Michael Anthony Adams Jr.'s Blog

Like the sounds hidden in a record’s grooves, smoke hung heavy and thick. It obscured the light from above as if the smog from his California childhood had followed him across the country. His dad still lived there, in Southern California. He’d been in Virginia for three years, since the summer of 1988. Now it was 1991. Not that the year made any difference. He was in ninth grade. Childhood—along with the Pacific Ocean breeze—was a distant dream.

He took a drag off his cigarette, exhaled, and added another layer to the smoke already choking them in that packed room. They were in the church’s outbuilding. The smoke’s scent was buried deep in the cheap carpet. Its remnants discolored the walls. He said, “My name is Josh, and I guess I’m an alcoholic.”

Beneath the haze, the room remained quiet and still. The scattered adults who had raised their hands to share dropped them back into their laps. All the eyes—young and old—turned to Josh. He looked down to avoid their gazes, even that of the girl in the corner who was about his age. She reminded him of his friend, Melody Fisher. Like Melody, she was thin, in a short jean skirt, rainbow tights, and a black tee shirt. Her stringy blond hair lay limp across her shoulders. Melody’s hair was curly. Josh didn’t know the girl in the corner. He didn’t know any of these people.

“I’m sure you all remember what happened the last time I came here,” Josh said. “Well, this past weekend was no different.”

That past weekend, Josh had told his mom he was spending the night with Todd Campbell. Todd had told his mom he was spending the night at Josh’s. They both wound up sleeping alone, one of them in the cab of a truck and the other in the backseat of a car, in Melody’s father’s backyard. The night had grown too cold to sleep in the woods across from Carrie’s, Josh’s girlfriend’s, place. But in only their leather jackets, the night wasn’t much warmer in those broken down automobiles. Melody woke them before 5:00 am, before her father looked out the kitchen window and spotted them there. Her breath made a mist in the chilly morning air.

She said, “You look defiant even in your sleep, Josh.” He’d been sleeping on his back with his head tilted back and his hands clasped in his lap.

Josh and Todd each dropped a hit of acid they’d purchased the night before, and they walked down the road to figure out where they might find some breakfast. But they were broke. Every dime they’d scrounged together had gone to buy the drugs they were on, the liquor they drank the night before, and the beer in the duffel bag Todd was carrying. A local biker gang ran an acid lab one more county south of the city of Richmond from where Todd and Josh were in Potterfield County. All the kids—the metalheads, the skaters, and the deadheads—had been eating acid regularly for almost a year by then. Josh and Todd were no different.

Todd’s uncle was a member of that biker gang. Todd had grown up down on Route One, Jeff Davis Highway, the Petersburg Pike, across from the Stonewall Park housing projects. He and his mom had moved to Josh’s town, the town of Louthain, only a year before. They were fleeing Todd’s abusive father.

When Josh saw Todd walking through their middle school hallway on the first day of eighth grade, he knew they had to be friends. Todd was wearing a tee shirt for the thrash metal band Megadeth and a black leather jacket with tassels dangling off its sleeves. The tee shirt had the band’s logo printed over a skull with its mouth clamped shut and metal blinders over its eyes and ears. When Josh later discovered Todd played the guitar, he introduced himself in the lunchroom. “I want to start a band,” he said.

Todd was a year older than Josh. He’d been held back in fifth grade. His hair was longer than Josh’s too, which dangled in front of Josh’s eyes in the front and came down to the base of his neck in the back. Todd would make the perfect lead guitarist for Josh’s imaginary band. They became friends. They exchanged song lyrics and guitar riffs. They huffed freon out of Josh’s parents’ air conditioner.

“I’m going to turn you into the thief I should have become,” Todd said to Josh one day. They’d just stolen a pack of cigarettes from the local 7-11. Todd had bumped into the counter and knocked a pack of generic smokes back into the arcade room where Josh was already waiting. Josh pocketed the cigarettes, and they left separately.

Josh liked Todd’s plan about teaching him to become a thief. It might help him get back to California, but not to his dad’s place in Orange County. Josh wanted to run away to Hollywood when he turned 16. Todd agreed to go with him. Josh had a knack for drawing people into his fantasies. None of those ideas kept Josh from making out with Todd’s girlfriend though when Todd got locked up at the end of the school year for breaking probation.

