I'm A Leaf on a Windy Day

He walked. Puffing a little, starting his fourth mile on a half tank of Rip It and a 40 inch waist. He could only exercise on a Sunday, and all he liked to do was walk, so he always overdid it. He'd drive into the city, park somewhere, and deliberately head in a direction that would make it hard to come straight back without getting bored. A favorite trick he played on himself was circumnavigating Reeds Lake.....pretty damn hard to take a shortcut back to the car with the placid, unrippled moat of kings and barons in his way. Today, he parked in front of Elliott's Newsstand, and, after purchasing an adult magazine and a map of Holland (feeding his twin obsessions), he struck out up up up the long hill past the community college and into Heritage Hill, the graveyard of grace, all the elegant mansions carved up into apartments, rickety stairways tacked on like orthodontia.

All over the city, people were emerging from the winter hunkerdowns, showing a little tiny bit of fettle. A coed hipster cotillion kicking around the Hacky Sack, ironically. Three kids in heavy leather jackets and skullcaps, roasting in the heat but too cool to change uniforms. One asked him what he was listening to on his giant flaking house-stereo headphones. (Sam Roberts. "That some kinda heavy metal?" "No, it's Canadian." "Uhh, okay." Blank stares till he hustled across a busy street.) A dog park, teeming with beaming yuppies and yapping puppies. Little kids kicking around a big blue rubber ball in place of a soccer ball; unseasonal exuberance sends it across the street. On a whim, he ran over and kicked it back. "Here you go!" A kid caught it, gave him a nod of thanks, but said no words, his eyes wary....all their eyes wary. He was suddenly very sad. When he was a substitute teacher, he was a joke, a tool, a fool, The Man Who Must Be Defied....but at least he was part of the system, an accepted piece of the daily puzzle. Out here, now, in his olive jacket and his poverty beard, on the street, to these kids he was just a big scary white guy. He hated feeling fear from children, from their dart-eyed mothers. He just put his head down and kept moving. Oh, good. He loved this song. He made tapes, endless mounds of tapes, bought records and CDs galore, because every new piece of soundtrack he added was another 45 minutes he could spend outside his head.