I was working in the guise of bartender at an academic party on the Upper East Side. The brownstone had seashell-like banisters and doorways echoing back to Greece, and, in the kitchen, utensils dangling from the ceiling. I had imbibed too much of the liquids I dispensed to others. A woman asked for wine and received Schnapps; her companion asked for a whiskey sour and received just sour.
          I smiled, they frowned. While the other bartender worked double time, I stared at the yellow impasto of a Van Gogh print. My mind wobbled.
          “Walk it off; get some fresh air,” ordered Harry, the catering captain.
          “I’m overworked, a little dizzy.”
          “You’re stupid drunk,” he shot back.
          “I predict more success for you than the captain of the Titanic.”
          “You’re fired, get out — out.”
          I stared at him.
          “I mean it. You create anarchy.”
          “Must I remind you of your episode,” I said, “and how I calmed you — ‘My acting degree has gotten me nowhere and I owe $96,438.’ I even had to take others to safety while you threw chairs.”
          “Can you work tomorrow?” he mordantly asked.
          “I insist on higher pay and a new title — captain of charisma.”
          “Is that for serving and drinking at the same time?”
          I saluted him and walked through the crowd. My tiny altercation, part of the larger tragic-comedy, lent me clarity. Entranced by the Mozart quartet I sauntered around, all smiles, but eavesdropping on them.
          Yes, I’ve helped many actors and I too have received the theatrical siren call early on. And yes, people who administrate the arts will fool you; I want to apprise actors of that fact. If actors wear winged sandals, I want them to land. If they have colossal egos, I want to turn them into quantum beings. It is, important, above all, to warn actors of the myth of fame. In mythological terms, it is a dragon. You seek it. It burns you. I was full of sad revelations. The professors, with their name dropping and theories, their narcissism and wit – well, they were better actors than I. I could have died.
          Instead my mind recorded the conversations. Those hyper-educated monkeys were blocked by specialization, the endgame of things that once shined but had become dusty and fragmented, so there was nowhere to go, just more critique, angst and Faustian covenants. High-end diversion, it was bad for the world.
          “Don’t you people ever talk about global warming?” I asked one guy in a dark suit and silk scarf, “or the loss of indigenous people?”
          Drink in hand, he walked away then turned to look at me. “Oh the bartender,” he exclaimed, as if pleased to see me.
          I left the party defeated and hurried down the avenue.
          Two subways returned me to Jersey City. Outside the station, some guy with a fluffed toupee showed me watches. One block away, I stopped in the all-night market. I was in some bad mindscape and couldn’t get out. I saw the house and ran up the stairs.
          I fell asleep around eleven. But my roommate Joshua blared music and got into a vacuuming frenzy, up and down, repeat. In the old days, the nut in the family would be ushered around by the grandmother, but now there was no stopping him, no supervision, just his own subjectivity. He’s a computer guy. Am I his keeper?
          “Why don’t you get a job as a vacuum salesman?”
          He hardly noticed me. I wasn’t dust. I slammed the door and walked past his shiny eccentric car in the driveway, which reminded me of the Batmobile.
          I walked two blocks to the Hermes Diner, which time had forgotten. It was dwarfed by tall buildings. Its walls showed framed magazines, from Franklin Roosevelt to Jackie Kennedy, and everyone seemed to be eating eggs and bacon. I sobered up with cups of tea. A few tears fell onto my journal.
          It was 1 am. Exhausted, I took two subways to visit Angelica. She had been watching a movie. We went into the kitchen and I put my shopping bag on the table.
          “I feel like I was just dropped on an alien planet,” I said, staring ahead.
          “Maybe you’re from the past or future. Is that why you never have money?”
          “Angelica, you’re quite witty tonight.”
          “I should be on stage. You’re box office poison.”
          I opened my mouth but nothing came out – a first. She kicked my chair.
          “Say, honey,” I replied in a 1940’s gangster voice, “that show went over big but alas no prospects. It took all my money to rent the theater.”
          “Some guy in the audience said Aeschylus destroyed the one man show.”
          “Point him out to me and I’ll use his nose for a garlic press.”
          “Greek tragedy is tragic,” she laughed. But I didn’t know what she meant.
          “I wish I could have seen ahead, but the light houses were always dark. Of course I might have jumped out the window –.”
          “The window is always open for business,” she pointed.
          She lit a red candle. The tin ceiling, Dali print, and statues of saints with bulging hearts disproved the dinginess of the rooms. I handed her the rose.
          “What’s wrong?” she asked.
          “I’m haunted by the dull repetition of everything, same stuff. I’m moving.”
          “You come here with a rose and Chinese food with gooey sauces and want crazy sex. Now you want to get out. Where?”
          I looked around as if I could fathom something from this claustrophobic oracle, and blurted out, “The Amazon.”
          “What, what?”
          “Not what — where.”
          “What’s there you can’t find here?”
          “The freedom to be killed by nature.”
          While she opened a bottle of sparkling water, I felt vindicated, inspired. The goddess spoke through me.
          “Listen, I became an actor because it’s about passion. But it’s faux-adventure. Doesn’t tame the wilderness in me – that place for which there’s no preparation. ‘Narrow is the journey, like a razor’s edge.’”
          “Bastard weasel. Narrow the hair strip on your head. Don’t come back, okay.”
          I tapped her on the head and apologized for being histrionic. She pulled me by the belt into her bedroom. We had sex on the Queen-sized bed, nearly killing her Vermont Teddy Bear. She murmured, “You little animal.” She’s gentle yet fierce; no experience is alien to her, and she does not act. She knows to melt into sensations, to jump in without a life saver. Otherwise we have little in common and I don’t think she agrees with me and she’s taller, so that I once woke up in the middle of the night and thought there was a man in my bed.
          When Angelica wants to be cruel, she says, “I will use you as my cane.”
          In fact, we’re faithful only during interludes when we’re unfaithful to others; moreover, the city is crowded it’s impossible to find anyone else.
          A year ago, Angelica left me for some guy and moved to Woodstock, but she returned after a few months, giving me a Tibetan necklace. Poor guy, he had to serve in Afghanistan of all places. Yet I can’t say she abandoned me, since at the time I was busy fighting Monsanto on an organic farm in New Mexico.
          I stayed with Angelica for two days. We watched a lot of movies, like “Roman Holiday” and “Motorcycle Diaries.” Then I returned to the world of time-pieces.
          Catering is like the mafia in that it’s difficult to escape. It seems like you’re in it for life and that if you leave even worse things will follow. Of course I could leave at any moment but, after masquerading in bartending and French service, I am inbred.
          Having fallen off the mind’s pirate plank, I sizzled with despair and resurfaced wounds. I sensed the police of one’s middle years and a life of old recordings. I wanted good things to circle, not to visit and vanish, overtaken by ghosts. The angel that had been on my shoulder since the age of six had retired to the empyrean – the angel that gave me a good family, that gave me summers off, that allowed me to create my own existence, as if outside patterns had no right to impinge on my freedom.
          On 57th Street I followed a gorgeous woman with black hair, jodhpurs and an orange scarf. She exuded the panache of those romantic Jazz Age aviators, with a cool but wholesome quality. She had emerged from one of those modeling factories and glided down the street, wandering into a boutique. I looked through the window into twenty-something cult fashion. She vanished into an inner chamber, like in Narnia.
          I wasn’t paying attention and someone bumped into me. His lips bulged angrily on one side. He had glistening black shoes and a garment bag. His hair cascaded in soft spikes, but hardness sat behind an accommodating smile. Like vampires, caterers can always be spotted if you know what to look for, and many are out only at night.
          Next, into a brick-oven pizzeria I followed a group of teenagers. I loved their raucous behavior, the way they carelessly ate, that none of them wanted to pay, and the way they imagined the future, as if something perfect and definite. It was the American dream without a context of responsibility or compassion, and it would be terrible when they awoke. I mocked myself for impinging on their dream.
          Sad humanity, we’re all just performing out of darkness – homo sapien thespian.
