It was like I produced it by some kind of biological function. That's what haunts me. The story itself only remains in my mind in the faintest possible terms -- something about unrequited love; there's a girl who's impossibly out of grasp. I remember the tone was informal, like it could've been told over a camp fire somewhere, the face of the teller up-lit in red and yellow. Nothing else stuck.

When I was still prepubescent, my parents responded to my youthful acting out by bringing in the "doctor" from down the road. Bent, liver-spotted with whole forests of nose-hairs and a necklace stringed with bits of bone and feathers -- I think he was half-Indian or something -- he was the only one they trusted. The only one who was part of their congregation. Perhaps if I had been taken to a psychiatric professional I would have been given drugs; tempered by the methods of Dr. Spock. Instead the "doctor" was convinced that the reason I was always talking to myself and not paying attention in school and so forth was an imbalance of energy in my pineal gland, and he hooked me up to an EEG machine. Cold, metal, gel-covered electrodes were pressed hard into my head, feeding into a little box on the coffee table. The "doctor" sat on my parents' green and yellow couch scrutinizing as the box went scritcha scritcha scritcha;paper spilled out of it and piled onto the floor and I remember the moment when his deep-set eyes bugged out and his back straightened up. He sat there for a long time, going over it. Eventually, he ripped the paper from the machine and brought it into the kitchen where my parents were sitting, smoking. There was shouting then.

The "doctor" came back. As he took off the electrodes he had this spooked white expression, looking at me and not responding to my questions about what was going on. He packed up his machine and left, and my parents came in and said I wouldn't be seeing him again. They turned on the television, told me to keep myself busy and went up to their bedroom. And then more shouting.

As soon as I heard their door close, I got up and crept into the kitchen where I found the rolls of gridded, greenish paper on the table. I pulled myself onto a chair and took it in my hands. Written on the paper -- and I'm aware this doesn't make sense, but I'm not liable for the coherence of memory -- were words, and the words were a story of unrequited love.

I read it through there, and when I was done I left it where I found it. I wish I hadn't. I wish I'd secreted it away somewhere, because the next day the story was gone and now I have only the vague but palpable impression it left behind. I went through the trash looking for it when my parents were in the other room, but only found some old food and beer bottles. How was a device equipped with merely a needle that goes up and down able to write English letters? Where did the story come from? I don't know. Maybe it was never there at all. Maybe I dreamed the whole thing. I'd ask my parents but they died two weeks later.

#

There's something about dwarfs. Or is it "dwarves"? Either way, the word brings to mind stout, rosy-faced little men who whistle while they work, or bearded creatures with pointy ears and pick-axes fighting trolls, or maybe the self-conscious weirdness of a Fellini or David Lynch. From ancient times to vaudeville, dwarfs have been mocked, made sport of and portrayed as non-human. There are a handful of contrary examples, like the famous paintings by Goya in which the dwarfs of the Spanish court -- kept around as clowns and freaks -- were painted in a way that emphasized their humanity. More recently, special interest groups have lobbied against stereotypical and degrading portrayals of dwarfs. But ultimately, for every Mickey on "Seinfeld" or Finbar McBride in The Station Agent there's a Mini-Me or "Midget Bowling" lurking around the corner. It's possible this speaks to a kind of cultural self-defense system; dwarfs didn't choose to be dwarfs, after all, and on some level that's deeply frightening. It reminds us of everything in the world that is basically beyond our control, height and bone structure becoming a metaphor for all genetic disorders, for family, race and nationality at birth, for every injustice of the world around us and for the inevitability of death. As with the mentally retarded, lampooning dwarfs and turning them into objects of ridicule is a way of distancing them from us, a way of avoiding the reality that, like us, they're just people trying to get along with their lives as best they can in an essentially unjust world.

In fact it was Peter Dinklage, who played the aforementioned Finbar McBride, that gave a well-known diatribe in the independent film Living in Oblivion regarding the use of little people in popular media. (Dinklage, incidentally, lives here in Williamsburg and I often see him walking around.) In a movie being filmed within that film, Dinklage's character, Tito, was cast as a dwarven dream-figure in an amusing, brightly colored suit and top hat, walking around a female ingenue. After being repeatedly referred to as "Toto," Tito explodes, "Why does my character have to be a dwarf? Is that the only way you can make this a dream, to put a dwarf in it? Have you ever had a dream with a dwarf in it? Do you know anyone who's had a dream with a dwarf in it? No! I don't even have dreams with dwarfs in them!"

The implication here is that dwarfs are a heavy-handed and artificial way to make something seem weird or dream-like. It's indicative of a lack of imagination, a cliché that has nothing whatever to do with actual little people.

That all said, this dwarf is making me very uncomfortable. His name's Charlie, and today he's just sitting on a stool and letting his eyes drill into the side of my skull as I pretend not to pay attention to him. He's wearing a white shirt with a red sash around his neck, black pants and a straw pie-plate hat with a red band -- a gondolier's outfit. He also has a long gondolier's oar, which he lets lean across his body and extend to the floor much as his feet don't.

We're in Hitchens' Tavern, a Honky Tonk bar in Williamsburg known for its assorted taxidermy, southern microbrews and for the impeccable selection of Southern, Country and Bluegrass hits on its jukebox. It has become popular among the Brooklyn hipsters for its kitsch, "ironic" value, though the proprietor Michael Hitchens (whom everyone calls "Cowboy") hadn't intended the place to be ironic at all; he just wanted somewhere to hang out in that was like his favorite bars back home in Texas while he pursued his abiding interest in New York fetish clubs. Which, of course, makes the whole thing more ironic, if, in truth, we're still talking about irony at all, a word which post-Alanis Morissette seems to have lost all meaning, anyway.

"Y'know," says Cowboy Hitchens, leaning on his side of the bar, "I think I've finally figured what it's all about."

"What what's about?" I ask, doing my best to ignore the dwarf. What's with the Italian thing, anyway? Maybe if he were dressed as a mariachi musician I could understand it as a straight-forward racist dig on my ancestry. But Italian? Apropos of nothing.

"Life, the whole thing," Hitchens tilts back his Cowboy hat with his thumb to look me in the eye. "The big question," he emphasizes.

