Ruby's Diner, Oceanside, CA

LOGISTICS UPDATE

I've just arrived in Los Angeles after a series of day trips to Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, Tucson and San Diego. That's the order in which I visited them and the smart-eyed will see they're not in geographical order. I've spent five nights on the Greyhound in a row and am exhausted. Hence the lack of posts for a while. In lieu of proper posts, a couple of teasers from the road (unrelated to each other):

1. 'Oh hey! Nice to see you again. How am I? I hurt bad: my hips hurt, I can hardly walk, and check this out!' [pulls aside green Disneyland hoodie to reveal seven bite marks on her neck]

2. Jeannie points up high with her beef jerky, brandishing the meat at the country's political stratosphere. 'Laura Bush called them up about me - ME. I mean, when Laura Bush has to call the State Department to tell them that you are crazy, you know you're doing something right? That's when I knew the Mafia were involved in everything'. Can a crazy person comprehend of someone thinking them crazy?

Bank of the Colorado River, Austin, Texas

It's time I told you about Bruno.

Bruno has been with me on every step of this journey. I've slept on Bruno and under him. He's as shabby as I am, which means we don't intimidate each other, and when we walk together our arms swing to and fro at the same speed without trying.

Bruno is made by the Driza-Bone company of Australia and is probably twenty years old. This means he is seven years younger than me, but, being made of waxed cotton, his scratches and tears don't heal so he has a large amount of visible life experience. He lends this experience to me whenever I wear him.

He is called Bruno because he is brown but really he is tending to black as I keep stuffing him in the dusty lockers of the Greyhound bus. Under the arms, which swing in time, the dust is ingrained and will probably never come out so it looks as though I have sweated heavily. And over the left should and down the front there is the suspicion of a shadow of the strap of my bag, which I should alternate on shoulders but don't. I'm not as good to Bruno as I should be: he needs a clean and a rewaxing but he won't get one as I can't give him up for even one day.

My two favourite things about Bruno are:

First, the hole in the lining of the right hand chest pocket which is an excellent joke on his part. It is big enough to allow my cellphone through, into the fluffy linty abyss in which only gum wrappers and valueless coins dwell. This means I cannot find my cellphone for hours at a time which is a terror particularly piquant given how far I am from my infrastructure. And more, the hole is not big enough to allow the cellphone back out, so for ten minutes I have to milk the phone out of the hole. This action alienates me on public transport, which is where it always occurs.

Second, the poacher's pocket in the back where the buttocks would be if Bruno was human. There is room for a whole pheasant or a half-dozen books. The corners of the books dig into my own buttocks and remind me not to get too comfortable.

Bruno smells, he smells of wax and smoke and he picks up a little of the smell of each state I visit. At the moment I am in Texas and he smells of mesquite, and of mangroves and old water from Louisiana, and of Spanish moss from Mobile, and echoes of every state north, right back to pretzel salt and steam from Manhattan.

What I miss on my travels he picks up after me: smells and dirt which leave tracks on his skin and in his fibres, a dirty map of our progress hand-in-arm.

Lulu's cafe, Birmingham, Alabama

From Studs Terkel's Talking to Myself, Pantheon, 1973:

One day, in explaining how he writes a blues, [Big Bill Broonzy] chose the knife as the subject. 'How many things can you do with a knife? You can cut fish, you can cut you toenails. I seen guys shave with it, you can eat beans with it, you can kill a man. There. You name five things you can do with a knife, you got five verses. You got yourself a blues.'

LOGISTICS UPDATE 7th March 2009

Black and White Taxi, 4.45am, Norfolk, VA:

'Headed for the Carolinas, uhuh? Let me tell you something real quick. Further south you go, the more dirty the folks get on the Greyhound.'

'I'll watch my step.'

'I don't mean more nasty, I mean more dirty, their clothes and bodies and such. Uhuh.'

