Sobriety Turns You into a Ghost and the Rust Belt Is Full of Life by Justin Karcher

So a group of buzzed suburbanites are walking down Elmwood. They turn onto Cleveland. One of ‘em looks at the street sign and says, “This isn’t St. Lawrence.”

1. No, it isn’t.
2. St. Lawrence is nowhere near here.
3. You’re probably thinking of St. James.
4. Cleveland isn’t St. James.
5. Just get out of the city as fast as you can.

But I don’t have time for this, to worry about the wrong kind of lost souls. It’s about 11 PM, Saturday night, and I’ll be up all night again, not because of insomnia or anything like that, but because I’m sober and have all the time in the world: wandering this city of the dead and talking to the saints whose churches aren’t mapped by Google, whose stories aren’t surfing on cereal-smelling airwaves for all to hear, people who fall through the cracks night after night.

So I walk. And I walk. And while walking, I come across these little mysteries that need solving. So I dig. And I dig. And while digging, I come across some of Buffalo’s most beautiful people.

People like Dan. That’s what he told me his name was, anyway.

First night I meet him, he’s pacing back and forth on Allen. Wearing white pants, he looks like an angel. He tells me his car got impounded, something to do with a DUI from years ago, and he needs $7 for a cab to the impound lot on Niagara.

“I’m not a bum,” he says, “that’s my wife.” He points to a woman across the street who’s giving us the evil eye. “I’m a family man,” he confesses, “and I keep fucking up.”

Dan and his wife are in the city for an armed services celebration at the ballpark. He served in the military for 27 years, quick to point out that he was involved in the Gulf War…the first one. I thank him for his service, but admit that I don’t have my wallet on me and can’t give him the $7. He’s disappointed and then asks for a couple cigarettes for him and his wife. I can’t say no, can’t lie about it. I’m a walking bonfire on these nighttime walks; passengers onboard a plane could spot my smoke.

After giving him a couple cigarettes, he dutifully runs across the street to give one to his wife and I’m reminded of a young lover presenting a bouquet of flowers to someone special.

A couple nights later, I spot Dan again on the same block and this time he’s talking to a group of drunk twentysomethings. I walk by them and hear him talking about his wife and pointing to a woman across the street I don’t recognize. That’s not his wife, I think to myself, but I just light up a cigarette and keep moving.

The stories we tell about ourselves, the stories we tell the people around us, what do they really mean? And does it even matter? In a city like Buffalo where truth and fiction mix like a bad drink, it’s tough to get to the bottom of anything, let alone a renaissance that flies overhead like a slow-moving plane dragging a banner with words in bold on it: THINGS ARE GETTING BETTER. It all seems like a big lie to me. How can things truly get better when so many stories fall on deaf ears?

And I repeatedly ask myself this question as I march down Elmwood, Saturday night, on my way to Allen to meet up with my girlfriend and some of our friends at Alley Cat.

Maybe Dan will be there.

So I walk down Elmwood towards Allen, carrying a magnifying glass and looking like a madman, surrounded by an energy that doesn’t know where to go, a sense of loss that’s hard to define.

***

These days, there are too many boarded-up and empty storefronts on Elmwood. Sometimes I pretend the boarded-up storefronts are guests at a kinky masquerade, like Eyes Wide Shut – and all you need to do is whisper the secret password and all will be revealed, but unfortunately, that’s not the case. When it comes to neglected Buffalo, it takes a lot more than some password to pull back the curtains. You need to put in the effort. Long hours, blood, sweat, tears—that kind of currency—but even then, it’s not always enough.

When I was a drunk, I would always whisper passwords at dilapidated buildings, thinking bells would go off, and they would shift their faces, revealing their teeth to me. The bite was never enough though. I wanted the city I love to eat me alive, to be a pile of loganberry bones at the bottom of Buffalo’s stomach. I’ve always been a romantic. Now everywhere I look, loose teeth roll through moonlight like tumbleweed. Despite popular opinion, the city doesn’t smile as much as it used to. There are too many gaps to lose yourself in. You can’t fill up all that emptiness with hashtags or pedal bike tours.

This city doesn’t understand progress. Leaders confuse progress with vampirism, sucking away the energy of one neighborhood to replenish another. No matter how you spin it, you can’t be screaming “Buffalove” while ignoring the ones that need help the most. You can’t close someone’s book when they haven’t even finished telling their story, but here we are, forgetting all about the mysteries that keeps this city going.

