The Truest Afterlife

There is a soft knock on my door.

I am not asleep. I am watching TV on the Internet, my recent stress reliever. I look at the door, then the clock. It is Five O'clock in the morning. Who the fuck is knocking on my door at Five O'clock in the morning? I turn the volume down on my favorite show: LIFE, and listen. The knocks come again and again. Did they hear the television? Then silence.

I'm not sleeping lately. I just don't. Somehow I got up and stayed up. My body does not like to be asleep, so it has decided to keep me up. I close my eyes to sleep and time passes but I do not go under. I just lay there until I'm tired of laying there. I finally get up in frustration and turn on my computer which boots up, comes up and then goes off. Bitch. It's been doing that lately. Just turning off and leaving me cold. The fan is dead on the system. I have to replace it. In time baby, in time.

I sit in the darkness, at 2:30 in the morning, staring at a dead screen, there is a soft knocking on my door. I look at it, and I worry. I have not been sleeping, not been doing well, is this a auditory hallucination? What the fuck is this? Who is knocking on my door at 2:30 in the morning? But then another thought comes to mind....IS THERE someone out there, knocking on my door at 2:30 in the morning?

Is this ANOTHER hallu- cination? I stand to go for the door, then stop. If I open the door, it will resolve too much. There could be a cold blooded killer with a gun to my face on the other side, there could be no one. I sit back down. Not that I'm afraid of a cold blooded killer with a gun. I am more afraid of seeing nothing there. That is the most scariest thing that can ever happen to you. When your world turns over in your head, and you see and hear things that aren't there. It makes you doubt your own sanity, and on the few hours of sleep that I get in a week, this is not good.

I avoid the door. Stopping my Internet TV and crawling into bed and staying in the fetus position. I don't go to sleep. I just stay there. Lay there. There are no more knocks. Could this be Igor, coming at odd hours of the night, looking for a friend? I think about that, but that is very remote. Igor did come one time to my room at some late hour with wine and flowers. It's in the blog here somewhere. I told him to get the fuck away from me. He never returned at such a strange hour. Then, just yesterday, I saw him in the lobby. He asked me if I needed help with my rent or the cable connection. I told him that I had it all covered. He made no mention of knocking at my door at some obscene hour and that I didn't answer. He would definitely have, he didn't. It wasn't him.

My diet has changed, against my wishes. I tend to buy what I WANT to eat. I have been walking through the grocery aisles for hours the past month. All I purchase is vegetables in cans, steak, fish and butter. Sometimes pork, which makes me sick, except for bacon. I have become a carnivore. More than I've ever been. Vegetables, 20%, Meat, 80%. It is not beyond me to make a rare steak in the mornings and gobble it down, blood and all. What is this about?

Oh, the red head. Oh god, how do I tell you about her? She is unbelievable. I wake up thinking about her and go to sleep thinking about her. She is the lynchpin to all of my energy. I met her here on this blog. She wrote to me, I wrote to her, we had a lot in common. Then our correspondence moved from the blog posts to email. We sent email to each other like bullets in a fucking machine gun. I just kept responding to her, because she seemed to be one of my avid readers who wanted a response from me...well that was until she told me that she was flying into New York to meet me.

Consider my reluctance. I'm a fucking hobo, and a woman of means is coming to meet me. What the fuck is that about? Is she a news reporter? What? Not that I'm afraid of news reporters, I had one follow me for a year, shadowing everything that I did. I just didn't know what to make of her. Who and what was she? She was coming though. The tickets have already been purchased, the hotel reservations made. She was coming. Now, am I going to man up and meet her?

I did....hey, I'm sorry that I didn't put this in my blog to begin with, I wish I did, but I didn't want to spook her, frighten her. I wanted to protect her. Don't ask me why I wanted to protect a stranger, I just wanted to protect her. My life is pretty public, and I hold very little back, but in this account, I did. We arranged to meet up at Astor Plaza, just blocks away from the homeless shelter that I lived in. I stood a block away from our agreed upon meeting place. She did not arrive. Then there was a woman who was standing there and I looked at her, and assumed that it was my redhead. I approached, she, not noticing me, walked off, and I just stood there, wondering. Was I stood up?

"Hey, Hobobob!" I hear, and turn about. It's the red head. Nothing spectacular, average in fact. Hey, she came all the way up to New York to meet me. I shook her hand, and off we walked. I took her to an Indian restaurant, and she paid for lunch. Two of my best friends love Indian food, so I had an idea of where to take her and what I wanted, but as life deals cards, I could not find a place and could not decide what to eat. She guided me through it all. We talked over lunch, and in the first five minutes of her dialogue about herself, I was intrigued. Usually, women who talk about themselves are BORING. Their cats, their quilts, their friends, their exes. God help me!!!

But the red head was different, let's call her July. July was smart, intelligent, sharp. She was cooking with gas. I couldn't STOP listening to her, and when lunch was over, I was depressed. We met each other since this lunch. She even took me to a Patti Smith concert at Lincoln Center at the bandshell. Shit! How did she know that the bandshell was my most favorite place to go to in the summer? I used to go there for the Mostly Mozart concerts. My ex-wife and I used to bring bottles of red wine, sit and listen to his music, and get plastered. Then in the back seat of my car in the Lincoln Center parking lot....well, you can take it from there, or maybe when I got her home...well, memory fades.

July flew away and I was alone again. No problem, I'm used to that shit. I'm a loner. I passed her away to the heavens, and they claimed her. I was certain that I would never see her again. Absolutely certain. I walked through the dark of a New York gloom, down barren sidewalks, back to the homeless shelter. I crawled into bed with scores of other men. Closed my eyes.

And she danced behind my eyelids. This story is FAR from over.

Hobobob