I pass a homeless man sitting on a milk crate wedged in the corner of a building. He’s programming a computer watch, like the kind that was popular in the 80s. Another is walking backwards, pushing his weight against a mound of stuff strapped into a shopping cart. He looks like the hypotenuse of a right angle.

I pass a beautiful building with windows billowed and bulging like smoke stacks and think: someone made that. My gaze is still skyward, sizing up the contrasting functional, flat-faced building next to it when I hear a voice huff from behind me, too loud to be an actual under-the-breath remark: “Men are pigs.” It’s night and I’m alone and it occurs to me that it’s not the best time to be aloof. I lower my eyes to street level and see a stout man hurry from behind, giving a sideways glance so that I know he’s talking to me.

“Pardon?” I ask to confirm. He starts in, “I saw the way that guy looked at you back there. Don’t worry, I have sisters. And a lovely wife. I gave him a good scowl for you.” I’m not sure how I’m supposed to respond. I didn’t see him. “Oh, I didn’t even notice,” I tell the scowl-giver.

He seems dissatisfied. “Yeahhh, he was giving you a look. I don’t know about some guys. They’re just wired weird. Anyway, have a good night,” he says and hurries along, this exceptional bald-headed man wearing a basesball cap and carrying a bag that says “Got Candy?”

“Well, thanks,” I say, my voice slightly rising on the “thanks,” indicating a question, which belies my confusion. I remember feeling this way when I was about eight, maybe 10 and my aunt, who’d apparently just had her heart broken, picked me up in her silver Mazda Miata with the top down and Patsy Cline blasting. We were supposed to go to the movies. A shy kid, I opened the door and quietly buckled up. She turned down the music a touch and looked at me with a serious, pleading face. “Rachael,” she said, “men are scumbags.” I sat there, fidgeting with my hands in my lap, uncomfortable and unsure how she expected me to respond. “Men are scumbags,” she said again. “Say it.” “What?” “Say it,” she repeated. “Say ‘men are scumbags.’” I wasn’t exactly sure what a scumbag was, but I knew it mustn’t be good. I wondered if it was a curse word as she waited for me to respond.

I didn’t agree with her. “I don’t want to,” I confessed. “We’re not going anywhere until you say it,” she said in a tone that implied I was letting her down. I might have blessed myself or crossed my fingers so it wouldn’t count as a betrayal to all the good men I knew–my father, my brother, uncles, cousins. And I said it.

My aunt’s face glowed. “Say it louder!” “Men are scumbags!” I said louder, wishing the car had a roof on it or the music was louder or we could just go already. “Louder!” she yelled excitedly. And I yelled a final time, closing my eyes and plugging my ears from the piercing shrill of my own voice, “MEN ARE SCUMBAAAAAAGS.” I opened my eyes and looked back at my aunt. She seemed pleased. “Good girl,” she said, and started the car.

I pass by a Subway and see a gray-haired man in a sports jacket who resembles Leo Kottke eating a sandwich by himself. His table sits in the front window and he faces a wall, staring straight ahead with each bite. I catch myself pitying him, and begin to internally reprimand. “You don’t know his story. He could be Leo Kottke. He could just be taking a break from being one of the greatest fingerpicking guitarists of all time. We all need to eat.” I look again. He continues to eat and it strikes me that the man sitting in this Subway storefront is potential at rest.

I want to find that little man who thought he was honorably throwing his half of our species under the bus for my benefit. I want to show him the homeless men surviving despite the confines of civilization. We’re all animals… I want to tell him about my introduction to spite and manipulation. We all have the potential to be scumbags… And I’d point to the city skyline all lit up. But also, to do great things.

I board a mostly empty bus after a long day: from darkness to darkness, bus to door, bus to door. Has waiting for the bus been the most I’ve been outside all day? I swipe my pass. It beeps, granting access to my choice of seats (I’ve been sitting all day) and I let out an end-of-the-day sigh. The first to get on, I start the procession towards the back of the bus. And stop.

