Worms

My drummer wants to know what the fuck’s the matter with me, catching my arm at the bar.

He’s sweating like he just jogged the New York City marathon.

Me, I’m trying not to look him in the eye as I wave for Tommy, the bartender. I’m scared if I look too hard at anyone I might see something crawl out of their nose or ear.

I held up two fingers to Tommy meaning I need a double shot this time.

My drummer says I played lead in the last set like I haven’t yet learned guitar.

Do my fingers hurt?

Or am I stoned again?

I gulp down my drink telling him I’m trying to get stoned.

But that won’t satisfy Curtis, who gives me a lecture on how he joined the band because of me, and if I’m washed up, he ain’t staying.

I tell him I’m scared, and when he asks of what, I’m scared to tell him, making him promise not to laugh if I do come out with him, and he promises.

This time I look at him square in the face, and I don’t see what I’ve seen on so many other faces lately, no crawling green-scaled earth (if that’s where they’re from) worms, no slowly altering flesh, just a set of concerned and angry eyes staring at back me.

It takes a lot to set Curtis off, but once he gets launched, it’s hard to calm.

I know I’ve pushed him too far, fumbling over riffs I know by heard, missing beats each time my heart beat skips at some new sight of warms. I am making the band sound bad, but only Curtis has the guts to tell me that to my face.

Yet even when I’m ready to tell him all, I hesitate, knowing he will think I’m making up a yarn and he’ll get even more peeved.

He might even walk out, leaving us high and dry for a drummer.

He won’t believe me. If anything, he’ll think I’m even crazier than he thought before which to anybody’s mind is pretty crazy.

I hardly believe what I’m seeing myself, struggling to make sense of it all, thinking maybe I am going insane, hoping I am because if what I’m seeing it true, then I might just kill myself to keep from getting caught up in it.

How do I tell Curtis that I started noticing worms around me weeks ago, not just at the club, but on the streets where we walk, in restaurants where we eat, at airports while we’re waiting for flights, even in the hotel when we’re trying to sleep between gigs.

Sure, it’s foolish. But at first, I tried to convince myself it was my eye sight. Some people see spots and known they need glasses, I see worms.

But I know better now, and knew better then, but I still cling to hopeful theories such as this being a flash back from my days when I did too much acid, although I don’t recall ever seeing worms when I really was high, and wonder how I can always have the same flashback.

These aren’t ordinary worms either. Not the kind I used to torture as a kid.

These worms are encrusted that look more like a lizard than anything I cut up or jabbed with a fishing hook.

Yet even this comparison doesn’t quiet fit.

No lizard I ever saw has the kind of eyes these little beasts have or such mouths filled with razor sharp teeth. I call these worms only because they don’t have legs, but these don’t do things worms do or lizards, weaving through people’s anatomies without the people even being aware of it.

What scares me most is the thought that these things might be weaving through me without my knowing it either.

They are always gnawing at something, and the sound of it drives me as bonkers as seeing them does, but sometimes I don’t see the worms, but I always hear them, day and night, regardless of where I am or where I go, or what I do to distract myself.

When I don’t see them, I’m more terrified than when I do, wondering what mischief they are up to. My imagination paints into every scene their perpetually gnawing mouths.

I tell Curtis I believe we’ve been invaded.

He blinks.

Despite his promise, he explodes with an uncontrollable laugh.

Invade by what, he asks? The Russians?

Something farther away than the Russians, I suspect, I tell him.

The laugh dies on Curtis’s face and a look of deep concern comes into his eyes, as he squints at me trying to determine if I’m pulling his leg or not.

When he decides I’m not kidding, he gets scared.

I tell him it’s the only thing that explains all the things I’m seeing, and he asks if I’m seeing them now, and after I glance around the club a moment, I say no. Not at the moment, nor are any of the people showing signs of transformation.

He asks what I mean by this last bit and I tell him people change after they’ve been invaded by the worms, their flesh gets a death-like color, and their eyes grow glassy and dead, too. Some even bleed from the ear after the worms dig there long enough.

Curtis sweats more than ever now as he looks around for someone – perhaps one of the other band members – who he can call on for help.

I’m not crazy, I tell him. He says, of course not, then waves frantically at Roger are bass player, who is busy trying to pick up a chick at the far end of the bar.

