So after I fled the airport, which was after the family of psychos in the woods, but before jail; I mean, in between the psycho family, and then finding junkies to live with and then jail, comes sleeping with the bicycles at Washington University. And the dream of the lavender hill.

--

It isn't too cold, there's a heat vent out here in the atrium, so I build my nest, after dark, all my filthy clothes and stuff become a fox hole, and I climb in. It's maybe 10 o'clock or so. Students come and go. I reach out and with one finger push down a jacket sleeve, adjust it til I have a peephole slot, and I can watch the inner door.

They have to pause and pull to open, to get in. It's a heavy push to get out. I see them for a moment as they pass through.

I jostle slowly, to get the best view thru my slot and three sets of spokes. It is the first time I am prone in days. I watch them. My mouth slowly falls open, my eyes burn, as I stare at each: the long scarves, inevitable books bristling with blossoms of paper. The smell of perfume and colgne. Their brusque courtesies, abrupt laughs, timid aversions.

Some hippies, some radicals come and go. Most are plain, high school nobodies rising up. Some sporty types, in tassled shoes and chinos. A few letter jackets. Some are very handsome, some very pretty.

"Her" I say to myself. Approximate, though; I am too exhausted. Usually it is "Her, I would go with", or camp out with, or ball. But this was just about sensation, to wake myself up from the terror and stupor of the last few days, from that ride into the plateau last night with the psycho family. Their guns.

I un-focus now, feeling how, how close I came. I shiver hard.

I need to wake up Me so I can finally sleep. So "Her" I say, quiet, sometimes to myself as round, slim, tall, even some black girls go by, alone, talking to friends, and to the ones I feel a little melt-into, who might someday smile wide at me, I just whisper "Her". My hands are between my legs but for warmth, motionless. Too tired. Too wide awake, still. Too afraid.

Long waits. Fewer of them come and go. An inner light, from the lobby behind me,  goes out, then back on. Is anyone trying to find me, I wonder?

I only look normal in the afternoon. A dirty hippie, yeah, with satchel and shoulder pack, but maybe just out of school, maybe expelled. I look almost really 14, and where I should be. After 3 pm especially. Especially if I walk faster, like I have somewhere to go.

But now I am small-fry fox in a hole. If caught I will be wrong at a glance. At the airport I studied signs, looked anxious, darted a lot, fit right in, especially busy times, in the afternoon. I had slept in by-way lounges, the chairs arranged to hide me. Finally, though, security was noticing me.

I think so. I think they were. So I split. Walked and hitched to get here. But here I do not look right. Too young.

There's a flurry again. Is it 11?

Every new entry fills the dark vestibule with cold air. They stomp feet, to get grey slush off nice shoes. Another bicycle is added to the full rack I lie behind, by a loud guy who rides his right inside, jumping off to impress some girl. He pushes it against the mass of them, they crash backwards on me. My hands are up to push back; I grip the frame near me so I won't be crushed, and freeze: they can't rebound on him, he will know I am in here.

He laughs, shoves one more time. "There," he sneers to his giggling girlfriend, "all locked up." They go in.

In the moments when no one is around I push and adjust the bikes, until I think it will hold and not bury me.

More go in. Some guy in a round cap with a chain of keys goes all the way out, stands for a moment, then comes in, goes to the far wall and some hidden switches. The heating vent grumbles to a stop. The outside lights go dim.

Better. Safer. Darker where I am now. Cap guy is an old black guy with a belly. He walks to my end, locks all but one door. If he glances down, to his right, he will see me. But he hums to himself -- it is nahnahnah nah, hey hey hey, goodbye -- and just peers out the big window at the end, hits a switch I can't see, and a spotlight goes on just outside. A bright slice shows my ankle and foot; I slowly pull it into shadow.

He goes all the way back in, locking three of the four doors there, too. I am alone again. Some lobby lights go off. The security light he turned on is the main thing now, false moonlight revealing the only way in.