Scattered about like leaves on a particularly windy autumn day, a dozen fortunes from fortune cookies litter the aisle. I look around, that streak of animal instinct that remains after centuries of “civilization” clicks on in the back of my head. Do I pick them up? What’s the trap? Out of the context of the cookie, maybe they don’t count. I play it safe and sit down as passengers swipe their bus passes and file in behind me. I glance around. Does anyone else notice this? Do they just not care? Even more suspicious. I could be having a Metamorphosis moment. What if the fortune I choose becomes my reality?

Once everyone is seated and the doors close, I slowly extend a leg into the aisle and rest my shoe on top of one. I scrape it towards me and peer towards the floor. “Good luck is the result of good planning.” I kick it back into the aisle and laugh to myself. No one seems to notice. Go fish. Reach, scrape, peer. ”You will take a chance on something in the near future.” I throw it back. What if choosing your fate was as easy as casting away a fortune you didn’t like? I try once more. “Your great attention to detail is both a blessing and a curse.” I exit at my stop. As I’m approaching the doors, I see a fortune teetering on the top step and pause to pick it up. As someone behind me rushes to get out, I leave it and step down onto the street.

I remember a game I used to play as a kid: I had a treehouse in my front yard that rested upon a hill. A rope swing hung from a branch that extended over the sidewalk below, a few feet above the ground at its apogee. I used to challenge myself to swing from one side of the hill to another before an approaching car made it up the street, to “save” a member of my family. I usually made it, adrenaline pumping my little heart as I successfully created meaning out of something meaninglessness. But, I was always a bit worried when I didn’t. Eventually I decided to give up the game, on the off-chance that I was affecting something that should have been out of my control. 

The night air hits me and I button my jacket. I catch a scent of orange blossoms and notice that the sky happens to be looking-glass clear. The moon is low, keeps it all in perspective. Everything is orbital: we’re all spinning–we can’t help but spin. Despite all our fortunes and misfortunes, we can rest easy knowing that night time will come at the end of each day.

     

There’s a prostitute on my bus, talking to a young gay couple, telling them about her day.

“Well, a guy picked me up and I went down to Market Street with him, had something to eat, then came back up here, went to a friend’s house, actually, for a few bucks and some dope. I like cocaine. Cocaine and heroin, that’s what I like. That’s the good stuff.” She pauses. “So, you got a girlfriend?” He shakes his head no and nods towards the man sitting next to him.

“Oh!” The prostitute laughs at her rejected proposition. “That’s cool. I’m hip,” she hurries, trying to salvage the sale. “You know, I have a friend who likes to have threesomes, and sometimes he throws his partner in the mix. I don’t mind. You know, as long as you love someone and find something you enjoy, that’s what it’s all about. You’re not affecting anyone else. You find someone with a special aura, and you don’t know what it is, but you’ll never find anyone with that aura again. Hey, go for it. If it makes you happy. Love is great. Love is love.”

The guys continue to nod and half smirk at the prostitute pontificating on love. They yank the cord and she acknowledges their exit–and their disinterest in the threesome idea.

“Hey, I’m happy for you guys. Good for you. You found love. Be good. Be safe. God bless.” They nod and return the well wishes as they alight.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” she yells after them and breaks into a cackling smile, revealing a mouth full of alternating missing teeth. She turns around in her seat and yells towards the window, “But there ain’t nothin’ I wouldn’t do!”

* * *

A couple of homeless kids (how can I tell? They’re layered, bags bursting with necessities strapped and caribeannered to the outside: a tarp, a water bottle, a teddy bear; they have the tired look of camping out in too many cold-weather nights) had been sitting on a bench outside. They enter the cafe, ask me how the connection in here is, say it’s weak outside. One asks the barista for water while the other grabs the key to the restroom. They set up camp at a table against the window, unload their packs, withdraw an Apple laptop from one of the overloaded packs, relieving it a bit. They use the free internet to connect to skype, and dial a parent or sibling or aunt. “Hi, it’s Andrea. Marcus and I are in San Francisco and we’re leaving at three o’clock, so we should be in LA around…nine? Love you, bye!”