Todd’s girlfriend, Tina, wasn’t allowed to have boys in her room, but that never kept Todd out of there. And she still took a long walk with Josh while Todd was locked up. The two of them weaved through back streets and trails to a wide open field. They couldn’t see the road in any direction. The grass grew tall all around them. It swayed beneath the springtime breeze.

“Are you ready?” Tina asked. Josh nodded. The sky was as blue as the ocean Josh remembered from Southern California. The clouds were blots on the endless expanse. Josh made up meanings for their various contortions.

Tina and Josh had already known one another for a couple years. They’d dated briefly in seventh grade, before Josh had even met Todd, but they’d never been as close as they were that afternoon. And they never were again. Both of them kept their mouths shut about it. Todd never found out.

Before Todd got out of the detention center, Josh started dating Carrie Condrey. Carrie was a year younger than Josh. But with her hair hanging almost to her waist, she’d matured early. And when Carrie revealed to Josh what her 17-year-old brother had already done to her, Josh was shaken.

“I’ve never told anybody about that before,” Carrie said.

Josh sat still in his chair in his mother’s den, his mouth agape, the telephone in his hand, the receiver to his ear.

“Are you okay?” Carrie asked.

The night outside the window to Josh’s right was black. He said, “Yeah. I guess I am.”

“Do you hate me?”

Josh’s face contorted. “No, I don’t hate you. I hate your brother,” he said. He couldn’t understand how one person could visit that kind of suffering upon another person. It opened up a brand new wound in Josh’s mind.

That summer, Josh lost his virginity to Carrie beside the television on the carpet upstairs in Josh’s home. The TV set was tuned into some cartoon, but neither of them were paying attention. Josh’s mother was downstairs cooking dinner. His stepdad was still at work.

That past weekend, Josh had convinced Carrie to let Tina sleep over at her place. Carrie and Tina weren’t friends. They weren’t enemies though either. Carrie agreed for Josh’s sake. He and Todd would sleep in the woods across the street. They could sneak in through Carrie’s bedroom window and visit the two girls in the middle of the night. It made Josh feel like he was in some old, youth rebellion movie from the 1970s, the kind of movie he would have watched on the floor of his mother’s den after his father first left them alone.

The four teenagers spent the afternoon listening to thrash metal albums Josh had copied Carrie from his own tapes and CDs on a boombox in the shed in Carrie’s backyard. That shed was where Carrie and Josh had often retreated during the summer. It was hot and sticky. It smelled of sweat, but it was the one place neither her older brothers nor her mother would discover them.

That afternoon, the four of them were all in there, smoking cigarettes and drinking a bottle of cheap wine. That evening, they all went to the mall together. That’s where Josh and Todd each bought a hit of acid. Then the four of them walked over to Dave’s, a pool hall across the street. Carrie and Tina convinced an older man to buy them a bottle of Everclear—190 proof grain alcohol—and a case of beer.

They drank the bottle that night. Carrie and Tina mixed it with soda. Josh and Todd drank it straight. As if ripping the flesh from their esophaguses, the Everclear burned their throats. With every sip, they closed their eyes and shook their heads. They put the acid—folded up in a little strip of paper—into a pack of cigarettes, which they forgot about until the next day. The remnants of that case of beer was what Todd was carrying in a duffel bag when he and Josh left Melody’s backyard the following morning.

“When we snuck in through my girlfriend’s window, we were already drunk.” Josh wasn’t looking at anybody in the meeting as he spoke, not the blond girl in the corner, not the preppy guy in a Polo shirt across from him, not even the tall gangly kid, sitting next to the preppy kid and smiling at Josh like he could relate. “We made too much noise and woke her mom up. Todd and I had to hide in the closet. When she came in, Carrie’s mom started screaming at her. As soon as her mom went back to bed, Carrie said we had to go. She was going to get in trouble.

“We went back out the window, and we were just wandering around the neighborhood, drinking beers, when this cop shined his light on us. The cop said something, but we didn’t listen. We took off running. We ditched the beer somewhere in the woods. We figured we could dig it back up once we were safe—”

A gruff voice broke into Josh’s monologue. “That’s enough,” some gray-haired old man said. “If we want to learn how to get drunk, we’ll call on you.”

Josh sat still. He narrowed his eyes. His cheeks burned red. His hands started trembling.

