In memory, it seems like I was born into an epoch of ice. As my mother waited for her body to signal I was ready to be born, she anxiously watched the snow fill the road outside her house, several feet of it. Six or seven feet, maybe. My father arranged for an ambulance to meet them at the main road a mile away, which was being kept clear by the township plows. He would get her to that ambulance on his snowmobile.

We were always snowed in. Even the old-timers around those parts acknowledged the severity of those winters. "Remember the Blizzard of '77?" they still ask. "How 'bout the Blizzard of '78? '79? '80?" In my memory there were ice storms; neighbors gathering to curse or admire fallen trees with bark encrusted by inches of ice; weeks without power; a room at the Knight's Inn just for the warm shower.

In early December 1982, there was already a lot of snow. Dad started up the engine of his old Polaris in the garage, and the blue fumes sputtered out and clung to my polyester jacket. The snowmobile clattered out to the snowcovered driveway and he idled the engine a while before shutting it off. Then he let me climb all over it, touch the handlebars even. I was Batman. I was Luke Skywalker.

He went to the shed and brought back our best sled, the big orange one that my sister and I could both fit in easily. He took a rope and tied the sled to back of the snowmobile. My mom had made sure we were both dressed up really warm with hats and mittens---scarves even. She sat us down together in the sled, me in the back with my little sister propped up inside my arms. Mom climbed behind my dad on the snowmobile, grabbing him around his waist as that little 440 engine started up again: that puff of carbon monoxide, some traction in the continuous track, and we were off, as slow, probably, as we could go, off into our own Christmas carol. The big black Labrador trotted alongside us.

In a minute or two, we were beyond the sight of our home or the lights of any neighbor. We went up and down hills, through the forests I would spend my childhood exploring and which would one day be torn down to build a subdivision. Around this time the man who owned this land offered to trade it all to my dad for a forty-year-old Ford; he kept the Ford, thinking the land would never be developed anyway. As we slowly cut our way across those hills with jags of snow falling from the shivering hardwoods, I didn't know anyone owned those woods. I had no reason to think they weren't ours.

We reached a hilltop filled with pines and cedars half a mile from our house. My dad, with his chainsaw, balanced himself on the lower branches of a mighty Scotch Pine and began to climb, disappearing into the tree. Before we heard the first rip of the starter cord he yelled out in fearful shock as snow poured down and he lost his balance, nearly falling. The beautiful Snowy Owl he'd disturbed stretched out her wings and flew off to a quieter perch. Undeterred, dad lopped off seven feet of the top of the tree and it tumbled down with a muted crash as the chainsaw and the snowmobile idled.

* * * * *

The three-year old in the Radio Flyer crunching along on an inch of freshfallen snow is almost four, she reminds him. She promises to hold on to her baby brother and not let him fall out. The German Shorthaired Pointer trots alongside them. "Don't eat that!" the dad shouts at the dog, who's got someone's discarded Turkey drumstick in his mouth. They pass a playground where swingless chains hang from a metal crossbar; a tennis court he's never seen anyone use, a 140-year-old church that's changed congregations a few times since the German immigrants who built it laid their Teutonic-scripted cornerstone. A homeless man watches the scene from a picnic table. "We can't do this," the dad says before they get to their neighborhood candle/witchcraft store, struggling to pull the wagon and its precious cargo along Detroit's broken sidewalks. He knows the little girl won't walk all the way home, not in this cold, not with the tree in the wagon, the baby in one arm, the wagon's handle in his other hand and the dog eagerly devouring fowl-bones left and right. What was he thinking? Could the dog pull the wagon, maybe if they dangle a chicken wing from a stick in front of him? No. So they turn around.

For three years now they've purchased their Christmas tree from the farmers who spend the month of December living in tiny heated trailers in Eastern Market half a mile from their home, within sight of the urban prairie. As he loads the kids into the car, he thinks about all the time he's spent wandering that prairie. He remembers the patch of cherry tomatoes he found growing wild in the middle of an empty field. He thought of the dogwoods and cherry trees left behind by the people who'd moved away from their neighborhoods, how they still bloom so beautifully in spring. He entertains thoughts of theft: thoughts of looking for an old Scotch Pine, pulling the kids in a sled through the prairie, and lopping off its top with a hacksaw. Silly, he thinks, as he wanders with his son on one arm and his daughter running through a maze of cut trees, looking for one she likes. He hands a Yooper in head-to-toe camouflage a couple of twenties for a tree that smells like Christmas always did. The Yooper loads the smell of Christmas into the trunk.

When they get home, the girl helps her father carry the tree from the car to the house and the dog runs out to greet them. He sniffs the prostrate pine, lifts his hind leg, and marks it to let everyone know just whose tree this is.

I have a tiny B&W Emerson television in my room as a kid. It is on all the time. The antenna picks up the three networks and a couple UHF stations, so I end up watching a lot of Scarecrow and Mrs. King and reruns of The Fall Guy. Anything is better than the silence of my bedroom, though I prefer situation comedies. One day when I am about ten I must have done something really horrible because my parents take the Emerson out of my room for a week. I roll around on the ground in histrionics: What about the eighth amendment? What about due process? What about MACGYVER? I can, of course, watch television with my parents, but that means either This Old House or enduring my father's feigned indignation every time someone alludes to the fact that someone somewhere might have something to do with S-E-X. "What is this crap?" He asks whenever a reference is made to bosoms. "What is the world coming to?" Just say the word "ass" on television and my dad turns into a Victorian southern belle who has accidentally wandered into a homosexual-bathhouse orgy.

There is no way I can endure such torture, so instead I sit on the floor next to the same transistor radio I use to listen to Ernie Harwell describe late-night Tigers games. I remember there's a strange FM frequency that broadcasts the audio from the NBC nightly lineup, so I turn the dial and close my eyes as I hear Rue McLanahan tell a racy joke about picking up two middle-aged sailors at a hotel bar. I can picture the hotel bar in my head. It has a cabana theme. Estelle Getty lands a zinger. The laugh track approves. Cut to commerical. I hold my radio up to my chest. Thank you for being a friend.

Though the punishment is only supposed to last a week, my parents either show great mercy or grow tired of what a pain-in-the-ass I am when not pacified by television. A couple nights later I am falling asleep in the monochrome glow of Jake and the Fat Man, as it should be.

Eventually I get a color Sylvania. This is where the story transitions to the nineties with a technicolor montage to the Smashing Pumpkins' "Today": Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier in gayface give two snaps up; Sinead rips up the Pope; Murphy Brown has a baby; Steve Urkel wonders whether he did that. The television stays on when I do homework. It is the white noise I require to focus on anything important. It will carry me through term papers, and college.

I'm certainly not one of those insufferable types who claims not to watch TV or even own one; I'm just one of those insufferable dumb asses who punishes himself for how much he loves television. I insisted we buy a 15-inch TV that we were supposed to watch less becauseof its size but instead we just squint at it from the couch or press our noses against the screen. In San Francisco I insisted we forgo cable thinking we wouldn't even turn on the thrift store TV, but every night we just watched reruns of The King of Queens. My ambivalence towards the medium is definitely behind my hesitation to let the kids watch television. While I do not want them to grow into insufferable adults who see nothing redeeming about television, I do want them to have a healthy relationship with the damned technology. I do not want them clutching the disembodied voice of Dorothy Zbornak in the darkness.

Also, there's nothing quite as refreshing as the feeling of being a total hypocrite. The damn television is on even now as I type this: some show on A&E about a biker gang fighting a group of carnies. Does it get any better than that? I suppose it could be better on one of those high-definition living room jumbotrons. But that would be just a little too enjoyable. We have started talking about the possibility of getting a Tivo. "I've heard you actually watch less when you have one," Wood says.

My ears perk up: "Really?"

My freshman roommate was in an a cappella boyband. This was 1995, so they didn't yet have In*Sync or the Backstreet Boys to aspire to, but make no mistake, it was a boyband. They were sort of an a cappella Color Me Badd, but with more fat white guys. There were seven vocalists contributing to the group's signature R&B harmonies, so they brainstormed for a week and eventually came up with the name "Seven." But they wrote it with a Roman numeral VII. Before creative differences splintered VII (if I recall correctly, one guy left to focus on his beatboxing, then the members who were devout Christians refused to sing anything but Take 6 covers, while the other half wanted to be "the next Rockapella" or something like that) for a few months there they had a pretty good run of dorm rec room performances, intramural hockey national anthems, talent shows, and shotgun weddings. I only went to one performance, where it quickly became clear that my roommate was "the cute one." At the crescendo of the most romantic song in their arsenal of Jodeci and All-4-One covers, with his bandmates harmonizing softly behind him, my roommate would pull one girl from the audience and sit her on his knee and sing directly to her. To my amazement, the girl he chose didn't laugh right in his face. She seemed to actually be moved by the lyrics to "I Swear." A few hours later, I walked into a darkened dorm room to a shout of "No! Wait!" and then I saw her underwear on the floor. This set of incidents merely confirmed to me that there was a lot I didn't understand about girls.

