It was at the midpoint of a storm that I finally washed up on the shores of the Hudson with all the other flotsam, the waves high but erratic enough to keep me from washing back down again, to give me time to stand up and rake the river vomit from my hair before moving up toward the asphalt that marked the edge of a certain kind of safety.
It's not even especially that it had to be the Hudson instead of any other shore in the world, but it was that that place had become a stand in for The City, the concept of the center of human life and human degradation. The antithesis of the slow suburban death that still clogged my arteries and gnawed at the edges of my brain. This was a place of life and thought and passion, where even the people trying to kill themselves kept on living, propped up by the vitality of the streets soaked in rain and plasma. I mean, that's how I thought of New York because it's how the world conceives it, and so how it birthed from my mind to the world in an endless hyperbolic, kaleidoscopic loop. Admittedly, I was on the wrong side of the river, but it wasn't a far swim to Manhattan. Then again, it was late enough in the year that the weather was turning cold. I could see myself freezing before I reached the far shore. I was halfway there already. I would instead make my start here where I'd coalesced, still in the body but not yet its heart. That was okay, the light still reached this far, just that the shadows were deeper, the shouts and screams more distant. It was already the halflight before the temperature drop, the bridgelights igniting, the foghorns calling out to be heard. I found myself drifting up the street with all the other trash, the stuff that was dry enough to be lifted on the breeze.
Having decided that, as a character, i was going to embrace and live by the stream of consciousness that ruled my universe, the first place i dropped into was a bar. Because they were as always the first thing that occurred to me when nothing else occurred to me, and they were the source of half the light and noise of the city, and the only place to welcome in a seamonster like me, with nowhere else to go. The places where only folks with business in those places went were already closing down for the evening. The bar was the place where the only business in the place was to be there in that place, so that's where I was.
This place was called The Horrid Hag, and had itself a nautical theme that somehow seemlessly incorporated lava lamps with spotlights behind them. There were fishing nets hooked around the walls and ceiling, appearing in the haze to have been fished directly from the river and still containing a multitude of fish parts, gasping mouths and staring eyes and fins reaching out for help in their last moments before their demise was immortalized. The lamps cast bulbous shadows over them that looked now like clouds at night, now like bubbles seen from the ocean floor. The bartender was a head-hairless man who had groomed a massive and nautical beard. A pirate's beard. The rest of him was neat, suspenders and dress shirt, a few immaculately combed hairs on his head, arranged across the scalp as if painted on or glued in place. This man's gaze took in my sorry state, the salt in my hair, the crustaceans in my pockets; and began to open his mouth to throw me out. That's when the largest woman I had even seen clapped me on the shoulder and said to him, "Gary! Another round for my friend here." Her index finger alone was the size of my forearm. Gary nodded you got it, and I read the first thing off of the chalkboard behind him. He placed it in front of me with a dead look on his face. It was frothy like sea spray, but tasted a good bit better. I took a sip and the giant woman who had rescued me patted me on the head like a stray dog. "Say hello to the crew." The crew looked at me with the same eyes. "What's your name?" "I don't remember," I said. "You're Gary," said one of them. Gary overheard. "To hell with that," he said, and spat on the floor. "All right, you're Garrett." They all nodded, including the large woman and myself (I realized). Gary shrugged and tended his bar. "Where you from?" "The sea," I said, without thinking. Everyone nodded. I looked like I was from the sea. I got another pat on the head and a toast to Garrett From the Sea.