When I retuned to the house, rather than continue my despair, I searched the internet, booking a flight. The next day, I bought some maps and travel books, adding them to the book of fate and my childhood angel. From the airport, before leaving for Ecuador, I called Angelica: she did not yell.

          ***********************************************************************

          This is how I did it (deux ex machine): I flew to Quito, Ecuador; took busses to Banos and Tena and Coca; took a twelve-hour motor-canoe to Nuevo Rocufurte and slept on a dirt floor; took another motor-canoe to Pantoja; then the four-day cargo boat on a tributary of the Amazon to Iquitos, Peru, where I stayed for two days; then hired an indigenous guide to camp out in the jungle until we reached a village by the river. I had been searching for this since childhood. But before we get to Esperanza’s village…
          The amazing thing about modern life is that one day you’re on a wheel with ten million others but, once you insist on changing, the geodes of life crack open. Stunning to be in the new world, undestroyed by the human paradox, looking up at waterfalls discharging into orange and blue mineral pools packed with moss-fringed boulders, and indigenous people staring from a backdrop of sun-pierced forest.
          The bluish paint of the cargo ship had been worn smooth, and the captain had a stained shirt with gold epaulettes. Immense jungle festooned the deceptive face of the water. Mosquitoes dive bombed me. Mist drenched me. My despair softened.
          The first night on the ship I heard another escapee. “It’s terrifying,” she moaned. I knocked on the cabin and calmed her. I had her look up at the sky, to be overtaken by the fires of cosmic invention. “We’re little stars,” I said to her. Her mouth looked twisted. I wished I had had milk and cookies but the cargo ship served gruesome food, such as piranha steaks, or lard with beans and rice. All my Cliff bars were gone.
          At each stop all sorts of people, animals and market goods got on and off – a floating village. Many times, I taught people yoga on deck. There was little else to do but smell and be greasy and battle with mosquitoes. The toilets overflowed, the water was fetid, and a cow had a heart attack and was slaughtered on deck, cut into constituent parts, like a puzzle in reverse. Most times, it’s impossible to save anything, yet you have to live on without debilitating scars and hatred.
          In fact, I couldn’t save myself.
          Once I was exploring the riverbank near the ship and didn’t realize that alligators were stalking me. They cast a sharp net. I ran. I screamed. I ran right into the water and got swept away. The river churned and roared. I gulped water. Bubbles, blue sky, death-blur. People screamed, even underwater the voices reached me. Alligators plunged in, those great monsters left from creation – the end. Then, villagers in a canoe fished me out and brought me to the shore. As I coughed water, the captain cursed at me.
          Another time, I walked into a makeshift town, just a stone’s throw from the cargo ship, and two guys ran up and snatched my glasses off my face. I ran through the jungle cursing and tracked them down. They wanted $10. I got into a boxer’s stance and said I was from New York and “my nickname was El Nosebreaker.” I bargained them down, “No diez! No cinco! No tres!” Finally, for $2, I got back my vision, but I was crazy.
          After four days on that floating Hades, we stopped at a village, a circle of huts amidst the expanse of cloud and rain forest. I made friends with many people and lingered. Even though they were very hospitable, many of them had a story as to why they needed money from gringo. I had gotten there too late: money is an octopus.
          “Jim, mi amigo, my mama has cancer, I need $365 for an operation,” said Cornburt the shaman. His name was Carlos but everyone called him Cornburt. He forgot what he’d said, because an hour later: “My aunt died, I have to bury her, need money.”
          I nodded with a solemn mien. “Where I come from,” I said, “guests always do the burying while the family lights incense. So Cornburt, show me where you want her buried and get me a shovel and torch, please.”
          He peered at me with tightening almonds, half-nodding, as he pushed back his hair and adjusted his bandana. He seemed ready to burst with laughing, then looked weirdly at me and hurried off without looking back.
          The next night, Neron and Fatima Montez & Cornburt the Shaman invited me to a party in an open-wall structure with a jukebox and tin roof. The music, the peering jungle, the symphony of crickets – it was sublime. But I drank from a cup bestowed on me by Cornburt, whose smile was the top layer of an underworld journey.