It’s the pressure, Curtis tells me, starting to pat my shoulder, and then pulling his hand back as if he believes what I have might be catchy, and I’m not sure it isn’t.

I haven’t the nerve to tell him the rest, about the bugs I used to see, and how these vanished over time when the worms appeared, just as the worms now are vanishing because the rats have come.

I see them fighting all the time, often over possession of one of us.

Just tonight, I saw a full war waged near the river and the bodies of rats floating down stream, bleeding.

I tell Curtis I think the worms will win in the end because they can get inside people’s bodies while the rats can’t.

Now Curtis is so frantic with fright he is waving Tommy over and asking if maybe he might be good enough to call an ambulance for me.

Tommy knowing us shakes his head saying he’s not going to let us out of our contract over some new stunt. Last month, one of us started a fire in the trash and called the fire department just so we didn’t have to play the last set. Now we’re trying to make out like one of us is going crazy and he would be crazy if he fell for it.

Curtis pleads. But Tommy is firm in his resolve.

But won’t do any good anyway. Right in the middle of this talk I see a worm’s head pop out from inside one of Tommy’s ears and know that he won’t be much good to us soon.

So I hold up two fingers and Tommy refills my glass.

The only thing I can do is drink – that makes the worms vanish at least for a while.

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Three-Day Pass

August, 1969

Nobody comes to places like this on purpose.

Even the tourists who rent here in season do so only when the more exciting seaside towns are filled up, then rush in and our for sleep and a change of clothing while using beaches, restaurants and amusements other places have to offer – towns that don’t roll up their sidewalks at dusk the way this one does.

But I can hear the ocean even as I step off the bus, a distant whisper of moving waves somehow connected to something inside of me – as if my internal organs respond to the same change of tides.

The quiet of this place has haunted me since my first accidental stop here years ago.

I still can’t believe this place exists or that it has remained unchanged since my boyhood.

I feel the ach the minute my black boots touch the sandy side and my duffle bag drops beside me – the driver closing the cargo hatch with some mumbled words about “good luck” as he rushes back to his seat to take off. The hiss of the door sounds nearly simultaneously to the grind of gears.

Even he doesn’t want to get stuck here.

I brush the sand off the single stripe that decorates the shoulder of my uniform as if fearful that the tiny grains might hide my life’s greatest accomplishment so far.

Although I come here deliberately, I have no intention of staying, using this stop as a short cut to the more popular retreat a few miles down the beach.

The last bus out of Philly filled so fast it didn’t have room for me, leaving me at the platform to watch the other soldiers waving at me in the windows as they went off to find cheap sea side thrills, while I got left behind.

Remembering this place, I changed my ticket for the next bus here, pondering the meaning of why it had so many vacant seats.

I figure to get a local bus out of here and reach the seaside about the same time the others do. But when I get into the bus depot, I find the station master pulling down the shingle to his window, telling me he’s closed for the night.

I tell him I have to catch the next bus.

No problem, he says, the next bus leaves at noon tomorrow, and I’m crushed.

Taking pity on me the bus clerk tells me the motel offers cheap off-season rates.

I have a three-day pass in my pocket and two bottles of whisky in my bag. I have no intention of wasting either in a town like this – alone.

I hate the idea of losing the first night of my previous pass sleeping away in this sleepy town.

But what choice do I have?

I half carry, half drag my duffle bag along the road, feeling as if it contains a dead body, perhaps my own.

Animals scurry in the underbrush along the road, wood chucks or rabbits, I can not tell with dusk.

Off-season, this place has all the charm of a ghost town.

Even now, the place looks haunted, the buildings pealing paint from a long summer of sun and salt with a few heroic people propped up on ladders scraping the old paint off.

Even the motel looks like a casualty, with one car parked in its gravel lot, and green growing at the bottom of its mostly empty pool.

I smell cooking before I even reach the motel office, and find a woman in an apron scurrying out from some hidden kitchen when I call out at the counter.

She seems surprised to see me and surprised at my uniform, having apparently seen only local people lately.

I ask if she had a room I can rent despite the fact that the “vacant” sign blinks out the window over my shoulder.

She hands me the key to a room and then stops me as I go to leave.

“You hungry?” she asks.

I shake my head, thinking of the bottles I brought, and how they will keep me company tonight, the first lonely night of the three-day pass the Army always issues before they send a man off to war.