Everybody was staring at him. He’d had enough. He didn’t want to be there. He didn’t care if his mom wanted him to go to that AA meeting. He didn’t care if he wound up in a psych ward that night. He stood up. He grabbed his leather motorcycle jacket off the back of his chair. The snaps and buckles on it jingled and jangled. Everybody—the gray-haired old man, the blond girl, the preppy guy, the gangly kid, and the rest—stared at him. Josh grabbed his cigarettes and his Harley-Davidson zippo lighter off the floor. He stormed out the meeting into the night.

To read more of my novel, Here’s How You Fly, click here.

My new novel, Here’s How You Fly, is now available wherever you buy books!

Josh Marshall is suffering. He’s 14 years old. His parents are divorced. He’s moved all the way across the country, and the drugs and alcohol he’s discovered simply aren’t working anymore. Only his best friend, a girl named Melody Fisher, offers him solace.

Then, one night, the frayed strings holding Josh’s life together unravel. But our darkest moments can always lead to salvation.

When Josh winds up in an adolescent rehab facility, he has no choice but to confront all the anger and fear that tortures him and start a journey that reveals what it truly means to fly.

A new kind of art resides in our minds,
germinating from the future’s seeds.
It has yet to be planted, but

it grows nonetheless like a
vine creeping up the walls of
academia.

(lightning waters
cells in our
brains as

thoughts

burst forth
from soil
we live beneath)

We can’t remove it,
rooted in collegiate
bricks. A symbiotic self,

it is one with that which birthed it,
as natural as chlorophylled trees—
life, death, and all that exists in between.

I am the breaking dawn.
My star burns eternal.
I light the way through all
you experience in
this world. Behold the night,
a supernova’s dance

frozen where no life dwells.
In space, it’s empty. We’re
godless, devoid of the
warmth we need to feel. I
cry. I yearn. I reach for
you, your heart, your mind, your

soul. I ask you what you
need to hear to be the
ruler, the lover who
unleashes holy fire
on this abandoned plane.
Angels fall from the sky.

By Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.

My emotions get the better of me…
Locking me inside myself, my mind starts
to turn on its thoughts like an imprisoned
innocent who’s done no wrong but suffers
despite themselves. This is the way I bleed.

Like dragons’ flames, the blood burns against my
skull. Its pressure boils inside my gut where
I’ll never reach to wash away the stain.
I writhe in bed. I writhe on the couch. I
try taking a walk, but my body won’t

move. It refuses to listen to my
scorched thoughts. I’m hollow on the inside, still
trying to become something I’m not, a
vessel of peace, a being like Buddha,
someone who’s worthy of emulation.

It’s too late to write this poem.
The night has gone on too long.
It’s too late to write this poem.
Everything has gone wrong.

Earlier, it looked to be a splendid
evening. Earlier, it appeared life
might blossom like a flower
at the side of the road.

The world was young and fresh.
You walked beside me in your dress.
Your lips curled up with a smile.
I had to look away after a while.

Now, I can’t see through this present
darkness. Now, I can’t breathe in
the smog choking our planet from
fires raging out of control.

It’s too late to write this poem.
I will never say what I mean.
It’s too late to write this poem.
Things are no longer what they seem.

When you stay present,
in the moment, you don’t die.
You live forever.

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Although he didn’t know what they were
at the time – mere cakes to hungry eyes –
beside a broken bridge, the boy stood still
patiently awaiting the Godhead’s pills.
Popping a handful in his waiting mouth,
he immediately felt the lonely
sting of immortality crush his soul.
That’s when the serpent awakened below…

Through murky depths, she gazed upon the sky
from behind her scaled eyes and somehow knew
she’d loved that boy in a heaven before
this world or time had even existed.
Like a baby bird’s returning mother,
the boy spilled those pills back in the water.
The serpent, a Taoist herself, swallowed
every last drop of what was given up.
The little boy vanished in a purple
puff of peyote smoke, and the serpent
ascended to the bridge where she transformed
to what she’d always known herself to be
– the goddess who she was on the inside –
recognized a fellow snake’s suffering
being sawed in half to have her belly
devoured by some mortal’s ministry.

With her forked tongue’s hiss, the goddess ended
this sacrifice. Sunlight shimmered through the
morning air reflecting off the dappled
flesh of the virgin snake’s battered, bruised scales.
Rough scales morphed into a woman’s soft skin,
and the new acolyte swore eternal
faith to the deity who had rescued
her from the hungry jaws of mankind’s hell.