The boyband performances proved to be a rich source of one-night stands for my roommate, who swore by the old sock-on-the-doorknob cliche, giving me endless opportunities to wander around to figure out my own way to snare a female. I usually ended up reading Whitman or writing in my journal alone in the forest behind the dorm, hoping that some other free spirit would just happen across me and think I was deep and romantic and not some kind of sexual predator. The one time a girl came over to the edge of the woods, she only did so to vomit. I do give my roommate a lot of credit for showing me how attractive the life of a swinging bachelor can be. For one thing, there were his sheets. I won't get into too many details, but let's just say if you were planning to be "the cute one" in an a cappella boyband in 1995, it would have been a good idea not to buy black sheets. His black sheets were so streaked with the DNA evidence of his voluptuary activities, they looked like you could ice skate across them. If you turned on the black light in our dorm room, his sheets lit up like Las Vegas in the desert night. I don't know if it says more about his skill in seduction or the standards of the seduced that he ever managed to convince anyone to climb in there with him in daylight. I swear, his blankets had stalactites.

I have been thinking about my old roommate a lot these days, particularly those sheets. You see, our newborn son is a lot like a drunk coed. He whines a lot and is an extremely sloppy kisser. He drinks a lot and passes out all the time. He throws up whenever he drinks too much, which is pretty much every time he drinks. He throws up ten times as much as his sister ever did. An hour after we wash our bedsheets, they are covered again in his milky spit up, which dries to a glossy stiffness that brings me back to my dorm days. And that's only from what comes out of his mouth (there's a whole other end). Anytime we wear black clothes (and duh, we are yuppies, so we have lots of black clothes), after a few minutes holding our son we end up looking like my old college roommate has been dryhumping us. I can't imagine what early parenthood must have been like for Johnny Cash. I have reached into coat pockets to find several inches of spit up, but my wife still gets the worst of it. I can't tell you how many money shots she's had right down her cleavage. That's where we are these days, wading around in slightly-curdled breastmilk and stomach acid. So what did we do yesterday? We grabbed our wellies and took a trip to the dairy farm that provides all the non-breastmilk to our household:

Because nothing makes you feel better about the sanitation of your own home than seeing buckets of freshly-pumped bovine milk speckled with hay and cowshit.

This is the fourth and final part of the story of the time I spent as a cowherd on a dysfunctional farm in western Ireland in 1998. The first part is here, the second, "In which Dutch conquers the Irish countryside riding on the shoulders of a gentleman who has just consumed 23 pints of Guinness" is here, and the third part, In which Saint Patrick causes Dutch to betray his own countryman for twenty quid, is here.

My days living among the Irish farmers were waning, and this filled me with incredible relief. I was growing tired of sharing the barn with Christopher the Bull and the 15-year-old Swiss kid who you might remember couldn't stop pestering me about "the pussy, it is good, yes?" while at the same time pandering to our Catholic overloads by promising to spend his life protecting the Pope. One afternoon I stumbled upon him masturbating vigorously to his dog-eared porno and he tried to play it off like he was practicing karate chops, but he knew that I knew he was lying so we just kind of stood there uncomfortably for a second before I grabbed what I needed and left. Eventually he put a framed picture of the Pope next to his framed photo of Bruce Lee and later added a small sticker of Padre Pio to the shrine. Tessie had been giving us an earful about the many miracles of Padre Pio for weeks. Trying to have a conversation with all these intensely-Catholic chronic masturbators with their Swiss/German-cum-bog-Irish accents was like plodding through a particularly impenetrable passage of Joyce. It was just too much damn work for what little satisfaction it actually provided.

One day I coasted on the old Raleigh down to Fisherstreet in Doolin to catch a ferry bound for the Aran Islands. I just needed to get away from these people for a few hours. The Aran Islands are creepy, desolate juts of rock in the Atlantic Ocean inhabited by a few hundred aging hobbits who wear piss-colored cable-knit jumpers and have skin like rhinoceros hides. While I was there a German fell off the wall of a ruined castle and they had to helicopter him back to the mainland. The island people were so excited by all of this you'd have thought the reanimated corpse of John F. Kennedy had just walked across the sea to announce the winner of the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest as well as Britain's hasty departure from The North. I ordered a cheese sandwich and a beer in the one pub on the island, but afterwards quickly grabbed the boat back before the locals could finish hatching their plot to lure me into that giant wicker statue out by the cliffs to burn it while listening to really bad techno music made with bodhrans and uilleann pipes.

On the way back to the farm, I stopped at the big field by the sea to count all eighty of Aideen's heifers and bullocks. When I got there, I saw that the bastards had knocked over part of a wall and some had strayed into the neighboring field so I knew I wasn't getting back to the farmhouse any time soon. It started raining heavily as I herded them back and began repairing the wall. When I finally did get back home, Aideen laughed and Tessie hobbled over to me from the stove, splashing me with holy water to prevent me from dying of consumption and then ordered Aideen to get me "some spirits." She then whispered in my ear, "Now ordinarily you know I don't approve of whiskey, Jimmy, but it can be a mighty elixir when you're as wet and cold as you are now." Aideen reached into her mighty chiffarobe of whiskey and poured me three shots' worth of Tullamore Dew, pouring herself about four. Tessie shook her head and stirred at her vat of cabbage.

We were nearly drunk when Davey O'Dwyer showed up for dinner. Aideen told him I was at Aran that morning. "Did you fall in love with an Aran woman?" he asked me, and I told him most of the Aran women I saw looked just like him. He grabbed for the bottle of whiskey and poured what remained into a pint glass for his apertif. I took another sip of my own. I've never held much stock in the wisdom of the Irish, but that whiskey did put a fire in me that warmed me to the core.

Davey knew I'd hoped to help birth a calf before I returned to the states. I'd been up in Belfast when the last one was born. He told me he'd been out to see Aideen's pregnant cows that day and promised that so long as I didn't head back to Dublin before the next full moon, I'd get to see one born. I had lived among these farmers for a few months, and never had I known a people so insistent that the moon plays a role in our everyday lives, that it pulls on the water in our bodies like it pulls on the water in the sea. The moon was always the scapegoat for any monthly aberrations or some violence down in the spa. These people could sit around and talk about the lunar calendar and the intricacies of the weather for hours. In this community, Davey was more popular than the veterinarian when it came to birthing livestock. Instead of money, you could give him a few chickens or half a salmon that you caught last winter from your freezer, and he'd come over and help you birth a calf. He insisted that cows always gave birth by the moon, and planned his social life accordingly. When the moon was thin he’d go off to Liscannor or the spa to drink himself into oblivion. When the moon was full and heavy he would wait at his house for the phone calls.

Over the next few days, Aideen had me bring the two pregnant cows in from the fields to the barnyard, and I warily moved Christopher the Bull to a small nearby field. A few days later, when the moon was full, she relieved me of my other duties and had me stay by them to wait for any signs: the rupturing of the placenta, the fracture of some bone she said I would feel massaging their haunches. It was early evening on the second night of the full moon and I was wrapped up in a blanket when I checked on them and saw an enormous wet spot behind one of the cows. Aideen wasn't home, so I told Tessie and jumped on the bike and rode up to Davey's place, a dirt-floored shack with lots of pictures of the virgin hanging on walls covered in ancient floral wallpaper. His daughter, Clare, was sitting lazily on a lumpy old recliner when I opened the door to her half-hearted come in. With adidas track pants, dirty runners, and bleached-blond hair, she had a look of trouble about her. Davey was sitting on the couch, his feet under three inches of water in one of those plastic foot-soaker tubs.

"The old gal’s giving birth, is she?" he said, without turning his eyes away from the episode of Friends they were watching on the small color television. At the commercial break, he let out a long slow whistle. "Let me change into my birthing clothes." He left me alone with Clare, the foot massager emitting a constant sorrowful moan.

"Yer from America, are ya?" Clare asked, and I nodded. "I want to go to New York and meet a black fella. I think black fellas are brilliant." I assured her there were plenty of black men to meet in the five boroughs.

Davey was back a few minutes later looking like himself: tweed cap, blue jacket, wellingtons. The bike had a flat tire but I coasted down the hill right behind his little Ford hatchback. I led him into the barnyard and he took one look at her and said she was ready. "Where's Aide?" he asked. I told him I thought she was all the way down in Milltown, so he had me help him get the cow into the birthing stall, a narrow corridor of heavy-aluminum piping that she was not at all interested in entering. We shoved the poor old cow in, and Davey rammed a pipe into a hole in the wall behind her legs so she couldn't back up or kick. The cow let out a defeated low and, in one gesture, Davey pulled up his sleeve and stuck his arm up her vagina. She hardly stirred. "There you are, crater," he whispered into the vaginal canal. "Shhhh, everything will be alright now."

