On a pile of shipping containers I sat with a woman who was all my past romances and current unrequited loves. We drank beer and looked into the sky at all the stars. We heard men coming. So we clamoured down from our perch. The bottom of the pile was a tangled mess of old train cars, even an old caboose. The men were not police. They were scavengers digging through the wreckage.

I had a visitor. A best friend. He was an old Haitian man. After driving wild and mad on dirt roads in my dirty old car just to prove it could still thrill despite its age, we sat lost and confused on my couch in a house I rent. Dirty brown couch in a room covered in dingy brown wood paneling. He didn't want food or beer and my efforts to please now left him suspicious and wanting solitude. Before parting we expressed our genuine, mutual and deep restlessness and boredom. Looking carefully into each others eyes and knowing that last moment why we loved each other so much. I left him siting on the couch and walked through the front room to the front porch, forgetting the beer. In a daze from the confusion of my friend.

I found myself peering out the second story front window down into the neighbors driveway where young girls and their mother were taking out the garbage. I knew these girls once when I was young myself. I recognized them as the childhood sisters I had played with. The oldest had become very beautiful. She saw me and I waved. Her mother recognized me and told the eldest sister, Sarah, to take everyone up and introduce them to me. I was in love with Sarah. I found myself being polite and making affable jokes like a grown up to hide my own perversions. I made up all the reasons to love her from looking into her eyes. I told myself I knew her now because I had known her then. She seemed confused and uninterested, like she had somewhere to go and desperately needed an excuse to leave.

Suddenly, I was hosting a party in the room I was standing. As I looked around the room was full of people. I am quite tall, but all the men that I approached with jokes and introductions were much taller than me. I found this terrifying. I felt myself shrinking. They were surrounding me. I made weak nervous jokes about how tall they were to which I received no response except names and handshakes. Until I was tired of looking up and being pleasant, and it was at this moment that I was taunted by a nearly 8 foot black man who's hand I was clasping at the moment without making eye contact:
"Oh, you can't look a black man in the face, huh? Look up here!"
I smiled and apologized, explaining that I was just tired of looking up and being nice. I forgot his name.

A snotty fag interrupted and insisted that if people are playing music, then could they please play this list of songs. The list included "My love will go on". The fag had demanded in that snotty I-know-what-is-cool-and-this-isnt-cool-unless-you-do-what-I-say-voice that people get when confronted with something out of their element. As if this was his house, his party by proxy of knowing me. It annoyed me because the DJ was playing hip-hop and it was a party and I love hip-hop which goes so well with a party. I knew the fag would get his way or leave in a strategic move to take the party with him. So I abandoned the party through the front door.

I wanted to find Sarah to see if she would love me in a different setting. I walked around the side of the house where there were benches and older people having a refined social time. When I found Sarah among them, I gave up any hope of her. I found that what I loved in her eyes, her soul she couldn't find in herself.

I walked desolate to the backyard to find hundreds of little kids, grade-schoolers, playing violently in the massive yard. They chanted:
"CRASH THE BUS! CRASH THE BUS! CRASH THE BUS! CRASH THE BUS! CRASH THE BUS!!!"
And I watched a young girl in protective gear ride her bike directly and intentionally into a park bench. I realized that they were already running the world. The children of my brothers generation: that generation trapped between vietnam and the 1980s. So desperate to do something right for a change that they are determined to give their children everything. The marketeers and admen know that too. They know that the children already make the decisions. I felt hopeless and trapped. I love them, but to them I am already old and tortured beyond my humanity.

I found myself longing for the company of my Haitian friend. I ambled back into the house through the back door I had entered earlier with the Haitian man. The party was over. Everyone was gone. I sat down where he had been, tired and depressed, just wishing I could ride wild in the night with my Haitian friend and again climb on boxcars to look at the night sky and dream of a future that I will never see. No matter how much I want to see it I will leave this fucked up party too soon.