After four days in Virginia I am heading south. I'm going to:

Charlotte North Carolina
Savannah Georgia
Fort Lauderdale Florida
Birmingham Alabama
Atlanta Georgia
New Orleans Louisiana
Houston Texas
Austin Texas
Santa Fe New Mexico
Tucson Arizona
San Diego California
San Francisco California
Los Angeles California

and that excludes deliveries picked up between here and the West Coast.

Conservatory Water, New York City, NYC

A Story Told in Black and White -

A black girl and a white girl are looking for treasure. They have climbed down into the Conservatory Water which is a large pond or small lake of man-made origin like everything else in Central Park where when the wind is good but not too strong people bring small boats that they have made or bought and sail them using luck to guide the sails.

The pond or lake now has no water in it. It is empty of everything except a foot-thick layer of gray sandy mud and black spherical fuzzy cobs from the trees and these two girls and a dog that is with the girls and maybe treasure.

The black girl wears a white coat. The white girl wears a black coat. The dog has a black and white coat. This story is real.

The girls dig at the sandy mud with black sticks that were until recently attached to spherical fuzzy cobs. They make foot-long curved gashes and poke in the gashes but if they find anything in these gashes they are playing it cooler than I could play it.

They make their way into the centre of the pond or lake and the dog squats. The black girl in the white coat pulls a white plastic bag from her coat pocket. She picks up a small black turd and puts it in the white bag in the pocket of her white coat.

I am not a parent or a park keeper but from the shore of the lake or pond the turd looked small and black and spherical and very like a small black spherical fuzzy cob.

Church of the Epiphany, 74th Street, New York City, NYC

Reading Werner Herzog's On Walking in Ice (from which I've quoted heavily below) on a bench on York Avenue. The Church of the Epiphany on York and 74th has a pink marble bench outside, above which hang photocopies on bright paper clothespegged to green wire. A bulletin board and mobile, it dances in the warm wind and flashes pictures of priests and adverts for BIBLE AND BREWSKIS.

On this bench I made a discovery: sitting on benches is publicly accepted, lying on benches is frowned upon, but in between, as your angle approaches but doesn't reach the horizontal, you become more and more interesting to the passerby. First I sat and read with the book in my lap; then I lifted up my stiff left leg in a baseball-slide position; then I reclined as on a chaise longue (a friend of mine slept on a chaise longue at boarding school so I am practised at this) propping up my scarf-swaddled neck on one elbow.

The attention I received from pedestrians doubled with each adjustment. When I was in the last position, reclining in my public boudoir, a distinguished man of fifty who might have been Mayor of the Upper East Side if they had one walked past me and slowed as he walked. 'Now there's a man who knows how to relax', he said, just to me and the cosmos that we shared, and felt no need to look at me for a reply.

Herzog's book is a tremendous, poetic account of a shattering journey on foot from Munich to Paris towards a friend who may be dead when he arrives. In one direction - towards Lotte Eisner, the friend who lies in hospital - his friendship is so strong it is preposterous; Herzog knows this, and the push of the preposterous seems to keep him going through life (in this book he claims to have swum fifty miles from New Zealand to Australia).

In other directions, though, specifically towards strangers, in my area of interest, Herzog is not a friendly man. He makes few connections with other humans on his trip and perhaps his closest companion is a dog who follows him for many miles - even then 'he didn't want to be seen, and he just trotted behind me in the roadside ditch'. Herzog is no wandering troubadour, singing for his supper: he makes a habit of breaking into empty houses for shelter.

All this rugged alienation makes me feel embarrassed and bourgeois. I want to impose myself on my surrounding rather than react to them; I want to lie down on the bench properly and sleep under my rapidly tinting spectacle lenses: the sun is warming the grey streets, the pink bench and my grey-pink skin, but I fear a tap on the shoulder from a leather glove.

I rescue myself by telling myself that I'm not Herzog: I want to connect with people, I want at least the option of making friends, and I can do this better reclining than lying down.

Whitney Gallery of American Art, 75th Street, New York City, NY

My favourite map belongs to Jeff. I first saw it in the kitchen of Jeff and Quinne's apartment in Cow Hollow, San Francisco. I think it's just a pull-out map from a Sunday supplement: the map covers the whole Bay Area but adverts for Bay Area Rapid Transit and sushi restaurants obscure large squares of the city. Only downtown is bare, and on downtown Jeff has made dozens of annotations in writing so dense it pretty much makes the map unnavigable.