"So what's the answer?"

"Gumbo," says Cowboy Hitchens, his voice gravelly with import.

"Gumbo?"

"Gumbo," he repeats, nodding. "All my life I think all I really wanted was a truly satisfying bowl of gumbo. See, it's the simple things that matter, you know? The basic human-type stuff. Why I remember when I was a kid, my grandaddy would cook up the finest crawdad gumbo you ever tasted. The taste'd hit your mouth, and it'd just be happiness, you know? Pure and simple. I tell you, I've made gumbos great and small in my time and I've never made a spoonful that'd compare to ol' grandaddy's."

Something cold smacks against my head and dinks to the floor. It's an ice cube. Charlie has another one in his hand and a second later it hits my forehead, leaving a wet smear. He's only doing this because he knows no one else can see him. He likes making me crazy. It doesn't matter how much I explain to him that a dwarf wearing strange outfits and speaking in odd, contrived manners is heavy-handed and unconvincing, he won't go away.

"Not that gumbo's simple, mind you. Why, making the roux alone... you ever made a roux, Reeves? Why, my granddaddy..." His voice trails off, and then he says almost to himself, "God rest his soul, he used to live on this big river you could just stick your arms in and scoop out crawdads hand over fist. But he never shared the recipe, you know? It was some big secret. He'd never tell. I even once hired one o' them ladies who say they can talk to the dead that I might get some hint out of Granddaddy, but she said that he just wants me to be happy or some trash that Granddaddy would never say. I tell you, Grandaddy's gumbo, crawdads so fresh they practically wiggled in your mouth, okra juicier than a pulpless orange. Just thinking about it gets me right here, right in the stomach."

"Why don't you ever make some gumbo for the bar?" I ask, "Sounds pretty good."

Hitchens frowns, "I could never get it quite right, is what I'm saying." He motions with his head over towards the kitchen, "Oh, I got a pot of gumbo stewing back there right now, but I'd never let anyone have a taste of it. What would be the point? It'd be like an appearance by the runner-up Miss America. Sure, she's pretty an' all, but why bother? Naw, until I get it right, no one but me'll taste it."

"You're a very strange man, Cowboy," I say.

"Gumbo ain't a joke, son," says Hitchens.

Meanwhile, Charlie (the dwarf) has jumped up onto the bar and is walking toward me, rowing along with his oar and singing "'Att's Amore". God, that song isn't even Italian, really. He stops in front of me, and yells out at the top of his lungs, "'AT'S A SPICY MEATA BALL!"

"That's so offensive," I mumble, pulling my palm across my cheek.

"What's that?" asks Hitchens.

"Nothing."

"Why donchu introduce us, yuh screwball?" says Charlie. "Yuh know you wanna tell everybody," he thrusts out his pelvis, "SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND!"

He knows that's not even the right stereotype. He must. It's just to get to me. I pointedly pick up my drink and slink over to a table in the corner. It's only when I look back and see Hitchen's open mouth that I realize I've gotten up and left in the middle of a conversation. Charlie too, seems a little abandoned, has hand indignantly on his chest. He jumps down off the bar and saunters over, "Hey, yuh screwball, what's da big idea--" but he is thankfully interrupted by the arrival of Slim Jake, who strides through the door, gives me a nod and a smile and comes over.

Slim is a busker, a local fixture at the "L" train platform at Union Square. He wears a black fedora with an ostrich feather sticking out of the band and a pair of reflective aviator sunglasses. He has dirty blond hair that falls in curls to his chin. Slung over his unbuttoned collared shirt and wife-beater is an acoustic guitar in a gig bag. He discovered that I once studied audio engineering (it was a long time ago, it felt like another life) and has recruited me to record the album he's putting together with his band, The Argonauts. I have been spending a lot of time out in Flushing with him and his buddies over the last couple of weeks, recording them in his drummer's parents' basement.

Charlie jumps up onto Slim's head and sits cross legged on his hat, peering down with his palms in his cheeks. Slim says that he's glad to run into me. He tells me we're having one last recording session before the whole thing is put on hold. Slim is going to head to Spain for a while. This strikes me as very strange, since he's worked so hard on the album and was really excited to finish it, and besides I was under the impression that professional buskers weren't the biggest intercontinental travelers, as they tended not to have a lot of money. This turns out to be a false impression as Slim explains to me that buskers travel all the time, in fact it tends to be a transient life-style, and thank god for the ridiculously low airfares advertised in the back of the Village Voice.

Charlie has grown bored and has started doing cartwheels from one end of the bar to the other.

"So you're going to Spain to work?"

"Well, not exactly. There's a whole story behind it."

"A story, huh?" I lean back against the table. Slim considers the glass in his hand, a huge grin spreads across his face. I know this grin. Slim doesn't use the word 'story' lightly.

He glances sidelong at me, "It's a really interesting story."

"Well, I'm not going anywhere." This is like a game, pretending I have to tease it out of him.

His guitar case is leaning against the wall, and Slim self-consciously reaches over and pats something large and square in the front pocket of it, as if to be sure it's still there.

"What's that?"

"A book," Slim adjusts himself and picks up his beer, "Its actually the reason I'm going to Spain, to find out where it comes from."

"Is it valuable?" I ask, "Rare?"

"More than rare, but here, let me explain. You see," Slim tilts his hat back and reclines into the bar, the lights reflecting off the sunglasses he hasn't taken off, "it all goes back to when I first came to New York." And as Slim begins to talk the bar seems to melt away, washing off into the world Slim creates one word at a time:

#

I was 17 years old when I came to New York. In the first two weeks I lost a pound for every year of my life. Just another penniless immigrant - well, I guess Alaska's not technically another country but me being Alaskan felt as foreign as being Italian or Korean or Nigerian or whatever. I slept on rooftops most of the time, climbing up fire escapes or testing for open front doors on the little buildings lining downtown. It was 1999, dot-com boom, gentrification sweeping through the city like some kind of yuppie plague and I was diving through the dumpsters while kids not much older than me were passing by chatting on their cell phones about their stock options and new computers. I guess I was drinking a bit then. It's easy to get into, especially when you're alone all the time. At least I managed to hang on to my guitar and busking was a lot more fun than panhandling. Me, a guitar, this old hat, a pair of sunglasses, down in the subways with my big ass grin.

