Sat on a bucket at 3:30 a.m. eating a hot pastrami sandwich with Matthew, and an Australian girl comes by in a gold studded tunic, sloshed and all smiles, looking for someone to talk to.

“I’ve heard things about New York City,” she said, “about young girls, and New York City. Can I sit with you a minute; would that be alright?”

And I’m drained at that moment. Matthew and I were hired to bring Poem Shop to a whirling-dirvish New Age rave in SoHo: blacklights and glowing gardens growing up the walls; music and tarot readings and two giant gongs that rattled to climaxes every few minutes. Was exhausted by the way people talked to me, leeched, argued about whether or not they should go to a Hindu priest. James Trimarco, though, took some mushrooms and sat in a corner: “The way I got out West was this. We were all drug addicts in Chicago, and I wanted to get away. So I went home to Florida and got in a car with two of my friends, and we drove really, really slow down Highway 10, until we got to California. It took three or four months.”

And I imagined all the people who’ve been whisked away this way, broken in the backseat under a blanket, trying to see things again.

The Austrailian girl looks at me, says, “You’re buggered, aren’t you?”

I sat, on the abandoned tracks of the JMZ, waiting to get back to my place in Bushwick. Every time the trains barrel past, I almost weep. Especially the ones that fly through center tracks and don’t stop. There is something about the tradition of it, this old system, so enormous and loud and esoteric, built out of survival to get the people from here to there. It just keeps going and going, disappearing into the black tunnels, and you can feel it like some kind of mythical beast every time it rumbles towards you. It’s like the way I felt the first time I saw a Lakota Sundance ceremony: people pierce to a tree, close to the source, dancing, hungry, like they have for thousands of years. It’s the witness that makes me kowtow, the practice and the ceremony over slogans and piety. Walt Whitman said, “Before one is a writer, he must understand at least the tip of his Nation’s spirit,” and it’s this understanding, if only for a flash, that makes my knees weak.

[By nation, he could simply mean “roots,” or “family.”]

I got home, played with the cats, Ruby and Agnes. They curled up in my shoes and on my pillow as the sun came up. I slept with the fan facing my bed, and woke up to a great summer wind in the morning.