitted in fabric, especially in institutions where infestations might not be noticed or treated right away like prisons and rest homes. While I hadn’t been in any such place recently, I’d been on a close approximation: The Redwood Transit Bus.

Because I’d braved all kinds of dirty scenarios and never had any ill effects, I’m not squeamish about germs or dirt or unwashed hands. The one aspect of filth that I try to avoid, and not because I’m afraid of it, is stink. Even in my unwashed years, I made an effort to avoid any kind of noxious odor: that awful mattress that got left in the flooded basement, the armpit infection a friend developed, people’s feet, vinegar in any of its putrid forms, halitosis and the incontinent. The latter I’d been increasingly encountering on the RTS bus. Probably twice a month, riding back and forth to work, I’d find myself seated too near someone who’d crapped or pissed themselves who didn’t have the energy or the wherewithal to do anything about it. Each time this happened, I noticed something awful. The offender would get off somewhere along the line and, within the next few stops, someone else, usually a fairly clean and nice-looking person would sit right where the incontinent had been, as if they were sinking into their own couch at home. I always wanted to say something, but how do you word that?

“Excuse me, ma’am, but you’re sitting in a seat that, well, the guy who just vacated it, well, I’m pretty sure he’d recently shit himself. The smell might not be too obvious anymore, but if you do some olfactory casting about, I’m sure you’ll soon discover all the evidence you need. You might want to take my seat. I’m about to get off anyway.”

A few times, I myself had sat down in a seat that had a lingering cloacal quality. But, because my experience had led me to believe such interactions were unpleasant, but ultimately benign, I didn’t think much of it. Now, it seemed, I had my answer. If I’d gotten the scabies from anywhere, it was from the bus, not necessarily from someone incontinent, but someone who had such a bad infestation the mites had been raining off of them onto the seat, waiting for me to get on and, so trustingly, take the open seat.

“Damn those padded upholstered seats!” I shouted, after returning from the walk and reading how scabies is difficult to transmit through hard or smooth surfaces, preferring fabric or hair the way lice do. “Why did they ever switch over from those hard plastic seats buses used to have?”

It was like we just needed the walk to process things and by the time we got home, both Gina and I were convinced what I had was scabies. Gina bathed Esme and put her to bed, hoping such preemptive measures could stop the dread mites from spreading. I sat in front of the computer, scratching and obsessing.

The internet suggested all kinds of things to combat my infestation, but, unfortunately, I’d have to go to the doctor to get a prescription if I wanted to be sure to get rid of them. I rubbed tea tree oil all over myself while Gina started striping the rugs off the floor and the covers off the chairs. She took all the pillows and blankets and made me sleep on the couch. I closed all the self-diagnosis windows on the computer and opened Youtube, searched, Choking Victim’s song “Infested”. I hadn’t listened to it in years, but I remembered the words. I sat back and listened, scratching and smiling with complicity.

I’m sure I hate ‘em, there ain’t no maybe/ body lice and crabs, headlice and scabies.

In the morning, first thing, we headed over to the walk-in clinic, one of those places that exist solely for people who are convinced they don’t need insurance and that any rash, cough or shooting pain will eventually go away on its own. To see such a place through the gloom of Sunday morning is really a powerful argument for finding a family practice but, of course, who has the money for that?

The clinic opened at 8, and we did the thing we always do which was that we got there just early enough to be at the back of the line of desperation before the place opened. Anything that was going to bring people out early on a foggy Sunday morning to stand around a parking lot in Eureka was surely going to be bad. One lady coughed like she had TB, an old lady chatted with someone else about her bladder infection. There were various symptoms passing between these people like witticisms at a 19^th century dinner party. We stayed by the car.

When the doors opened and everyone ran to claim their place, I found myself predictably near the end of the line, between the old lady with the bladder and the woman who couldn’t stop coughing. A guy with a clipboard was moving down the line, asking everyone, in a way as to completely dispel any lingering illusions of privacy, what we were there for. I didn’t bother to beat around the bush. When he came up to me, I told him, ‘scabies’ and almost enjoyed watching everyone, including him, shrink slightly away from me.

I was told there’d be an hour wait. Gina and Esme were waiting in the car, not wanting to risk exposure to the miasma of germs and bacteria swirling around that waiting room. There was a cafe nearby and I went over to get a coffee to calm my nerves. Gina made me get decaf—probably for the best.

After an hour of hanging around the walk-in clinic parking lot, they called us in. When we were all ensconced our little examination room, a girl, no more than 20, peaked her head in, she was observing the doctor today and would we mind if she observed my case. “Sure, join the party,” I waned to tell her. As little as I was concerned with my image, I understand why people don’t want to tell everyone they have scabies. For one thing, it’s contagious. If you told me you had scabies a few months ago, I might still consciously move a few feet away from you and go wash my hands at the first opportunity. Furthermore, well, it’s got that association with filth. I was surprised to find all these things online telling me that it wasn’t only the lowest of the low that got scabies and to not take the diagnosis too hard. It seemed the biggest blow for most people is psychological. Not only do they feel dirty, there’s the knowledge that they’ve got bugs burrowing through their skin. But really, we’ve always got bugs burrowing through our skin, it’ just that certain varieties are a little more pernicious. I didn’t mind the observation, but I wasn’t about to tell all my friends I’d recently seen that I had scabies. It just makes you sort of untrustworthy in a way, like you’ve allowed yourself to be colonized by bugs.

I had tried not to harbor any illusions, but when the doctor came into the room, I couldn’t help but to hope that maybe she’d tell me that, as much as it might look like scabies, I’d just had an allergic reaction to something. But when I told her I had scabies, she just nodded and began showing the intern—or whatever she was—the telltale signs, making me strip down so that they could both marvel at this thorough example of an infestation.