The streets here are different, I assure you.

This one time I was at a séance at the Amherst Museum and beforehand, there was a guest lecturer and he talked about Sherlock Holmes hanging out in Buffalo. He nerded out over it and talked about how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said that Buffalo is the psychic capital of the world. It was in the paper and everything.

Who knows though, right? It might not even be true, but it’s nice to think about, especially on those nights when the Medical Corridor seems to be squashing everything in its path and there’s a pedal bike full of reapers laughing at junkies. 

***

Saturday night and I run into my friend—let’s call him H—hanging out in front of Alley Cat. We catch up, if that’s what you want to call it.

“Still breathing,” he tells me.

This dude on a bike chimes in, “I stopped breathing for a few minutes…it was the greatest time of my life.”

He pounds me and H and for whatever reason mentions the West Nile Virus before pedaling off.

“I know someone who had that,” H tells me, “he had to learn how to write again.”

How awful, to relearn how to write, because of some mosquitoes—a bunch of bloodsuckers. This makes sense. Progress as vampirism, a swarm of bureaucratic mosquitoes attacking all my artist friends, leaving them emaciated and gospel-less. I tell H to watch out for mosquitoes and we hug it out.

Heading into Alley Cat, the bouncer smiles at me. No need for any ID. There’s a whole bunch of baby-faced white kids, cribs still in their eyes, loudly singing “Vindicated” by Dashboard Confessional. What. The. Hell.

There’s a war going on right outside these doors. A bunch of bloodsuckers flying over rooftops, dilapidated homes, boarded-up schools—and here we have “Vindicated,” the song from Spiderman 2. The soundtrack for the night.

It’s weird for me to be here. This was one of the places that forced me to think, Hey Justin, you should really stop drinking. It was for the launch of my book, When Severed Ears Sing You Songs. I drank way too much whiskey and fell into the Bermuda Triangle of who’s hooking up with who.

Here I am again, in the corner booth with my girlfriend, her sister, and some med students ten years younger than me. They’re all talking about classes and the Medical Corridor. Depression rears its ugly head, which is funny, because above the booth there’s this buffalo head on the wall and a red neon sign underneath it that says BUFFALO, so the glow makes it looks like the buffalo is wearing lipstick.

I imagine putting on the buffalo head and roaming around the bar, around Allen, like a minotaur, because this all feels like a labyrinth you can’t escape from—imagine that though, some minotaur roaming the streets with an old Bills jersey on, chasing an invisible thread to find its way out and into the light. Let’s just acknowledge that this whole city, the whole Rust Belt for that matter, is a maze built by a senile king with the sole purpose of imprisoning who we’re supposed to be, an embodiment of shame that we were never really wanted in the first place, that there’s no future here—but it’s best to stay positive and that’s perhaps the biggest mystery to solve in Buffalo.

I crack a joke to the table about the buffalo head with the lipstick and nobody laughs, so I exit the bar to have a smoke. Outside, the musician is at it again, the dapper gentleman with the nice suit and fancy shoes who sometimes screams at God in the middle of the night. He’s balancing a beer bottle on his head and everybody’s laughing with their smartphones out.

Someone asks him, “What’s your favorite music instrument?”

“Crack cocaine!”

“No, you play the sax!”

Everyone is livestreaming his feats of strength and it bothers me that nobody is asking him about his saxophoning.

While lighting up another cigarette, an old friend comes up to me and we hug. A lot of bleary-eyed hugging happens in this city. He introduces me to the girl he’s with, referring to me as “this really good poet who once made him cry with a poem about World of Warcraft.” I take the compliment, but I don’t think I ever wrote a World of Warcraft poem. My friend also informs me that he’s cutting back on drinking, which also happens a lot in this city.

When I head back into the bar, the night starts turning into a blur. Everybody’s getting drunk and I’m pounding back Red Bulls like I’m desperate for wings and suddenly that Florence + The Machine song “Dog Days Are Over” is playing and my girlfriend tells me that a few years ago this was her ringtone, when her ex made her life a living hell, so every time she hears it, she thinks of that time and it doesn’t make her feel good.

That ex passed away. He was a friend of mine.