          In a few minutes, my body detonated in loose-limbed dancing, as in those hippy films from the 1960s, the flower-power girls and beards. Worse still, Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” had arrived in the jungle: I peered down to see myself tap dancing with my arms making synchronized circles. The villagers laughed grimly at me, some even falling to the floor, but I laughed back. Then, in my underwear I ran around saying, “I want an indigenous woman, I want an indigenous woman.”
          The air carried light. My sensorium discharged into the brain of matter that sparkled everywhere, a great river of consciousness. It was layered, incandescent and pure glee. I saw behind everyone’s mask: they were jaguars. In one eureka flash, I told Cornburt that the universe teases us with unspeakable beauty and mystery, but that we’re basically stuck with convenient descriptions that really say nothing. He sort of understood and hit me on the back, “eso passora.”
          When everyone had vanished, one of the cousins remained in shadow. We laughed as we walked toward each other. Her name was Esperanza and she mouthed Spanish slow enough for me to understand and taught me a few words in Quetchua. She was petite with caramel skin and narrow hips. Her black silken hair flowed down a macaw-hued vest. “I’m indigenous,” she whispered, then reached for my hand.
          I looked into her black eyes, wanting to die at this summit of my life, when each cell groaned with perfection; for just one night with her I would have allowed them to kill and dismember me, as in the eternal days of old; and so I followed the dark line of her neck, to her breasts and belly, to “Pachamama.” It seemed too good for a melancholy mad actor. “Accept this, fool,” I said to myself. We touched each other, shuddering. Then we leaped into each other as if there was no outside.
          The next morning, I awoke to the delight of her faint respiration. I was cocooned by a hand-woven blanket whose lines told a story – about the jaguar, the river, the sun. My glasses somehow got stuck in candle wax on the floor. This was not the right journey for Mr. Glasses. She looked at me, smiling.
          “What did I drink?” I asked her.
          “Dr. Pepper?”
          “Nooo, it was more.”
          “Love,” Esperanza replied, her white teeth against a background of pink lips. “Oh Cornburt te dio algo?”
          We sat together on wicker chairs as I babbled. A dog came over, gulping the yellow and purple Inca potatoes that rolled onto the floor. Some well-dressed parrots screeched in the trees and tiny lizards clung to the beams.
          We stayed together for three days. I think she wanted to return to New York with me and have a baby, but I knew it was a bad idea. She really was a village girl and there are no villages where I come from, only village idiots.
          “I love it here. But soon I have to leave this place.”
          “Gringo Jim, are you a cowboy?”
          Oddly enough, we exchanged emails and agreed to ponder a future together. The whole family embraced me and wished me well. They knew I wasn’t right in the head and had to continue, but they also knew things they did not speak.
          I found work on an organic farm putting manure around plants and digging a well. Then Esperanza showed up, joining me in the fields, moving nimbly about. After that, we worked for an eco-tourism outfit and even assisted a biologist in the light-pierced arboreal world. One day I was in heaven observing Glasswing Butterflies, and fell. I would’ve died if not for sleeping bags on the ground. I was out cold. I woke up and saw Esperanza and Cornburt, both smiling. I told Esperanza that I loved her, and told Cornburt that he was a wicked shaman.
          But the next day I came down with some convulsive illness. For two days, I shook and hallucinated, at one point believing that giant suit-wearing frogs had finally won out in the human zone. I lost fifteen pounds, twenty pounds. I turned gaunt, hallow-eyed, and an old woman named Tita pronounced me dead and lifted her hands to the sky.
          I had to return home. I told Esperanza I would be back soon. She quizzed me with her eyes. She didn’t need to. I was desperate for her, but if I stayed, I would die.
          What was adventurous on the way down proved to be an odious geographical reverse. Of course, we must own the whole adventure. At some email café along the river, I finally reached Esperanza. I was forlorn. I also learned that my friend Joshua had sold the Jersey City house to some developers and moved to some community in Brooklyn. He too had had a calling. I was a homeless wanderer, but not for long.