He turned to me and pointed into the gaping cavity. "Feel him?" I rolled up my own sleeve and stuck my arm into the sticky warmth. It was so spacious in there I was sure I could have crawled all the way inside with a lit candelabra whistling "Flight of the Valkyries." When my arm was so far inside that the mucus from the ruptured placenta was creeping up past my elbow, I reached beyond the cervix and finally felt the warm, soggy calf. "Grab his legs, will you?" Davey said, and I felt around until I recognized a hoof and dragged it up and out of the cow's uterus. "There's one," Davey said, and quickly tied a rope around it. I groped around looking for the other, but couldn't find it. Davey reached back in and pulled out a soggy hoof with a laugh: "Would you look at that, I found another one in there." He tied a rope to that one as well.

While he was messing with some contraption that looked like a long metal pole with bicycle handlebars attached to one end, tying the rope to some winch-like mechanism on the pole, Aideen burst out in the yard in her long red coat.

"Davey O'Dwyer! Were you planning to birth this calf without telling me?" She'd been drinking.

"Git over here Aideen, you know this American is dying to take some pictures."

With one end of the contraption pushing up against the cow's backside, and Davey holding the other end, they let the cow out of the stall. She sent out a long, anguished moo that was answered by several of her colleagues in a distant field. After a few seconds of Davey dancing with her across the barnyard, and Aideen holding her tail and swatting her still with a stick, a calf's head emerged behind its outstretched arms, its eyes begging Davey to put it back in, and then its entire body landed hard on the concrete in a pool of blood, followed by the the sliding slap of the massive placenta, and the cow turned around to start gently licking her calf. "Let's get her over there, Jimmy," Davey said, and together we carried the shivering calf---"a girl!" he shouted---over to a pile of hay while Aideen led her mother over to her.

"Let me get a picture of you, Davey," I said, and he posed up against the wall:

We went off to wash our arms, then returned to watch the calf take her first tenuous steps. I asked if they were always that easy. "No, that was nothing," Davey said. "That cow's given birth twelve times before. She hardly noticed this one." I thanked them for letting me help. "There’s nothing you Germans or Americans enjoy more than seeing a cow give birth," he said. "I don’t know what’s so special about it. We do them all year long." Then he stood there in silence and stared across the yard.

"I'll never look at cow vagina the same," I muttered.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said. "Next time this happens, be sure to bring Thomas the Swiss boy out to see it. He's very interested in the cycle of life. He also told me he wants to help you collect semen from Christopher the Bull."

And with that, I packed my bags and returned to the states.

Saw a couple of high school friends over the weekend, went to a few hometown bars where we hoped we wouldn't run into anyone else we knew from the dark old days. As we took the first sips of a fourth round of pints, one of us mentioned how none of us ever drank in high school.

"What was wrong with us?"

"What did we do then?"

But we knew. Unlike normal, decent kids who got wasted at some house whenever someone else's parents were in Aspen or Acapulco, we were out causing real trouble: trespassing, jumping from rooftop to rooftop downtown, violating any number of other local ordinances. I spent nights in police stations. I was frisked more than once. "Remember that time you jumped out of Steve's jeep after he drove up that giant sand dune behind the Budweiser plant?" I asked one friend. "We chased you home with Steve shining that police spotlight on you the whole time."

"You assholes said I looked like a Yeti."

But more than anything else, back then we broke into abandoned buildings. There was the ghost town out in the country, the abandoned tuberculosis asylum down by the cemetery, the vacant churches, the shuttered paper mills. We'd bring girls with us sometimes, and they'd stay close, hide their eyes in our shoulders, their frightened breath on our necks. When one of us couldn't round up a girl, we'd go out ahead of time and wait alone for our friends to show up, ready to terrify them with stomping footsteps and rattling chains. I remember the feeling of being alone in those damp, echoing places, the cold silence of the long-vacated morgue, its steel corpse drawers haphazardly opened and closed. I remember the smell of ancient wine spilled from casks stored in the back of the old hotel, where there was an open door facing away from the road and where, terrified, we'd burst out into air that smelled like the mint growing wild in the fields. The ghost town had once boomed providing mint to William Wrigley. The town had died, but we went there to feel alive.

Detroit, with its thousands of abandoned structures, is something of a mecca for kids and adults who still do this sort of thing. There's a whole community of them here, and people come from all over the country to "explore" the city's ruins. In the little I've done since we moved here I haven't found that same adolescent thrill. Maybe because I no longer need to terrify girls to get them to come close to me. Or maybe the whole thing just seems so hackneyed because there are so many people doing it here. My photographs of these buildings seem so clichéd, so easily sentimental. There have been moments where I have been awed, like the eve of this past Thanksgiving, when I finally wandered into the darkness of the Michigan Central Station, a Beaux-Arts masterpiece designed by the same firm as New York's Grand Central, but abandoned to the mercy of the elements, architectural scavengers, vandals, and graffiti taggers. To visit and photograph this building again is something of a cliché in urban exploration, as it ranks high among the greatest modern ruins in the world. It is our Parthenon, our Colosseum. Yet in the stillness of the early evening, with rain dripping everywhere through its tattered roof, and darkness slowly swallowing the faded, almost-unfathomable grandiosity of the waiting room, it was not hard to get lost in the sublime. I was alone in there (as far as I knew), and the darkness and giant Doric columns allowed logic itself to bend. I saw things I will not admit to you. It was terrifying and highly satisfying.

But trespassing across the road, I experienced something else entirely. Because of the response to the photos I put on flickr of the abandoned Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, I went back again to take some more with a better lens in HDR (blending different exposures):

This is a building where our deeply-troubled public school system once stored its supplies, and then one day apparently walked away from it all, allowing everything to go to waste. The interior has been ravaged by fires and the supplies that haven't burned have been subjected to 20 years of Michigan weather. To walk around this building transcends the sort of typical ruin-fetishism and "sadness" some get from a beautiful abandoned building. This city's school district is so impoverished that students are not allowed to take their textbooks home to do homework, and many of its administrators are so corrupt that every few months the newspapers have a field day with their scandals, sweetheart-deals, and expensive trips made at the expense of a population of children who can no longer rely on a public education to help lift them from the cycle of violence and poverty that has made Detroit the most dangerous city in America. To walk through this ruin, more than any other, I think, is to obliquely experience the real tragedy of this city; not some sentimental tragedy of brick and plaster, but one of people:

Pallet after pallet of mid-1980s Houghton-Mifflin textbooks, still unwrapped in their original packaging, seem more telling of our failures than any vacant edifice. The floor is littered with flash cards, workbooks, art paper, pencils, scissors, maps, deflated footballs and frozen tennis balls, reel-to-reel tapes. Almost anything you can think of used in the education of a child during the 1980s is there, much of it charred or rotted beyond recognition. Mushrooms thrive in the damp ashes of workbooks. Ailanthus altissima, the "ghetto palm" grows in a soil made by thousands of books that have burned, and in the pulp of rotted English Textbooks. Everything of any real value has been looted. All that's left is an overwhelming sense of knowledge unlearned and untapped potential. It is almost impossible not to see all this and make some connection between the needless waste of all these educational supplies and the needless loss of so many lives in this city to poverty and violence, though the reality of why these supplies were never used is unclear. *[see update below]* In some breathtakingly-beautiful expression of hope, an anonymous graffiti artist has painted a phoenix-like book rising from the ashes of the third floor.

This building is not far at all from the Michigan Central Station. Its exterior boasts no Corinthian columns, no real ornament to speak of. Unlike the station, it is squat and quite unremarkable. Suburban teens and even adults often ignore it as they regularly break into the station to leave their talentless tags, thrill at the decay, or just stand in awe of the colossal space inside. Their grandparents might have first set foot in Detroit at that station, stepping off trains from back east or down south. It was built with the sort of opulence that signified great promise for anyone who passed through it. Peasants from Poland or Alabama would have been awed by it all, but could hardly have realized that their great-grandchildren would one day leave their names upon its crumbling columns, binding themselves in that way to those same stones as though it were a promise kept.

When I post pictures of Detroit, I am always struck by the way people respond in the comments with a sense of "sadness." The reactions we have to ruins is something that fascinates me, and I'd love to hear more in the comments about how you feel looking at such buildings or even just seeing the photos I post on flickr. Of course, I sometimes share a sense of sadness, but still I wonder: why is it "sad" for a building to be left to decay if there is no one willing to use it? Can decay be something more than sentimental? Can it ever be beautiful? Can it just be respected for what it is, and not further corrupted by our emotions? And what is it that draws us to ruination? Why do some of us find it so compelling? I'd like to believe I am much more saddened by people whose lives fall apart than I am by crumbling stones or plaster. Sadly, social decay is just so much more easy to ignore, and not as prettily exposed with the lens of a camera.