* * *

Some winters back, my brother had come out with me to a friend’s house for a party that culminated in him playing the spoons with a lampshade on his head. We sat in the car with the windows down before driving home because he was nauseous and already moving. He’d lost his glasses, so I went back inside to find them and to grab him a red cup full of water. He drank down the water thankfully, and I snuck back into the house amongst the passed out party-goers and spilled drinks to get more. Three glassfulls later, he gave me the OK to start driving and halfway home, he said “STOP” in a voice that startled me.

I pulled over and told him to roll down his window if he was going to throw up. He silently obeyed and sat back in the passenger seat. Again, he told me to stop. I told him we were already stopped, that he was the one moving, not the car. And he whispered, “No, stop. Just STOP!” So I just sat there patiently, confused. He took a deep breath and exhaled the word “leaving.” And then I noticed he was crying. The wafting, sub-zero air felt like a million little paper cuts and we sat in stark silence in the type of cold winter darkness that gives everything a blue tint, like burnt-out stars on deeply blacksky nights.

Sometimes you have to leave home to find it. And inevitably, you’ll lose it again. Perhaps you’ll go looking for the version from your childhood, complete with that squeaky bottom step and front yard treehouse your dad built. In that case, you’ll only find sadness, even if you find the same house on the same street and it comes close to how you remember it (though it usually doesn’t, because that home probably didn’t even exist as you remember when it actually existed). I must tell you–you would have found out eventually: time and distance have the tendency to shrink the mountainous hills you used to roll or sled down and named “Killer” and memories are just stories we tell ourselves about our lives.

But don’t worry, you’ll find home, if only for a moment. You’ll hear it in the lulling whirr of a working dishwasher, or the low-hum shuffle of early morning voices through paper-thin apartment walls. You’ll pass through some place that gives you that feeling, like an electric charge running from the ground up, a pull like gravity on the “N” on your compass, or the hard-to-fight drowning warmth of cold medicine as you doped-up drift to sleep. Other times, you’ll glimpse it in a person when they say a certain word or hold your hand a certain way. But be careful before planting a flag and staking claim in these traces of home (for illusions exist, the same as magic does). That is to say, mostly, you either carry it with you, or you don’t.

Maybe that’s all deja-vu is–brief, fleeting feelings of home. Maybe that’s why we can’t put a finger on it (or even words to describe it), the feeling no clearer than someone trying to recollect a dream long after the haze of waking has cleared and the sleep’s been wiped from bleary eyes.

The fact is, you could be made to feel at home or a million miles away, regardless of where a map (with its arbitrary circulatory system of roads and borders) says your location is. Sometimes, 5 miles can feel too far, depending on the people you’re missing down the road. And sometimes, even the next room can.

The point, (yes, you can fault me for rambling, but keep in mind that important points aren’t worth rushing) is that you’ll van Gogh-stumble through your share of alien terrain (from Holland to London to Paris to Holland to South France). You’ll try and abandon and try (from art dealer to teacher to minister to sketcher to painter) again. You’ll sacrifice your comfort for your passions (and sometimes your health for your vices). And the thought of what you should be doing will drive you in some strange directions, most notably, perhaps, walking nearly a hundred miles to seek the advice of someone you respect. And when you finally get there, bare-armed in the cold and pissing rain (as you stand outside the house of this person), it will occur to you that you knew the answer all along, and you’ll turn around. You’ll go home.

The boy had been watching a cloud of birds swerve drunkenly across adjoining fields and settle on an arthritic oak that he’d started a one-sided staring contest with. Then the rain started screaming back. It was dusking and he longed for a hood and a pint of something from Vermont or Colorado or one of those places where drink was perfected to combat weather that made you feel uncomfortable and alone. The birds—ravens, he wondered, or crows?—were acting too spring-like for this time of year. It was early fall, and he considered that no species was exempt from the uncertainty of what it should be doing.

