I went for a month to Southfields, London. There, an old prep-school buddy known to the world only as the Wrangler had a dreary row house, withered gardenias in the window boxes. While he edited computer manuals in the afternoons, I went for rides on the famed red buses, slept in pubs, talked to homeless men. One gray morning at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park I persistently begged cigarettes from strangers, then stood listening for a while to the resident white supremacist, a dozen lit fags in my nostrils, ears, mouth.
One evening while the Wrangler was out with his Swedish girlfriend, who despised me, I called the Norwegian in Miami. I told her I’d studied history in college. I told her a kid in second grade had punched me in the stomach on the bus and made me vomit. I told her I’d been in a celebrated rock band with a hit in the U.S. and U.K. Hearing that last she blew air out her nose, amused. “I knew,” she said, “it had to be something like that.”
“Why don’t you leave that gun-toting jerk-off?”
“What on Earth are you doing?” she asked. “I mean, with your life, what are you doing?”
“You nitwit. The same thing everyone else is.”
“Oh yes? What is that?”
“Waiting to die.”
I materialized next in the not-so-deep American South. A sleepy state-university town whose