“Year of the Snake” poem from the Zodiac Cycle, featured in my poetry collection, We Are the Underground.

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This is an excerpt from my novel, Crossroads Blues.

Trigger Warning: This story relates events that take place in New York City on the day of 9/11/2001, after the Twin Towers collapsed.

When the first tower fell, nobody knew quite what to do. After the initial outburst of terror, the angel’s cry, there is silence about the space of heaven. Was it real? Did I see what I thought I saw? Did one of the permanent markers of man’s majesty, a structure as grand and immaculate as a mountain, a city reaching into the sky, really turn to so many grains of dust? Please, God, don’t let that happen to the other tower. Leave us with something, a reminder of our world before today, please…

When the second tower falls, the entire island of Manhattan shakes. The ground beneath your feet rumbles as the earth swallows the glass and steel and paper and hair and flesh. It might be purely psychological. It could be real. With a second joined gasp, a multitudinous cry, the monument to man’s magnificence has given way to a memorial to his madness. The World Trade Center is gone, charmed, by ancient spells, into a great miasma carrying once important faxes and memos, monogrammed notepads and family photographs, rising and drifting across Lower Manhattan, the East River, Brooklyn. The elder god has been displaced by its children. Its body cut up and fed into the sky, creating a new world, a new topography at the tip of that tiny island.  

On Fifth Avenue, a woman standing next to Charlie collapses to her knees, reaches to embrace the sky, and cries out to God to save us, save us, please. But heaven stays silent and blue. No army of avenging archangels appears. The host of bodies beyond the clouds of dust pouring down the financial district’s streets might be safe, but their souls are lost, stolen by fleet, fleeing thieves arising and descending back into the dust before they can be seen. Looking to his right and left, Charlie sees zombies with trembling lips, shaking limbs, wiping their wide, staring eyes, clutching at one another in shock, in horror, in anguish and pain. He’s one of them, and he doesn’t even realize it.

A black zombie beside him, his face contorted in agony, his eyes open and glazed, cries out to him, “Why are they doing this to us?” He has a Caribbean accent. “Why are they doing this to New York? We’re not even from here. We are from everywhere…”

Charlie shakes his head. Like so many others at this moment, he doesn’t know. He stumbles backwards, turns around, and starts walking back to Madison Avenue. There’s a bar across the street from his office. That seems like the right place to be.

The past is a mirage. How many temps did he have in those buildings? How many temps had he placed permanently at the top of one of those towers? The reality makes him sick to his stomach. So many thousands of people, living and dreaming a moment ago, dead, disintegrated, incinerated now. He feels as if he might vomit. Maybe a beer will help him to relax a little bit, put all of this into some sort of perspective because from out here it’s nothing but horrendous.

He’s going to have to start calling people’s homes, find out who was late for work, who was able to rush down the smoke-filled stairs in time. How many clients is he going to lose (his bank account dissolves into the same cloud as the World Trade Center)? How many deaths is he responsible for? You can’t think like that.

Even though it’s a little early to be drinking (most of the people in here would never before have found themselves sitting in front of a beer at this hour of the morning), the bar is as full as Fifth Avenue. It’s as wall to wall packed with people as an East Village dive on Friday night, but a solemnity has replaced the expected frivolity. A subliminal, subconscious mass, the same specter that Andrew met on the subway, has infiltrated the stale atmosphere. Very few people have anything to say. Those who do are speaking in whispers that echo. The rest are leaning against the walls, shaking their heads, propped against stools, arms draped over the bar, holding undrunk bottles, tickling their lips, their eyes glued to the TVs on CNN at either end of the bar. On the TVs, the planes crash into the towers again and again and again. The World Trade Center crumbles again and again and again. Downtown, a crowd of people run, screaming, clutching handkerchiefs to their mouths, away from a surging, consuming cloud of debris again and again and again. With each replay, a collective, almost imperceptible, wince circulates through the bar. One or two people groan, shake their heads, appear ill. By each patron, the horror and agony and frustration is experienced again and again and again. It’s overwhelming, destabilizing, jarring, psychotic.