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This faded world in which we live

November 20, 1980

The bar is bathed in red lights by which I can just see my drink in the dark, lights that circle around the ceiling of the room advertising this place as some kind of whore house – which it is.

For enough money or cocaine, any of the men around the bar might be able to buy a little joy for a night with any of the women dancing on the stage.

Even if we can’t, we want to think we can. Everything is illusion and lust. And the darkness and the red lights hide as much as they reveal.

I have seen this place in daylight from the outside, the concrete exterior the flood lights this time of night do not fully expose.

Daylight shows all the flaws, the shoddiness of reality that is invisible inside and outside right now.

A slightly brighter and whiter light highlights the dancer’s moves, she as limber as the trees that fill the space behind the bar – a large park of sorts that serves for parking during Sunday mass in the Polish church just beyond the rectory which sits just across the alley from the bar.

Sinners and saints occupying the same space although at different times of day or night, drawing some of the same faces that try not to show themselves when they come in here.

We all watch the dance – which is not really dance at all, merely movements the dancer knows each of us will follow regardless of how clumsy or out of time with the music.

The dancer watches us watch her.

I wonder where the dancer ends up in the daylight when I walk down the alley to the park where young kids gather before, after and sometimes during school hours.

This is an old-fashioned neighborhood with old fashioned people living in it, and old-fashioned stores such as the butcher, the barber, and the baker, where by day I go to get my meat, haircut or bread.

 Even the park isn’t really completely a park, crossed over by old rail road spurs that once fed the factories along Eighth Street and ran cross the river via a stickle bridge to factories on the Garfield side.

These tracks haven’t seen trains since before I was born, not counting the rusted freight train along the side of the park on which the children climb, green and brown paint long flaked into dust, bare metal exposed under the rust where the kids hit the cars with rocks.

Stands of trees fill the park near where the rail line crosses the river, and I sometimes wander there by day, crossing the rail bridge thinking the wooden planks might give under my feet – I never go across it at night, fearful of mis-step and the muggers that sometimes prey on the homeless that sleep near there.

Drunks that wander into those woods from this bar or the others across the street sometimes don’t come out on the other side.

When I leave here, I go the other way, across the misnamed Wall Street to Eighth Street, passed the house Loretta Swit was raised in and her parents still occupied until her father died, to my apartment building on the other side of that.
I’m often less drunk on the drinks I buy than on the feelings I’ve stirred up inside myself by being here, trying to cure loneliness with a heavy dose of teasing – since I can’t afford the cocaine or the night’s frivolities with any of the dancers.

Sometimes, everything loses color outside, bar and street, so I feel like I am walking through one of those old movies that has turned too dark or too tan from being projected too many times.

Sometimes, I just stay here until my money runs out from too many drinks, tips to the dancers and the barmaid, feeling exploited, and lost, feeling as if I can find no salvation in this place I live by day or night, in bar or church, hearing the echo of children’s laughter against the rusted sides of the trains long after the children have gone, and the bartender has announced last call. Sometimes, I don’t go home at all, but walk over to the Wall Street bridge and stare down into the churning dark waters of a river I can barely see, the stench of it even in winter telling me it still flows invisible and powerful, and deadly.

Tonight, I have just enough money to get myself drunk, and make myself feel just a little less lonely – something that lasts right up until I sober up, then I’m even more sad.

Tonight, I won’t go home. I’ll stare over the top of Rose’s bar on the Garfield side until I see the sunrise, bringing a bit of color back to this faded world in which we live.

Symphony

November 21, 1980

A chill wind blows outside my cold water flat this Friday in late November, racing through the alley and into the court yard, creating a haunting howl three weeks too late for Halloween. It stirs up junk from the shed carrying it along the walls, pealing away even more paint than neglect has, the rattle sounding like a kid with a stick striking the individual spears of a fence; the wind misses none of them.

The trash truck makes it rounds with its own symphony of crashes and bangs, the massive compacter crunching the contents of each trash can deposited in its massive mouth – sometimes devouring the rusted trash cans, too.

This is the kind of day when even the heartiest of the neighborhood don’t wander too far out, taking shelter against an invasion no one can resist, brutal in its occupation, threatening to remain for months and promising to inflict even more damage on this dismal landscape in which we live.