The night before, the boy studied his father as he ate a bowl of soup, leaning into it like a complicated math problem he didn’t intend to solve in one sitting. In that empty threat light of a drooping sun, his father’s hands were large, cracked and calloused, knuckles fat with the Midwestern cold of pre-dawns and late nights of birthing calves. And it occurred to the boy that the man hadn’t a day of rest in nine years.

They sat across from each other at the wooden table he helped his father build when he was a boy and his mother was pregnant with another and the father said the old table wasn’t sturdy enough to support the appetite of three men; they’d better build a new one. And now the boy studied his father from across that same table, as a man studies himself in the mirror upon waking one day and suddenly feeling old. The boy thought of his own hands and his own posture and before the last stabs of light and his father tipped the bowl, finally, towards his tired mouth, the boy decided that this was not his life; he was not yet this man; and he was no longer a boy. So he left.

And as he sat half-heartedly against the guardrail, studying the scattering, swooping, uncommitted roosting of birds, it was then that the girl showed up. She slowed and pulled to the side of the road, straining against the unrelenting protection of her seat belt to roll down the passenger window and ask, horizontally, squinting through the intrusive drips, “Where are you headed?”

He couldn’t tell her he didn’t know where out of the embarrassment that not knowing made him feel. Instead, he looked her over as she waited, extended across the dampening front seat, for the name of a state or even a general direction. She had kind cheeks and she seemed like the sort of girl who would sing to her children and not yell at them for things like muddy boots in the house, and he could only reply to a question she hadn’t asked: “Ansel. My name’s Ansel,” for that was the only truth he could offer at that moment, through the spitooning of rain against the car.

My family was visiting: Mom, Dad, Emily, Jon, and Thomas—the whole crew (it’d been about a year since they actually did visit and I think I was feeling particularly homesick. I always feel particularly homesick around my birthday, in the fall when the trees should be on fire and you get a taste of winter on the backend of every gust of wind, but instead it’s summer days here and it doesn’t feel like Thanksgiving and you feel farther away than 3,000 miles). In the dream, I didn’t live in San Francisco. I lived in some quaint European village–the type with stone walls, perpetually overcast skies, and exaggeratedly green grass. If I had to throw a dart in a map to pinpoint it, I’d probably aim for Ireland or Wales, maybe the Swiss side of Germany.

Anyway, the family was here but they were getting ready to leave and we were reviewing the trip: everything we’d done, favorite parts, observations about a foreign land. We were in the living room of this incredibly modern building that didn’t fit the landscape: floor to ceiling walls, all-white leather furniture that you’d see displayed in the storefront of a boutique home shop, a polar bear skin rug.

Thomas handed me a birthday present and I thanked him and started to say that his birthday would be coming up soon, but I stopped because I suddenly couldn’t remember his birthday, not even the month. And then I just left the room, either out of embarrassment or because I had to go to the bathroom, or both. I ended up outside in a backyard, still a bit perplexed, when it started to occur to me that maybe they weren’t leaving; I was. Does this look familiar, I asked myself. Does it feel like home? Do I know where I am? I decided that the only way to find the answers was to explore.

I got about 100 yards up a gravel, stone wall-lined road and I started to get the sinking feeling that I needed to go back. I ran to the door that I’d come out of, but it was locked. So I ran around the perimeter of the building until I came to double barn doors, the wooden kind that swing out.