Why are they making us watch this? Charlie thinks. It’s portentous of our own demise. He wipes his forehead. He isn’t sweating. He notices that he’s shaking a little bit. His stomach is a strand of rope, stretched taut, looped around itself, tied into a torturous knot. His nerves are buzzing, jumping, popping so suddenly that he twitches and starts. Constantly glancing at the street, he realizes that he’s not quite himself. He wonders if he ever will be again. Am I going to die today?

It takes forever to draw the bartender’s attention away from the television, but Charlie’s in no hurry. Today isn’t a day when he feels like getting on the bartender’s case. Regardless of what the images might be doing to his now fragile psyche, he’s as consumed as everybody else is by the destruction. Drawn by the spectacle, the power, the force, they have no choice but to watch, to keep watching whether they want to or not.

Another plane crashed somewhere in Pennsylvania. Charlie hadn’t heard about that one yet. CNN is showing maps, pinpointing the PA crash area right now…

Finally, the bartender notices Charlie standing by the bar.

“Heineken,” Charlie orders.

The bartender nods. He doesn’t say anything. He looks tired. His passion drained, he moves mechanically.

With his beer in hand, Charlie retreats back a short way, towards one of the tables by the wall. A young man is standing there, his eyes wide and bloodshot. He’s loosened his tie from around his neck. He’s Charlie’s age or younger, probably twenty-one or twenty-two. His hand trembles as he lifts a beer to his lips. As Charlie approaches him, he says, “Think about it, man… Think about what might have been on those planes…”

“What do you mean?”

“Diseases, plagues hidden in the baggage compartment, released by the fire… We could all be sucking in some sort of sickness right now, dying as the wind blows, and we don’t even know it.” The young man nods knowingly and takes a sip of beer. He’s driving himself insane. We’re always dying as the wind blows.

The thought chills Charlie. He hadn’t considered that possibility.

The young man goes on, “What do you think’s going to happen next?”

“I have no idea.”

“They could open fire on the streets, start shooting from sniper’s nests on top of buildings. The police are all downtown. They’re not gonna be able to do anything. They could start picking us off, one by one. There could be bombs planted all over the city. They could just be waiting for all of the news networks to have their cameras on New York before the nuke goes off, and we all disappear, in a flash.” He snaps his fingers. “Just like that. It’s all over. The rest of America watches white noise on their TV screens. I’ll tell you one thing. I’m not stepping outside of this bar until the whole thing’s over. Think of how close we are to the Empire State, to Grand Central, to Times Square. There’s still a shitload of planes they can’t find. I wish I could get in touch with my mom.” He pulls a cell phone out of his pocket. His fingers are rattling horribly. “But this damn thing isn’t working.”

Without saying goodbye, Charlie walks away from him, picks his way through the crowd towards the back. The young man doesn’t seem to notice that Charlie’s disappeared. He’s still rambling almost incoherently.

Is anybody listening? Charlie thinks. Does it even matter?

In the back, a man and a woman are talking. The man says, “I was on the 7 train when I saw it hit. The first tower was already on fire. We were all pressed up against the windows, trying to figure out what was going on. The plane circled around the building. It disappeared for a moment. We were all watching it, trying to figure out what it was doing. It was like a hawk, some sort of huge bird-of-prey, searching the skyline for a mouse, and suddenly it slammed into the other tower. This woman beside me screamed. I went deaf.” His gaze is distant and glassed, his lips curled in an aspect of self-loathing, despising himself for what he has witnessed. Speechless at his memories, he shakes his head and sips his drink. His features are so hideously deformed, his eyes so filled with incomprehension that Charlie wonders what he would have looked like if they had encountered one another on the way to the subway that morning. The man would have been bright and full, impressive in a suit as he carried his briefcase and nodded his smiling greeting, rather than a twisted shade of a human being, an inward malefactor guilty of crimes of omission.

The woman glances at him with an air of compassion. She wants to embrace him, to let him melt into her arms, to be the comfort that her womb desires. She’s never even met him before. She nods at Charlie as he sets his beer on the table they’re sharing. The man doesn’t notice him. He’s staring at his hands, reading his future. It’s empty. The woman says, “My name’s Hillary.”

“Charlie,” Charlie says, and they shake hands.

“I figure I should know everybody’s name just in case you’re the last person I ever see,” she laughs.