Unless, that is, you stumble upon a warehouse full of abandoned hope. Walking back home from the book depository that day, I stopped to talk to the homeless men who live in Roosevelt Park. They told me they see people like me going into the station every day. I assumed by "like me" they meant bourgeois whites carrying tripods and DSLR cameras. The next time I went, I saw a few dozen more homeless men and women receiving handouts from some mobile charity, directly in the shadow of the train station. Some of them have made homes inside these ruins. They carried bottles covered with paper bags. They seemed almost giddy, happy just to eat something warm. I thought of the lovers in Robert Browning's poem. I thought of the paintings I'd seen earlier that week at the Detroit Institute of Arts, of medieval peasants frolicking amid the ruins of Ancient Rome.

Cows once grazed in the forum. And rich men who are long dead once decorated their walls with scenes not so different from this.

[*update* I have done some research about what actually happened at the book depository/Roosevelt Warehouse and post about it here]

The first time I met a real hooker I was eighteen and working in a haunted house wearing a long black robe and jumping out at people in the darkness. She was smoking a cigarette outside a small purple building along Main Street that had a sign advertising a 25-cent video arcade and LIVE GIRLS, represented on the sign by a voluptuous brunette wearing a silky negligee. The Velvet Touch sold pornographic movies and sex toys to men who would willingly venture into a building with no windows and a buzzer on the door to stall police raids. The parking lot abutted the backyard of the haunted house, where a few of us would hang out on lawn chairs when no one was coming through. One night the hooker looked up at us and smiled. She had dyed-black hair with that always-wet look still popular among certain elements of the population in 1995. My friend Matt said to her, "Excuse me, ma'am, we were just wondering what kind of services you offer in there."

She looked at us skeptically, perhaps wondering whether she should take us seriously. Matt was dressed up like an evil dentist in a bloody smock. She just laughed and came closer to us. At first I'd thought she might actually be cute, but when she laughed I saw she had strangely-elongated teeth.

"Well, first you give Bobby $40 at the counter," she said. "That lets you into the back room, where I work. Then I give you a massage. But let's say you have some more money for me, then you might get something more." She rattled off a list of happy endings, like a technician at an oil change shop might describe various package options. She told us her real name was Julie, but her name inside The Velvet Touch was Asia. There was nothing discernibly Asian about her, though, and she later said she'd grown up "really religious" in a small Indiana town. She was one year older than us, a sophomore at Indiana University in Bloomington, and every weekend she drove 300 miles to give hand jobs to anyone who handed her a $20 bill. She drove that far because she didn't want to run into anyone she knew, and besides, southern Indiana's pretty much the Bible Belt, she said, and they don't have much tolerance for that kind of thing down there. She was managing to pay her own way through school. She was just like any girl who might live in my dorm, eat lunch in the cafeteria, except she was 6'2" in five-inch heels. It didn't seem so crazy that she was a hand job hooker, not when there were girls in the dorm giving away full lube jobs for free.

I got the Haunted House job after a couple friends from high school and I answered an ad in the college paper: WANTED actors and artists to help create the most frightening Halloween experience in town. Haunt Industry experience a plus. $8/hour.

We weren't actors or artists, and we certainly didn't have any experience in the Haunt Industry, but we sure did like the sound of eight dollars an hour. I even quit my minimum-wage job at the student bookstore. The guy in charge of the operation was a scatterbrained 20-something named Cameron ("Call me 'Cam!'") who'd inherited an old house that he planned to gut and flip after Halloween. He hired us the second we showed up. "Can you papier-mache?" was all he asked. He pronounced it "pop-ee-ay ma-shay." Nearly every night during the month of October, we toiled at the haunted house, building rooms, painting everything black. Cam would show up every few hours with hundreds of dollars of materials, gallons of fake blood, pizza, and cases and cases of beer. Cam had bowl-cut blond hair and he literally tied sweaters around his neck. He had Excel spreadsheets to show how much money he was going to make on this haunted house. Cam was the first entrepreneur I ever knew.

The majority of our fellow spooks looked like they'd made the short list for "most likely to become a serial killer" at their respective high schools. The time spent decorating this haunted house was kind of like an extended group therapy for these people: Instead of sitting around alone, torturing small mammals and masturbating to old issues of Fangoria, they were doing something socially redeeming, you know, brainstorming better ways for the child mannequin torso to emerge from the bathtub full of blood or how to make the corpse hanging from the noose the closet look more realistic. "Let's put a puddle of real piss under him," one suggested. The others nodded. Who knows how many lives this haunted house actually saved.

Two of the nicer guys were in a local death metal band called Erotic Funeral. They had t-shirts and everything. I spent some time trying to convince them to write a song called "Orgy of Knowledge," consisting only of those three words chanted over and over in that death metal voice. They weren't very receptive. In addition to this stringy-haired, vaguely-Satanic crowd, apparently a number of individuals from the local community theater crowd had decided to use the haunted house as a resume builder for that winter's Our Town auditions. One middle-aged guy named Tony was recruited to play the role of "zombie tour guide." He wore a moldy old morning jacket with a waistcoat and a high, stiff collar. That's how he showed up for his interview. Like Robert Deniro, Tony the Zombie was a Method actor. He never went out of character. He came and left with his outfit and zombie makeup on. He refused to eat pizza with us, too. "Tony prefers brains," he grunted.

When we were done with construction and decoration, I have to say the house was pretty damn impressive. The upstairs was reserved for "shocking" scenes of flailing strait-jacket bound lunatics, silent murder-suicide victims and cannibals eating dead bodies. In the cannibal room, Tony the Zombie would remove the cover from a platter on the table and say, "Dinner is served!" as a human head surrounded by parsley and quartered lemons came to life. One of the cannibals took his role very seriously, and would stuff his mouth full of whatever it was they were eating to resemble flesh and then vomit it out whenever Tony the Zombie led guests out of his room. After a few tours, Cam had to warn him not to vomit on the guests. Downstairs was full of strobe lights, black-lit dry-ice vapors drifting through maze-like hallways with actors dressed in black jumping out to scare the guests. I did that for a while, until a group of sorority chicks came through and one of them punched me in the nuts. In the last room, Cam had set up an old dentist's chair, and this was where my friends Andy and Matt took turns playing the sadistic dentist and his patient, the dentist squeezing the trigger of a power drill or feigning treatment with a hacksaw or claw hammer, with the patient convulsing and howling in pain. Like the cannibal upstairs, they really got into their roles, and by the end of the night they were always sore and covered in bruises. The third night, they broke the chair.

The worst part about this job was that we had to listen to this horrible sound effects CD on repeat, the kind with creaking doors, demonic laughter, baying wolves, rattling chains, disembodied sobbing, more creaking doors, laboratory bubbling, thunderstorms, some creep's limping gait, spooky wind, more demonic laughter, and lots of barred owl calls. One night we grew so sick of listening to all this over and over, we switched it right in the middle of a tour. One second it was all cackling witches and chainsaws, and the next David Byrne howling out the first few lyrics of the Talking Heads' B-Side "Sugar on My Tongue." Man, Cam was pissed.

On many of those October nights, no one came to the haunted house at all. We all stood around in full costume, staring out the windows like stood-up prom dates, griping about whether Cam would ever be able to pay us. He promised business would pick up closer to Halloween. He showed us his spreadsheets again and said that everything was still on track. He kept buying pizza and beer. A suicide victim got drunk and made out with a cannibal. The lunatic juggled flaming torches for our amusement. Our favorite thing to do during down time was lurk in the trees over by The Velvet Touch's parking lot and whenever a new car pulled up and some lonely middle-aged guy headed towards the door, one of us would call from the bushes, "Daddy? Is that you, Daddy?"

Julie/Asia only worked weekends. On other nights during that long October, there were other women who would come out of the Velvet Touch wearing go-go boots, mini skirts and bustiers to smoke cigarettes. We were pretty sure these other women weren't in this gig just to put themselves through college. These were honest-to-goodness hos. One of them looked kind of like someone had chopped up a bunch of bodies and mixed them up before sewing them back together. She literally was Frankenhooker. The other one was slightly less monstrous, but Andy swore he saw a rash grow three or four inches down her left thigh as she sucked down a menthol. We looked down at our spook outfits and felt ridiculous, standing there in the presence of something so legitimately scary. Cam should have hired both of them for his haunted house. I looked over at the dismal little smut shop. I wondered what it smelled like in there. I figured I didn't really want to know.

The days leading up to Halloween were actually pretty busy. Cam kept some space in his budget for beer, but we noticed there was less of it and he was much more concerned about collecting the bottles for refunds than he had been at the beginning. Tony the Zombie demanded to be paid the night before Halloween, so Cam fired him and started doing the tours himself with his little powder-blue sweater tied around his neck. He was in such a frenzied state that he was way more frightening to the customers than Tony the Zombie. They thought he was supposed to be the Preppie Murderer. After midnight on Halloween Cam sat down in the backyard with his head in his hands while everyone circled around him, expecting hundreds of dollars each for their month of labor. Cam pulled out a giant wad of cash and started doling out an equal share to everyone. You could tell by the faces of those who got theirs first that it wasn't at all what they were expecting. He handed me three twenties. "Sorry dudes," he said. "I totally fucked up. I'm taking a huge hit on all the other costs. We didn't make a dime on this thing." I was pretty pissed, but I figured I still earned a better hourly wage there than I had busing tables at that Dutch restuarant. Besides, from the look of fury in the Satanists' eyes, I could tell Cam was already in pretty hot water. There was some shouting. I think one of the cannibals had already spent his paycheck on facial piercings and he tried to head butt Cam. The Velvet Touch hos came over to find out what all the ruckus was about, but then just walked away, laughing. "Always get paid up front," Frankenhooker shouted at us. "That's the first rule of business, unless you just wanna get fucked."