I opened the doors and slipped inside a concrete-floored basement (or maybe it was dirt), the kind you find in really old East Coast houses: low-hanging ceilings with exposed beams, spiders, all that. As my eyes adjusted, I could see to the other end of the room, which was the size of a floor of an indoor parking garage. In the corner, there were three people crouching down and I had to squint, but I could tell they were doing some sort of an art project. I think they were painting. One of them sprung up from the milk crate he was sitting on and started coming towards me. He was stocky, wore a baseball cap, T-shirt, cargo shorts, and Birkenstocks and looked like he should be directing traffic at a Phish concert.
I started to talk, wanted to ask him how to get back upstairs, but he cut me off before a word could form.
“Can I help you?”
“Oh, uh, I’m just trying to get back upstairs,” I said.
“This is a private residence,” he said with an authority I wasn’t expecting.
“I know, but we’re already upstairs, I was just exploring. I had to go to the bathroom and then—” I managed before he cut me off again.
“This is a private residence.”
The people at the other end of the room were huddled together talking, looking up every once in a while. I started to worry what would happen to me.
“But my family is upstairs. I just came from there. How do I get back up there?”
He seemed to understand this time. At least he nodded like he did.
“You have to rent a car,” he said.
I was confused again. Maybe I was confusing him.
“What? To get upstairs,” I asked.
He nodded again, slowly, like someone who wasn’t going to respond to another stupid question, so I didn’t ask one.
“OK,” I said, “So how do I do that?”
He motioned for me to follow and led me into a hallway with a low-hanging ceiling with an ATM-looking machine. The screen had two options:

• VW Bug (Old School, Brown): $15
• Other car: $38

I wasn’t going to pay $38 (did I even have that much on me?) to rent a car just to go up the stairs, so I began to select “VW Bug” when the guy cut in with a karate chop between my finger and the button. He shook his head. “You want the other car. Trust me.”
“I do?” I challenged him, growing more confused by the minute.
“Yeah,” he said, “You do.” And he pulled a $38 bill from his pocket and fed it into the machine. I was shocked. Have $38 bills always existed? The machine accepted it and spit out some kind of ticket. He grabbed it and led me out of the basement into an overgrown lot.

The VW Bug (old school and brown, as promised) rested on cinder blocks in one corner of the lot. I guess he was right. We walked passed the VW and get into something like a Prius, but a really advanced one. As I buckled myself into the passenger seat, he asked for my license. I handed it to him and he inserted it into a slot on the dashboard.

“Ah!” He says, cracking a smile for the first time, which sort of relieved me. A receipt printed out from the same slot and he handed back my license.
“It says you’re a musician, a magician, and a writer,” he grinned again.
“It does?” WHO says that? I wondered but didn’t ask. I stretched across the emergency break to read the tiny piece of paper.
“Yep,” he said assuredly, “it does.” He wouldn’t stop smiling and I started to question who this guy was and what I was doing in this car with him.
“Well presto-chango and all that man, but I ain’t no magician, that’s for sure,” I said without thinking–or did I think it?
“Nope.” He shook his head again.
“It says you are.”

Lights on the runway–through the fog and above it–simplify the feat of flying into archaic video game graphics (Pac-Man, specifically): cars as dots of lights mazing steadily along a pre-programmed path (someone should tell us that’s what we look like from above).

Rain reflected in the light of the wings looks like flashes of TV static.

The man in front of me on this mostly empty flight (who goes to Salt Lake City unless it’s the 2002 Olympics or they absolutely have to?) fidgets with the lighting. He has three seats to himself and he’s exploring his options (the hypothetical has come true: if you could turn on any of these overheads without someone complaining, which one would you choose?). I prefer to write in the dark, like when I was a kid and supposed to be sleeping: belly-to-the-floor, trying to catch a glimmer of the hall light from the crack under the door. Now, I bask in this man’s choice of overhead lights (the one on the right and in the middle).

The flight attendant describes the turbulence-to-come as “some good, uneven air.”

Sailing knots above cloud level, you get to understand why sailors use the stars to guide them, where the idea for lighthouses came from. The clouds are patchy like lily pads on still water that allow you, occasionally, to peep what’s beneath (a glimpse of the moon on the water like the spine of a silvery fish and clusters of trees like those below-the-surface seaweed forests). Whenever you feel like life’s unremarkable, you should fly.