Everything changed when I met Julio. See, once I started busking I figured I should take it seriously and started scoping the competition. I found Julio by the west stairs of the "L" train platform at Union Square, and you've gotta picture him - black and gray hair down to his ass, and this Fu Manchu mustache like pencil-thin white ropes coming off his lips. Always wore purple because he said he was royalty. Right after he gets out his nylon string baby and sets up his case he starts howling, screaming and yelling like someone had shoved a butter knife right in his eye. The people start coming around ready to call 911 or Superman or something because Jesus God this guy clearly'd just had his appendix or his spleen or his whole damn brain just blow up into a billion white-hot pieces and then

and then when all these people were gathered around him, his hand came down on the strings like a jackhammer and the howling morphed into a song lyric. He shocked the entire station into submission. End of the first song, I swear to God on my life this dude, in his sixties if he was a day, does a run at a trashcan -- a subway trash can, five feet high, made of metal and attached to the floor -- he runs up onto it like Jackie Chan and back-flips off, Pete Townshend windmill move, Beatle bow. Subway goers erupting into a Vesuvius of applause. Incredible.

I sat there for six hours straight watching him, until finally he takes the donations from his guitar case -- more money than I'd seen in my entire time in New York -- and starts shoveling it into a backpack. He'd noticed me sitting there, he waved bye and was gone.

The next day I was there waiting. He nodded at me when he came in, took out the guitar and started hooting and hollering and going insane again. Six hours later he picked up, waved and left.

The third day when he saw me waiting, I think he decided to put a little extra juice into the show. Like it was for me. I swear the guy was the best busker this city's ever seen, he totally redefined my idea of subway performing. Comedic sentences rolling from his mouth in his easy southern drawl, mixing in shots of Spanish and Japanese, playing with the crowd, teasing and talking and hand slapping and dancing. He just didn't let up. He ended the set with a backflip into a no-handed cartwheel. And after packing up he waves bye to me again, but this time I'm not just gonna let him go, I run up after him and start walking beside him.

"Yuh know," he said without looking at me, "I think I'm getting too old for these high fallootin' acrobatics."

That's what he said, Fallootin', and we start talking, right in with no introductions like we'd known each other for years. I said, "You sounded really good today." And he said, "I know."

And then he goes right to his life story. You see, Julio's dad was Puerto Rican. He'd volunteered for World War Two and tested into the OSS. Trained in espionage. Trained in Japanese. Few years after the war ended the first ever Japanese restaurant opened up in his county in Missouri. So he went in and started flirting with the waitress in her language -- the girl'd never met a gaijin who spoke the mother tongue and she's so weirded out by the whole thing that she didn't even think to say "no" when when he asked her to have a beer with him the next night. That's how Julio's parents met. Sweet, right? I got the feeling later, much later, over long talks passing back and forth a bong tall as my forearm in a fog of smoke, that his childhood wasn't actually so rosy - he ran away from home pretty young to hitchhike around the country, and never talked much about his parents beyond how they met. But then, that first conversation when he was wheeling me back through his history, everything about him was magic.

I mean, there was a while there, sifting for half-eaten burgers or nursing a brown-bagged bottle on a stoop, when I really regretted coming to New York, where I felt like I'd made this mountain-sized mistake. But talking to Julio made it okay. Like living the "traveling" life-style was the most fundamental act of liberation, the only real way to grab hold of the American Dream. At least until we started walking through Tompkins Square Park, the part where the old homeless go, the path that the police call "death row". Julio is saying "hi" to some of these guys, chatting for a moment with dudes that smell like urine, or who stared into space with faces blank as a switched-off TV. I swear I saw one guy actually take a dump through the slats of one of the benches. It scared me cold, that I might end up like that, and I couldn't reconcile this thousand-volt musician who had the world in his pocket with these sad drunk people lining the benches, waiting to die. You have to understand, up in Alaska we just don't have homeless people like there are here. I had no way to understand.

Julio took me out into Alphabet City and told me that he's a squatter, part of a community of homeless who took over abandoned buildings and fixed them up for themselves. So we go into a run-down old building on avenue C, the insides covered in graffiti floor-to-ceiling, and with each step we go up the stairs I'm getting more and more down because I'm thinking even if I get to be like Julio, even if I become as good a musician, an entertainer, even if I achieve all that he has, I could still be part of the "homeless", like him. Living in an abandoned building. How could he have ended up this way? Didn't someone as great as him deserve to be rich and famous and, y'know, have roses thrown at him wherever he went? And then with a click he opens his door and we're inside this garden, the whole place laid out with trees and bushes and God knows what else, little pot plants hidden away on one side of the room where he could slip them down a crevice if the place got raided, a green sofa and a TV hidden in front of it so that it seemed part of the scenery. He had a water bed. He had a full surround stereo system he'd built into the walls that was playing nature sounds. Against one wall there was a god-damned stand-up jacuzzi he'd made look like a pond, with a spout high up near the ceiling that poured out over some rocks and into the water like a mini-waterfall. And he walks me around the place, starts telling me how he'd been landscaping it, and the little ideas he'd played out in flowers and greenery, and fixes me a dry sherry from this massive liquor cabinet.

See, Julio was the best. The most successful busker this city's ever seen, and he didn't waste it all on dope or anything. Instead, he'd built himself paradise in a forgotten low-rise on avenue C.

He let me crash there for a while, and I became part of the community. We would perform together sometimes, and he taught me some moves. Wailing on tunes with him in a Subway station was the best education a man could have.

So one day I was sitting on a log in Julio's apartment and he brought out the book, just casually like it was nothing. And he flipped through it, pointing out some of the titles and little illustrations.

"What's that?" I asked.

"This? This, m'boy, could be yours one day."

I tried a different tack. "Where'd you get it?"

"There's a funny story behind that, actually." He said, "I ever tell you about the first time I got down to Mexico?"

