I went in and ordered a hot dog with everything but the pickle.

“You know, I made my fortune off of pickles,” the hot dog man said. “Everyone wants cheap hot dogs but nobody asks the price of a pickle. I can say two dollars for a hot dog and it is the truth but the six dollar pickle is what made me a rich man. You are a smart kid to not get a pickle. I see myself in you. You will go far someday, maybe president.”

By the time he stopped the microwave was yelling and he sprung the door and handed me my hot dog on a tray.

I sat on a tall and squeaking stool under a buzzing neon open sign in the narrow window of the hot dog shop and I watched cars pull into a drug store parking lot across the road. Every so often on the sidewalk just outside a head would bob by in front of me and I assumed there was a body bobbing by as well but if there was I couldn’t see it behind the tall counter and my paper tray soaked in mustard. I saw newsboy caps and bucket hats and hair like a drum solo. One girl bounced by with a proud-postured pigeon on her head.

“What kind of music?” the rich hot dog man shouted from the back.

I responded something vague and evasive and he turned the radio to some pop station. The song that played was like watching scrolling credits after the ambiguous and impersonal ending of a b-list thriller with lots of airports at night and empty warehouses and theatrical hacking and men without names. After looking back at the kitchen my eyes struggled to adjust again to the night outside and the window seemed a one way mirror and I felt neon-bathed and observed. I imagined the final shot of the lonely film receding from the window away and up into the darkness until I was a speck in a sea of small pallid lights.

And then the hot dog was gone and I walked west toward dimmer streetlamps and wider trees and the night felt much less lonely without thick glass between us. I picked at poppy seeds which hid behind my molars and wandered through a park I had never seen before. The night was quiet now and a path wound around dormant oaks and ducked under bowing boughs which speckled yellow streetlight across the ground like salt from a shaker. Wide leaves brushed my temples.

I came to the edge of a field, domestic grass drowning in mud. Under the brown glow of the urban sky I could see the fading bounds of a game long gone. White lines, sinking, led my eyes to a stand of pines at the edge of the park and, walking like a flamingo to avoid the small swamps of the field, I made my way to them. The trees looked wrong up close, like a too-small toupee on the bald ground, huddled together.

A path grew from the mud and grass and led me through the pines and as I swept aside reaching needles I heard the noise of buildings inhabited on the street beyond the line of trees. Standing against a trunk I felt at the resin in the bark and smelled my fingers and looked up at the fence which split me and the trees from the street. Low apartments lined the road opposite and yellow light, curtain-diffused, fell on the sidewalk. Under the dark and fading blue of a patched awning a metal arrow leaned against a fire hydrant and pointed towards the ajar orange door of a corner bar.

I jumped and grabbed the lowest limb of the pine and scrambled my feet up the chain links of the fence until I could swing myself up. The branches above me were short but stiff and I walked my hands up the trunk until I had a firm grip on the next branch and I stood and shuffled out from the trunk until I was standing almost over the fence and my knuckles were white against the thin end of the branch. As I wobbled I could feel the limb below me undulate like the stomach of a sleeping giant. I was at the end of the limb and I stuck a tentative foot down onto the top of the fence and it clanged cool and crisp in the night. I watched the small strip of packed and pine-needled earth between the fence and the sidewalk and grabbed the limb with both hands and the branch above me whipped up and I pushed off and like a hesitant pendulum I eventually found gravity and came falling down onto street-side dirt.

I bent to sweep needles from the knees of my jeans and heard an exhale of voices across the road. The door on the corner was swinging and a couple stood on the sidewalk in drooping coats and I saw one of them lean over and point and say “look, a raccoon” and they peered into the darkness around me. I sat still and breathless until they turned and ambled off into the night.

Leaves fell from the folds of my coat as I rose. I shoved my hands into the depths of my pockets and felt the pressure of my coat on my shoulders and walked across the street towards the bar.

Soon I was in a neighborhood of hunchbacked bungalows and twisting oaks. I stepped around a reflective metal sign at the end of the pavement which marked the Road Closed to Thru Traffic and even though I was Thru Traffic I went down the torn and empty street where the bulldozers slept. The windows of the houses around me were all dark because a road where bulldozers rest is a road where bulldozers wake early and loud and you have to adjust your schedule to their violent pneumatics or you’ll never get any sleep. Before long the sidewalk too was broken and short square barricades with thick plastic lights like the heads of stocky middle schoolers blocked the way. Their lights blinked as far down the street as I could see and not quite in tandem, firefly calls like a constellation against the night. The only sound was the crunch of street destroyed beneath my feet. I kicked and a small rock flew and hit a barricade and the sound it made was hollow and unsatisfying. I kicked another, harder, and it bounced off down the road. In time a stoplight appeared, red and green in the array of barricade blinks and before I knew it I was standing on the bank of a deep and deserted avenue, a greenless sprawl of ghastly pavement which stretched from the solid doors of yellow brick apartments to flashing lotteries in the lifeless window of a gas station.

I looked north and south and saw no cars and with a habitual halfhearted jog I crossed the avenue. On this far bank the houses jostled and pressed like an anxious crowd and green lawns receded as facades drew close against the pavement.

The trickle of traffic grew steadier and I was back at the edge of the city. I passed a dusty old man perched on a yellow metal exhaust pipe which spouted from the brickwork of the basement of an empty barbershop. He cradled a guitar and I recognized Boots of Spanish Leather from the only CD in my dad’s ancient minivan and I got real lonesome and crossed the street to get away. The only other person on the block was a hemmed and wiry woman walking quickly and elbowing the snout of a tiny dog back into her burgundy purse.

I turned into the park and sat down for a while on a bench that was dedicated to the Memory of Lola Grumpk, May She Rest in Peace in the Gardens of Heaven and in the glow of the streetlights I pushed my thumbs against one another and generally tied my fingers into absentminded knots and thought about how I was glad my name wasn’t Grumpk. Soon enough the stars which were bright enough to glow through the pollution faded into twilight and then the smell of dawn rushed through the park and the blackbirds started yelling and I got up and walked home.

When I got back to the apartment my mom was awake making soup and I told her I had gone for a morning walk and I crawled in bed and woke up in the mid-afternoon.

Falmouth, Cornwall
Autumn 2020