The doctor prescribed the Permethrin I needed, but when I asked about my family, she told me that she’d have to see them, too in order to prescribe more. The cost of ‘seeing them’ would be 100 bucks a person. I considered protesting, but Gina told me she’d call the open door clinic and see what she could do—they’d probably be willing to help a breast-feeding mother by just sending in the prescription. The doctor even told me, sotto voce, that she was prescribing the largest size and including instructions for female and well as male application, wink wink.

Next it was time to worry about the insurance covering the medication. I’d read on the walk-in clinic’s website that they accepted Medi-Cal, but when I got there, I had to sign a waiver saying that I acknowledged that they didn’t accept Medi-Cal and would have to pay out of pocket. I’d been told my insurance would probably cover the Permethrin, but, I was expecting the same thing to happen again. This is usually what happens with insurance. They do all they can to avoid paying for anything. At least, for once, I wasn’t paying for the insurance anyway, so if it gave me nothing, it wasn’t like I’d put anything into it.

I was so happy to find that the Permethrin was free, I didn’t worry much about the size of the tube that didn’t look like it would be enough for three people even if one of them was a baby. When I got home, as usual, Gina took the disappointment in stride. After all, I was the one who actively had the bugs, shouldn’t I be the priority here? She agreed, but I understood her reluctance. I’d read somewhere that an infestation could take a few weeks to display symptoms and she had rubbed the lotion from my rash onto her face and then there was Esme who, as a breast-feeding baby, was still attached to her most of the time. If Gina had it, it was certain Esme would get it too. I tried not to picture the wriggly bastards flocking eagerly to my daughter’s soft and probably much more vulnerable skin.

We spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning the house. We bagged up everything that could be bagged and sprayed Clorox on anything that couldn’t. I wiped down the floors with bleach water while Gina took Esme for a walk, but as I cleaned, I couldn’t shake the notion that I was undoing my own work. I hadn’t put the medication on yet so I was still crawling with scabies. I’d thought about putting the Permethrin on first, but then I would’ve been touching all the things that potentially had scabies on them, as well. Despite this concern, when I finished the cleaning and the whole house seethed with bleach and Clorox fumes, I felt better. It was hard to imagine anything, no matter how tenacious living through the disinfectant—even I had to open the windows and go outside.

That night, I put the Permethrin on, taking care to rub it into every pore beneath my chin. I’d hoped it would tingle or at least smell like an insecticide, but it was about as sensational as an application of Jergens. I went back to the couch to sleep for the night. As I lay there, still itching, I couldn’t help but to wonder if I’d gotten a defective tube.

After the application of the Permethrin I was safe to go back to work. It was for the best, if I had to stay home, I would’ve done nothing but sit around and worry. I woke up and took a shower after leaving the Permethrin on for the maximum time of 12 hours. I couldn’t even tell if I was washing it all off. There was no residue or any hint otherwise that I’d gone to sleep slathered in toxic goop.

Even though I wasn’t contagious, I stayed as far away from everyone at work as possible. Not only to avoid an outbreak but also because I was beginning to look scabrous. The pimples on my wrist had swollen to pustules. I had an inflamed and sweaty plateaus on the back of either hand. Despite the medicine, I could swear the bastards were spreading.

I was relieved to get a call from Gina in the afternoon telling me, after much finageling and calling around, she’d managed to get another tube of Permethrin for her and Esme. When she’d called the local open-door clinic they told her they’d have to see her before prescribing—the same runaround we’d gotten before. She tried to explain that she had no symptoms, but the receptionist wouldn’t accept this. When Gina relented and asked for an appointment, they told her it would be more than a month before they could see her. No wonder people are clogging up the emergency rooms. There’s no where else to go. I could see how something like this, though not necessarily an emergency, would make anyone frustrated enough to just risk the expense and go to the hospital—even with no symptoms. After everything we’d read said everyone who’d been in contact with the afflicted needed to use Permethrin.

By the afternoon, I’d begun to itch like crazy and I felt guilty as hell just being at work, sitting in chair that other people sat in. Using a computer that other people used. Touching things. Would the mites crawl into the mouse pad and wait for another wrist to infest? Was that how I got the bastards in the first place? Maybe I’d been wrong to accuse the bus, maybe I’d gotten scabies from a much more benign place, like the college. My mind went into hypochondriac overdrive. Everything around me could’ve been infested. I started thinking of all the other associate faculty. Who knew where they’d been. I was freaking myself out and I decided to go home.

Over the next week, I continued to have small outbreaks I was convinced were indicative of the Permethrin’s ineffectiveness. I still itched and nothing looked to be receding. If anything, it was swelling and growing more red and involuted as the days went on. I started putting on aloe and tea tree twice a day and showering like a madman. Every time I’d feel itchy, I’d point to it as evidence that nothing was working, but, gradually, the itching and the swelling started to go down. By the time a week had gone by and we were to reapply the Permethrin, I was nearly back to my normal appearance. Other than a few red bumps on Esme that we obsessed over, but turned out to be pimples, nothing developed in anyone else.

It’s now been almost two weeks; today is my last day of class for the semester and it’s looking like infestation has subsided, except for this strange collection of small red bumps on the side of my nose...oh well, it’s probably just another symptom of the larger, more generalized infestation of time, one that, unfortunately no cream can combat which continues to ravage my body. I guess it’s just something I’ll have to get used to—time that is.

Sicilian Lines

Between the Silicon Valley tech booms, Mikey and I had been able to ‘sneak into’ San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, (Mikey’s words, not mine) each of us paying a measly $325 or something for a studio on Hyde and Turk. The neighborhood was dense with squalor. You can put whatever label you’d like on the Tenderloin, but, there’s something objectively squalid about it. Even if the rent hadn’t been cheap, I’m not sure we wouldn’t have ended up there anyway. We didn’t exactly find the squalor appealing; we just didn’t care where we lived and when you don’t care, why not do everyone a favor and live in the Tenderloin?