For me, lying here, under three blankets (and still feeling cold), sounds fill the world, a train whistling from the freight line three blocks away, dim, but clear, as regular as the tick of a clock, a visitor we endure everyday in the early morning hours before most of us rise from sleep.

It is too early in the season for the river to freeze, the way it does by mid-winter when its surface turns into overlapping slabs of ice.

When people wake and wander out they grumble and vow to get home early or soon or as fast as possible, going off to work or store or school or some other destination I cannot make out from their shouts back and forth.

Yet after a while, after the frustrated starts of cars, grinding of gears, doors opening and slammed shut, and finally tires spinning away, silence returns, not the early morning silence, but a murmur of a city staggering into day.

This ritual varies with the temperature, louder in warmer weather when windows are ajar, muffled now huddled against the cold, made remote as the cars here fade into some distance I only imagine, and repeated in reverse later with their eventual return.

This an aging neighbor, full of old Poles, and new Puerto Ricans, and a scattering of blacks that drift down from Market Street – that imaginary border between the Dundee side of this city and downtown.

We keep expecting it to change, the way other places change, new, richer, arrogant people displacing the poor the way they have in places like Hoboken and Manhattan; new sounds to interrupt the morning ritual I can hear awake or sleep. None come. Not even with the trains.

The old slowly die off, replaced by younger versions of their selves, new immigrants speaking in tongues from Communist ravished Poland, and young Latinos bringing in new strains of Spanish when I still do not understand the old.

I just listen to the sounds, putting each into its place each time a new one comes, part of this symphony I wake to each morning and drift off with each night, wondering the whole time, where my sounds fit in.

It never rains in Southern California

June 1970

The heat bakes Hollywood like an overcooked tomoli.

I ache for rain.

People last fall warned me when I got here not to take for granted the rain that falls in winter, mudslide turn to concrete by the time summer comes.

This is not a time of year people like me from the rain-rich east love in this part of the planet, regardless of all the songs we hear on the radio about going west to wear flowers in our hair.

These days we live in a building called “The Black Burn Hotel,” which is really an apartment building, owned I’m told by Lorretta Young – though we see no more of her than we do the rain.

When we walk from here a block north of Hollywood Boulevard across Vine to Argyle to get the Free Press to sell from Bob, we look up at a mustard-colored sky for any sign that rain might come. It might as well be the Mohave, and we stumbling across the salt flats of marble stars, dying of thirst.

Moses might have led us over a less arid desert and might explain why I feel so giddy when we get to Argyle and why I bump into a car filled with mean-looking men, mean faces glaring at us through the dusty windshield, yelling as us to hurry or their might run us down, and me, being the kind of me I always was in high school, give them the finger once we reach the curb, an act of defiance no Pharaoh would tolerate, and neither will these, Louise whispering in my ear how I should not have done that, but as with all things I do, it’s too late to take it back.

All four jalopy doors fling open, out of which the mean-looking men emerge, heavy with chains and switch blades I could not see through the windshield for the glare of the sun, each wearing cut off denim jackets with some kind of biker logo across the backs, the hairiest and meanest of these growling at me and asking me what it was I meant by what I did when we both know exactly what I meant, and he clearly intending to make me regret it. One of the others asks me if I think I’m tough, just the way the school bully did back in high school just before trying to make me prove it, even though like then, I think no such thing.

Louise whispers that maybe we should run; I won’t run, not because I don’t want to; it will just make it worse, giving these men more the reason to think they can prove me wrong. I tell Louise to keep on walking, and then turn my back on the men, moving away from them, not fast, just steady enough to keep them from seeing my hands shaking.

They like this even less; the way teachers hated me when I refused to answer a question or simply stayed silent when they accused me of breaking into someone’s locker or setting something on fire in the wood shop.

The chains rattle a moment before the pain erupts across my back, the men howling at us the way wolves might at the first scent of blood, some trying to kick me; I skip away, they miss, and get even angrier and swing some more chains at me, this time at my head.

I push Louise ahead of me and tell her to run, and when she does, I turn not to follow, I turn to face the horde of men who are swinging chains at my face or back or whatever part of me they think they can reach, each needing to get a piece of me with not quite enough of me to go around, while I swing back at them, just trying to get in a few blows before I go down.