#

See, I hitched on into Chihuahua and down to the Copper Canyon for a spell. Copper Canyon -- four times larger than the Grand Canyon and at points a half mile deeper. There's this whole tribe'a Indians lives down there, and without a casino in sight, and they sell crafts and perform their dancing around and celebratin' and tourist bilkin'. Now, think about this fer a second, you've got this unbelievably gigantic hole in the ground, a genuine un-reservationized tribe'a Indians in their native habitat, and all within a couple of hours flight'a good, old Texas. The place was white boy city! And as you well know, tourists equal money, always and forever. So I found a hotel along the big train route, and watched the white folks shell out peso after peso for little homemade Indian knicknacks, the profit margin on which must've been just staggerin', let me tell you. I had it in my head on the way down that I might make a few bills singing there, but the Indians had such a lock-down on the street-level markets that lowly li'l me with a guitar and an attitude din stand a chance.

So I think to myself for a while and I look over at the Indians, and I look at the tourists, and then I look at the Indians again, and suddenly, like a flash'a magic, it hits me. I sneak off into the woods, and I take out an old shirt, all paisly-like like those Indians love, and I start tearin' and rippin' at it, 'til it's all in shreds. And I strip down 'til I'm bare as daylight, and I wrap a bit around me like a loin cloth and I wrap another bit around my arm, and another like a headband, and then I grab two sticks lyin' on the ground just like any others.

And I pack up my clothin' into my satchel, and I grab my guitar case and I sneak off down into the Canyon - not too far down, you understand, so it's all hikers and thrill seekers and people who eat yogurt and who knows. I find a path where there's not so much heavy traffic but like groups of two or five comin' down through, all pointin' at things and stickin' their heads out like a bunch of geese.

And I put down my bags and wait. As soon as I see a nice, obese little Southern couple come waddlin' down like pair of giant penguins, you know -- the kind what makes apple pie, and goes to church and don't like to discuss one or t'other's drinkin' problem -- and I clap my sticks together and leap out with a big old grimace and scare them half to death, like. And then, I give out a li'l hoot, soft and curious -- "hoot?" -- and I dance. And, I'm dancin' away and what I'm doin' is, I swear, half Michael Jackson and half Bruce Lee, I'm gyratin' and I'm shimmerin' and I'm spinnin' around like I was in the goddamn Ice Capades. And at first they're practically clutchin' each other for dear life, like I was gonna eat them up, and then they're touristin' nature just gets the better of 'em and you can almost see their resistance just meltin' on away, like the scare plain wiped them brains clean out and slowly my dance was pourin' on in. By the end their greasin' my outstretched hand with enough money to buy two or three of them over-priced trinkets up on the hill.

Was able to do that for 3 whole days, 'fore the tour guides chased me out of there.

Anyway, I was meeting up with a buddy of mine who used to tell me these stories about getting the kindest, sweetest buds for practically nothin'. Mexico -- from the way he told it, you'd think the streets was paved with weed, right? So, I get down there and my friend is living in this hovel -- and this is a hovel by Mexican standards, keep in mind, so it's basically like they dug a big hole in the ground, put a hovel-sized cardboard box over it and then shoveled in a few thousand cockroaches, you get the idea. My friend is laid up with the goddamn tourista, but sho'nuff he was so stoned he couldn't hardly feel it. If you wanted some weed down there, you'd just knock on the wall, and the guy next door'd come over and sell it to you for less'n a quarter of what you'd pay for it stateside. 'Course, I think he was just reselling his own stash, not a dealer or nothin', so he was actually marking it up from street price, but it was still so cheap we din care.

I stayed there for a couple of weeks. It was a decent sized town, full of colonial-style stucco and gigantic trees willy nilly everywhere, and maybe an hour and a half walk to the beach. It was warm and slow, and smelled like wet grass baking in the sun, and if it weren't fer the trucks and cars barreling through you might think you'd been stranded back a hundred years. The beer and smokes were cheaper'n the weed, and every couple of days I'd go down into the main square and play on the street, and folks would throw me some pesos. I took a chance that they din wanna hear Mexican stuff, and I played American music for 'em and they mostly ate it up, especially the li'l kids. Anyway, one day I'm down there in the square playing, and this li'l ol' Mexican guy - who had enough hair pouring out of his ears that he could've wound it up a few times 'round his finger, and was missing most of his teeth, a reg'lar Señor Toothless - appears out of somewhere with a mandolin and asks if he can join me. I says sure, the more the merrier, and I start in on an ol' Leadbelly tune that Señor Toothless somehow manages to make sound like mariachi. After that I did a Willie Nelson number, which he made sound like mariachi. Then I did this surf rock thing which he thought about for a second and then made sound like mariachi. He had a real gift.

Anyway, after a while I'm ready to pack it in and shove off, and I offer Señor Toothless some of the money, since he helped me make it and all. He looks at the money and then looks up at me kind of funny and he asks me if I like to gamble. And I shrug and say "sho'nuff", and he grins like a hyena - he had this big gummy kind'a old man grin.

He leads me back down some dirt road, hopping along on his arthritic li'l legs, until we come to a cantina sitting there in the middle of nowhere - the kind they still have down there with the swinging gate doors, that don't allow women and whose only purpose seems to be drinkin' and beatin' up on other people drinking. I tell you, it's a good thing I wasn't wearin' all the purple back then, 'cause I prob'ly wouldn't've come outta there with all my appendages and whatnot. Inside we're tearing through veils of smoke and squintin' and drinkin', 'til we're past a doorway where the smoke lifts up to a high ceiling. And there's rows of people back there all sittin' on benches, facing a stage at the far end of the room. On one side of the stage is a microphone stand, all alone in the spotlight. On the other side was a big circular table, 'round which were seated a whole mess'a folks playing poker. And Señor Toothless, he leads me right down the aisle, up onto the stage and sits me down there, introducin' me. Straight off I'm smokin' ceegars and throwing back Tequila and Whisky and Pulque and God knows what else. They was talking Spanish so guttural I couldn't hardly follow it all, and the bottles just kept flowing, a stream of full ones passed up by the audience, empty ones back.

And it wasn't exactly poker that they was playing, neither. I tell you 'fore or since, I ain't seen nothin' quite like it. Essentially it was 5-card Mexican Stud, played with a Spanish deck - you know, only 40 cards - 'cept anytime you showed a face card up you had to take a long swig of whatever kind of liquor got handed you. After each round the two players with the highest hands would play a best-of-three run-off round'a Siete Loco.