This was in 2006, but it could’ve been 2005 because I had no reason to pay attention to the year back then. I’d graduated, applied to grad schools and then chucked the whole thing and convinced Mikey we should move to San Francisco after going through on a road trip. We packed up and said goodbye five or six weeks later. When we drove out of Michigan, everything started to blur together the way things do when you transcend a structure you’ve been leaning on for a long time. We even lost our conversational paradigm and all the way through Indiana, we looked out the window, no longer sure how to address each other until we came out on the other side of Chicago with the alliance only hours of highway driving and gallons of gas station coffee can induce.

The night before we were to move into our new apartment, driving down from Oregon, we stopped at a Denny’s somewhere off the 5. I bought a copy of the SF Chronicle thinking I’d look for work in the classifieds. I ended up with the paper all over my lap, too excited to pay attention to it after the sun came up and we turned west on the 80. We crossed the Bay Bridge in the gritty-eyed wonder of those who have spent weeks on the road and have driven through the night to reach their final destination. Once you’ve driven in SF like this, no entrance to any other city will ever compare. It rises up over the bridge, over the Bay, jutting from the ocean like an emerald city painted the wrong color.

Our apartment wasn’t far from where we came off the bridge. Just over Market St. One person had to stay with the car while the other ran our stuff up so nothing would get stolen. It didn’t take more than an hour. It was mostly books. I had a bunch of scarves different people had made me for the foggy weather. Mikey had more than a few brass instruments. Everything else could’ve fit into a single garbage bag.

I hadn’t been in the city a week when I got a job working in North Beach, the retail manager at a cafe, which meant I sold the beans, t-shirts, postcards (the place was well-known) and dusted off the espresso machines no one ever bought. The best part of the job was the walk there and back. I wrote multiple letters back to Michigan with my commute as the subject. I started in the Tenderloin, meandered into the shopping district of Union Square, climbed the Stockton Tunnel into China Town and then cut across Columbus into Little Italy. The variety in the 45 minute walk was incredible. It was more than neighborhoods, it was like crossing between countries. It got even better when I got a night job at the Tower Records on Bay St. and had to walk down Columbus after my shift at the Cafe. Then I hit the Pier 39 touristy area and came home over the esteemed Nob Hill which the city glittered beneath, distant and cold like an asteroid belt. After a 12-hour workday, it was a great place to slink home from, down from the cold, marble heights into the siren light and the streets peopled with addicts in every conceivable stage of addiction. Many of them yelling but, from Nob Hill, their yells blended with the rest of the night sounds and sounded no more significant than the chirping of crickets in the bushes that lined the quiet streets.

One night, coming down Hyde, still at the top of the hill, I noticed a bush in flower shedding petals of the most vivid purple on the sidewalk. I stopped, picked one up and examined it. Even under the streetlights, the petals were a matte florescent. That was the zenith. Up on the hill, over the glowing city, looking at those petals, I felt a surge of something like contentment. I was living in the only city that was effortlessly beautiful. Other cities were convenient containers for people to do what they needed or wanted to do. San Francisco was a landscape. It was less of a city and more of a park, a place you hiked through, camped in and woke to the fog moisture and the smell of the ocean with a feeling of calm reverence. When I wasn’t at work, I was hiking, exploring and losing myself to my own contented thoughts.

Despite the brilliance of the city, my job at the cafe was dull, probably duller than any other job I’d ever had, in part because I’d expected something complementary to the purple flowers and the unique nation state-character of the neighborhoods. Every morning, North Beach was aclang with espresso cups on marble bars. The fog slowly crept back to the water and the smell of coffee and pastries mixed with the salt air. Newspapers were shook open, tour books in various languages were considered, old shop fronts creaked open. Life alog Columbus Ave. was picturesque on weekday mornings , but the exterior of these institutions was one thing and the interior another. Like any museum, it had the tendency to turn boring without warning. In cafes, the conversation, the steaming milk and the rattle of the register kept life moving at a brisk pace, but in the back, ashtrays overflowed, dust seethed and old computers dreamed in that crunchy loading noise they used to make. In North Beach, for every busy cafe or breakfast place, there is a sleepy retail store trying to cash in on the flow of people coming through the neighborhood. But the flow of people is a focused thing. They want what they want and don’t plan on stopping for anything else. Thus, retail spaces like mine languished and sank behind their dead fly-littered windows, while, just around the corner, a line snaked around the block. For every person in the neighborhood slamming out espresso shots or yelling at fry cooks there were two clock watchers who read standing up, leaning on retail counters, adding yet another rubber band to the ball after getting the mail. In the retail area, behind the cafe, that job was mine. The museum guard who watches everyone come and look at the famous paintings who can only see the famous lines and strokes as part of his job.

Most of the time, I sat on a stool reading and the customers recognized that my time came cheaply. They’d either stand around talking, not waiting for my replies or act as if they were in a big hurry—something they’d never be able to get away with in the cafe where the baristas barked at the customers and slammed their orders together and the customers accepted this, heads down, pretending not to have noticed their insignificance; those who wandered over to the retail area, quickly unloaded this insignificance onto me as a representative of the same institution.

There were a few homeless guys who hung around and kept their stuff behind the counter where I worked. After I came to know them, I found myself spending most of my time getting their stuff and putting it back for them. Around Christmas, I spent over an hour with a guy trying to get one of those plastic, anti-theft locks off the top of a fifth of whiskey he’d stolen from someplace. We were unsuccessful, but he came back the next day with a bag of pistachios as thanks. I could only wonder where they’d come from.

Around noon, the cafe traffic would thin out and I’d go over for a snack. One of the privileges of working in the same building was that to the baristas, I was something of a coworker and I was given none of their disdain. If anything, they took pity on me, freely offering everything the cafe had to offer. I’d stand behind the counter eating a bagel, drinking my coffee chatting, glad for the recognition, until the customer flow started up again and I had to duck back to my quiet den hollowed out behind the cafe into which, in the 20 minutes I had been gone, no one had so much as peeked. I could tell by the way the dust motes swarmed, undisturbed.