"Well, at least we got a lot of free beer," my friend Andy said. This fact meant more to him than me, because at that time I didn't drink. Matt was the real hothead, though, and I was a little afraid he was going to go get the shotgun he kept in the trunk of his car.

"What are you going to do?" I asked him.

Matt ripped off his dentist outfit, rubbed a sore spot on his arm and looked down at the sixty dollars in his hand. "I think I'm going to go get a hand job."

After a mile and a half ride, I would lug my bike across a fallow corn field to get to the gun shop, a windowless pole-barn set on a hill overlooking the nearest blue highway, a road my parents specifically identified as too dangerous for cycling. The gun store had been around for more than half a century and had some legitimate business name, but it was always known simply as GUNS, because the word GUNS stood on its exterior in giant 10-foot letters that glowed red for miles across the county. The journey across that corn field and back usually discouraged any follow-up visits for a few months: the ground was uneven and it was often easier just to carry the Huffy than roll it through the waist-high switchgrass and forbs.

I grew up in what then seemed like "the country." But that fallow field was never replanted, as far as I know. Now it is a parking lot for a big box hardware/lumber store, with a McDonalds, a Subway, and a tire store out there islanded by asphalt. It was all built after I went to college. But at thirteen, it felt so liberating just to leave home on my own two wheels and go to a store, even if all it sold was weaponry I couldn't buy. Once every summer, the farmer who owned all that land would have an all-day sheep auction and he would hire a lady to sit in a trailer and ladle sloppy joe meat from a crock pot onto wonder buns for a dollar each. She also sold candy and pop. I looked forward to riding my bike down to that trailer every year. There was something so satisfying about being able to engage in such commerce on my own accord. That's partly why I loved going to GUNS. They had a pop machine and charity candy for sale at the counter. I remember strolling through the aisles of the gun shop, staring at semi-automatics and revolvers, assault rifles and shotguns. I admired the sophisticated lines of vintage Walthers and Lugers, the slick, gimicky plastic of the Glocks, the harsh beauty of a Sig Sauer .45 caliber handgun. I would spend hours there, wandering with the distant staccato of small-arms fire from the basement shooting range, dreaming of turning eighteen, examining everything from boxes of bullets to the armpit holsters to the compound bows and their vicious broadhead arrows. I would hover over the case of Rambo knives, listening to the clerks describe to their customers what kind of damage the various pistols would do to an intruder's skull. When you're a 13-year-old boy, you are not just grateful that the only business within bike-riding distance is a gun shop and not, say, a place that sells dollhouse miniatures or scrapbooking supplies. You are in heaven.

One night, a few years later, GUNS caught fire. My dad and I drove over there in his truck, while the disco lights of the local constabulary and the firetrucks and the red ten-foot letters of GUNS itself were outmatched by the flames illuminating the night. There is a strange sense of community when some local building catches fire: neighbors come out from behind their televisions and have conversations when they might not have spoken in years; hands are shaken, news exchanged. Someone is a grandfather now. Somebody else had a good old dog die and now they got a new one. Word quickly spread throughout the township that GUNS was on fire, and soon more rubberneckers in pickup trucks and station wagons were lining up along a road that now spans five lanes between a Wal-Mart Supercenter and a Meijer's Thrifty Acres, all assessing the heroism of the township fire department, the performance of the brave volunteers, the possibility of a malicious cause of the blaze, and the speculated damage to our township's lonely island of commerce. I remember some men were drinking beer, the flames reflected in their glasses. Before the fire could be contained, the building was rocked by a series of explosions: enormous hollow, echoing booms, probably from the cannisters of gunpowder. "It's nearly muzzleloading season," a nearby man said. "They sell a lot of black powder there."

Then the ammunition boxes caught fire. I remembered where they were kept along the eastern wall of the store, 25-round boxes of Remington buck shot piled 50 high and ten deep, hundreds of boxes of .45 caliber bullets and countless 5,000 round boxes of Winchester rifle ammunition. Now you could hear them whistling into the darkness. The volunteer firefighters tore away from the scene in their Broncos, cops barreled towards us screaming through their loudspeakers to get the hell away from there, bullets, they said, were flying in every direction. I've never seen my dad drive so fast, my teenage body tucked snug under his right elbow, my shoulder practically against the wheel and his big battered hand around my head.

Every year on a September Saturday my high school German teacher would borrow one of the athletic department's 15-passenger vans and take eighteen of his German students to Chicago. This teacher was a wise and fabulously lazy man who grew up in the very small town of Watervliet, Michigan before attending college and settling down in the slightly bigger town of Kalamazoo. Looking back, I believe he saw his role in our lives as more than a mere martinet of Teutonic grammar; he considered himself a mentor whose mission was to expose young provincials to the possibilities of the wide world beyond their petty secondary-school social upheavals. Not to get all Mr. Holland's Opus on you, but if men and women like him weren't out there sacrificing the exciting lives they could have led in Berlin or New York to inspire the pubescent petite bourgeoisie to get liberal arts degrees and move away to bigger cities, there would be no embittered penniless hipsters living out their thirties in cramped Brooklyn apartments writing short stories about embittered penniless hipsters living out their thirties in cramped Brooklyn apartments. And without them and all the other urban paralegals, copy editors, consultants, lawyers, editorial assistants, government employees and research associates bored out of their fucking minds at work, who would be left to read and write blogs? If no one had inspired us to break up with our high school sweethearts and seek something more from life than throwing empty cans of Milwaukee's Best into the rock quarry every Saturday night, there probably wouldn't be any blogger conferences to go to in Chicago. Danke Herr Holland!

Back in Chicago all those years ago, wir deutsche Kursteilnehmer were supposed to spend the morning on a brief architectural tour, followed by a few hours in the Art Institute, and later dinner at the Berghoff. But between Nighthawks and the Schnitzel, we were allowed to roam the city as we pleased. Most everyone headed up Michigan Avenue, straight for Niketown. I remember Niketown being a very big deal to people. If you told someone that you went to Chicago, you were always asked if you went to Niketown, and if not it meant you had a lousy trip where it was assumed your parents made you do all kinds of boring crap. I don't think Niketown is such a big deal anymore, now that downtown Chicago has ESPNworld, OldNavyburgh, Hollisteropolis and HighSchoolMusical2Land.

Skipping the not-so-magnificent mile, a few of us hopped on the elevated train and headed up to see Cabrini Green before it got knocked down. We did not consider this to be dangerous; all our knowledge of Cabrini Green came from the movie Candyman, so we figured if Virginia Madsen could almost survive it, three high school guys from Kalamazoo should have no problem. People there just glared and made us feel like the assholes we were, so we left to try to find Al Capone's hotel, which was also scheduled for demolition. After we stared up at that crumbling old building ("that's probably where he killed that dude with the baseball bat!") we rode the train down to Chinatown and laughed at the crazy and smelly goods in the stores and wandered around the surrounding area filled with abandoned buildings until we found a paper bag stuffed with about twenty little plastic baggies of a resiny drug none of us recognized, along with a wad of about seventy dollars in cash and a .38 caliber revolver. We tossed the drugs and split the cash, and I saw the guy who picked up the bag put the gun into his jacket's inside pocket. "The best place to find shit is where people are always running from the cops," he said. The whole afternoon was just like that "going to town" scene in Wet Hot American Summer. Only real as fuck. By six we were back in the Loop with our classmates and their Niketown bags, eating spaetzle.

I wonder sometimes how horrified I will be when Future Juniper does stuff like hop on a train into an unfamiliar city and walk around places where she could very easily get sold into white slavery or get forced into running guns for the Yakuza. This is a curse of parenthood, I suppose, desiring nothing more than for your kids than for them not to be as fucking stupid as you were. I read an article a few weeks ago about how over the course of four generations, an eight-year-old British boy's freedom to move had been restricted to 300 yards from his front door, while his great-grandfather had enjoyed the freedom to walk six miles every day to go fishing. I thought of my own youthful wanderlust, spending all day hiking through endless forests (that are now endless subdivisions). I think of days like that one in Chicago, formative in a way of what I still find fascinating and interesting about the cities of the world. And then I wonder if I am committing Juniper to a life of virtual house arrest, even though my fearful colleagues in the suburbs are largely doing the same thing.

