Roads, Mills, Laps

Dedicated to the Lost Boys.

During the dark days of my Vermont winter, I rubbed shoulders one cold night in a Church Street bar next to a man named Nickel. He wasn’t really named Nickel, but that’s what people called him. He was a lost boy from the Sudan. These courageous men–massacred and hunted, usually orphaned, all abandoned–walked a thousand miles to freedom.

They walked into charitable open arms and have been ‘assimilated’ into sections of America and other Western countries. Their ‘assimilation’ should be open to debate. Nickel walked a thousand miles; he slept and dreamed under the starry African sky; he thirsted and he starved to end up tottering and stumbling drunk next to me in the bar.

He was alone–always alone.

He wore a gigantic jacket. It was one of those puffy winter coats that form bulging creases of stuffed warmth in riblike sections. It was obviously donated because no one wears them. The jacket consumed him over in the corner. He pounded his beers and looked down. Were it not for his height and his beautiful, dark, purple African skin, he’d be invisible, but this was Vermont after all. A wide arc of empty chairs surrounded him as Vermont’s finest* dreadlocked and bearded cretins shot pool and threw him occasional stares.

I was with a couple friends. We needed chairs, so we pulled up alongside him. Funny how everyone thinks that we’ve come such a long way with racial tolerance. We all like to think that we’re past racial stereotypes and racial bigotry. We think it’s all over– a bygone era in this country with a horrid record of these matters where a mere 40 years ago blacks down South hung from trees; everything’s great now. Happy times indeed. But a large African man was in the corner by himself. He hung his head. He had walked and walked and toiled and dreamed of freedom and there he was–looking down at the bottom of his glass. Alone, in the middle of the great, white, tolerating Vermont.

We took him under our wings that night. He followed us around wherever we went and we got him to smile. We babysat him in his childish drunkenness and we learned a bit about his experience. We gave him a ride home at the end of the night. He got out of the car, shook our hands with both his hands beaming a chalk white smile, and then asked for our phone numbers. We gave them to him and as we pulled away he waved at us excitedly until we were long gone.

I remember watching him standing on the corner waving to us–a tall man in a cold place; a survivor, alone again, on a journey to fit into a country that hands him a lonely bottle and uncomfortably rewards him with a wide arc of empty chairs.

He called me once. It was couple weeks later and his message was left at 2am. It was garbled, drunken and full of this, “Maaann…Fuck maaan…..Maaan…..give me a call….maaaan…Fuck maaaan.” He never left me a number and I still wonder what happened to that tall, beautiful purple man who fought so hard to live the life of an outcast, in the corner of bar, in a country that doesn’t really want him.
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My first poem was about Nickel; he moved me that much.

Narcissism and the Nickel

A mirror to stare;
Television’s hue and glare;
Narcissism stands at the door and is welcomed by the throng;
Shake not.
Hands comb hair only few of us dare; Paper’s crumbled texture holds the keys to the riddle.
The Nickle’s number shares a space with the vain’s.
One honored and true;
Tested and tried in the journey across sands and seas;
Tears and strife; The other given the gift of the Apple and fading, fleeting beauty.
A devious sun to rise, shine, and then set behind a just horizon.
Two numbers, two paths;
Narcissism and the Nickel.