Charlie doesn’t think it’s very funny, but he manages to smile. It’s nice to be near a woman. Her femininity provides a comfort. To lie in bed with her and have her hold him… He wants to be sick, as if he’s already had too much to drink and needs the pressure relieved, but no amount of vomiting could alleviate the illness in his guts. He wipes his hand down his face.

“Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t say things like that at a time like this,” Hillary says. She smiles consolingly. “Humor’s just the way I deal with things.”

“It’s okay,” Charlie says even though it isn’t really.

“I’m here on business,” she goes on. “I was here on business the last time they hit the World Trade Center, too, but this is nothing like that. I guess I’m bad luck for New York. I don’t think I’ll ever come here again. I was staying at a hotel above Grand Central, and I figured that it wasn’t a very safe place to be so I decided to come down here instead, but how safe is any place in Manhattan today? If I could get on a train, I’d get as far away from here as I could, but it looks like we’re all stuck together, at least until they open the island back up.”

“You didn’t make it very far from Grand Central,” Charlie notices.

“Far enough. Far enough from Grand Central, still far enough from the Empire State, a little ways from Times Square, right in the middle of everything,” she laughs again.

At the front of the bar, a man shouts, “A car bomb just went off in Battery Park. Did the TV say anything about it? I heard about it on the radio. We gotta get off the island.  The whole place is wired…”

Somebody tells him to shut up. A frenzied panic ruffles the patrons, but nobody goes anywhere.

“Do you think that’s true?” Hillary asks Charlie.

“Who cares,” the man beside her says. “We’re stuck here. There’s nothing we can do but wait.”

Charlie shrugs. He wonders if she’ll invite him back to her hotel room. She’s not gorgeous, but she has a nice body. He hates himself for thinking that. “Who knows,” he says.

“I wish I’d taken a train as soon as the first plane hit,” she says. “Gone out to anywhere. Somewhere in Connecticut or New Jersey. I don’t know. Any place that was still connected to the United States, where I could still get home.”

Charlie nods. His whole life – his job, his apartment, his friends, everything except his family – exists in New York City, on Manhattan Island.

At the front of the bar, somebody yells, “Fuck you!”

Yasser Arafat is on TV. His complexion and mannerisms appear exceedingly foreign. A reporter is interviewing him. One patron throws a coaster at the set. The coaster ricochets off the screen’s glass, off Arafat’s trembling face and petrified eyes. The bartender laughs uneasily. With nervous glances, shaking hands, and unsure nods, Yasser Arafat sends his condolences to New York City and the people of the United States. The entire exchange is surreal, an episode in the annals of science fiction. The future has shifted radically into the past.

“Bull shit!” somebody shouts.

 “Maybe he knows what we’re going through,” Hillary whispers. “Look at him. He’s as scared as we are.”

“He knows he’s in deep shit,” Charlie says. “Any hope for Mideast peace or a Palestinian State disappeared at the same moment the Trade Towers did.”

“The only thing that would make me happy right now is to bomb the fuck out of his country. We should turn the entire Middle East into a goddamn parking lot. The bastards,” the man sitting with them says.

A crash echoes through the room. A screaming stampede, a blur of colors beyond the windows, a triple exposed photograph, tramples along the sidewalk outside the door, bangs across the metal grates.

“God, what was that?” Charlie gasps. Unsure of whether or not he’s still alive, he grabs his beer and along with everybody else rushes for the exit. The entire bar empties into a tangled mélange of running, petrified zombies: Mardi Gras, the day of the dead.

“What’s going on? What the hell happened?” Charlie asks everybody as he walks back and forth along the sidewalk next to the honking, stalled traffic, searching for smoke, bumping into the fleeing dead, adrenalin rushing through his mind, fear clawing at his intestines. He’s lost Hillary and the man who was with them.

“A bomb went off in Grand Central,” he hears.

“What? What?” he keeps asking, wandering like the homeless insane, like the elderly with dementia, clutching his beer between white knuckles. “A bomb? A bomb, where?”

A female zombie grabs him by the shoulder. “No bomb, a bus crash, everybody panicked.”

“Are you sure?”

“I saw it. Everything’s all right. You’re not going to die. Not yet…”

For a moment, Charlie wonders if it’s really okay for him to be standing out on the street with an open beer in his hand. Amid all the tumult, all the madness of the day, would anybody really care?