It wasn’t a bad job, but for someone still high with newly acquired ocean proximity and palm fronds that could just be picked up from the street like oak leaves, it was too slow. In my visits to the cafe, I started to make friends with a few guys. One of which was a guy named Chuck who reminded me of my brother though they neither looked or acted anything alike. Chuck read a little and was interested in travel, so after the morning rush, I’d often tell him about what I’d been sitting there reading while he’d been ferociously knocking out espresso shots, steaming pitchers of milk, banging cups on the bar and yelling ‘next!’I tried to talk to him like we were on the same level, but I knew he’d been the one working all morning while I’d been staring out the window, wondering if anyone would come in and give some purpose to my placement behind the counter. It was hard not be slightly fawning in our conversations.

During the day, the place was too busy to do much talking, but at night, when the patrons switched from coffee to wine, the place was much more mellow, even if the tips weren’t as good. On the weekends, when I wasn’t working, habit often pulled me back up into North Beach. I’d be walking through the urine damp sidewalks of the Tenderloin, paying little attention to where I was going but it seemed like the maze of the financial district only had one outcome for me. No matter how I tried to navigate them, the streets dumped me out at the top of China Town and gravity carried me down into North Beach.

San Francisco is always chilly in the evening, that is, it’s always conducive to a cup of coffee, especially when you have no intention of sleeping anyway. Lured by the free coffee, I’d stop off at the cafe. Chuck did a lot of evening shifts because he was new and didn’t seem to mind the lowere tips. The evenings were better suited to him. He had the kind of face that never looked entirely awake. In the morning, looking at it made you feel like you hadn’t gotten enough sleep. His heavy lids seemed to mirror your own, but in the evening, it invited you to share the story of your long day to a sympathetic face—really, now that I think about it, more the face of a bartender than a barista. But the cafe itself changed in the evening, adapting well to the convivial evening crowd. The lights went down, the wine glasses tinkled on the metal tables, smoke—improbably else where, curled into the air. When there was no one wanting their glass refiled, Chuck would step outside and we’d watch the characters go by and talk about the places we wanted to go, knowing that we were already in one of them.

I dropped by one Saturday night, to find the place almost empty. It had been raining earlier and the regulars seemed to have assumed it was still raining from behind their wet garret windows. The wine bottles stood untouched behind the bar. The ringing of glass and porcelain struck down on the marble counter had been replaced by the splash of cars drifting up and down Columbus. I stood at the register, drinking my coffee, dripping water all over the floor and watching the wet night while Chuck and I talked about Cervantes. I told him he had to read Quixote. He told me he didn’t have time and I thought of how I was getting paid to read most of it, sitting on the stool in the room behind us which, now that it was the weekend, seethed in its coffee bean dust, waiting for Monday to creak its reluctant door open to the world again, but it was Saturday, I pushed the thought aside.

“Oh that reminds me.” Chuck said, turning from his sleepy daze at the window, you remember when you were here last and we were talking about Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi? You were telling me about how you could never find any good Italian music? That you had to buy the, uh, Laura Pausini and how everyone made fun of you?”

“It’s still good.” I said, only taking up the latter part of his question. “Maybe in Italian it’s cheesy, but to me it sounds different. It sounds genuine. Like she means the words she sings. Maybe it’s because I only understand about half the lyrics. What’s scary is what that says about our pop music and its perception around the world. Who knows how good Brittany Spears sounds if you’re from Calabria?”

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Chuck said, respectfully considering what I’d said, but steering the conversation back to its starting point. “Well, I was thinking about this—your Italian music problem, even if you’re not considering it a problem anymore—and I made you a CD. It’s in the back with my stuff. If you’re going to stick around, I can give it to you when I get off.”

No one had bought me anything other than a drink in years and I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had made anything for me. I wasn’t so excited about the CD, as I was the act. It seemed to say ‘I consider you a friend’. I tried to make my thanks address this, but perhaps the reason giving is considered superior to receiving is that it’s much more subtle. There are no shades of meaning in a ‘thanks’ no matter how often it’s repeated or turned around. It remains perfunctory. In an attempt to better show my appreciation, I asked what he’d put on the CD. “Anything I might know?”

He thought about it. “Maybe. Have you heard of Celentano? Andre Celentano?”

I told him it sounded familiar, but like anyone saying something sounded familiar, I wasn’t entirely sure if it did.

I went out into the night to wander around and get a beer while I waited for the cafe to close. I’d brought Quixote in my backpack, but it was too big to open at this hour, the print illegible in anything but full lamp light. So I went down to a pizzeria where they served beer in plastic cups, giving the place the air of a keg party.

I sat at the counter, busy with customers buying pizza and looked at the mementos and knick knacks against the back wall. Every restaurant or cafe in North Beach seemed to have a photo of someone famous visiting the place. You get the impression the whole neighborhood used to be real chic. But the pictures were all old—Pavorotti with the black beard, Bill Cosby with a smoother brow, young-looking boxers. The only famous people still around were the beat poets and no one had ever put their pictures up anyway.

Buzzed groups of bar hoppers passed the pizzeria, smelled the garlic and declared, almost in unison. “oooh, let’s get some pizza,” and then jammed themselves into the already crowded restaurant raising a hand with a credit card between the index and middle fingers, hailing the waitress. Outside, a bunch of people were standing around or sitting on the curb eating, most of them having to use the paper plate to prop up the slice. The later it got, the more people came out of the bars and ended up sitting over here, some of them obnoxious, some of them falling asleep.

I finished my beer and went over to Columbus and walked down toward the park. Compared to the pizzeria, the place was silent. One bench had someone sleeping on it, and two girls were jogged by but the lawn of the park was empty. The lamps glowed reverently, like tabernacle candles.