          ***********************************************************************

          I called my parents and went to their home – what I call the Doll’s House. It’s always like returning to one’s childhood but in an adult body, and no one suspects that one sees through the folly, but so do they. The place also felt odd because my mother changed the furniture: all floral designs and giant couches, giant TV, fluffy prints of girls with kittens and such, and a placard: “Jesus is a Guest at Every Meal.”
          “If he’s here at every meal, why are you two always sniping at each other?” I asked the old folks. “He would’ve preferred dining with Lazarus.”
          I was still sick and convalescing. I think I was even more depressed about Esperanza and cursed the fault line in my life. Yet, for the first week, my parents were thrilled to have me home. Then their shadow emerged, the one that many years before, had “accidently vacuumed up” my Buddhist altar. Week two they refused, for fear of mockery, to let me in the room when they watched “American Idol” or “Dancing with the Stars.” And my father accused me of eating pretzels and laughing on the phone “like a schoolgirl.” The phone bill was enormous. Yet sitting with them in the living room or on the lounge chairs under the wise oaks seemed eternal.
          Then I received a list of chores that symbolized other troubles.
          “Wallace, you don’t need to put these leaves into plastic bags – mulch,” I said. “You’re an old goat who hasn’t been in the meadow in over a century.”
          “Hey hey, I camped out a few times in the ‘70s.”
          “Is that when you and mom came home with mud on your bell bottoms?”
          “My friend, he he ho ho, you’ve had a vacation and old pop’s paying the price,” he said, adjusting the beach hat on his moon-like head in the fermenting sun.
          “It wasn’t like a cruise with shuffle board and expanding girdles. While you were running around crazy with the edge trimmer, I was almost killed.”
          “Son, I thank God you’re okay. But almost doesn’t count.”
          We stared at the garden and the levitating rivers of heat. The tomato plants had a mix of green and red fruits. The dark lettuces and herbs – basil, fennel, rosemary and others – brought me images of the jungle where I had learned that water and art and life don’t need to have meaning, but merely to continue, the message of Walt Whitman’s beard.
          “You don’t walk anymore. You’ve been turned into diversion machines.”
          He glared. “Jim I just want to relax. You have a free life but you couldn’t afford to raise bees. Furthermore, art fart.”
          “Wallace, you should be excited in the presence of an artist-adventurer; Hemingway wore khakis too.”
          He shook his head and smiled, but he wasn’t smiling inside. Sure he was mad. He’d been buried by accountant-numbers long ago and along the way he raised a flock of agitated children, and all he wanted was to sit in peace during his retirement.
          “I’m starting an eco/adventure travel business. No more catering.”
          “Whatever,” he said, handing me the sports section of the paper. The World Cup was the reality at hand. But then we took a drive to the mountains. We passed the outdoor market across from the post office, which had an Amish family selling bread and shoe fly pies and such. In America, everyone aspires to be homespun or English.
          Going west toward wealthy towns, I fell silent as we passed a lonesome farm and a golf course-like graveyard, then up we drove on Gallows Hill Road, used for executions in the long ago. Now it was for mansions that enlarged as we ascended up the hill. Since our first days as chimps, we’ve preferred to live higher up for safety and view.
          “I don’t understand your life, but I’ll come to the next show. I like that character based on me – to pay $25 and get laughed at.”
          “Many suburban husbands pay a lot more.”
          “Fine. Just enjoy the ride and don’t be a homo.”
          “Everything’s named after what’s been destroyed.”
          “Jim, so did you really almost get killed?”
          We returned home and parked in the driveway. I was red and greasy from the sun and put on some lotion, my eyes fluttered from the dread that I had no money, no Esperanza. We carried beer and pretzels to the back yard.
          “Alligators hunted me. I ran into the river — their gator friends were waiting. I got swept away, but some villagers pulled me out.”
          “Like in the movies,” he clenched his heart. “You could’ve lost your hair too.”
          He knew I was no Tarzan and would have been gator food. He didn’t say much for the rest of the hour, and afterwards he went inside to help my mother with dinner.
          The funny thing about moving home is that your childhood returns in ways you’ve forgotten. It’s beyond words. The other thing is you realize it wasn’t so bad when you look back on it, but that still you would want some kind of refund.