Homespun phrases like 'grass not good HERE + good HERE but they dont let you play' and 'WALGREENS good for steal toothbrush' and 'HERE be monsters' overlap like the writing on old letters where, to save expensive paper, sheets would be written on horizontally, vertically, and in both directions until the whole sheet was covered in meshes of letters like the webs of a pompous spider.

I love this map because, like the whole enterprise of Google Earth, the space shown on this map is coded with one man's intimate experiences but, unlike Google Earth, the experiences are more important than the map.

Jeff's map is the first symbol I've found of my kind of geography, a geography that deals with space only as far as people live, meet and make friends in that space. This geography is non-linear, it doesn't conform to a grid, it is flexible in ways I've just begun to imagine: A standard geography might have a globe as its symbol: the lines of latitude and longitude are like a coat of mail over the earth, protecting with their impartial straightness the inhumanity of borders. The geography I'm going to write about strains at the coat of mail. I'm going to take off the coat and tickle the flesh underneath.

Beanocchio Cafe, 75th St and York Ave, New York City, NY

A man comes into the cafe wearing two pairs of glasses. Small black-framed nose-perchers threaten the tip of his nose, pushed forward by gold wire rims. He looks over both pairs as he orders a regular filter coffee with a shot of espresso. He turns to survey the room, below the gold wire, above the black frames, and as he turns I see the ashen cross on his forehead. Two things hit me: first, it's Ash Wednesday, the first in five years on which I haven't worn such a cross myself; second, why did I assume the man was Jewish?

Two girls aged perhaps ten years are eating by my side. I'm on the end of the cushioned bench facing into the room: all I have to do to watch them intently is stare into the reflection on the bright copper tabletop. Bright it is though puckered: I only see movements and gestures rather than features, so it is good training for a screenwriter, and I feel like a gladiator practising with a lead sword. One girl - in dark blue, I cannot make out the cloth - is eating a bran muffin (I cheat and look up but only at the dishes); the other is wearing a pink Puffa and picking at a complicated salad.

The ritual of Ash Wednesday seems unique in the Christian calendar because it dirties you: all other ceremonies from baptism on are cleansings. I can't remember the rules on wiping your forehead after the ashing, but it surprises me that the man has not cleaned himself. I think one reason America is so hygienic is that dirt has narratives attached: it tells stories, usually of wild nature - the wilderness refusing to be tamed - or individual weakness, the precise opposite of the American Dream.

The ashen-faced man is angry. He ordered his coffee angrily, he waits angrily, as there is a problem with the espresso machine. There is a public nature to his anger: like so many Americans I've met, he seems willing to use the hard red tiled walls of the cafe as a sounding board, echoing his anger off them until they sound like rage. He doesn't say anything but he paces. He is wearing a green windcheater and his rambling fills the cafe. Why is he angry? Is he angry at the first day of Lent? Isn't Lent, like America, supposed to be about self-control? What is he giving up? Would he tell me if I asked? Why does he generate so many questions? I know I'll never ask him: there is a jagged world beneath the portliness.

'This muffin is heaven on earth! Isn't it good to be out of school?'

This from the girl in dark blue. There is no extra, empty seat for an adult. They sit opposite each other and the girl who is not sitting on the cushioned bench has her legs crossed at the knee.

'Do you want me to get you something?'

'No, why don't we go to the candy store and I'll treat you to something.'

'Fifty cents for candy! It's incredible, isn't it?'

The age of the girls, which I'd briefly forgotten, comes back to me with a jolt. They are wearing this weird sophistication like medals for girl guides: urbane discourse, pin it to the sash. I try to imagine their parents, trusting, accomplished, domineering, surely proud at the meek facsimiles of New York adults their daughters have become. I wonder what puberty will do to these contraptions? And how much do they understand of the jagged adult world that needs to be lubricated with this politeness they're blithely trying on?