And it din end there. If you won the run-off, then one of 'em with a big hairy arm'd wipe your pot clean into a bin on the side of the table, then you'd have to get up and stand in front of that microphone on the other side of the stage and - get this now - tell a li'l story.

If the audience liked the story, which liking they would show with applause and hollers and passed bottles of booze, then you get to keep your winnin's and rejoin the table durin' the next game. However, if'n the audience starts booin' and, yuh'know, throwin' the aforementioned bottles 'stead of passin' 'em, well, not only did an hombre lose his entire pot, added back to the current one, but you was liable to get bodily removed from the place by a sea of hands and be lucky if you still had any money or valuables on the other side of the door.

Anyway, once I'd sat down and had this whole rigamaroll 'splained to me, the bunch of 'em looked at each other all shifty-eyed-like, and immediately started throwin' the game. See they wanted to get me up in front of that mic right off with a small pot, just to see what kind of mettle I was made of. So, sho'nuff, I end up standing there with a little el cheapo spotlight pointed at me, and what looked to be a seventh or eighth hand mic thrust up in my face. And I looked out at this crowd, and, yuh'know, they're gonna judge me quick and fierce -- you think you've seen hostile audiences, you ain't seen squat, man, lemee tell you, these guys would've just as soon gutted you, skinned you and fried you up with a side'a beans as looked at you. I decided I was gonna keep it short and sweet, and thinking up right quick I laid this story into 'em:

#

Once upon a time there was this kid who everyone called El Coyote, 'cause he was always sticking his nose where it din belong and, yuh'know, pullin' up mail boxes, stealin' other kids lunch money and things. Now, El Coyote was real vain, always workin' out in his school gym, 'til he got himself big and buff and lookin' like any of them guys posin' in the magazines. That is, 'cept for his ass, which no matter how much he seemed to work it always stayed thin and bony and nothin' much to write home about. This bothered El Coyote like some big, red rash you just can't get rid of - I mean, you know women - they love the ass.

Now, at school there was this girl who El Coyote thought was just the prettiest li'l thing he ever did see and she made his heart thump half to pieces just to think of her. 'Cept this girl was dating a big, beefy soccer player guy who everyone called "the Duck" on account of his feet would stick out either way when he walked. The Duck and his girl would spend every free second they had together. It seemed every time El Coyote went to find the girl and declare his undyin' heart-thumpinness, there would be the Duck all nuzzlin' up with her. She would even go to all his soccer practices and games, she was never far from him.

Now, the Duck had this pair of glass marbles that looked like eyes, which was given to him by his dear ol' grandmommy - family heirloom, right? And the Duck was very superstitious, and kept the eyes in his gym locker and said he couldn't possibly play a game but he knew the eyes were safe and sound in there.

Well one day during soccer practice El Coyote snuck into the locker room with a crowbar, and stole away with the eyes.

When practice was over, the Duck right away is searchin' around everywhere, askin' everyone if maybe they'd seen 'em roll somewhere, and El Coyote bounds right on up to him and says he happened to be on the school roof when he saw a real shady looking character up there with a pair of marbles just like the ones the Duck lost. And the Duck tells his girlfriend to go wait for him at her house, and then he and El Coyote go on up the stairs to the roof. And when they get up there, sho'nuff, the marbles are lying over in a corner, and the Duck grabs 'em and turns 'round just in time to see El Coyote close and lock the only door. The Duck was stuck.

Giddy as can be El Coyote hops his way over to the girlfriend's house and sees her lookin' out an open second story window, watching for her love's return. And El Coyote stands there under the window and proclaims, with all the practice of long days of waitin', heart-thumpin', unstoppin' love for her, he yells:

"Look! See these arms and how strong they are! I made them strong for you! And look, look at my legs! They could run forever, if they were running to you! And look at my pecs! Look how they dance for you! They dance for your love!"

And the girl looks down and says, "And that scrawny, little ass, is that for me too, El Coyote?"

El Coyote turns the color of a radish.

"You don't want me anyway," the girl taunts him, "I have teeth in my cootie and I'll eat you up!" And she starts making gnashin' and gnawin' sounds with her teeth, CHOMP CHOMP GRIT GRIT.

Meanwhile, the Duck had somehow actually climbed down the side of the school building, and right then he comes 'round to his girl's place and sees El Coyote there, and with a big ol' roar he gives chase, the girl's laughter trailing behind them. Through street and alley, they run, and El Coyote is windin' through crowds and vaultin' over car hoods, and ends up in a junk yard, hidin' out inside an old cabinet. And as the Duck goes searching for him through the rubbish, El Coyote starts thinking about how the girl din want him, and the more he thinks 'bout it, the more angry he gets that his one, shining chance at true love was dashed all to pieces by his bony, tiny, worthless, pitiful excuse for an ass. And he starts cursin' his ass to himself, thinkin' every lousy thought a guy can think about his own rear.

Now, I don't know if body parts have feelin's. I don't know if El Coyote's ass was sad that it wasn't never able to make good, if it choked back li'l ass tears up inside its colon, if maybe it rued the day it was placed on the back side such a no-good ingrate who didn't appreciate an ass that worked so hard at emptyin' out bowels and other such assly duties, no, I couldn't tell you what that ass might've been thinking, or if it wanted to be good or get revenge or what, but I swear on my life that that ass grew right there five times as big, bursting out through the doors of the cabinet, where it was immediately seen by the Duck, who grabbed El Coyote and beat him to a bloody pulp.

The moral of the story is, don't ever try to impress a girl with dancin' pecs.

#

Well, the folks in the bar roared up with laughter and applause and I took my pot from the bucket and sat back down at the table.

From there on in there was no foolin' 'round. In truth it had to be better to be in the audience than in the game - even if the players did drink free - since the players where too busy trying to concentrate on the game to pay attention to the stories. Which was part of the idea, y'understand, the storytelling to distract the players, and if you had any sense you just tried to block it on out entirely.

I quickly lost what I had won in that first round, and the winning hands went 'round the table, 'til finally old Señor Toothless hisself was sent over to the microphone, at which point I folded early 'cause I was dead curious as to what he was about.