* * * *

"Psychogeography" is the study of the specific effects of a geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. In 1958, Guy Debord wrote the seminal psychogeographical text Théorie de la Dérive, or "Theory of Drifting," what he called, "a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences." In a dérive you (or you and a friend) drop your existing relationships for a few hours, you drop your work and usual leisure activities, ignoring all your other usual motives for movement and action, and let yourselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters you find there. Sights and attractions intended as touristic are to be avoided along with itineraries, your journey instead becomes "dependent on chance and the spontaneous subjective impulses and reactions of the wanderer."

Debord had been inspired by the situationalists, particularly the study Paris et l'agglomération parisienne, in which Chombart de Lauwe noted the narrowness of the real Paris in which most individuals actual lived, in comparison to the grand, touristic idea of Paris. Most Parisians, he suggested, dwell exclusively within an extremely small geographical radius. Lauwe diagramed all the movements made in the space of a single year by a female student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary formed a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which were the School of Political Science, her residence and that of her piano teacher. Why live in Paris at all? One naturally wonders.

We spent the past weekend in Chicago. On Friday we followed our itinerary, visiting friends and beautiful old buildings, finally ending the day on Navy Pier---a tourist destination with a character seemingly defined by the absence of reality---to visit with people we only knew through the internet. On Saturday we took the train to uptown and walked back towards the tall buildings. I love Chicago. Beyond the city's obvious charms, there are still so many wonderful thoroughly unspectacular things to see there. It is never the grandeur that impresses me most, though I can certainly see the appeal of gothic skyscrapers and miesian monoliths as well as the bustle of a vibrant city center. I love the dirty Italian beef stands in Chicago, the old movie palaces turned into Mexican dance clubs, the Indian funeral homes, and the bars with glass-brick windows and faded Old Style signs hanging above the door. Tourists are almost always in a better position to partake in the dérive: seeing the familiar as new, bisecting the small triangular ambulations of the locals as we walk down streets with no idea where they'll take us.

We are back in Detroit now: house, market, playground, our own comfortable triangulated rut. But beyond the joys of seeing old and new friends, getting over to Chicago for a couple of days reminded me of the pleasure of wandering that so consumed me when we first moved to Detroit. Tomorrow I'm going to turn left where I usually walk right.

You never know when you're going to come across a paper bag filled with drugs, cash, and a gun.

[This is the second part of the story of what happened to us in Greece ten years ago today when we woke to find everything we needed to survive had been stolen while we slept on a ferry to Crete; the first part is here]

After an hour's worth of searching and pleading with the unhelpful officers of the docked and now-empty ship, we were shooed down the gangplank. There seemed to be a small village, Souda, to the east. The ship's purser had told us to go see the Tourist Police, but nothing seemed to be open that early in the morning, so we sat down on the vast concrete pier and considered our options. There was no American embassy on Crete; we would have to get back to Athens. But we had no money to buy tickets back to Athens. We didn't have enough money to buy a phone card to activate a pay phone so we could call our parents collect and beg them to figure out a way to get us some cash in the middle of their night. I feared that we would become beggars, or throw ourselves upon the mercy of a band of gypsies. Wood, I thought, would make a pretty hot gypsy, at least. That line from Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee" kept running through my head: "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." God, I kept thinking: if that's true, freedom totally fucking sucks.

What I found interesting about this crisis was the way Wood and I exchanged panic and comfort. When Wood stood there on that empty pier, shaking with fear and wailing with uncertainty, I would be calm, holding her close and stroking her hair, whispering that things would all be okay, at least we were alive, this would be a big pain but that's all it was. As she would regain composure, I would start to slip. I would think about everything that was gone. The money, the plane tickets, gone. The passports, gone. All gone. A few months earlier, Wood had gotten her long red hair cut short, and I was so distraught I'd asked the stylist to save me a lock of it, which I'd kept in my wallet. The thought of some thief with that precious hair made me so angry. I swung wildly at things. I might have cried. And Wood held me, calm and close, whispering the things I needed to hear. We sat there islanded by cement for a long time.

At some point, the purser came out and stood at the top of the gangplank. He shouted Wood's full name. We looked at each other with great hope and rushed up to him. They had found her purse. It was empty except for a few photographs and her Trinity College Dublin ID card. It was found by a janitor emptying a trash bin. Still, it was something. This could prove who she was to some authority. We waited anxiously, hoping something else might have been discarded, but about an hour later the ship belched out smoke and slipped off into the Aegean. With no options left we stood and wandered into the village of Souda.

I found a couple of cookies in a garbage bin by a bus stop. That was something. We sat and ate them in a small plaza. Those cookies were delicious. Eventually we decided to try the police station. They might be able to tell us what we should do. But really, I thought: what do you tell people who have wandered into your town like time travelers, people with nothing but their clothes and a deep need for mercy? Still, it felt like we ought to do something and not just sit there. I found a map of the village with a building that said "civic law" in Greek, and we headed that way down a residential street lined with olive and lemon trees. When we got to the building all we saw were a couple of squad cars and a typical old peasant woman in a black dress sweeping the walkway. She looked up at us with black eyes nestled within the parabolas of age, and I said, "Police?" She nodded her head sharply. She pointed into her own house, and we followed her past faded oriental rugs and some dried plants piled on a table, over to a staircase. She pointed and urged us up, eager, it seemed, to get back to her sweeping. We climbed the stairs in this old woman's house to discover a fully-operational police station on the second floor. Fully operational in the Greek sense: several mustachioed men lounged about in an office setting, one pecking lazily at an old-fashioned typewriter, another fully asleep at his desk.

They looked up at us as though they had never seen anyone other than their fellow hirsute, worry-bead clicking countrymen walk through that doorway. And of course, not one of them spoke English. They were charitable enough, tolerating my effort to explain what happened in a language that must not have been spoken in those parts since the age of Pericles. Plato himself might have been able to discern something from my barbaric mispronouncements, but not Sargent Balki Bartokomous there. It was like walking into a police station in rural Arkansas and explaining that you were just carjacked using only words you remembered from Beowulf.

One of the officers knew the word "wait," so we did. We had nothing else in the world to do. After about an hour, a hot lady cop showed up to work---not hot in the Jennifer Aniston sense, but hot in the sense that she was the first Greek woman I had seen in 48 hours without a mustache. Even if she'd had a beard I would have thought she was hot, simply because she spoke English. Beautiful, beautiful English. Wood and I stumbled over each other's words trying to get our story out. She looked at us with a mixture of pity and confusion. Finally, she spoke: "Why do you come here? We can do nothing. You need the tourist police." She led our mournful asses down out of the station, out through the old lady's living room, and drove us back to the plaza where we'd started. Taking some pity, she handed us a 500 drachma note, and we thanked her until she probably wished she hadn't. It was enough money to buy a phone card and a bottle of water, so we were able to terrify our parents and rehydrate ourselves from the loss of all those tears.

Once we sat down we realized it was our anniversary. Exactly one year before we'd gotten drunk and made out all night. This was not how we'd envisioned celebrating it, trying not to cry into each other's shoulders in a nondescript plaza waiting for the tourist police whose office might never open.

About an hour later a car driven by an attractive young man pulled up in front of us. He was wearing a uniform of some sort. "Camera?" he said. I thought he was another one of those con artists trying to sell us a broken camera. "Ohee," I said, and he shook his head. "We find camera. Yours, maybe?" We jumped in the back seat; we would have followed him anywhere. He drove us right back to the old woman's house; took us up the old woman's stairs, through a maze of cubicles. The hot cop and the sleepy cop and the typing cop all looked up and stared as we passed their desks.

And there, on a sturdy wooden police desk, was everything. Everything. Our passports. Our plane tickets, credit cards, traveler's checks, cameras, film, Irish money, American dollars, and a wad of drachma notes so big it looked like it belonged in the fist of a blinged-out Hellenic rapper, not tossed casually in a pile of treasure the likes of which had not been seen in all of Greece since Schliemann dug out the tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae. I saw the lock of Wood's hair peeking out of my wallet.

Then there was that feeling you get when you're dreaming of something wonderful but you're slowly starting to realize that you're dreaming and you still just want it all to be real. But this was real. I am not a religious man, but at that moment it felt like the gods had intervened in our lives just to show us what mercy they were capable of.

The lady cop came over to the room. "We caught a man who does drugs, a wanted man. We recognize him, find this in his bag. Do not touch it. He is dirty. It is dirty. A bad, dirty man he is." I realized that if we had not wandered far into the village to find the wrong police station, they would not have known about us. They wouldn't have sent the young cop to get us. By some stroke of luck, we'd wandered into that old woman's attic.

Then a new voice spoke in English from the other side of the station. "I took no Greek money," it said. "Only American money. Tell them I took no Greek money!" It was him. Standing in a small closet with a window cut in the door, a window affixed with bars he was banging and hanging from. This was the guy who'd seen two rich foreigners sleeping together on the floor, saw the bag under one's head and took it and everything it contained, leaving them to spend so many hours fearing the worst. "Quiet you!" (or its equivalent) one of the cops barked at him, raising a nightstick threateningly as the thief shrunk back grumbling.