I don’t know where the police come from; they pop out of nowhere like a sudden downpour of rain, blue uniforms flowing over the gang of men, throwing them against a wall, chains clinking as they fall at their feet.

One cop asks me if I want to press charges. I’m in a daze; I shake my head.

I have warrants for my arrest back east and dare not give a name they can trace back there. The cops look disappointed, perhaps because the violence ended too soon, perhaps because they wanted someone to take a wrong step so they could continue it.

“Then get the hell out of here,” one of the cops tells me. “We’ll hold them until you get away.”

I don’t look back. I grab Louise’s arm and lead her towards some promised land that is not the place we are right now, crossing some great divide the way Moses did the red sea, hoping desperately for rain that doesn’t come.

Strip club

November 19, 1980

The room swirls with cigarette smoke that makes me choke and can make out the shape of the topless stripper through its thick haze, as if the smoke covers up the parts of her that the law here says should not be exposed, flaunted in this bar here in Passaic because many of the patrons are off duty cops.

I haven’t been here in a while, not since the barmaid promised me a good time if I waited for her after closing, hinting that she might do something special for me if I could give her something more than the usual tip.

Men fill every inch of the oval bar, faces half lit by red and amber light from behind the rows of bottles and the flood lights focused on the stage where the dancer goes through routine gyrations, each set of male eyes fixed on each curve of hip or breast, desperate not to miss anything important, documented and filed for later personal consumption at home or in their cars on the way home.

And I’m no different, staring just as hard, making my pick of my favorite woman, tonight, a blonde, who comes on early, giving me the same look the barmaid did the last time I was here, with a wink and a nod, expecting something I’m not sure I can afford, but I want to.

I’m not even sure if it is the cold or something else that makes me shiver, though in the back of my head I think about options, about what I might get if I accept.

You don’t find love in places like this; so, it’s pointless to look for it. And it’s not why I come here anyway.

I had a chance yesterday to score with a woman at school or at least snuggle in some remote corner of campus the way I see other, younger classmates do on warmer nights, wrapped in each other’s embrace as if scared to let go, we all people floating after some dismal shipwreck seeking anything and anyone that will keep us from drowning.

The young woman in film class whose name I don’t even know kept smiling at me in that special way, and for two hours I drifted in a different more personal haze, paying almost no attention to the professor or the lesson only her and how her hand moved up and down her thigh as she smiled at me.

Then, I stumbled out of class to meet up with my on-again-off-again girlfriend and feeling guilty because I want or need something she can’t or won’t give me, needing a nod and a wink sometimes she doesn’t know how to give, even though every waitress I see in every diner and every dancer I meet in places like this, does.

I am constantly resisting situations I shouldn’t resist, shrugging them off, giving myself bonus points I don’t deserve for virtue I really don’t have.

I get all choked up at the smell of perfume or the lingering touch, that is rarely my on-and-off girlfriend’s.

We sold an old school ring I found in the street – I’m always desperate for money which is why I can rarely afford to come here.

She implied we might get back together. She doesn’t mean it.

We’re both too caught up in the need for personal freedom to ever commit to each other, her future taking her to some other remote place (geographically and metaphorically) I can’t go.

I left her house without her and did not want to face my lying in my own bed alone.

So, I come here, in search of something I can’t find there and should have gotten at school when I could, knowing I will leave here bruised even more than when I came in, thinking I’m doomed to spend my life sleeping with strangers, confused about what is right or wrong, good or bad, smart or stupid to do.

I stare up through the haze, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind the cash register, looking exactly the way the other men look, waiting for something I know can’t come or shouldn’t if it does, waiting for the moment when the bartender – who isn’t talking to me anymore – shouts for last call, and we all plunge out into the cold and dark, alone.

Brick and glass

1969

I feel small coming back here.

This brick and glass dinosaur looming over me, a monstrous shadow that I can’t stop thinking about, couldn’t stop pondering over, even as a drill sergeant screamed in my face for months for me to shape up.

Not quite a nightmare, but still a persistent nagging dream I can’t wake up from, I still feel guilty quitting the job the way I did, pretending I joined the army because I wanted to fight for my country, and I did, yet wanted to escape this the way I did high school, school, job, army, making me feel as if I can’t finish anything I start – though what I really quit here wasn’t a job as much as a heart break, a true romance I never expected, and got scared off when it leaped out on me and ripped out my heart.