          Last week I was going through old papers and found a progress report from 6th grade: “Each day, Jim arrives one hour late, usually with muddy shoes. He takes the long way through the woods. He rarely does all of his work and seems to be in a fog.”
          Based on that assessment, my mother took me to a local quack: I had to hit a punching bag named Butch and yell out my anger. One thing was that my father, who had almost been chosen by the Yankees, kept hitting me on the head with a baseball. He’d take a huge windup and I’d start running. But I never got very far. I was also an alter boy (The Latin still echoes.). The therapist said I was being “Crackers the Mean Clown, who wasn’t paying attention. Isn’t it better to be Sedgewick the Happy Clown?”
          I laugh at this hodgepodge of complaint, even the fog aspect. That’s the human condition; each person, as I learned in the jungle, is a drop amidst billions of others. The problem is when people think they are greater; the thinking thinks it, the body knows not.
          The next morning, I went downtown and took an acting class with Michael Rowe. His career was starting to rattle and he’d just sold a script to HBO, yet he made room in his schedule. Michael is slender with a monk’s skull and great charisma. It can’t be forced. It is innate zeal, or it never was, not unhinged emoting but believing.
          “Holy Cow, I can’t believe you’re back,” he flung his arms around me. “A few days ago you were in the jungle and now you’re here.”
          “It’s not all that different.”
“What was it like?”
          “Oh I went on an incredibly shitty boat ride and felt every human-inhuman quality. Boa constrictors, alligators, bats, flies, poison dart frogs, carnivorous plants, processions of ant armies — and monkey-cousins observing it all like old philosophers. The mist shrouds you in fate. The jungle’s dark and lonely and always the sun creeps in and the bigger trees and fanged life wins. Death and life are mixed…”
          “Man, that’s heavy.”
I showed him some photos, and we worked on fine-tuning my characters for the next show. Afterwards, I walked a few blocks and noticed that the trees were like vitamins added to white flour, and said hello to an old man in a wheel chair. I visited Rama at the nearby health food store. He’s the manager and a yoga instructor, and a former Black Panther. Now he has a comfortable life dispensing wisdom.
          I ducked into one of the aisles. An old couple asked him about cholesterol. Behind another aisle, I made meow sounds.
“I hear a cat, don’t you?” the woman asked, then pointed. “D’you work here?”
“We fired him long ago,” Rama said. He was stunned but played it cool. “Jim, why don’t you scram for ten minutes until my break? Do some shopping. Good boy.”
          I moved over to the book rack. I thumbed through books and spoke with the cashier, who was from Fez. For old time’s sake, I grabbed some dried fruit and rainforest chocolate from the bins. In ten minutes, I returned.
          “Terrible friend, I hardly got emails from you?” I said wryly.
          “I sent a few. Don’t forget I have a radio show now,” replied Rama. “Why didn’t you bring back a village woman? You wouldn’t be talking about emails.”
          “Soon, I’ll be returning to Esperanza. Then you’ll only have anti-ageing friends.”
          We walked to Washington Square where the statue of George Washington was being cleaned, and admired the mansions. At the fountain we fed pigeons. We watched the intrepid skateboarders leaping from the embankments and benches. We laughed about how I sampled all the snacks and told the customers “there’s sugar in the soup.”
          Over the next week, I visited JP the blues singer, my guitar-obsessed cousin and his wife who were expecting a baby, catering friends, and my former girlfriend Angelica. It was dinner time and I was actually excited about the city. I was okay until I got to midtown with the malicious outpour of taxis and advertisements, worker armies and gazing tourists. I felt an inward scream, a kind of hospital emergency room emptiness.
          I was overcome and jumped into a taxi. As twilight settled, I went into Central Park. I found a bench and watched a baseball game. It was enjoyable and took me back to childhood. Still I fell asleep. At some point, someone put a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on my chest, which made me laugh when I awoke the following morning. I looked for my glasses – stolen, gone for good. I had actually fallen asleep in the park. How pathetic is that. I could have been killed.

Richard Marranca