It was good that I did too. If I hadn't I prob'ly would never have gotten the book:

#

I'm guessing nobody here remembers the revolution. Only viejetes like me remember it. It took eight years, but none of my brothers came home. Well, some of them came back in a bag. The rest we would just put rocks in the coffin. Big Catholic funeral for a bunch of rocks. I had eleven brothers. I was the youngest. My Papá, the war took him too. It was just me and my Mamá, and when the soldiers came she hid me. Papá was too old for war, but most of my brothers were already taken by the time he went. By then they were taking just about anyone.

We lived in a little village in Veracruz, and Papá used to play mandolin down at the cantina with some friends. I went down and watched him, usually. He used to play every week. After he was taken Mamá gave his mandolin to me.

Once the war was over, I saw my first gringo. One day he was sitting in the main square with a guitar, singing for pesos. This was before television, we all went out to see him, never saw anything like him. He played and played. I went and watched him every day. Even after weeks when most of the other people stopped going and listening, I kept listening. He spoke well, he would say to me, "Hey, chico, have pesos today?" or "Hey, chico, how are you called?" and eventually he asked, "Hey, chico, do you play music?"

One day I brought out Papá's mandolin. Papá taught me how to play a little. Not a lot. But the gringo started teaching me things. Jazz chords, blue notes. He told me about street performers and how they go wherever they want to, whenever they want to. We spent a lot of time together.

Every Easter a man in the village would put on a loin cloth and a crown of twigs and carry a cross up a hill, where we would have a big fiesta. Now most of the young men were taken, and the last Easter old Señor Cardoza had brung the cross up and had almost killed himself doing it. I don't remember who pointed it out first, but the gringo with his skin and his beard and hair never combed, he looked a lot like Jesus. That Easter we asked him if he would take the cross up the hill. We dressed him up and up he went. We all danced behind him, playing drums and singing.

What we didn't know was that the gringo had gotten the hep, and he was already starting to sweat all the time and feeling bad. He was pissing black piss. He's taking the cross up the hill and halfway up, he tells me all about it later, halfway up he starts seeing spots. And he starts feeling bad in his stomach, breathing hard, his head is hurting. And right when he's getting near the top he says it was like everything stopped. Like if you've ever had one of those dreams where you're walking except it doesn't seem like you're actually going anywhere because nothing's moving. Like that. He can only see straight in front of him, everything else is black. And there's this man standing there, some guy in silver rim glasses. The man touches the gringo on his forehead, here, and the gringo falls onto the ground, onto the cross.

We carried him down. I asked my Mamá if he could be taken to our house, and she said okay. He had been camping out in the woods. We laid him on one of my brother's beds, and the doctor came and told us he had the hep. So he stayed in our house for the night and Mamá had me sleeping in her bed, because my bed and my brothers' beds were all in the same room, and she didn't want me sleeping in the same room with a sick person.

The next day I sat with him in the room and we played some music, but he couldn't for very long because he was sick, and mostly it was me playing to him. He was very quiet.

That night I was woken up by a noise. Some kind of bump. My mother was still sleeping. I left her room and opened the door to the other bedroom and peaked in. The Gringo was sitting on his bed and he had a big book sitting on his lap. He was writing very quickly, sweating. He sees me at the door and waves me in with two fingers. I stand in front of him, and he tells me about what happened up on the hill. He tells me that after the man on the hill touched him on the forehead, he knew things he didn't know before, things he couldn't know. He told me, but I was too young to understand. To me they just sounded like all the secrets of the universe. While he talked, I fell asleep on the floor. He kept talking until morning. When I woke up he was gone.

Two years went by. A package arrived at our house. It was addressed to "El Chico". Mamá carefully unwrapped the brown paper. When she saw what it was, she didn't understand why anyone would send me a big book with all the writing in English. But she gave it to me, anyway.

I never did see that Gringo again.

#

There Señor Toothless paused long and hard, and then he started to step to the table. The audience was in an uproar, demandin' to know what was in the book. But Señor Toothless was wily and grinned a little and said that they'd just have to wait for him to win again.

And he sits down. A few more rounds and sho'nuff, I'm dead out of cash, so I sit back and watch the stories for a while, and then eventually I slink out.

With no money I'm naturally back on the street playing guitar the next day. And into the afternoon, here comes Señor Toothless with his mandolin. We play for a while, then we stop and get a couple tacos. I ask him if the story about the gringo and the book was true, and he grins a little and reaches into his bag and pulls up, just enough for me to see the bindin', the yellowed side of a large hardcover tome. And he tells me that he had traveled all over, and gotten people to translate it, and it wasn't what he expected at all. Yuh'see, apparently the gringo wasn't the first person to have it. The stuff about the guy on the hill was only the tiniest bit of what was in there -- it was full of stories, brimming over, in all sorts of handwritings and languages going back who knows how many years. Decades. Centuries, maybe.

Señor Toothless tells me that according to somethin' written on the front of the book, the thing was passed down from street performer to street performer. And he said that he supposed he'd have to pass it on to someone soon, too, since he was gettin' so old and all. Naturally I volunteered right off. By now I was just dyin' to see what was in that thing, but he just laughed at me. He said the book was a big responsibility, no telling how much busker lore on the line if the book was somehow mangled up like.

Now, when I was a little child, my mother used to make all sorts of things for me with origami. My favorite was this here nautilus shell, made with blue washi paper, and she had it laquored for me. When I left home I took it, and I put it on a string and I wear it around my neck to this very day. I took out the nautilus shell, and I explained about it, and I said if I could keep this li'l thing safe, surely I could a big ol' book.

And Señor Toothless again said no, he'd just met me, it was too soon. But see, I had an idea about this guy from when he first asked me to join in the card game - he was a big-time gambler, the type of guy who just couldn't resist a bet or a wager. So thinkin' quick like, I waggle my finger at a particular pretty girl talkin' to some girlfriends on a bench. And I say, listen, how about we both play a love song to that girl, and whichever song she says she likes better, well, the singer gets the book. And I look at the old man, and I see this sparkle shine up in his eye like he thinks he's got me licked already. He says, you first.