The whiskey hits me mid-air, like the slow creep of Novocaine, while the flight attendants are trying to keep us seated with peanuts. No elephant who had to pee would fall for that bribe.

Mid-stream, I notice a changing table tucked up against the wall and think “now there’s something you don’t think about until you have to do it.” As the “Fasten Seatbelt” light bings in the cabin, I brace myself against the narrow bathroom walls for balance, like trees when I’m peeing while camping. I think of my brother stuck on a coast-to-coast flight with a bad bout of food poisoning. Now there’s something you don’t think about until you have to do it. But we do it: find comfort in uncomfortable situations, even when you’re fetal-position sick. Take eight hour flights that should be less than two just to get to someone. Gain perspective from a height that even the birds can’t reach on some good, uneven air.

Games
Keys
Phones
Friends
Arguments
Money
Fights
Bets
Blood
Our minds
Our homes
Our way

Grandparents; parents; brothers; sisters; aunts; uncles
Hats
Babies
Innocence
Appetite
Teeth
Feeling
Vision
Voice
Breath
Love

Limbs
Luggage
Glasses
Retainers
Socks
Mittens
Memory
Time
Touch
Hair
Hubcaps
Face
Faith

Opportunities
Pens
Jobs
Sleep
Focus
Temper
Hearing
Interest
Lunch
Brain cells
Sense of self
Sense of humor
Life

Of all the things there are to lose in the world,
I guess your wallet isn’t so bad.

But then there are some nights, like this one, for example.
It’s not so cold that the chill goes through you, not to the bones
at least. And smoking a cigarette just seems right. It’s nights like these
that you wish you smoked cigarettes regularly, forced outside
by a compulsion only to find pauses
of unexpected stillness.
Someone coughs.
A little kid raises his voice in whining excitement and is told
“Shh, not now.” An old man bends over his desk, deep in thought—reflective,
not perplexed. Writing a letter? Perhaps. Not paying a bill. Dear Someone…
the possibility of good news exists. A plane flashes by—you think
it’s a plane—seemingly the same distance as the blinking
blue star directly overhead that trembles
with light. And you’re comforted by the fact (because it is
a fact, sure as facts go—as real as the tip
of this cigarette anyway, and as flimsy
as the smoke) that the flickering light may have burned out long ago,
but still you see it.

DAY 2
The six of us are two to a bed. My sister and I share the pull out couch, a minefield of sinkholes, wily springs, and (maybe) imaginary bed bugs. Once I contort to a manageable sleeping position, my sister slings the deadweight of her leg over me or something bites my ankle and I jolt awake, the manageable spot lost to the temperamental, poor excuse for a mattress. I imagine you’d get better rest on one of those cat-ravaged, stained couches you see on the curbside that makes you wonder a.) what took the person so long to get rid of it, b.) what the tipping point was (the first nine times the cat threw up on it was acceptable, but the 10th? Put it on the street—now it’s ruined), and c.) who do they think would ever take the thing into their home. I consider the floor, which would definitely be more comfortable, but also more disgusting, so the couch-bed wins.

A combined four hours of this type of spotty sleeping finally gives way to the day. We get dressed and lotion up and head to the deli across the street for our complimentary breakfast: a single scrambled egg with a blanket of cheddar cheese laid over the top and a two-sip cup of orange juice. Not what you’d imagine it’d be, especially with the way the motel advertised it on the scrolling marquee out front: free full breakfast every morning. “Well, it’s a great breakfast for the price,” my dad points out. I suppose he’s right. You definitely get what you pay for.

Far from being full, we load up the car with drinks, snacks, beach towels, and books, gearing up for a long day at the beach. We arrive 15 minutes later to Island Beach, a rustically beautiful state park that splits the ocean and the bay. We see osprey, dragonflies, jellyfish, and even a small red fox. We’re there for maybe two hours when the rain starts. We think it might blow over. We defy the sky’s empty threats and really push it until the last minute before we have to pack up and make a run for the car.

