The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

Now that I think back on it I realize that I wasn’t in my right mind. I realize now that if I stopped the drug I could start my way home to Moxy. Whether or not she would have had me back at that time, this was during our longest separation of almost two years, was the question.

I finally took that step, but the journey towards it was such a one that to speak of it is to put yourself into a predicament, because when you go where I went you put yourself outside of the normal realm. Time stops. Months turn into years. It’s like being in a perpetual dream, but then, after awhile, your dream starts losing power, you don’t have much to think about.

Having forsaken the idea of the future your desires wither, the outer edges of your universe start to crumble and burn. You whittle yourself down to the bare being and at your core you realize that the netherworlds that you belong to are claiming you, that you are mortal becomes a deep seated feeling until you sometimes dream that you are withering, that your face could peel off, that you are already skeleton, that you are already dead.

It is that sense of having reached the point of no return that keeps you within your isolated, protected world. At some point you stop blaming, too. I stopped blaming my mother and even my father for dying. I took it all into myself and realized that I was just a weak specimen of human being. I had lost all will power. Any good thing I had had in my life I had forsaken, like Moxy. When I sat there and thought about these things it was like the thoughts were doing battle with each other, but in some far distant galaxy. The night in which they belonged was peaceful, though, so I tried to look away, but I could always hear them. I could always hear the gods of war clashing high above me, but they became tinny and I would look away again.

I know now that these were the sounds of Moxy calling me. But she demanded so much. She wanted me clean. I wasn’t done at that time, not by a long shot. I felt I was on a journey of discovery. It’s like I was a child playing dead, like I was hunkering down close to the grave so that I could hear its meaning, soak it up. Moxy was all life. We’d taken to two different roads. I was the seeker getting more and more lost. Moxy lived in the real world. I had begun to melt around her, felt inadequate, and yet had determined that my purpose was not wrong, but only different and of the utmost importance. I was simply seeking, trying most of all, I realize now, to find the meaning behind my father’s death. That really fucked me up. I responded to it the way that Moxy responds to the world, but she doesn’t respond out of a sense of tragedy, but a sense of adventure of never having bowed down to an enemy, to always having faced her fears. I thought I was doing that by saying fuck you to the world. And that’s what I did. I said fuck you to the world and I was a bad ass mother fucker for a long time, but when I got the heroin going into my veins full time there with the lady, I started to wither, the defenses that I had made me who I was started failing, they were like muscles that I had spent years building up and then, one by one, they started withering away.

I remember sometimes shooting up and then when I was peaceful enough to go outside, stepping into the sunshine of Harlem and actually having the sunlight frighten me. I couldn’t look anybody in the eye. I felt like I was surrounded on all sides. I was a scared doe, wrapped inside of my leather jackets and behind my shades. I would walk and feel like I wished I could lift up off of the ground and float above everybody else. The soles of my feet contained questions about the meaning of each step. I was jittery and hollow, but I kept up the facade of worldliness so never got hurt. Anybody could have squashed me like a tick.

So that’s where I lived, in incense filled and darkened rooms, the Lady in her negligee beside me, our dancing in wild delirium together to sitars and synths, falling to the floor in each others arms, having tantric sex, just holding each other and staring into each other’s eyes for hours and all the while Moxy in New Jersey, me hoping through all of it that somehow I was just in the middle of a bad dream, that this ecstasy that I thought I was finding with the Lady was just a side excursion and that Moxy’s memory would fail and she would forgive me when I finally got back to her, which, oddly, I never doubted I would even though all signs pointed to the very real possibility that I had fucked things up with my wife for good. No, this wasn’t a possibility. This was a fact. I’ll never understand how facts can become lies. Moxy should have been gone forever. And Teardrop should have been dead. Once again, angels.