So I go over to the girl, and I introduce myself and ask if maybe she can settle something between this friend and me, and I wink and smile and kiss her hand and nod at her friends and then start into a low down, sultry kind of song, something drippin' with sex and giggle rousin' innuendo. By the end the girl and her friends are all clappin' and cheerin' and they're eatin' right outta my hand, and I say to myself, there ain't no way that old fart is gonna be able to top me by nothin'.

Boy was I wrong about that. That old, creeky, liver-spotted, toothless, white haired midget started singing a song that, I swear, I was half expecting the whole sky to open wide up just so a big shaft of golden sunshine could spotlight upon him while li'l birdies an' deer gathered all around, and cherubim soared on down from heaven to sprinkle him with multi-colored flower petals. The girl was probably in tears by the end of the thing, 'cept I wouldn't know 'cause by the middle of the third verse I'd slid the book outta his bag and hightailed it down the street fast as I my legs would take me.

#

Now that I look back on it, I think the whole time Julio was grooming me for the book. He used to say there was a hunger in my eyes - the kind of hunger that would send a kid from Alaska to New York with no money and knowing nobody. That's why he thought I wore the sunglasses all the time. 'Cause if my hunger was naked it would eat the world.

Well, I don't know about all that. But I guess it's the kind of thing where if you look for something hard enough, if you want it badly enough, you can find it. I wanted a more interesting life, a more interesting world. Julio gave that to me, in spades.

It was pretty soon after he showed me the book that he disappeared. The last time I saw Julio we were heading down to jam at the Astor Place station. He kept stopping to pet all the dogs we passed, practically rolling around with some of them, getting on his knees and panting and sniffing their butts.

"Always be right by dogs." He said to me, in his most professoral voice. "Yuh know, the Aztecs believed dogs where... whatayacallit... psychopomps. Led the dead to the next world. I think they had the right idea. Let's say you're dead, and your soul's just floating up there, all tired and weary from a long, hard life, and you're headin' up towards this light. And as the light gets bigger and bigger, it starts to take a shape, until, sho'nuff, what is it? Why, it's a big, friendly puppy dog come to lick your face and lead you where your supposed to go. Don't that sound nice?" And he panted at me a little to emphasize his point.

He said I'd come a long way since we first met.

"I bet I'm getting even better than you." I said. I didn't actually believe that, but you know, you say things.

He sort of chuckled at me, and said, "Alright, I tell you what. I'll go over to the other side of the station, and we'll both play, and whoever has the most money at the end of the night, well, he's the undisputed, undeniable, true and rightful king of the subways."

I couldn't resist something that might have Julio the Busker calling me the true and rightful king of the subways. So we shook on it, and when we got to the station he took the uptown side and I took the down. He didn't do his shouting routine. He just set up, grinned at me from across the four lanes of tracks between us and started playing. He was really on that night, peeling off the chords with a machine-gun rage, a wail-you-in-the-gut kind of sound-fisting. I harmonized with him arpeggiating notes in a higher register and we started alternating lyrics, call and response, the melody reverberating across the tracks and down the tunnels. When we broke into the chorus, we were laughing together like old drunks.

Then there was pain in my finger. One of the strings had given me a static shock. Then I got another, and another. But I kept on. I looked him dead in the eye and he smiled wider. The shocks became steady, riding farther and farther up my arm. I closed my eyes and saw red in my eyelids. Soon my whole arm felt white, hot and cold at the same time and melting and when it got to be like someone pressing a burning radiator up against my body I let go, falling to my knees and clutching my hand. When I looked up again, Julio's head was down, eyes shut and he was dancing a little, a jig, and something like St. Elmo's fire, like the Northern Lights themselves rode his body. He looked up and winked at me, and just then a "4" train came speeding down the express track, and when it passed Julio was gone.

I looked around for him for a while, then went back to his apartment. His door was unlocked. He'd sold off or replanted everything, his place was totally empty except in the middle of the floor there was the book, waiting for me.

#

I have been drinking as Slim has been telling his tale, Hitchens replacing each empty beer with a fresh one. He doesn't charge me, one perk of befriending an owner who understands my perpetual destitution. But as my vision of Slim in front of me, Hitchens beside me, and Charlie hanging upside-down from a stuffed moose's head across the room wobbles a bit, I conclude that I am now drunk. The crowd has thinned out, there's only a few kids left and Old Man Withers down at the end, and he's always here. Hitchens is talking to someone a few feet away. Slim says, "so I ended up taking over Julio's apartment and his spot at the Union Square subway station. Since then I've spent a lot of time studying the book, really getting to know it. There's these weird letters on the inside of the front cover. I spent a while trying to find someone who knew what they were, and finally I got help from a librarian at the New York Public. Apparently it's in Koine Greek, if you would believe that, and it says to go to Madrid, Seville or Calcutta and look for someone with a certain insignia, which it gives a picture of, a book shape with a weird spiral coming out of it that's in shaky lines like it was embroidery. So I found a particularly cheap rate to Madrid..."

I put my hand to my chin in a way I think is thoughtful, but might just be sloppy, I can't tell at this point, "Could I..." I say, "could I take a look at it? The book, I mean."

Slim glances around, giving an especial look over Old Man Withers, who, with Cowboy Hitchens' distracted, is pulling a whiskey bottle from the other side of the bar to refill his glass, tongue sticking out of his mouth with the effort. He waggles his unruly white eyebrows at us.

Slim turns back to me, "No offense, but if it's just the same to you I'd rather not be flashing it around. Anyway, if you're wondering about the part that was written in there by the Gringo, you wouldn't be able to read it anyway. It's in some kind of code or something. I'm really hoping the folks in Spain will have some idea how to translate it or decrypt it."

"No, no it's," a belch erupts out of me, "its fine, I understand." I pat him on the shoulder. Actually, I'm pretty sure I really say, "ish fine, I unnerstand."

"You alright there, Reeves?" He smiles and his eyebrows rise up over his sunglass, "You need me to walk you home?"

"No, I'm be alright. I get lish'nen to stories aneye loosh track of how mush I'm drinking."

