3 a.m. Passaic

January 18, 1980

I am walking the streets of Passaic with the cool air swirling around my face. I can taste the impending day on the tip of my tongue, tainted with the fiery touch of frost, the chill of it kissing my cheeks with hints of snow.

In the dark, under the blue glow of ghetto street lights, these bits of frost look a little like bugs, swirling around me and the immobile objects that proliferate in the night, the wind stirring up all that can move, newsprint rising with paper wings to wrap around my legs as I walk, the rattle of trash can lids an unsteady imitation of the ghetto kids who drum by the tracks during the day, this music at night more haunting when all else is silent.

My feet stumble over the pebbled surface of a sidewalk beaten down by rock salt and the heavy traffic from the church to the factories along 8th Street, with me, pausing near the porch where Loretta Swit used to live and where I last saw her father puddling around in the flower beds, all frozen in time, a brief memory I think of each time I pass it, how close to fame we all come, and how pointless it becomes when we do.

How we have all become trapped in our own lives, my coming here attracted by artist friends who came for the cheap rent, flying off to leave me behind when the landlords changed, and I roam these overnight streets sometimes searching for what was lost, a little drunk, weary but not enough for sleep, thinking of the girl was my girlfriend, who might still be, although as much a mystery to me as the universe it.

I step off the curb into mush, the chill not yet chill enough to turn the wet to ice, my breath stretching out ahead in steam caught too in the street lights as if spirits are rising out of me to haunt this place at this ungodly hour.

I run away from something in a staggering walk, but I don’t know what it is I run from, the flick of the snow on my check like cold tears, my life tied to this place in a tender bondage, something gnawing at me from the inside, maybe jealousy, that Othello curse but not over my girlfriend, but over something less concrete, that sense of ever elusive success I suspect I will not achieve, the same specter Miss Swit likely chased, and certainly did my friends, out here in the chill air, at this hour, in a season when we should all be snug in our rugs aching for spring.

3 a.m.

Passaic.

In the snow.