Even at night the Sts. Peter and Paul church hung a shadow over the place. The facade of the church impassively watching the Saturday night revelry with the piety of the old world, where life always takes place under the visage of such churches. Here, the sobering glance of the place didn’t travel far, but it was enough to quiet Washington Square even while the side streets buzzed with bar music feedback and revelers staggered from one bar to the next, howling any lingering inhibition out into streetlight dusk adding more noise and frenzy to the night. Yells from both men and women went up like wolves calling to the moon but weary of each other.

It was almost 11, nearly time for the cafe to close. I walked back down to Vallejo and, by now, the hedonistic shouts of Broadway were banging down the narrow streets like so many upset garbage cans, but the corner around the cafe was quiet enough to discern the buzzing of the streetlight above. Chuck was out there bringing the tables in. I grabbed a stack of chairs and followed him back inside, enjoying the purpose, however brief, after a day of indolence.

We tried to think of a quiet place in the area, but were unable to come up with anything. The whole neighborhood was turning inside out with light and noise as the bar patrons spilled out onto the street, made restless with the building noise in the streets. At ever bar, a group of people pushed to get in and another pushed to get out. Someone yelled for Ben. “Heeey, Ben! Heeeeey!” There was no response. Ben either didn’t care or was gone perhaps swallowed by that place on the corner of Grant and Green that was pulsing with music and inscrutability behind its dark windows. We got on Chuck’s motorcycle and went over to Polk, thinking we might find a bar between the Marina and Tenderloin that wouldn’t be too loud. We drove, seeing nothing but howling crowds—some of them howled at us as we slowed down to try to peak in windows of suitable bars. Each howl only sent us speeding back down the street. It was late now. Everyone who was going out was out. The people obscured the ambiance of the evening. Obnoxiously waving their own good time like it was a flag for everyone to rally around. Only there were too many flags and too many anthems to make sense of. We turned onto Geary, but even with the change in crowd, the night had become unappealing; the sense had been taken out of sitting in a bar, drinking, talking. There was no reason to force it and Chuck pulled over to the side of the street.

We were only a few blocks from my apartment, just above it, really, on the hill. I only had to walk down Hyde, as I did every night after work, down into the swirling light, sound and smell of the part of the city that was always at least partially awake. The chaos here was of a much less controlled nature. It didn’t emerge on Saturday night to howl out the pains of the Apollonian week, but was constantly present, fighting, sleeping, laughing, screaming. As destructive as that energy could be, there was something appealing in it. No matter how long the night seemed to drag on or darken, there would be someone, out on the street, wide awake, keeping watch. I said goodbye to Chuck and started to wade out into the lake of light beneath Geary. The neon was lapping at my ankles when Chuck called me back. I’d forgotten the CD.

I thanked him probably too profusely. I knew it wasn’t a gift I could reciprocate. We didn’t listen to the same music and, besides, the CD was meant as an introduction rather than an update. I can’t describe it now because I’ve forgotten, but there was a decorum of mixtape making and, in that decorum, somewhere, was the rule that I’d break if I made something for Chuck. I just had to accept his gift. He reminded me we’d see each other at work Tuesday. I wished him a good weekend and he drove away, east, toward the financial district. I started back into the lucent waters, looking over the CD, wondering if it was going to be worth listening to. As much as I loved Italian culture, the modern music I’d been exposed to all sounded bland in the way that early 90s college rock in the US had sounded bland. Like a stopgap measure. Chuck’s writing was clear but small, written in felt-tipped marker, the edges of the letters had blurred into themselves. I had to stop under a streetlight to try to read the titles. The first looked interesting ‘24,000 baci’ Andre Celentano. There are certain artists that one can not allow to be merely ‘heard of’. Any adherent to the music knows that such a claim only means the speaker has yet to be touched, yet to be apostatized by it. Back then, if anyone had told me they’d ‘heard of’ the Arcade Fire, I would’ve made them a CD, too. It was clear from the way it stood out at the top, he’d made the CD for the Celentano, everything else was too pad it out.

I put the CD away and continued past the shuttered Vietnamese cafes and social clubs. Outside the Brown Jug the same kid who was always out there at night selling, leaned lazily against a streetlight pole. The gel in his hair, shining under the light, looking like rippling water under the moon. The Lafayette Coffee Shop irradiated the sidewalk panels in front of it with the glow of old neon, pumping sluggishly through the glass tubes above the door. Someone banged what sounded like shopping cart into a hydrant. I went in and went to bed.

…

“Con viente quattro mille baci!” I sang, as we waited for the bus. Gina looked at me like I was crazy. I’d been singing the Celentano song on and off since we’d arrived in Italy about a week earlier. The song had become my anthem and, as I sang it, I tried to move in the appropriate Elvis-esque way of early rock and roll, the swinging hips, the pinballing arms. I did none of it well and when I almost fell over, I sat down.

There was only one other person at the bus stop besides Gina and me. The clouds were beginning to amass in the southern sky, blowing in from Africa. I thought of the stories of the Sirocco, the hot sandy wind that crossed the Mediterranean from the Sahara and killed the crops, spread pestilence.

My Italian had been corrupted by years of Spanish use and now I had something approaching the lingua franca sailors on the Mediterranean spoke, a patois of romance languages. I turned to the other person waiting and tried not to think about the words I used as I asked the question.

“You are waiting to the bus to go Palermo, yes?”

The other bus patron was kind enough to piece together the broken syntax of my question in her head and nod in response. It’s always comforting to know you’re not the only one waiting on a late bus. We probably wouldn’t get into Palermo until after dark, but there were always those cheap motels by the bus station. Gina and I’d get a room there, probably be kept up half the night by people yelling, playing music or knocking on the wrong door, but in the morning we’d go out and find something more accommodating. It wouldn’t be so bad.

The bus pulled in, a model like one imagines Greyhound ran in the 50s, when women still wore kerchiefs over their hair and everything that moved was done in chrome. There were already a few passengers on the bus because it had originated in Syracuse. We sat in the back near another backpacker, brought out the snacks we’d brought and luxuriated in the peace that arises from cessation of anxiety waiting for a late bus induces. For the next few hours, we had no times, no connections to anticipate. We could sit and relax and be ferried to our destination.

