The mother, nearly a foot taller than her agreeable husband, looks so much like Robert in high heels, she will spook me. I’ll shake both their offered hands. I’ll try to lug their largest powder-blue American Tourister. Their features grow less irritated, my Southern manners somewhat softening their rage.

“We’re under lots of pressure,” she tries explaining. “You cannot imagine.”

“Aha. I can only guess. —I’m afraid we still have quite a hike straight-up,” I smile so; they must never understand my full exhaustion. They are still innocent. And I? Am not.

His mother lightens: “Our Robbie certainly chose a colorful neighborhood.” Just eleven minutes late for this, now fighting with the keys while dragging heavenward a Stonehenge of luggage, I call back down the steps, “Mmmm, yes, colorful. You have no idea.” Then I’ll lead them. Lead them up toward the huge bed waiting, made, hospitable.

But for now, here on the train, to bear these select items even higher—scepters, majorette batons, my isthmuses worth crossing. Titanic and magnificent and clumsy, manly weapons. No one will come near me … and why? Because they guess that these I hold are souls. These—raw, toylike—are retarded but honest, the wasted overly-male souls I am still somehow in charge of. —These, my favorite thirty.

Lord-Express have mercy on our stop-making, stuttering local. Place me expressly beyond these stares, past such terrible embarrassment. I say I do not feel it. I feel it. Credit me at least for trying to help my others. Let me trust your blueprint even though you’re really succch a bad designer. Let me know how best to clean up after people other people do not want … Let Ninety-sixth Street happen soooooon! Say my friends are at least as safe as they are dead. And since You’ve done all this to them, could You please just let them go now? Just leave my boys the fuck alone.

Someday let me rest. Then tell me, You, O Lord and architect of suffering. Tell me, You:

Is it going to have to get … Betterer, or Worserer?

—Take me aside, and set me down on something soft—and, promise me just once, that …

—All will be well, all will be well, and all will be wonderfully well.

Amen.

Won’t it?

Catastrophe and Child’s Play

Our life is based upon the mutual interpenetration of play and earnest. So long as this happens, we live in peace. In a catastrophe, the mixture is lacking. Just as it is lacking in the games of children.

Catastrophe and child’s play are the two poles of all social life.

—ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY

I.

don’t consider myself psychic, just lucky—with friends.