Innocents on the Lamb

    The bus stank of heated plastic seat covers and the accumulation of passengers that had come up from Washington, DC and points farther south. The seat was uncomfortable and stuck in that halfway position between sitting up and lying down. I had a great view of the bald head of the man in the seat in front of me. I lit a cigarette and sucked the menthol smoke deep into my lungs. I was exhausted but could not sleep and sat with my head against the cool glass watching the side of the highway as we passed. I ached for a pillow like the ones Greyhound used to issue when my mother and I took the bus to Ohio when I was very small. A heat vent blew hot air onto my face regardless of which way I turned. Outside, mountains rose and fell as the miles passed, ripples in the landscape like worn down teeth. We passed through long dark tunnels that plunged through mountains the road could not avoid. Signs appeared for Harrisburg along with more local destinations such as La...

  Through the tinted glass of the bus window, Philadelphia looked cold and uninviting, less the city of Brotherly Love than a collection of gray stone buildings stuck on the edge of the Delaware River,  suffering the cross winds that smelled of oil slick and rotting oysters – the bus crossing into his dirty and dismal streets, rich with history and poverty. It was easy to imagine the white slave markets that had once decorated its shore where Germans and other white Eastern Europeans were put on sale, chains rattling as their masters showed them off like prized stations to feed the ever needy northern slave trade, ghastly now in a different more depressing way, haunted by the ghosts of Ben Franklin and other of the nation’s founding fathers, who like me could not believe what this city had become. Maybe it was just the part of town the bus rode through, giving me a dark glimpse that did represent everything or my mood, fearing the worst of what would happen when the bu...

    The interior of the bus stank of old cigarettes and body odor, mingling with the stench of exhaust. An old man lay across one of the seats in the rear near the door to the toilet, snoring, as if he had lain there through several trips. I settled a few seats up from him, avoiding the hump where the rear wheels took away leg room, relieved that the high back of the seats in front of me kept anyone – including the driver – from seeing me. The wide tinted windows looked out on a garage-like world where other buses sat in their slots waiting to load, bearing destinations north and south. A smudge marred the glass where someone’s greasy head had rested. Then the bus pulled out into the open air, down twisting ramps that led to the Lincoln Tunnel, going back the way I had just come, sending a small shiver of panic into me as if the bus was bringing me home again. But the illusion soon faded as the bus followed the signs for the New Jersey Turnpike, and in my head, I heard...

  The cab let me off at the 9th Avenue entrance to the Port Authority building, not quite as familiar to me as the main entrance on the other side. I stumbled out onto the sidewalk, overwhelmed as I always got when coming here, amazed at the tall buildings the same way I had been when I came to this place with my mother when I was five. The awe of it never left me, an icon of my life I still clung to, those journeys here with my best friend Hank, the wandering through streets to places no tourist would go. It pained me to leave all this behind, even the would-be muggers who had mistaken us for easy prey, finding out only too late that we had been seasoned on the dark streets of Paterson, not at all the usual naïve suburban teenyboppers who stepped off the buses from New Jersey. The shapeless gray people clung to the street corners even now as dawn exposed them, turning them not to dust they way dawn might vampires, but into the sad collection of drunks, junkies, pimps a...

   I stared at his suspicious eyes in the rearview mirror knowing he would remember me later, hard eyes of a man who had been wrung through the late-night ringer of violent Paterson Street, no doubt robbed a few times, maybe stabbed or shot, eyes aware of trouble when they saw it, and they seemed to see trouble in me. His gray brows rose over the black rims of his eyeglasses like question marks as he wondered what an underdressed young man like me was doing up this early, guessing perhaps from the cut of my hair that I was in the military or fresh out of it. That might have been the selling point that made him accept me as his fair. Had I looked the way I had looked before the Army, he might have passed me by, his blue-collar background hating hippies as much as much my uncles did. He steered the cab straight down Main Avenue, headed in the direction of Passaic, over more of my old stomping ground, under the parkway overpass, passed the massive old silk factory on the ...

    The gas station’s pay phone hung from its hook, wires spilling out from the mouthpiece. So, I had to cross Crooks Avenue to the Paterson side to find a working phone, and luckily found a few coins left over in my suit pocket from some previous use, dropping several into the slot after getting information to provide me with the number of the cab company. Clifton likely had its own cabs, but I couldn’t recall any of the names – only Veterans Cab company located off Market Street in downtown Paterson, whose doorway I had passed frequently, but never thought to use, a dark office filled with broad shouldered men wearing out of date hats and smoking stubs of cigars that stained the windows – an office that never closed. Hank, my best friend, often relied on the company to get him home after arriving too late from our adventures in New York City to get the last bus to Haledon. He could have walked home the way I did during those late hours, only his route took him through ...

    A chill air blew down Crooks Avenue from the east, yet snow had not yet arrived, leaving the slate sidewalk at the bottom of my front stairs clear, as was the street itself, parked cars lining the curb, including Harold’s Cadillac and Ritchie’s carpentry truck. A block of stone and a small concrete post stood at the curb from another era before the horseless carriage, where people mounted and dismounted from the back of carts pulled by horses. I paused brief porch steps to catch my breath with two sets of stairs leading to the slate walk at the bottom, the wooden porch steps and the concrete ones below those, with grass slopes to either side, and a concrete retaining wall at the bottom which has served me as The Alamo, Mount Everest and a host of other imaginary places when I was young. The yellowed grass on the slopes reminded me of the chore I had promised to complete, overgrown weeds stooping over like abandoned wheat. My heart still raced, but not nearly as bad...