I roll over. I look through one set of spokes and the plate glass to my right, to the black night beyond, the trees of the quad, the corner of a dorm. I can see the stairwell windows of the top two floors. Students, indistinct, go up and down. At the top window I see a sliver of door open each time they go in or out, a door covered with more paper.

All day I made up stories for almost every student I saw. She is from some weird aggie county, down south; that one has an eye problem and gets teased; he's in love with her but she is mean to him; this guy studies and reads all the time, he gets to sit and read in his dorm with his posters and maybe a guitar; a long-haired girl would listen to Joan Baez with me, and think I'm cute.

All these stories dry quickly in the cold; they fail, they fade. Most become, just before they fall apart, a variation of salvation: he shares an apple with me while we talk about the war; she asks me to her dorm and gives me cake; they think I am cool for being a young hippie runaway; they adopt me into their group; they save me.

It all fails because I try to fit it too exactly, make it realistic, the details. It has to match what might really happen. Like in the library, earlier. I see this one girl with a macrame bag and blue eye makeup. She is alone and reading a book, so she needs me to help her study, I pretend. I try to make her face change to become a glow of admiration for what I say, but I cannot think of what I would say, and her face won't change that way, it is too serious, she chews the inside of her cheek. She would not like me. Not really.

This other girl, earlier, at the student union building, standing with her friends, who gave me a quarter and a dime and a polite smile: I pretend she is even more charmed by my twinkly panhandling than she pretended to be, and that she comes back, buys me a lunch. I start to look for her, convinced I really saw this in her look, and wait for her to come back, to find me, start a conversation.

She didn't.

I lie there and imagine some really cool radical hippy students with a commune would see me here and invite me to crash at their place, then let me stay on, hide me from the cops, make me a mascot. I would do jobs for them, like roll their joints for them and help them study and maybe even clean or cook. They would sneak me into class, where one day I give the right answer, from the back of the room, and then the professor would be in on it, and then he would teach me personally, too.  And I would be so cool to all of them, young and on my own and already as cool as them but in a way even cooler because I was as cool as them but only 13.

A snowball hits the glass. A moment later Cap guy scares the shit out of me by  rapping hard on the glass above my head, hollering "Hey! You boys!" and "You boys get outta there!"

Laughter outside. Fades. I don't move. Cap guy walks off, keys faintly jingling as he goes.

I re-arrange, to make my jacket a blanket. I think about freezing out here. Being found frozen. So of course I think about Shorty. I can't help it, once I start: the smell of the gun, the radio, his brains on the wall. My stomach ripples. I squeeze my eyes shut, wide open, shut again. I can't change the subject , my brain movie rolls ahead, over and over: the blood, the face half gone, the vomit on the carpet.

After a while gag and sad becomes hunger, just hunger. Funny. I am hungry, no matter what. I pull out the lunch sack I stole. First, one of the Fritos, now crushed powder in a foil bag. There's some baggy thing at the bottom, too, a sandwich maybe.

I feel it again, the yawning mouth of Satan below me, that crackles and stays at the widest point, held open for me, full of teeth and bad breath and red muscle, a black cave at the bottom, ready to swallow me for stealing this lunch.

"I had to" I say out loud. No food for three days. I couldn't panhandle at the airport. And no one took me with them, gave me a ticket, for California or Boulder. I got no in-flight meal.

If I am quiet I can eat. I crack the Fritos and half the bag sprays all over me. I don't care: the oily corn smell ravages me and I dump the remaining crumbs into my mouth. Chewy bits that stucco my teeth and gums. No drink. Maybe I could sneak inside to the fountain later. But Cap guy is on the job.

I poke open the baggy. Not a sandwich. Some kind of pulp, a thick slice surrounded by a black skin. Tomato Sauce, crumb crust, some cheese. Smells like spaghetti. I lick it. I peel off and eat the cheese and the crumbs and the sauce with my fingers. Yuck.