The man grabs his coffee, pushes up the black frames (which push up the gold rims) and pushes past the girls and out the door. The girls are tidying as he leaves; a few seconds later they bus their trash and walk out of the cafe. Three people, wearing badges of things they don't understand. In the street the dark blue girl takes the other girl's hand. Suddenly they are children again. I wonder when the man is going to wash himself?

Angel Shoe Repair and Watch, 77th Street, New York City, NYC

My new watch has a Tyrannosaurus Rex on its face. The T-Rex ('T-Rex' is scrawled on the face below its chin) is attacking 9 o'clock but its mouth is open a little too wide, so I think it knows the camera is on it. Yesterday I got drunk and waved it in the face of a near stranger, shouting 'It's five to five! RRRRRRR!' It wasn't five to five: the watch battery was dead.

This morning I got a new battery from a grotesquely cramped, dusty and hyphenated store: a cobbler-mender-keymaker-jeweller-watch repair store which I guess uses the same tools for everything and might perform surgery if the hardware allowed.

The floor, windows and walls are grey on purpose, but would probably have ended up that colour because there is a fine layer of grey dust on my boots when I leave. Worn brass footplates for a hand shoeshine look like ancient, well-fondled bronzes; the seats of the chairs are duct-tape grey and are held together with duct tape. There are hand-written signs all over the walls, no two at the same height, in bold letters spelling gruff words:

NO CCS NO CHECKS CASH ONLY

NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR OBJECTS LEFT FOR MORE THAN 30 DAYS

DO NOT ASK FOR CREDIT AS WE WILL OFFEND YOU

I am scared as I ask the two men for assistance. One is clean-cut, my height, looks like Jimmy Smits: he runs the cobbler and the clothing mender. He points me at the the other man.

A huge, spherical rubbery head of an incredible mossy green-brown looks down at me in spite of my two-inch height advantage. His spine is bent so I suppose he looks down out of fifty years of habit, habit not lost in twenty years of physical decline. He says nothing but already I know he has an indomitably middle-European accent, a detail he confirms with 'walk this way pliss' as he walks two yards to his desk.

He screws a jeweller's glass under a fold of his sagging right eye-lid, thicker and fuller than his left eye-lid through all the years of clenching. I wonder at what point he stopped using his brow and had the self-assurance to use the lid-fold? I have only just started to rest a cup of tea on my belly when reading in bed.

'Can I watch you do it?' My journalistic ambitions kick in.

He looks at me as if I've told him I want to be present at the birth of my child: warm, tolerant, but dubious of new values in a new time. He reaches for a small, strong-bladed knife.

'What's that knife you're using?'

'Oyster.'

'I'm sorry?'

'It is oyster knife.'

When I first saw his face I wanted to look at his fingers, but I forget them as he shucks the watch - it's incredibly quick, done with one hand, as if he's shaving a sliver of cheese. And then the guts are exposed, and he looks at me inquisitively, and my guts are exposed. What does he want from me?

His eyes, milky eyes, one only a pupil in its black metal tunnel, stay on me as he tests the battery. The machine beeps and a smile crinkles his lips.

'New battery.'

Long pause- he takes out the eyeglass and turns both milk-eyes on me. I start to understand - he's looking inside me, he's interested in how I tick. He is a philosopher in the medium of tiny cogs. He and I are engaged in the same investigative project, except he gets at humanity through delicate machines, fixing up the perfect creations worn down and soiled by imperfect creatures.

What stories the watches must tell him! The substances they are dropped in that coat the mechanism, the scratches that scar them from polo sticks or lovers' teeth, the inscriptions of love on the backs erased in hatred with household cutlery... a half century with sentimental objects must have bestowed on him an anatomy of human sentiment and sentimentality. And now he is appraising me, seeing what cogs are misaligned and what springs are worn.

He slowly parts his lips. 'For this....ten dollars?'

There are no price lists on the walls. He has looked deep inside me, analysed my machinations, seen the workings of my heart and worked out my price. Who can say what his criteria were? Was he considering what I could afford, or what he could take me for?