"A ginger thief," Wood said aloud. He was redheaded and redbearded and they were right: he was filthy. He looked just like a satyr: there was a peculiar goatishness about him. "I took no Greek money! The Greek money is not yours" he shouted at us. "Tell them." The thief spoke better English than the police.

The cops gave us latex gloves and allowed us to take everything. I'm still not sure all that money was ours, but they insisted we take it all, as if to spite him. "Noooooooooooo," wailed the thief from his cell. I will never forget the feeling of that cold, dirty cash in my pocket, the sight of those passports and plane tickets in my hands. I thought of our parents, awake and terrified for us. If only they could know what had transpired, and rest their heads against their pillows with a smile.

There was still paperwork to be filled out. I was given copies of the mimeographed police report, much of it typed in Greek. At one point, the officer filling out the report grunted something at the girl cop, who was acting as translator: "Do you wish to punish him?" she asked. The typist looked at me expectantly over his Mexican-bandit mustache. I had visions of cat'o'nine tails and iron maidens. What he had done to us was still fresh on my mind and I would have happily punished him. "Yes," I finally answered.

"No," Wood said at the same time. She had already forgiven him. So Christlike, this wife of mine. I wanted blood. Welts, at least. The Greeks waited for us to make up our minds. "We have everything now, we should just let it go," Wood said.

"I don't want him to think he can just do this and get away with it," I replied. The point was moot. In order to "punish" him, we would need to stick around for months to testify. I was disappointed I wouldn't get to dole out any punishment personally, but the man was already in trouble for possession of heroin. The Greeks made us wash our hands with a foul-smelling soap, then we shook all their hands and said, "efharisto" a thousand times. We heard the thief pitch a fit as we climbed down the steps: "I took no Greek money!" I could have kissed every hairy mole on the cheeks of the old hag still sweeping her front porch outside.

* * * * *

Crete is a beautiful island, but you have no idea how beautiful it is when you are flush with cash just hours after having nothing. I counted the money and could have sworn we now had a little more than before the theft. We took a rickety bus across the island, down to a hippie beach town called Paleahora on the southern coast. Wood fell asleep with her head on my shoulder for the entire ride while the bus radio blared bouzouki and tambourine chants. I might have whispered myths into her ear: "On this island, something new was born: demarcation between barbarian and Greek; Crete stole Europe from Asia, back when things like continents were sexed. It was just the first of many thefts, when Zeus, guised as bull, swept Europa across the sea; later Jason stole Medea; Paris, Helen; from this very mass of rock Theseus reversed Crete's crimes: he took Ariadne but left her somewhere in between. Here we are, at the source of it all. From these mountains and these valleys, chieftains of ragged tribes emerged to give us light; from these craggy hills, the Cretan mists, they started stories that still pass human lips." I might have said those things. I wouldn't put it past my former self. She might have smiled, cooed, and nestled deeper into my neck. Kissed it even.

We got off the bus and headed right to the beach. We met the woman who wrote the Lonely Planet Greece, and she helped us find the a wonderful room with its own rose garden. For a few days it was though I was not Dutch, it was like I'd been replaced by some profligate Irishman willing to spend all his money on all manner of fine food and drink. I ate a whole octopus. Wood went topless at the beach. Hot. We became so sunburned we could hardly move. It was one of the best weeks of our lives.

But before we left town, I booked tickets for the voyage back to Athens. Although I cannot pretend it wasn't difficult for me, I spent three times as much to get us a private berth. With a door. A door that locked.

Lately I have been telling Juniper stories from the Greek myths. This is something I have long desired to do. Even back when I was terrified at the very idea of becoming a parent, I still dreamed of one day telling a child intricate, partly-embellished versions of those myths. The stories would impart important lessons to my progeny, I believed, as they had for thousands of years. Recently, the book of graffiti letters helped pique Juniper's interest in mythology: one day she sat next to me pointing at the letters, saying the words she knew from repeated readings. "I is for Icarus," she said, and this led to the story of Daedalus and his son, a boy with wings who flew higher than the birds and even higher than the clouds, so high you couldn't even see him. He did not listen to his dada and he flew too close to the sun and fell into the water. See what happens when you don't listen to your dada? "Dada tell story Icarus flying then falling?" she now asks ten times a day.

"Icarus was a little boy who lived in Greece," I start.

"That's where Dada missed Mama," she said the first time I told the tale. I must have told her something about that at some point. How does she remember these things?

Ten years ago this week, Wood and I were living in Dublin. My classes had finished two weeks before hers, and I impetuously took off for Athens. I was studying classics and knew that if I wanted to see all of the important classical sites, this would be my chance. Archeology makes Wood sleepy. This was an era before cell phones, a time when Irish university e-mail required Eudora software and a 3.5 inch diskette. Wood's apartment had no phone. I left knowing I would not communicate with her until she herself arrived in Athens after her term ended.

I landed at the airport with one of those asshole "rucksacks" and a tent. It was two o'clock in the morning, so I spent the night slumped in a fiberglass shell chair welded to three others, one of which was occupied by a heavyset black woman from Indiana who had been in Crete visiting her boyfriend, a soldier stationed on a U.S. base there. "Raki!" she kept saying, "Damn, boy!" She was talking about some local anise-flavored drink that had left her severely hungover all day. I did not realize at the time this would be the last real conversation I would have until I picked Wood up in that same spot two weeks later. In 1997, the airport seemed more like an empty bus station, but there were a number of Greek soldiers patrolling the place with their hands on the barrels of submachine guns slung on straps over their shoulders. At dawn I took the first bus into town, spying the pillars of the Temple of Olympian Zeus amid some poplars, finally hopping off in pre-rush-hour Omonia Square, with its smoke-drenched Soviet-looking architecture and shifty gypsies making me question whether I'd mistakenly taken the wrong plane and ended up in some unpronounceable Albanian megalopolis. Up on the side of one of the buildings I could barely make out the word "Hellas." But in the pale haze of a smudge-fingered dawn, the lights of the "A" and the "S" were broken, so it simply read "HELL." I waited in Omonia for another bus that I believed would take me to the long-distance bus station; I considered this all an inauspicious start. Athens smelled. It was dirty. Everyone had a mustache. I wanted to go home.

Instead, I went to Delphi. Other than an old German man who looked at everything with a flashlight I was the only foreign tourist there, and he refused to speak with me (even in German). All the stores were open though. When I walked down the street in town I was marauded by shopkeepers and pidgin invitations to peruse their racks of baubles and t-shirts adorned with pornographic scenes from ancient pottery. For several days the only people I spoke to were shopkeepers, waiters, and the pension owners who held my passport and handed me keys. At night I would drink a big cheap bottle of Amstel, choking with boredom and loneliness until I fell asleep at sunset only to be woken in the middle of the night by random celebratory gunfire. This went on for many days: in Delphi, Olympia, Arcadia, Sparta, Mikenes, and Corinth. The restaurants were always empty. I welcomed conversations with scam artists who tried to sell me broken cameras and slip their Nescafes onto my taverna bill. Even the smallest transaction fulfilled a deep need for some interaction with my species. I smiled at ugly children. I bought souvlaki through the window of a stalled train. I stole blood oranges from trees and camped quietly in olive groves. I saw many beautiful things, but it was one of the loneliest times of my life.

I was eager to get back to Athens, to get a sense of the city and wait out the final days before Wood arrived. I rented a simple room on a quiet street between Syntagma Square and the Plaka, an area largely empty of tourists but bustling with pimps and con artists. One day a very nice older man who spoke excellent English started talking to me and walked alongside me until we came to a bar where he invited me in for a drink. It was foolish, I know, but at the time I was so desperate for conversation I followed him into a dark bar where he assumed a seat next to me and a fat woman behind the bar silently opened two beers. "Do you see my niece?" he asked, nodding into the darkness. I then noticed the heavily-made-up woman who looked like Abe Vigoda wearing a peroxide-blond wig sitting in a booth inside the otherwise-empty bar. "She is beautiful, yes?" I took another look: unibrowed and squat, she easily outweighed me by 30 pounds, but this was the man's niece. "Yeah," I said. "She is."

"She would like a drink too, is that okay?" he asked. The niece smiled at me under her bleached blond mustache. "I guess," I said. The silent bartender had already made her a pale blue cocktail. It suddenly occurred to me that I would be paying a exorbitant price for all the drinks. "Do you like her?" my new friend asked.

"Um, I have a girlfriend."

The truth is, Wood had forced me to learn that sentence in Greek before I left. I said it again, in Greek, and they laughed. "Well," the old man said, "you still buy her drink."

"No," I said. "You make me pay for that drink and I'll go straight to the tourist police."