The interior of the island was choppy, low, rounded, grass-covered hills like Marin or Sonoma, but the smell was different, the citric, soapy smell of chaparral was missing and there was only the earthen sweetness of wheat; the ocean was too far to influence the climate. The hills and the sky were dry like an old unglazed terra cotta pot. The dry grasses rubbed together like cricket wings making a restless music.

I watched the undulations of the landscape for a while. I noticed the backpacker just across the aisle was doing the same thing. I called over to him, ‘There’s something of the ocean in it, right? Like a dry, woven sea. He turned from the window, nodded and introduced himself as John. He was a tree-planter in Canada, which he described as hard but rewarding work. We talked about our travels in Sicily and what we planned on doing in Palermo. Through our conversation, John discovered we had no place to stay and offered to ask at the place he was couchsurfing, a house of European Volunteer Service (EVS) volunteers. I was surprised that EVS had volunteers in western Europe at all. I’d imagined they were like the Peace Corps with no presence in ‘developed’ countries. John said from what he knew, they were all over Europe.

When we arrived, the neighborhood around the Palermo bus station was already inundated with the night that leaks out from under low buildings when they’re ringed around each other. The sun was going down over the horizon but its rays were walled off in every direction, giving Palermo a labyrinthine quality. The ocean was close enough to smell in a briny, seafood market way, but not close enough to hear and without the sound, we couldn’t tell where it was. The result was disorienting. From the bus station and the market outside, Palermo was like a moat of land around the Mediterranean, the land taking up three sides, the boats in the harbor ringing the forth, hull to hull, stern to stern, strung together with thick, sea-crusted ropes.

We waded out into the evening as one does after getting off a bus that’s traveled through a bright, dry afternoon, feeling our way through the city. It was difficult to see. The darkness was about five feet high and there were all kinds of small obstacles to bang your shins into. We did some sleepwalking around the neighborhood, arms outstretched, until we found our way to an internet cafe full of Bangladeshis calling home from plastic chairs, their faces framed by stacks of cigarette ashed monitors and lit up with the electric gray of a videochat in which the interlocutor is standing in front of a white wall the computer resolution can’t account for and projects with a weird, oilslick grayness. No one turned when we came in. There was no service counter. The entire place had been taken up with computer kiosks.

John sent an email to his couchsurfing host, asking if it’d be alright to bring us over and we waited to see if he’d answer while we talked in low voices and we watched the digital clock on the computer screen run down. The place was filled with the kind of hopeless homesickness that clings to reluctant Diaspora communities. I smoked and tried not to look around the room at the private conversations everyone was having in low tones.

Our half hour ran out with no reply. Which didn’t surprise John and he was undaunted. We walked over to the neighborhood of the EVS house, looking for a place we could wait while John went to ask if we could stay. We found a post office few blocks over, which was defiantly open to the night and John stashed us there. I stood in the doorway awhile, watching the neighborhood kids run all over the place. A butched shop at the end of the block illuminated the area with a mottled red light from the glistening flanks hanging in the windows. Carne di Cavallo. A sign above the shop announced. The smell of dried blood commingled with the salt of the sea.

The post office had a single seat in front of a neglected computer which looked primarily to be there for the neighborhood kids and half-hour rounds of video games. The letters of the keyboard were partially worn away and had the tacky grit of the keystrokes of many unwashed hands. As we set our bags down, a middle aged woman with died black hair and eyebrows wearing a loose pastel dress appeared from behind the counter and asked if we needed to use the computer. As the ancient CPU wheezed and spun its fans, we talked to the woman in our poor Italian. We praised Sicily, but she gestured in a vague way and said nothing. She asked us where we were from, but again when we answered, she lapsed into silence. It wasn’t an angry silence, but came naturally, like she was giving each response time to fade out of memory before asking another question. When I asked my own questions, she did the same thing before answering.

As I tried to fill up the silence, a large German Shepard came into the room from behind the counter. When he came over to sniff us and we started petting him, the woman’s silence lifted and she began chattering to the dog, half-heartedly scolding him for being so forthright, but while the tail swished in our faces and the tongue probed our ears she couldn’t help grinning like a mother hearing her toddler repeat a bad word in the tone-deaf way that implies incomprehension. After a few minutes with the dog licking, wagging and nearly knocking over the displays of packing materials, the woman lead him away with an air of delighted resignation. We’d passed the test in our appreciation of his affection and, on her way out, the woman told us just to yell if there was anything else we wanted.

There was no message from John. Rather than wait at the computer, we went outside and leaned against the wall of the post office, stretching our bones. Without heavy packs on it felt as if we were going to float away into the evening, above the kids and the lurid butchers’ windows. Every gesture flung out further, every word seemed to shoot into the rarefied air.

We sat down on a bench and watched the neighborhood. Which is all short-term travel is: finding a good bench to watch from. A young woman walked by, pulling a kid by the arm. An elderly man lingered over his passagiata. A light came on and shone like milk on the worn cobbles. A boy ran by. His sister yelled something after him and turned back. The boy stopped, turned around and, after a few seconds, ran after her. After being in the country for a few days, I was enjoying the clacking echos of the city and the coos of the pigeons from a roof crevice overhead. When it seemed like it had been about half an hour, we got up to get our bags, agreeing that if there was still no news from John, we’d find a hostel on the computer. It was getting late and I didn’t want to wait around all night.

In the post office, our bags had slid down the wall we’d leaned them against and were laying on the floor like exhausted children. Behind the counter came the sound of forks glancing off plates and low conversation. It was like coming back into someone’s living room and finding everyone at dinner. At the computer, John had written. We were welcome to stay. He’d supplied an address and vague directions. We left 3 Euro on the counter, the price for an hour of internet, shut down the computer and went off to find the place.