It started out as an interesting show. When Michael Lourdes’s roommate woke him up that morning to tell him to come up to the rooftop, to see the World Trade Center burning in the distance, it was another one of those many momentous occasions of living in the city, a chance to see something, to be a part of something, that the rest of the world was only going to read about in the papers. He didn’t even think about the fact that there were people in those buildings.

Now, it’s something different entirely. Michael’s roommate is gone, frantically trying to locate a girlfriend who lives on the Lower East Side and works in the World Financial Center. The devil’s midsection has been reached. The entire world has flipped upside down. Pacing in circles atop his roof, Michael walks alone among neighbors crying with their arms around one another, men consoling women, women consoling men. One group asks another if they’re okay. A girl of nineteen or twenty wants to know if Michael needs a hug. He says he does. The girl says she’s glad because she needs one too.

She wraps her arms around him, pulls him into the soft fleshiness of her breasts, rubs her cheek against his chest. Her body radiates heat. Her hair smells of comfort. Her tiny shoulders tremble. Beyond their embrace, smoke is disgorged from Manhattan’s ruined body. Mt. Vesuvius burns their shadows into Pompey’s cement. “It’s gonna be okay,” she whispers between sniffles. “It’s all gonna be okay.”

“Yeah,” Michael says. They let each other go.

“Thanks,” she says, her young, sparrow eyes wounded and questioning. She melts. Her skeleton remains.

“Yeah,” Michael says. None of this is right. There has to be something he can do. He can’t stay on his rooftop. He leaves the girl and his neighbors.

On the streets in the East Village, a silent compassion, like that of Simon for Jesus, pervades the usually frantic atmosphere. A parade of people, some covered in dust, ashen as death, in burial suits, make their way up and down First Avenue. One woman, coated from head to foot, the body of Ash Wednesday’s cross, has stopped. She’s turning circles in the middle of the avenue, going nowhere, a demagnetized compass, lost in once familiar territory. The living hold doors open for one another. They greet and help and gaze at one another in ways that New Yorkers on their impersonal streets usually never would. The shields that separate one from the other have melted imperceptibly into the atmosphere of the city, sheltering the inhabitants, the victims, from those outside.

At Houston Street, Michael turns right and walks past a million risen Lazaruses stumbling toward the bridges, waiting and hoping for their opportunity to escape the terrorized island of the damned. Hell has opened its dungeons, released its prisoners. Somewhere, Lucifer gazes with compassion upon his fallen compatriots. Free at last, shocked from millenniums of imprisonment, he roams along at the edge of every human’s senses.

A police-manned barricade finally stops Michael’s meandering. Rowing Charon’s boat themselves, the silent terrified exit. Michael tries slipping past the guards, back into the dungeon that everybody else is in such a panic to leave.

“Where you think you’re going?” a tee-shirted cadet, one of the heads of Cerberus, asks.

“I want to get downtown,” he says.

“You can’t go any farther,” the cadet responds.

“I want to get down there and help clear out the debris, try to find people.” The world echoes, like a bomb has been detonating continually, unceasingly since the moment the Towers fell.

“You a doctor?”

“No.”

“You with one of the unions?”

“No.”

“Then, you can’t. There’s plenty of people down there helping already.”

“I need to get down there. I need to help.”

“You wanna help? Go give blood.” Discouraged, Michael nods. He only has his body to give: a scant sacrifice for the souls already crucified. He turns around and starts walking back to the hospital. He doesn’t realize yet that people in pieces don’t need his blood.

To read more of Crossroads Blues, click here.

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Back when I was golden
and the cherry blossoms scented the air,
you and I went bubbling down the avenue
consciously oblivious to the world’s ills.

The myth had it backwards.
You were the first to speak,
and I the first to listen…
or so it seemed at the dawn of time.

You told me to look clearly at the trees.
Their vibrancy was the opening shot of our movie.
I trained my ears more closely to the dialogue –
whether or not such ideas could be stated right.

In chaos’s miasma, I’d never felt such passion
as that which emanated from your mind.
I’d tasted the fruits before existence,
before I’d ever even possessed my body,

which was nothing compared to you possessing me,
and the greatest trick of all was just the truth.
Tonight, I stare again at the darkness,
grateful to have held a halo to my heart once in this existence.

From Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.’s collection of poetry, Indigo Glow, available here.