We chat for a little longer before I say that I mush be getting home. I call Charlie down from where he's doing the can-can on top of a mounted swordfish, take him by the hand and start down Grand street, waving behind me at Slim heading off in the other direction. We pass five or six people wearing wet towels wrapped around their heads, which at the time doesn't strike me as odd. The Williamsburg bridge rises up in the distance, a steel latticework against a light evening fog. I look down at Charlie and he looks up and me and grins.

The first time I saw Charlie, I was 12 years old, sitting in a church that had been bought up by the horrible people my parents had thrown in with and had been redubbed the Church of the Great Serpent. Reverend Gilgamesh, the clerical voice of the Great Serpent and second only to Johnny Anaconda had been a successful stage hypnotist before his "conversion" to the One True Snake. He said he was of the opinion that one of the greatest problems with modern Christian sermons was that there was only a few minutes of scripture to every hour of commentary. This struck him as the height of hubris, that the opinions of a single man could be more important than the revealed words of the Almighty, and so mostly he just read long, long passages of Bible text to us, as well as passages from the Quran, the Talmud, the Zohar, the Bhagavad Gita, the Theravada Pali Cannon, the Dhamapada, the Popal Vuh, the Codex Chimalpopoca, the Republic and some other things I was never quite able to identify, always winding up with an extended reading of the Eternal Kindness of the Great Serpent by Johnny Anaconda. It was only much later that I understood how he crafted his vocal modulations and body mannerisms with the precision a composer might give to a symphony. It was only later that had any inkling of the kind of Neuro-Linguistic Programming he was performing on us wide eyed followers. It didn't actually matter what he was reading, as long as it was wordy. He would alter his intonation, a whole range of vocal registers that he would use on individual words and word fragments to create different kinds of commands to kneed our supple brains into predetermined behaviors, and he had ways he would place his hands as visual triggers he could link to ideas if he wanted to, say, encourage hatred for the government, or love for Johnny Anaconda, or boredom with scientific thought, and so on, so that later all he'd have to do is put a finger in the air a certain way and the appropriate feeling would rush into any given congregant. His hands became tools running across a subliminal map of ideas he had impressed into our subconscious, drawing out complex systems of submodalities from one presupposition to another. This is what I've been able to figure out, anyway, he was probably doing other things, too, things that I've never even heard of. It helped, of course, that the kind of people who run off to join snake-worshiping-apocalyptic-death-cults, who pick up from where-ever they are and move to a little town in the mid-west just so they can be closer to their Messiah-King, are invariably the same sort of day-dreaming, vacant expression, psycho-chemically imbalanced folks who are ripe for hypnosis. Lord knows my parents were. Benito Luis Palomar Hernandez and Luba Marquez y Rodriguez de Palomar, a pair of upper-class hippies who had thrown in hard with the LSD movement of the late sixties in Mexico City had come to the US so that I might be born with dual citizenship. This was one of their more understandable decisions. Other decisions were not so understandable. Like, for instance, my mother's choice to drop copious amounts of LSD during her pregnancy with me, that I might be born with the doors of my perception "blown wiiiiiide open". Or, you know, having us join a group whose ultimate plan involved a mass suicide. There are little things like that which still irk me.

I was sandwiched between them in the church, congregants up and down the aisle with their homemade clothes and beads and unshaven everythings, while Rev. Gilgamesh read the Book of Revelations all the way through, when I noticed that Jesus on the crucifix hanging behind him, in the center of the immense ceramic snake eating its own tail, had become dwarven. That is to say, Jesus had been replaced by a dwarf Jesus, a disproportioned little messiah who winked at me through the bloody tears he started crying. A plate of light formed behind his head, a white sun which glowed ever brighter, until in a moment that Rev. Gilgamesh's voice rose to a fever pitch as he described the opening of the seventh seal and the revelation of the whore and the serpent, the serpent, the serpent, and up on his tip-toes, Rev. Gilgamesh's head came to be perfectly in line with the halo of the dwarf Christ. In that instant the light broke through the reverend's head, pouring out his eyes and nostrils, shining from his ears, pinpoints erupting from his pores and then I saw Gilgamesh, a copy of the self-published Eternal Kindness of the Great Serpent in hand, meeting Johnny Anaconda for the first time after a small open gathering. I saw Gilgamesh in a Jeep with two men dressed in black suits and sunglasses, heading towards some kind complex of domes in the distance. I saw Gilgamesh at a trial, being pointed at by a witness. I saw Gilgamesh on stage in dapper tux, mouth agape, as the man he has convinced to be a koala bear has lurched forward and torn out his own wife's throat, his mouth filled with blood and tendon, feral eyes scanning the room. I saw Gilgamesh in a bar talking to a woman in a low-cut dress, her eyes glazed over, her face flushed, one hand on her chest. I saw Gilgamesh before a mirror, practicing with his face and hands and tongue, until all movements were liquid smooth. I saw him thin and pale and masturbating watching a documentary about a woman who went to Guatemala and was kidnapped and brutally raped and tortured. I saw him screaming at his mother, screaming and screaming and screaming and unable to stop himself. I saw him digging into a cantaloupe at the dinner table as if stabbing an enemy while his parents argue about custody and bank accounts and infidelity. I saw him poking the family dog with a stick every time it tried to get a bite from its food dish, until it stopped eating and grew emaciated and feeble and had to be put down. I saw him up before the dawn, standing at his window and commanding the sun to rise. I saw a thousand narratives of his existence played out in the heat of a second.

This was the first vision. Over the course of the next few weeks I had another, and another, several more, each coinciding with the appearance of the dwarven figure I had come to call Charlie. If someone asked me why I called him that, which no one would since no one else can see him, but if they did I would probably say it was because he just looked like a Charlie and leave it at that.

#

Charlie leads my stumbling self by the hand through Williamsburg to my apartment, leaping by twos up the stairs and inside, where he dances while I take off my clothes and then tucks me into bed. Crouching imp-like on the top of my bed-frame Charlie asks me if I would like a bedtime story. He is absolutely the best at bedtime stories.

Snuggling up under my covers, eyes closed, enjoying the cool sheets, I say, "Please."

"What kind of story would you like, Reeves?"

I hum in consideration, hmmmm, and then conclude, "Something with a topless girl in it."

"Alright," Charlie begins, his voice slow and deep, "Maxine turned the Spongebob Squarepants squeaky bath toy over in her hands,"