HAVING settled in a portside seat, J. watched Jersey's Palisades pass by up to Fort Lee as the Greyhound followed the Joe DiMaggio along the Hudson apartment cliff-banks. He caught brief glimpses, past the passengers across the aisle, of the sky funneling down the cross streets through Manhattan. The bus turned onto I-95 at 174th and sailed in and out of holy Bronx, and the Long Island Sound burned platinum under the morning sun until New Haven. There, the bus cut north on I-91, and J. turned his attention to his seatmate, a chattering strange-o named Duluoz, recent divorcee from Spindle City, MA, recovering from a crack-up, traveling under an assumed name, and hoping to Go West, young man, and seek his fortune there. They sat beside each other and thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed.
At Hartford, J. transferred to a regional that took him the rest of the way to his uncle. Family but not familiar, J. knew him best in his recurring role as deus ex machina, e.g., when J.'s mother was short on cash again or they needed to find a new place to live again because they'd received a final eviction notice again. It was that same savior-now reluctant warder-wingless, haloless, yet nonetheless recognizable, who greeted J. as he stepped off the bus at the end of the line on a cold moon's day.
ALL small towns are alike. Upend a box filled with a Main Street, a Center Street, a Peach Street, a Plum Street, a Cherry Street, a series of numbered streets. Arrange loosely around a church. Pour streams or rivers or ponds or lakes along the outskirts. Lay macadam roadways in cowpaths or grids or both and arrange homes accordingly. Unroll thin, threadbare runners of grass to weave between sidewalks forced slantward by flexing tree roots and potholed roadways. String a ring of storefronts around Main and Center. Populate with the descendants of Puritanical zealots. Pressurize under restrictive, backward social norms until tender to the tooth.
Small towns are the perfect contrapasso for all city sinners.
THE day J. arrived, he found himself confronted by the fair sight of a gazebo planted in the dead center of the town square. He tried to remember if he'd ever seen a gazebo before. Where in the city could you find a gazebo? Maybe Central Park, but J. preferred the small parks overloomed on all sides by streets and buildings, the ones that had to fight for every shabby emerald inch. A salt smell, a memory, scratched at J.'s nose though the ocean lay far away. Gazebo, gazebo, gazebo, gazebo, gazebo. J. thought the word to himself over and over until it was just a series of syllables devoid of meaning. Origin unknown, oriental corruption, c.f., belvedere: "a fair sight." Gazebo. Gah-zee-boh. Gaze-bo. Gaze. J. felt eyes on him. Small towns reversed the polarity of city invisibility. Move along, move along, the orangutan gestured to the rubbernecking zoogoers as he loped away in search of boundaries, borders, demarcations, dark alleys, a gas station to get a new pack of Old Golds or at least an off-brand loosie, and the local book shop. A vinyl banner hung across the main street read "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate" in Comic Sans.
J.'S uncle owned and operated a diner that white-knuckled the edge of the town square. Like a theatrical stage transitioning between scenes, the building's previous incarnation as a hardware store could still be seen through the diner's scrim. The old sign still hung over the doorway, and in situ overstock still cluttered the diner's shelves, befuddling the non-locals who occasionally wandered in and attempted to purchase a garden hose or paint can or car wax or batteries or box of nails.
The diner served as a cenotaph to J.'s grandfather, who kicked off shortly before J.'s arrival in this world and passed the hardware store down to J.'s uncle. By then, J.'s mother had already departed the small town, having fired herself at velocity toward New York (along the same path, albeit reversed, of J.'s exodus) and away from her dying father and her big brother the moment her high-school graduation cap hit the ground. She was eighteen years old, and the world could wait no longer, not even for them.
