The Grip of It

Another unholy October heatwave in Boston and I felt compelled to flee, abandon that cotton air intent on strangulation, the hot waves wiggling up from the blacktop of Boylston, and that inebriated rabble in white and red marching to Fenway in order to commune with their beloveds who had just won the Series—again, goddamn. They were scary soldiers undeterred by heatwaves or, I figured, hydrogen bombs, and I was not a real man: I hardly knew the difference between a touchdown and a homerun, plus my leather belts frequently matched my leather boots and for that reason everyone thought I was homosexual. The white and red waves flooded down Boylston and Newbury and Beacon toward the ballpark where they would await the return of the Red Sox from the place they had won the Series—I don’t know where. I went the other way.

There’s more: The Globe had just fired me for inventing a story about a B.C. professor who moonlighted as a call girl in order to double her salary while simultaneously defending female sexual freedom and everything with a womb. It sounded enticing to me but they didn’t think so; my chicanery was discovered the day after the story ran—I was quote-a-derelict-unquote. But it wasn’t much of a scandal—nothing like the Jason Blair debacle at the New York Times—because, really, I wasn’t much of a reporter; my ideas were miniscule and some said medieval. Like most scribes with coitus on the brain, I thought and wrote so incessantly about sex only because I wasn’t having any. But I was not to blame: abnormal autumn heat activates a person’s libido and transforms him into a drooling android eager to lap, lap. Nature is not kind. Plus—who under heaven wanted another article on Iraq or the buffoonery in D.C.?

And I was looking for attention, true, a smack from strangers, anything to distract me from the ennui and the ache I felt gaining fire inside me, disrupting the tunnels and pipes that processed my fast food. I had lost weight recently. Also, I invented the story to try to get the notice of my ex-fiancée who had dumped me hard and from high. As every man knows, when he needs the notice of a woman, he must lie.

Various websites informed me that the temperature in Toronto was twenty-five degrees cooler than any place in Massachusetts or indeed in the whole grandiosity that is New England. I made a decision, which was more than I had done in ten days. And so I packed a duffel bag on a Friday morning, cut my measly savings in half, and trekked across the Common and through the swarm of Red Sox drones at Downtown Crossing, each one drunker than the next and it wasn’t even noon. I couldn’t understand what they were chanting or why it mattered, or why I had even moved to this baseball town in the first place. How much longer could I stand to be an outsider in a city where everyone—everyone—knew the names and stats of pitchers and catchers and first basemen? In a city that offered me not the slightest inkling of love?

At South Station, very damp and salty with the stuff my body did not want, the thump-thump of my pulse in my right ear, I stood in line and bought a train ticket to Portland, Maine. From there I’d bus it to Canada or else rent a car and then . . . what? I did not know. Be Canadian maybe, whatever that entailed. In my breast was an emotion akin to hope, despite that relentless inferno Boston called weather. And—I will not lie—I was thinking that Canadian women might be more accepting of my average looks and the poverty-level earning power that had landed me a basement broom closet on Beacon Hill.

South Station, packed with multi-colored travelers and their lovable tikes, is a lonely place that calls to mind the words mismanagement [End...