We found the street quickly, but the oval numbers seemed tacked up next to the doors with no sense of order. I couldn’t be sure if we were going the right way, so we stopped into a little grocery, crates of vegetables stacked and displayed outside the door, bottles of wine behind the counter and a noisy freezer that competed with the buzz of the florescent lights, so bright as to make the tile floor look wet.

I stood there for a while, waiting until the other customers had made their purchases and left so they wouldn’t overhear my terrible Italian, to which I tried to subject as few people as possible. I had to shout to be heard over the freezer’s compressor.

“Dov’e questo indrizzio?” I asked, holding up the paper I’d written the address on, not even sure I was using the right word. I could’ve been saying ‘toilet’ or ‘asthma’ for all I knew. I was too tired to pay attention. The grocer scrutinized my handwriting, worse than my speech in terms of incomprehensibility. His face impassive. But after a few seconds, he gestured out the door in a familiar way. The place was obviously nearby.

We bought a bottle of wine and went a few doors down the block to a solid, but worn wooden door. I rang and John opened the door like it was his house. We went upstairs and were introduced to Felix, the only EVS volunteer who didn’t go home for the Christmas break. He was German, but his mom lived in the States. He didn’t like Germany or Germans and had a young world-weariness to him. He said he wouldn’t mind living in the States, Los Angeles or someplace. He set some glasses out, we opened the wine we’d brought and the four of us sat talking and drinking. The conversation centered on different places we’d been. It was exciting to talk to other travelers and the wine was wiping away my inhibition. I spoke loudly and waved my arms to illustrate my points. Gina corrected my faulty memories and all of us laughed. It was one of those lucky occasions when everyone seemed compatible with everyone else and we were all at the same level of mild intoxication.

After an hour or so, we left everything in a hurry. The scene of our conversation that felt like it could go on all night, was abandoned—probably much to the neighbors’ relief—and we left the wine coated glasses standing on the table among the still smoldering ashtrays and undisturbed glasses of water. It’s not difficult to imagine this tableau as a stage set, standing bravely without actors as the lights dim, causing the audience to look closer than they had previously, noticing how simple it was. Just an ordinary table with some glasses and then the lights go out. Next scene.

We snaked down a few alleys I never could’ve found my way back through and went to a Erasmus student meet-up. As we walked in Felix told us just to pretend to be Europeans studying in Sicily. Not wanting him to doubt my American panache, I immediately pulled someone aside and began talking about my academic aspirations. I’d met Scandinavians who sounded like Americans, so I didn’t need to fake an accent, besides, no one really cared. There were free cans of beer and everyone lazily standing around sipping from them; one or two of the girls had gone to get glasses to pour their cans into. The event’s similarity to an American party seemed to indicate how quickly it had been thrown together. I didn’t know how to feel about that, but I thought about it while I talked about the work of Bellochio to Belgian film student. I couldn’t remember much about the movie we were discussing and waited to agree with him between sips of beer.

More students were making their way in, many of them looking like they’d come straight from a nap. They were all dressed well and had sleepy, half-drawn eyelids that took in the situation and asked only ‘what’s this all about?’ One conversation grew until it touched another and soon about 12 of us were sitting on wooden benches placed rockingly on the cobbles, sipping our beer and talking about whatever came to mind. A harmony of purpose was in the air and communicated between us. We were like the cast on a well-written sitcom with no overlap in our personalities. Individually, we were only people in Palermo, there for various purposes, but together, we were a group and something of a spectacle. We were slightly aware of our ability to attract attention, even if we left it underused.

Someone complained about the atmosphere of the wooden benches and beer cans and we all fell in line. There was so much more. Why stew around this quaint little place all night? En masse we got up to leave, taking the whole atmosphere of the place with us. I don’t doubt that anyone who stayed behind probably soon found themselves feeling just as dissatisfied with the place after the silence of our group’s departure settled in.

A light rain was falling. The lights of the alleys and arcades drained out to the street where the water ran between the cobbles. A few of our party had brought their beers from the bar and the cans were being passed around. I didn’t know whose they were, but I drank anyway. It didn’t matter. We were all the same, more or less. Our group was European, students mostly, some of them Sicilian, if not Palermitani, they were from nearby. One of our group, was a Roberto Begnini. He moved in an out of the rain in dramatic Chaplin-esque ways that were impossible not to laugh at. He placed himself at the group’s head, acting as our mascot, dancing ahead into the wet night, joking and dancing with middle-aged women on their way home from the market. They accepted him and his erratic movements in good humor like this sort of this happened to them all the time.

As we walked, Gina and I learned that we were headed to a street where there were a number of outdoor cafes. Another place with rickety tables on cobblestones, but some that didn’t have the same sequestered feeling as the previous place. This place was much less organized. Lots of people and lots of wine. Maybe with the rain there wouldn’t be...but he waved the thought away. Thinking of this place empty on a Friday night a week before Christmas was absurd.

We came around the corner into a scene of dripping light, glowing stands of hair, light on the rims of wine glasses, no tables. Everyone was standing and talking. The cafes were small and huddled together in the rain with wet rope lights garlanded around their awnings and porticos. People were stuffed in the alley between the buildings. During the day, it was obvious there’d been a few metal tables, but they’d already been taken inside. The rain brought the crowd up under the awnings, but when it slackened they’d spill back out into the alley. Walking up, I saw this happen two or three times. The action was like the working of some crowd-controlling bellows or waves pulling and pushing a cobblestone shore. But even in the rain, a few defiant drinkers remained in the middle of the alley, until the heavy drops began to splash the contents of their wine glasses and they’d run under the awning.