I  finish the second Fritos bag. Lick my teeth clean. Even hungrier now. I lie back down, settle in. A tower bell bongs outside. Sirens, far away, from downtown. I have to pee. I rearrange again, squeezing my knees together. Doesn't help. I turn all the way around so my head is down where the light comes in, and I pull out the notices I swiped earlier, from the bulletin board.

"Free John Sinclair" the first one says. 10 years for one joint it says. White Panthers, it says. I try to think about this. One joint, then prison, for practically your whole life.

The next one describes a Myths study group. It has three pictures on it, mimeo-smeared. One is of a bowl with what the paper says is Odysseus. He is tied to a mast. It looks like a comic book. I know this part of the story, I think, if this Odysseus is like the Ulysses story. He wanted to hear the sirens on the rocks. I think about their bare breasts, them sitting on the rocks. I think about his bulging eyes, and what it sounded like, music so beautiful and weird it makes men mad, makes them leave safety, head for the rocks and destruction. I am so tired.

Another picture shows columns on the ground and a building. The caption says something about Pallas Athena. It must be her palace. I try to remember about Athena. I think she can run very fast.

The last picture, a girl's face, but she has a sheer napkin, a scarf, across her face. It is lit from the side. The fabric drapes her nose, her slim cheek, her coiled hair, even one sad eye. The flyer says "Greek woman, marble bust, c. 450 BCE", but I keep looking at this, squinting at it in the harsh light from the window. Did they put a kerchief over her head? to protect it? why not take it off before they took the picture?

Maybe it was carved this way. Doesn't seem possible; stone can't do this, can't be made to show frail cloth on a face.

I imagine these students meeting, in their Carnavoran Study room at 7 pm every Wednesday, in the Piermont Library. Just to look at these pictures, to talk about and learn about things like that girl's veiled head, how very beautiful she is. And they will drink bowls of wine like Ulysses did, and just be curious and figure everything out together about Greece and ancient times and why that woman looked so sad. And the school just goes "use our library for your fun group!"

Besides all the classes and all, these students still don't get enough, they just go and sit and figure out some more, on their own, just for fun. I cry about this. A little. I am not sure why.

I fold that flyer carefully, in 6ths, to fit into my top pocket. I close my eyes tight, open them, close, open, til they feel right again. It is colder now. I still have to pee. I put everything back on: the sweater vest, the jacket, the gloves.

Keys jangle. I freeze: Cap guy comes out again, lock the last outer door. No more in and out. All closed up.

--
I dream about a lavender hill, a slow rise of purple flowers, an enormous summer.

I am being dragged thru them by students on bicycles. I look beyond my feet as the path I makes closes behind me, no trace of me in this ocean of green and flowers.

The students ignore me, chatter with each other. I look up at them: their skin is old, too white, outlined with black grease lines, like crude cartoons. But they sound young.

I think it should hurt, being dragged like this, and suddenly they let go.

The flowers rise over me, snap back, upright, and I am just a fallen bloom. I know myself: filthy, a grubby thief, a bad thing in this beautiful place.

I get up, I follow them. I see glimpses of them,  I hear  voices: one of them sings, another carries a shield and sword, swinging the blade overhead, the bike wobbling under him as he screams a victory cry.

I try not to break stalks as I run to catch up.

I begin to find the bones they leave behind, the first ones dry, then gristled, and finally bloody parts, each with stuck-on bits of  jeans and sweater and mud, torn threads, paper.

I get to a place of bare dirt. Cold. They were here. Now gone forever.

There is no sound.

They have burned something: I can see the skull of a bull, the horns gleaming among the wood ash and cracked rocks. The minotaur, slain.  

I look back and all around, but there is no more green, no purple, no life, just winter sticks, upright, dead, endless in every direction.

I look down but I cannot see myself. I know somehow I am broken and torn, from being dragged. I am raw, flayed. I shake in my own wet pulp, splattering, staining the grey ground at my feet. I know if I look I will see nothing there.

