bottomless cup of coffee

On this cloudy July 4th morning, even the birds had taken a holiday;
you remembered where you were and who you were. All down Beethoven Street, the crows fell silent. Up on the North Side, the plant belched its visceral black soupy smoke cloud, mixing with the stagnant mass that hung perpetually over the sky. To the east, the folks in the mutated Victorian mansions-turned-tenements along Murray and Oak Streets would be climbing out of their hovels over broken beer bottles to their pick-ups and off to another long grind at the factory, never knowing that their make-shift homes were once responsible, in a different form, for the coining of the town, "The Parlor City".

I had come here a student so long ago I'd lost any sense of time, so study Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University, one of the foremost in the nation for this field. This sad city - it's hard to believe that so much has passed here. Somewhere on the South Side, I'd met a professor of mine casually at a theater performance and he'd asked me for a beer afterward and 10 cent wings at the Sportsman's Pub, which seemed innocent enough. But two hours and several pitchers of Yuengling later, I'd suddenly fallen for the shaggy old guy. We'd since made some heroic journeys into the nearby hills, stocked with magic mushrooms, some pot and a sense that the rules of the universe didn't apply, but of course each time we'd found ourselves back on dingy Main Street at the end, talking and screwing in his rusty car with the local Jazz Station that he ran blaring his blessed Coltrane at our sorrows.

Unwilling to abandon this current wife and family - another former student, who was by now his third - for fear of being labeled 'an old lecher'(as he put it) by his peers, my professor offered to rent me a room in his pretty old house overlooking Rec Park, with its strange 'historical' carousel, a polygamy of sorts but it worked well enough that with babysitting and light cleaning (these for his wife) I hadn't been charged any rent and no one had asked any questions. Somehow the PhD never came any closer to being complete, but I had never really considered anyway what would come next, so I was in no hurry for change. These were the days of no responsibility, the days when Mom and Dad still sent checks every month, still hoping their little girl would get her nose to the grindstone and graduate as someone on the cutting edge of a burgeoning field - any field. In the humid Upstate air, everything had hazed over and past, present and future little seemed to matter.

Every so often some friends and I would pile into a car and rumble out to Cleveland or Buffalo to catch a Dead show, but as for the major metropolis just three hours southeast, it was as if New York didn't exist, so cut off were we from the relevant world outside the Rust Belt. Here your basic needs were met - there was plenty of sex, plenty of drugs, tons of intellectual banter, and somehow a stability in the midst of all this rot of a crumbling society. Down at the Hancock Diner they had the best peanut-butter pie known to man. And somehow interminable afternoons spent sitting in vinyl booths sipping bottomless cups of coffee with the professor and eating this sublime pie made me think that I had made it - and maybe I had, because in the many years since, in which I have traveled widely and achieved a great deal, I have never had a greater feeling of warmth, of happiness, or felt more secure in my self and what I believed in, than those waning afternoons.

Why this would be so with the professor remains a mystery to me. A Brooklyn Jew, he had long ago come Upstate and been whitewashed by the stale degree of academia in this toxic wasteland, gotten tenured, and immersed himself in potsmoke, jazz, gin and tonics - and his female students - for the good part of 20 years. All this had made him a pretty decent conversationalist, which is very rare in this world, and had given him a thorough understanding of the region's industrial past. None of which had anything to do with Artificial Intelligence (or did it?), but unlike many of his fawning students, my attraction to him had not been as a wise professor, but as a diversion from the hallowed halls of the academy and the bleak university campus. He seemed to sense that somewhere out there beyond the dormitories, beyond the crumbling smokestacks; the graffitied abandoned buildings, the redneck make-shift tenement houses and polluted waters of Binghamton's two rivers, there was something else - something unexplained out there, sometthhing perhaps created through the dumping over the years of all that radioactive waste.

Or perhaps it has been there much longer, since before the place was inhabited by stupid white men, factories or even humans. I for one felt that he was on to something, and maybe he was. We never really found out conclusively, for within two years of my settling in to this unholy (holy) life, it was all shattered by the professor's stroke. After what I had seen, I had not the fortitude to go out there alone. Still, it was time for a change, and after his failure to convalesce quickly I gladly moved on to another life amid the mindless chatter of New York City, closing a chapter but unwittingly leaving a gaping hole in my non-conscious brain that would haunt my tracks for years to come, drowning me, until I finally had the courage to turn around and face the ghosts we had awoken in the frenzy of our mushroom cloud.