I was terribly hung over, freezing, still in the clothes I’d worn the night before, which were now sopping wet. A ragged, thin jacket. Cold wind coming in through several cracked windows. The bus wound its way off Manhattan, sped through Jersey. After a half hour the rain stopped and my clothes dried and I finally quit shivering. A movie showed on dropdown screens but the girl beside me busied herself with a paperback I wasn’t familiar with. I watched from the corner of my eye. She didn’t seem to notice so I kept leering, hoping for an introduction to conversation, at the very least another peek at her panties. I’m horrible with women, always have been aside from a quixotic confidence that sometimes finds me both fleeting and unpredictable. I was lucky enough to have been born with blue eyes and what others have called good looks. Or, as a girl I briefly dated once said: “You’re a very handsome guy. Maybe someday you’ll actually realize it.”

The tires of the bus sliced through puddles of standing water that had yet to drain. Cold and gray pressed against the windows, the landscape paling away into a sunless murk, misty and somewhat eerie looking. I was exhausted. I’d gone out the night before after convincing myself I was celebrating new beginnings, but really I was trying to drink away the emptiness my decision to leave had left me with. It was the right decision, but not a single thing about it felt right; I didn’t really want to leave, but the sad truth was that I’d grown desperate for some semblance of direction. I’m a firm believer that things rarely change with a simple change of scenery, but something had to give and it sure as hell wasn’t giving in New York.

I’d gone out in the East Village. I’m fond of the dingier bars there, the kind where your feet stick to the floor and a jukebox plays songs for a quarter and quarters line the only pool table, the whole interior redolent of flat beer and cigarette smoke and regardless of where you stand the urine-soaked sanitary cube still finds you from the bathroom—which is to say, the kind of bar in which I was raised.