The talk of the crowd was rain-blurred until it resembled the indistinct sound of a train in the near distance. A voice would occasionally pop loose with a laugh or a comedic sound. A few people near the laugh would turn to look. If they looked long enough, they were invited over. The crowd was amorphic. Their dark wet eyes and hair shone like the wet cobbles, languid in the rain and fragmented light. Standing in doorways, perched on stairs, the people patched up the architecture of the place, became ornaments of the doorways and windows. It was easy to imagine them all as statues. Parties always have their indistinct lines. They can’t be seen, but are felt. Step over one, it’s like being back in high school, forcing entry into a clique above your social position. Maybe it was the new culture; maybe I just couldn’t perceive of the Sicilian lines, but even as I moved through the crowd, people I’d never met turned to face me like they were expecting me to greet them. Not wanting to rebuff anyone, I got Felix’s attention.

“What is this place?” I asked him, hoping everyone could hear my revealing question and English.

“La Vucciria” He called, partially turning back to me. “It’s like a market.” and then he added “of people” and chuckled.

I nodded at the useless information and followed Felix and the others into one of the cafes that formed the walls of the place. We nearly overwhelmed the place, but there was only one drink to buy: sangria. The bartender, who looked completely disinterested in, but not annoyed by the throng around him, dished out glasses of this stuff and took the euros in payment without bothering to count.

After watching others try to get their drinks outside and losing half in jostling against the crowd coming in, I drank off half of my drink at a gulp. The flavor of wine was stronger than it is in US sangria. Giving it less of a fruit punch quality and more of the Sunday evening quality wine has always induced in me since my parents used to give me a watered down glass of it with dinner on special occasions. Since I was a kid, I have ascribed to wine the flavor of boredom and the funereal feeling of Sunday evening. But, the fruit flavor in the sangria was strong enough to balance the rustiness of the wine. The awful feeling of a quiet, lonely Sunday was gone. Maybe it was the scene, the old buildings, the glistening hair, the light patter of rain on the awnings, the Sicilian conversation, but I could no more find the old flavor in the wine of my childhood than I could remember what coffee tasted like the first time I had it. Still, I was used to beer and the wine, tempered as it was by fruit, had a mature flavor.

We slipped between the shirt backs and long hair back to the street. The rain had recently thinned out to a mist and there was still room in the middle of the street where a small drain was gurgling with rainwater, spilled wine and urine from behind the dumpsters further up the street. Gina and I took our positions with the dignity of tourists in constant expectation of a spectacle, arms akimbo, legs spread out for balance. We sipped our wine and looked around, expecting to find the spectacle in anyone, anything but each other. But there was too much happening to stay so observant and we were soon discussing La Vucciria, probably as most of the people there were.

The mist began to fall a little steadier and soon regular drops were breaking the puddled light at our feet. The rain was spaced out. The drops were overflowing but irregular. I thought about making for the awnings, but there were already so many people crowded against the buildings. We moved slightly but not entirely out of the rain. I stood there talking to Gina with the sangria bouncing around in my glass, slapped around by the heavy drops. Our Roberto Begnini, noticing the opening, shot out from the crowd and began to mime actions of holding a desperate umbrella and make pathetic gestures, as if he were a maudlin character unable to get out of the elements. The universal little tramp.

The crowd was one probably accustomed to such spectacles. They took in the performance, but continued with their drinks and discussions. As the rain fell harder, Roberto’s comic actions took on a more desperate tone, which made them even more funny.

I couldn’t watch all this without a small bite of jealousy. Having once been a person to stand up in front of a crowd, I am always a little envious of anyone who does so before me, but here I was: Sicily, Vuccirira, Erasmus, Palermo, 50s buses. I was out of my element. I knew if Roberto wasn’t acting, I wouldn’t be and I was glad someone was doing it. I drank and watched and let my envy mellow into appreciation.

I went back to the bar, passed a few euros over came back holding two sloshing glasses of sangria when the opening strains of the song began.

Ahhhhh mamiiiiiiiiii

It was the song that Chuck had handed me so many years before, the one I’d been singing since Gina and I had arrived in Italy. I handed both glasses to Gina, who, not recognizing the song at first, was confused by my sudden launch into action. The crowd quieted. I ran up to where Roberto was already holding his mime microphone in the rainy opening between the two sides of the crowd, huddled under the awnings. The crowd quieted. Everyone knew the song, but they waited. I opened my mouth and the lyrics came out:

Tiiii voogliooooo beeeeen-eeeeh.

Roberto looked at me with surprise and then we wrapped our arms over each others shoulders and screamed the chorus, which is hoarsely shouted they way the chorus of “Twist and Shout” is shouted. Which makes it even more dramatic to be standing under the wet lights of La Vucciria with a tousled crowd huddled around, watching and enjoying the spectacle that we were making. We shouted the words together, eyes squeezed shut and soon, the entire crowd was singing along. The huddled crowd broke loose from the awnings and collapsed into the middle of the alley. In those Sicilian voices yelling themselves hoarse in the rain, there was that moment at the top of Hyde in San Francisco when Chuck gave me that CD. In that commonplace action, that empty night when the bars were all full, was the seed of this bacchanalia. I sang with my mouth open to the sky, letting my voice directly into the rain. I put my arm around Gina and finished singing the song to her. Now she knew I wasn’t nuts. I wasn’t the only one who sang of ‘24,00 baci’; other people sang, too. Italian people. Sicilian people and, for that moment, I was one of them. Like any significant cultural experience, it was all about knowing the words. How easily the moment could’ve fallen to blameless obscurity, but, it had been ordained, years before, in a slow-blooming gesture. I hadn’t been given a CD that night, I’d been given this moment. I couldn’t help but to wonder how many others I’d been given and how many would I be able to realize. In that moment, there was an opening on the frame of reference for the transmigration of souls. There’s so much in our experiences, stored up; it has to go somewhere. Right? If I hadn’t gone to Sicily, hadn’t walked to La Vucciria in the rain and hadn’t sung 24,000 Baci the burden of the unrealized moment alone would’ve been massive. As it was, I’m just glad I had the experience, especially because it was years in the making.

Thanks, Chuck.