It starts to snow, but the snow is bits of blank paper; they pile around me and cover me up.

When I am just a face, mouth open wide, a mouth full of black blood, looking up, staring out of all that unwritten white, I wake.

The pee is cold in my jeans, and wet on the hard floor under me.
--

Before dawn I risk it, I get up and go inside, to clean up, to drink some water. I grab handfuls of student newspapers from the garbage can, and return to my hideaway, and slop up the pee, try make blankets out of the trash that's left over. I drift again into almost-sleep.

Too early: crashing sounds in the hallways inside, loud talk. A different Cap guy, a young guy, comes out and unlocks all the doors. He sees me, kicks my feet. "Hey. You can't be here." I quickly gather up. He frowns when he sees my face: wrong, too young, his look says. He notices all the papers on the floor. "Hey!" he says.

Some students leave. I walk around Cap guy and follow them out. "Go on, scram! Get lost! Don't you come back here!" he yells out the door, after me.

Bitter cold. The students turn, to see what's up. I stop, hold my two bags close, shivering, I can't stop. Half awake. One girl eyeballs me head to toe, turns away, says something to her friends , who laugh. One of them wears a new pea coat; it says "Stop the Draft" in stenciled letters on the back.

I have thin sneakers. I rolled on cold hard stone all night and my bones hurt, my crotch is wet and freezing to my skin. I don't know where to go. Is anyone looking for me? has my Dad given up again? Does my mom know I left, again? Does he even tell her anymore, when I go?

I have no food. I hate these pretty faces. They walk wide around me, notice me just enough to want no part of a dirty boy. One sliding look, and back to cradled books and hot coffee and all their lucky world. I walk off campus. The snow underfoot refreezes every night, so every step's a break-thru to mush, below the icy crust. I stay off the paths.

I start to make a list as I walk, of the people who know me, who might be worried. It is no one. It is so short a list it is no one, really.

When I think of my Nana I first think she won't be told this time, then I cry about my Nana and how she will never know me ever again, if I make it, this time, to somewhere. It is too cold for the tears to do anything but stick my eyelashes together. So I stop.

I will walk to Forest Park, I decide. It's time to go back, to give up, stop putting it off. I have to grow up, I say to myself. "Be cool", I say out loud. I crush my fist into my palm. "Be Cool." I pound my fist into my palm, switch hands: "Be COOL." I can DO this, I think.

 It is my only hope, those junkies. 

I imagine how to approach them. First I have to be cool. I stop, shivering, look in my satchel, pull out the headband and the long multicolored fabric, like a scarf; I tie it sometimes around my arm, hippy-style. I look at them. Yeah. I will put these on when it's safe, just inside the park.

I shove them back in. I trudge on. At least it's sunny. Maybe they will be there later.

I stop at the first off-campus intersection, There's a head shop and a used record store on this block. It's too early to go looking for those junkies in the park so I panhandle. I try to look older.

Not much luck. It takes two hours to get a quarter; this plus my 35 cents gets me a hot chocolate and a day-old glazed doughnut from the cafe. It makes me sick after two bites so I put it away for later. I am so hungry but eating it makes me sick and this makes me want to cry again. I don't understand.

Cop car goes by; I turn away, looking in my bag, face hidden. They don't notice me. I remember my half a joint. I keep looking in the bag til I find it, still secure in the foil of the empty Marlboro pack.

OK. My scarf, my headband, my half a joint. If I can just get close enough, be Cool, walk over, sit down nearby. Some nice junkies, not the biker kind. I will offer them some of my joint.

I have no matches.

OK, so I will ask them for a light, to "light me" like that guy said at the Dr. John concert, that guy who slipped me acid from his canteen. I will say it cool, like a question: "light me?", then I will just share.

I will be cool. They will let me sit with them.

Then one will say "hey, want to come to our pad?" and I'll just say "sure" and go.