I love this man, now, I love his fleshy lids and I love writing about his fleshy lids, so I want to assume the former - but in either case he has pulled the price out from me, not from a policy, and I'm happy to pay it and also I've experienced a new and mystical form of capitalism called metaphysical haggling, soul bargaining with soul. I say nothing but smile as I hand him the money.

The signs in this dusty store are misanthropic, alienating, and they rip apart language and friendliness, leaving only human charisma to make bonds between customer and craftsman. Down the street a Starbucks offers its wares in cups with friendly slogans on them: Starbucks' words, like so much of the modern rhetoric of friendliness in cafes and on soup cartons, are empty and bland, human contact processed and pasteurised like American cheese. The friendliness of this aged man is European cheese: it is smelly, it might be rancid, it might give me strange dreams or upset my stomach, but it is flavoursome and home-made and the smell of it will be with me for days.

New York Public Library, 42nd Street, New York City, NY

I was struck by the pleasant equality which reigned among the stage company, and their broad and invulnerable good humor. They were what is called free and easy, and met one another to advantage, as men who had at length learned how to live. They appeared to know each other when they were strangers, they were so simple and downright.

They were well-met, in an unusual sense, that is, they met as well as they could meet, and did not seem to be troubled with any impediment. They were not afraid or ashamed of one another, but were contented to make just such a company as the ingredients allowed.

From Henry David Thoreau's Cape Cod, Thomas E. Crowell, 1966

New York Public Library, 42nd Street, New York City, NY

Haile Selassie was executed. His corpse was burned together with an executed greyhound, an executed pig, and an executed chicken. The intermingled ashes were scattered over the fields of an English county. How comforting this is.

- from Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice, Free Association, 1978

New York Public Library, 42nd Street, New York City, NY

I fly and fly and don't stop. Yes, they scream. Why doesn't he stop? I think, "Better keep on flying before they see that my legs are so brittle and stiff that they'll crumble like chalk when I land."

- from Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice, Free Association, 1978

New York Public Library, 42nd Street, New York City, NY

At the end of November 1974, a friend from Paris called and told me that Lotte Eisner was seriously ill and would probably die. I said that this must not be, not at this time, German cinema could not do without her now, we would not permit her death. I took a jacket, a compass, and a duffel bag with the necessities. My boots were so solid and new that I had confidence in them. I set off on the most direct route [from Munich] to Paris, in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot.


- from Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice, Free Association, 1978

68th Street Hunter College subway station, New York City, New York

I can't accurately describe the sound of three guitars hitting the door of a subway train, but guitars are cheap so you can bang one with a spoon three times and there you have it.

Three short Mexicans with short-necked guitars hustled themselves into the train and held the doors for a taller Mexican with a double bass. The tall man wore a moustache; all wore straw cowboy hats with brims folded up for manouevrability in the throng. They could turn their heads without pecking.

Before the doors had closed the four-piece had struck up: a folk song in Spanish, almost ludicrously quick, the beat annoyingly close to twice as fast as the rhythmic motions of the train. Two guitarists sang with dry, beautiful untrained voices as the bass player chewed his moustache and plucked.

The bass strings were painted with red, white and blue stripes which didn't line up string to string but probably once had, and the paint was coming off where the strings hit the black wooden neck of the bass.

I put down Francis Parkman, Jr's The Oregon Trail and looked at the third guitarist. He was taking off his hat to use it as a cup and then he slung the guitar behind him, dropped a few quarters into it to make a rattle and walked down the train, rattling his hat in time to the music. I pulled out a $10 and a single and gave him the single rolled up into a ball. The man sitting to my right gave him $5 which was all he pulled out of his pocket.

The train pulled in to 59th Street station just as the band were finishing a verse. Without slowing they grew louder over a couple of seconds and then finished up with a yell! 'Gracias, amigos', the oldest Mexican said as he finger-flourished his guitar, and the four were gone, out of the train and back in, into the next carriage.

I heard the three guitars bump into each other as they made way again for the bass. Why did the third guitarist bother to tune his guitar?