I look at each of the cars in the parking lot and wonder which of them is hers, forgetting in the haze of this hot fall sun that she doesn’t drive, forgetting all those times I walked with her to the bus stop for her to take the bus back to Wayne while I waited for mine to carry me away to Passaic.

I keep thinking maybe she’s changed, the way my whole world does each time I step out of my life for a moment or a week or a year, the way my grandfather’s old house changed color that time I went away for summer camp, or how he replaced the squeaky screen door during my boys scout trip.

Everything changes when you least expect it, even whole towns like mine, where they buzz-sawed a whole block of trees on East First Street and filled in lots where we used to run wild after school, filling in each space with concrete, brick, glass and asphalt the way a dentist fills a gap with a phony tooth.

Brick, glass and concrete, making the world boil under my feet and the air too hot for me to breathe.

And this isn’t even summer anymore.

I keep thinking there should be snow on the ground or at least puddles from rain, not this heat creeping up under my clothing, stirring up sweat the way it did in boot camp.

But then, I remember this place is always hot, not outside the way it is now, but inside, where the presses bang out sheets of printed material paper for me to sort, paper making my fingers bleed from the thousand little cuts they cause, and my back ache from bending and lifting and carrying the bundles down from this place to put down in another.

The smell of the inside ooze out every pour of this building, seeping out the cracks between the bricks, a scene of ink and oil I could not wash out of me the whole time I spent in the army, even though the sergeant squeeze sweat out of me as if I was a pig.

I count the cars like I always did during breaks here, always coming up with the same number as I do now.

I’ve always been a crazy kid, counting things when I wanted to stop thinking, playing little games with myself, spotting out of state license plates or cars still with mud flaps a decade after mud flaps went out of date. And at night, I count my breathing, waiting for the time when I run out of breaths to take, but never did.

Maybe I’m mad like my mother is, only in a different way, she hearing voices, while I count my breaths. And like her, I just can’t finish anything, and watch the pieces of everything I touch shatter and scatter around me, while I count them all to make sure they still add up.

My uncles hate the fact I can’t finish anything and are peeved about the fact I didn’t even finish the Army, and came home, not the way Uncle Ed did, a hero, but wounded by some petty disease of the kidney and not even a bullet.

I hate coming to places that make me feel small. I am an insignificant insect buzzing in an out of control wind, not sure just where I am going to land next and whether I will hit so hard I won’t have to worry about counting breaths, since I won’t have any.

I quit the job, too, because it made me feel that way, slaving away, sweating out all the salt in my blood for a petty pay check at the end of every two weeks.

I want to be something more than that; I just can’t say what, and so I quit things, and search for something else to do or count, using some excuse as lame as love as to why I do it. I keep thinking my history teacher in high school might be right and that I might not amount to anything no matter how many things I start and stop. I won’t matter to anyone, not even myself.

It’s crazy to think like this at 19 years old, but I do.

I keep thinking about giving up on Louise, too, and how we nearly made love standing together on the bus stop waiting for different buses to take us in different directions, and the bus I took to Fort Dix taking me so far away from her, I could only make love to her in dreams.

I still have the letters she wrote me while I was away. I never wrote back. Even though the letters kept coming, maybe out of habit because she could not stop writing any more than I could stop counting, one perfumed letter after another that made the other men in my company howl, calling each letter a love poem, though none had poems, only aching suggestions of love.

I can almost hear church bells ringing between each word.

Two men in blue overalls come out of the building holding a football, scruffy men from the warehouse part of the building who haven’t yet manage to wash the dust out of their hair, carrying a football they will toss until the whistle calls them back to work, stopping just outside the door when they catch sight of me in my uniform.

I should not be wearing it, I hadn’t meant to, putting in on last minute, maybe to prove to my bosses that I actually went where I said I was going, perhaps more to show off for Louise, me needing to impress her with the idea that I am somebody after, or convince myself I am.

“She ain’t here,” one of the men shouts, recognizing me even in my disguise.

“Where did she go?”

“Don’t know. She just quit not long after you did.”

I nod, turn away, and march back up the hill to the bus stop, trying to ignore the brick and glass glittering under the harsh sunlight, trying not to count all the cars that pass me by.