I thought Greeks were animated in normal conversation, but I had never seen one really pissed. They were shouting at me, at each other, in Greek, in English. The old woman bartender was insisting that I pay for my own drink at least. The old man was telling me I could go to hell. Wasn't I already there? I suppose I could have avoided all the Hellenic histrionics by paying the bill and learning my lesson, but, you see, I'm Dutch. We don't buy drinks for anyone, especially the manly-whore spawn of two miserable con-artists eager to take advantage of a lonely traveler.

A few days later, when I related that story to Wood, Athens was already a lovely city full of charms. It looked so nice from the Acropolis. We walked hand-in-hand through Monastiraki. We lounged outside a Byzantine church, tossing pieces of pretzel to dogs who slept on cobblestones. That afternoon we headed to Piraeus, where we bought tickets for an overnight sea voyage to Crete. We figured we'd save money on lodging by sleeping on the boat. Once aboard the good ship Aptera, we found a nice quiet room where we had relative privacy. There were a couple of other guys who'd sought out a similar arrangement sprawled out sleeping between rows of airline-style seats. I took everything valuable out of our rucksacks and put it all in a smaller bag that I would use as a pillow: our passports; our plane tickets onward from Athens to Rome and eventually back to Dublin; about $1000 in traveler's checks and $500 in Greek drachmas; credit cards; cameras and rolls and rolls of film. I went through the rucksacks again, meticulously removing everything that might tempt a thief, finally stuffing a fleece jacket in the smaller bag that would rest underneath my head. In our first year together, Wood and I had slept in the back seats of cars, on dorm-room floors and long bus rides. We made a bed for ourselves on that ship between the seats and snuggled close, so happy to be together after several weeks apart we could have slept on a rock. We fell asleep wrapped in each other's arms.

The ship passed through winedark waters reflecting the lights of the Cyclades, of Naxos, so close, reversing Daedalus' daring flight, from Athens to Crete. We woke at dawn, still hours from port. But the bag beneath my head was gone. I stood up, panic shedding all trace of sleep from my eyes, and I found it, emptied of its contents on the seat in front of us. The thief had left the fleece, but nothing else. We suddenly had nothing of any real value. We didn't even have enough coin to buy the 200 drachma phone card we would need just to activate a pay phone to make a collect call to our parents, who had just gone to bed back in America. We searched through our rucksacks. We had nothing at all between us but dirty clothes and a rudimentary grasp of Ancient Greek when the ship docked at Chania and the thief finally escaped with the crowds down the gangplanks out into the unknown.

[Next week I'll get to the really good part of the story; and Wood has promised a post for tomorrow.]

[*update* The conclusion is here]

During my last year of college, I lived with five other guys in a house that was falling apart. One day we returned from class and the ceiling in one room had collapsed completely onto the floor. When we moved into that house there were already cockroaches there and when we moved out there were many more. For half of the year a sixth guy lived with us, but he slept in the attic and didn't pay any rent. He was the kind of guy who could disappear into the wilderness for weeks at a time and when he returned to find himself locked out of the house, rather than knock he'd just go across the street and bury himself in leaves and sleep on a hill. While trying to sleep I used to hear him up above me in the attic practicing making fires by rubbing elderberry spindles against dry-mullen stalks. There were always fun people around that house. We threw a lot of parties. At one party everyone got naked and played hungry-hungry hippos.

We once spent hours plotting out the funniest way to re-arrange the letter board of the Lutheran church down the street. Originally it stated the title of the week's sermon and the time of church services. My two favorites alternatives were, "Homos: holier than Christ?" and "Nun titty show: 11:00." In the end, we only had the balls to make it say this. For years after graduation I felt an emptiness in my life, a conflicted wistfulness for those days of debauchery and spontaneous fun. You never knew when a Sunday night would turn into a silly four-hour movie shoot or when it was time to throw a bike from the roof of a six-story building or break into the football team's equipment shed and steal all their tackle dummies. After graduation, my friends and I vacillated between asserting that we needed to move on with our lives, and gut-wrenching reunions where we realized things were never again going to be like they'd once been. It was all very St. Elmo's Fire/Fandango, except, you know, in 1999. We eventually moved to different corners of the country, but every year as many of us as possible would get together on New Year's Eve for a drunken elegy to the past.

I hadn't been to one of those parties in more than three years; but this year we got together in Detroit. I hadn't seen one of these former roommates since his wedding, and now his marriage is ending after two and a half years and the birth of a beautiful daughter. When you build your life around the commitment to another person, when you make all the compromises required by that series of acts, and then you find one day that it has all been washed away, what can you do? Where can you go when you find yourself shattered back into one person, like who you were before? This friend got in his car and drove to Michigan. I don't know if it was good medicine to be around us, but I hope it was. We knew and loved him before, and still.

If I have not been writing, it is because I have been with these guys, either in real life, or in my head, traveling back to who I was then and reflecting on how I got here now. It is strange to see receding hairlines and the marks of age on your beloved friends, knowing that they must see similar changes in the face you look at every day in the mirror. And it was so wonderful to see Juniper playing with the children of old friends. She stayed up until nearly 10:30 on New Year's Eve, deciding for the third time that week that she wanted to get naked around all my old friends. She does this thing where she looks at me and nods her head vigorously to reinforce that she should be, "Juney baby naked!" So we relented and allowed her to run around the party in nothing but her baby legs, and upon seeing Juniper's bare flesh, the 3-year-old daughter of a girl who once played hungry-hungry hippos naked in my living room stripped off her clothes and ran around the party squealing with her.

My first real job was washing dishes and bussing tables at Russ' Restaurant, where I earned a busboy's wage of $2.65 an hour. At the end of the night, I was supposed to get a ten-percent cut of each waitress' tips, which they would leave for me in a little white paper bag under the time clock. Sometimes a paper bag would only have a quarter and two dimes in it. Other times I might see $1.65 or more. With five waitresses on the floor, I eventually had to complain to the manager, Rod, that I wasn't making minimum wage. He smiled at me and told me that he, too, had started as a busboy at a Russ' restaurant in Holland, Michigan, but he worked hard and didn't complain and look at him now: he drives a Cadillac. He said if I worked hard, I might expect the same.

In other words, he told me to shut the fuck up and get back to my sink full of soggy french fries and greasy water that smelled like thousand island dressing and meat. One time, one of the waitresses came up behind me, slipped her arms under mine to grab my nipples and whisper in my ear: "what would you do if I got naked and climbed into that sink right there?" I looked at the foetid detritus of several dozen house salads and chicken bones floating in the murky, malodorous sludge. "Um. . ." I said, and she cackled and went back out on the floor.

God she scared the crap out of 16-year-old me.

One of my friends ended up regularly fucking her out in the parking lot during their 15-minute breaks. Restaurants are such hornet's nests of sexual depravity. When she cheated on him with another line cook my friend and a buddy got really drunk and broke into his house and tore it apart. They said they would have killed him had he been there. They both got probation.

Do I think the waitresses were stiffing me on the tips? Probably. Most of them were in their forties, supporting both their broken families and their addiction to Basic Ultra Light 100's on the same $2.65 plus tips I was making. Their nametags said things like Mabel and Rita. To their credit, Russ' was a Dutch restaurant whose most loyal customers usually needed to be wheeled in from a nursing home van. While pushing my bus cart around the restaurant I always had to be careful not to knock the tubes out from the various oxygen tank carts that lined the aisles. If most elderly folks on fixed incomes are frugal, you can imagine what old Dutch people are like. Four old Dutchies would each order (on separate checks) a $1.65 cup of ham-n-bean soup, each ask for six packs of saltines, and then each leave a dime and a nickel for a tip. I know all this because I used to clear their tables. Rumor was that the first Russ' restaurant on Chicago Drive in Holland, Michigan had telephones installed in every booth so customers could call the kitchen and order their food directly with the cooks. This was set up so no one would ever have to leave a tip.

Russ' mascot was Russ, a Dutch boy more annoying than the bowl-headed chap on the paintcans, a clog-wearing punk carrying a gigantic burger through the tulips as though it were his reward for sticking his finger in the goddamn dike. I'll never forget one evening in July when the manager pulled me away from my buscart and told me he had a "special duty" for me that evening. He had a big gap between his top front teeth and he smiled when he pulled some red and blue clothes and a pair of wooden shoes from a bag. "Look what I've got," he said with aplomb. "You get to be the Russ tonight!"

I should have walked out right then.

But I was a weak-willed sonofabitch back in those days, scared of a guy named Rod with a clip-on tie and a ten-year-old Cadillac. I put on the pants, the hat, the neckerchief, and the wooden shoes (which were about two sizes too small) and held a giant sign that said, 3-piece chicken dinner, w/ fries & slaw, only $4.99! in front of the restaurant on main street, certain that every girl in my high school was driving by, laughing. People yelled things. Flipped me off. Honked. When it was a slow night and nobody needed any tables bussed, Rod would pull out the Russ costume to remedy it.

To this day, whenever I see someone dressed as a banana or a hotdog, or some woman dressed up like the statue of liberty outside an accountant's office during tax time, I am haunted by the familiar look of quiet desperation in their eyes.