With the entire afternoon left to kill, we venture to the interpretive center, a wildlife museum of sorts that takes about five minutes to fully tour. The rain stops, but not convincingly enough to set up camp again, so we compromise and decide to take one of the trails to the bayside. We get about 100 feet before the biting flies, mosquitoes, and rampant poison ivy along the path make us to turn back. We call it a day and go back to the motel for a round of showers and naps before an early dinner.

We’re seated almost immediately at the restaurant with the 45 minute wait from the night before. We’re led upstairs to a table next to a family with a severely mentally disabled child who yells out through the duration of the meal. “That kid has a loud voice,” my dad remarks after about 10 minutes of consistent squealing. “Dad!” My brother reproaches him. “He’s retarded.” My father, the hopeless semantic, responds, “So? Whether he is or he isn’t is beside the point. He has a loud voice.”

Our waiter arrives apparently stoned and clearly disheveled. He introduces himself as Jared and addresses us all as man. He seems more like a caricature of a California surfer than the Jersey menfolk we’ve been seeing. It’s refreshing. He races downstairs to check with the kitchen at least four times before he puts our order in. He’s unsure of the soup of the day (“I don’t really know, man, but I think it’s vegetable soup or something”); he tells my brother they don’t carry Smithwick’s though it’s on tap at the bar; and he’s really thrown when my mom asks if they have anything gluten-free on the menu (“Umm the chef says the burger, the steak, and the pasta.” “The pasta? Really?” “Well, that’s what he says and it’s his place so, I dunno man.” I imagine the chef is another 19 year-old dude). He returns out of breath and apologizing each time; it’s only his second week, he explains. He grabs his brow and nervously shifts his weight and pulls up his pants. His reaction time is slow—he instantly agrees with whatever we say and then seems to snap out of a daze and asks a question. He repeats all our orders a few times, wiping his forehead as if to clear away some of the haze. The ordering process takes 10 minutes longer than it probably should, but for some reason we all really like him and aren’t at all bothered. It sort of feels like rooting for the underdog, cheering despite all the errors and the more they lose, the more you love them.

And so it goes through the end of the meal, when a bewildered Jared returns my dad’s credit card and says it’s been declined. This really confuses him, and we half-suspect that maybe Jared doesn’t know how to use a credit card machine? My dad calls the credit card company right at the table, while a completely overwhelmed Jared runs around to other tables. We leave the dining area to make room for waiting diners and Jared runs after us. As it turns out, someone tried to steal my dad’s identity and deposit $16,000 into their account, so the bank froze the card. My brother explains the situation to Jared, and he stares blankly, looking down the barrel of a $150 bill. “Well, I still need the bill paid, man,” he quivers. “Yeah,” my brother assures him. “We’re going to pay up at the front; we just wanted to clear the table for you.” Jared seems unconvinced, but eventually gets rushed away, perhaps by something shiny, and we resolve everything with the front of the house.

We head to the boardwalk for the second night, my dad calling for Snooky like a cat (“Snooky! Snooky, where are you?”). We all laugh because for some reason, it’s hard to be embarrassed in front of this crowd. We throw baseballs at beer bottles and plates for prizes and watch a five year old pose for a picture next to a cut out of the elusive Snooky. But we have to leave the spectacle of the boardwalk early when my mom starts to feel the effects of Jared’s mistaken gluten-free dinner recommendation. My sister tries to pawn off the Mardi Gras beads we won to a father with two little girls. “Do you want some beads for your kids?” she asks sweetly and he crouches away from us with a protective shoulder. “No, I’m good,” he says with wary eyes, like we’re gypsies trying to swindle him.

The Maiers try to go on vacation and somehow end up the freaks at the Jersey Shore carnival.