When I go out for my last cigarette in front of Alley Cat, the police have the saxophonist on the hood of a cop car and he’s screaming, “I just wanna go home.”

I’m not sure what happened, but another smoker tells me that the saxophonist grabbed this woman by the hair and slammed her to the concrete, but that doesn’t seem right. Drunk twentysomethings still have their smartphones out. There’s no empathy anymore—it’s all just vampirism.

I’m thinking of going back inside the bar to kiss that buffalo head with the lipstick, its lips looking so red, so ruby, so cherry, like blood, to whisper in its ear, “Everything’s gonna be okay, I got this.”

Walking to my car, I see Dan and his new wife.

Me and my girlfriend get into a fight.

***

My girlfriend’s comfy in our bed, but I can’t sleep. Again. So I walk and find myself in front of my meditative hotspot in Buffalo, the Walgreens on the corner of North and Delaware. Not inside the Walgreens, but standing out front and staring at that weird, big clock, which seems so out of place—magical almost, like a piece of steampunk severed from fantasy. I get lost in its face.

Buffalo’s Big Ben, a pharmaceutical mask reminding us that this city has a problem of showing its true colors, its true feelings—a sense of pervading numbness.

I imagine all my friends who’ve died, all the addicts, all the people we used to be emerging out of the asphalt to crawl into the face of that Walgreens clock to turn back the tides of time and I simply watch, chain-smoking, probably downing yet another can of Red Bull.

Dan, H, the musician, old friends, ex-lovers, suicides.

This is a holy place, I tell myself, a place we should all congregate so we can reflect on the past, the present, and the future.

Let us all meet at that Walgreens clock in the middle of the night. Let us share our stories. Let us be empathetic in the face of progress. Let us be minotaurs holding hands and trying to find our way out of this labyrinth.

***

Walking home, I feel the rumblings of a sun about to burst. It feels like I haven’t slept in three days and I probably haven’t. I cut down Bryant to get to Elmwood, but it’s really because I enjoy the ambiance of the old Children’s Hospital, all its unsolved mysteries roaming the cream-colored hallways—an unused monolith just sitting there, hollow-eyed and yearning, with some of its lights still on. I’m always sure to tell myself, people were born here, people died here, a mantra to power me through the night.

Suddenly I see something on the lawn, not moving, still as a tree. As I get closer, I can’t believe my eyes and I just have to laugh, because it’s all so absurd: a cardboard cutout of the Energizer Bunny. Those floppy pink ears, the sunglasses, the sandals, the drum with Energizer emblazoned on it.

Who would deliberately place a cardboard cutout of the Energizer Bunny here? It’s maddening. Is it some kind of ironic installation art piece? An empty hospital with no energy and this cool bunny with the all energy in the world—it makes sense and I want to meet the person who put this here. It’s like a sign from above or something, yet another reminder one finds in Buffalo at night telling us that we need to keep going—and while we don’t know the destination or how exactly we will get there, the most important part about it all is the journey—and maybe that’s what we’re all not getting about “progress” or “change”—that the whole city has forgotten about the journey, the mysteries that keep us going on a daily basis.

I light up a cigarette and imagine all the people who’ve died at Children’s Hospital, all those ghosts, slipping through the dirty windows and flying over our neighborhoods, guardian angels maybe trying to steer us toward the right path, the empathetic path, the genuine path. I imagine all the junkies from all corners of the city picking up drums and banging out their songs. I imagine all of us actually listening.

   

*

The Story Behind the Story:

So Buffalo is a beautiful and weird place but at times, it can feel like you’re on a self-destructive carousel. They don’t call the Queen City “a drinking town” for nothing! I suppose the same thing can be said about most places but with Buffalo, it has a small-town vibe so if you want to hop off the carousel and choose to not drink or get high, your nights suddenly become quite limited in terms of what you can and can’t do. At least it feels that way. You essentially become a ghost wandering the streets, itself a strange kind of high, and when you choose to hang out at your old haunts, you’re there but also not there. An exercise in lucid dreaming but you’re not sleeping. It’s a lifestyle that takes a bit of getting used to if you ever do. After hopping off Buffalo’s self-destructive carousel, I was lonely for two years but got closer to the heart of the city. Here’s a story from that era of my life.   

“Sobriety Turns You into a Ghost and the Rust Belt Is Full of Life ” was first published in Mojave Heart.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay