castleford

i have moved to the city of new york three years ago from Castleford, Idaho. a small, rural, empty town of three hundred people, persistent dissatisfaction and negative aspirations. we are evenly gendered; with a modest household income of thirty five thousand and forty seven dollars. there are seven churches of three denominations, a deserted synagogue and a decrepit rectory, which was once the home of Father Cecil who molested a fourteen year old boy in a nearby sanctuary the summer of 2002 and went to jail in Arbon Valley. no one has seen or heard anything about him since then, and it is better that way since he was a brutish individual with an overdose of self-ego who would beat people up whenever he got a chance.

we have our own high school at the edge of town, with a serious teen-pregnancy scare and installment of poor scholarship that pushes our students into aimlessness rather than motivating them to pursue higher education. the football boys want to farm, the swimmers want to be cashiers at the Walmart in Buhl, and the non-affiliates of the athletic bandwagon are left to decide for themselves how they want to spend the rest of their lives; in the shadows of a quicksand-esque familiarity or to knuckle through a hyper-polymeric bubble of unclear establishment on the brink of a new life. art billington, local hero and charity lord, encouraged me to choose the latter ever since my parents disappeared with the drug dealers from Clark Fork to indulge in the trade, and lead better, care-free lives, when i was fifteen. it didn't matter much to me, since i was never close to them. no emotions were ever displayed, and no difficulties were ever talked about. but i missed their presence, and my mother's huckleberry pancakes, Russet fries, and pheasant casseroles that she made every other Saturday.

the motto during my upbringing, after my mother lived through seven miscarriages and a stillborn, was to make of me an independent man; without any community strings, religious beliefs and political hunches. it was always feared that i would run away with a conniving blonde from Hayden Lake, especially the one i had been eying on at Tcby for almost a year, or a jock from Kooskia to either San Francisco or Portland and never go back to Castleford and so my parents needed supreme disclosure of my whereabouts at any given moment in time. what happened as a result of their constant hyper-vigilance was that i missed out on how to read social cues. i had very few social interactions to begin with anyway. my parents had no friends, which did not help. i was the 'colored boy' with potato skin who no one cared to talk to other than during lunch at the north corner of the school cafeteria, a non-resident asylum seeker who was a drain on the Nation's economy and stealing opportunities from the real Americans, and most importantly, that i was extremely obese and therefore must automatically have been lazy, selfish and greedy.

art billington, an ex-Wall Street analyst, forty-five and plump, has been my constant source of encouragement in the withering, ruffling town of Castleford. he spotted me by a convenience store restroom, in the fall of 2004, with my copy of Animal Farm and articulated a friendly chatter. his son had run away to Bellevue, Washington, to become a yoga instructor after a plummeted failure in the fashion industry and his wife had died of Lou Gehrig's the year before. he was looking for a 'replacement son' to coach, with the eventual hope of becoming the father of an astrophysicist or a computational geo-chemist. we bonded easily, since then; discussing philosophy, Proust, geometry, circuits and aeronautics in the evenings on his porch with the clouds unfolding over whistling ocher skies, scuttling in zigzags over the faint pencil sketch of a quivering horizon. he bribed me with fourteen dollars every time i earned an A+ on a test, egging me on to self-educate, self-discipline and to self-motivate in pursuit of scholarship; incentivizing a concerted leap on to the linoleum patch of an angry city, far away from the threads of collapsible rhododendrons by the Schoth's, the tensile zizzing of the Wells' divorce, small talk at the Howard's, and the general consumptive milieu of a non-ambitious stagnation oiling the mechanics of a dead society, pooling and freezing the recoil of minds, the ladder of dreams, and the consonance of desires.

on a tuesday night in September 2010, art takes me to the Starbucks on Filer Avenue in Twin Falls, 24 miles east of Castleford. he orders a Grande dark roast for himself and a Tall mild roast for me, pays it off with a hazy blue-and-white Visa debit card, holds the drinks by the coffee sleeves, sneers at the barista's 'Fair Trade Coffee' button, and proceeds to the milk stand by the door entrance. he pours a little skim milk and empties out half a packet of Raw Sugar on his own drink, and adds some Half and Half to mine, and stirs both drinks simultaneously, anti-synchronously in sporadic jerks and jitters and walks over to our Harvest Cherry colored table in the south corner. he looks very confused, distant and disturbed today and is muttering something under his breath. five minutes later he looks at me and says, Daniel, if someone doesn't appreciate you and love you for who you are, then fuck them. you've got one shot at being yourself, play it out brother. do you understand, Daniel? This is no joke. i want you to be yourself and become powerful and invincible and successful in a way that no one can touch you or bully you or piss on you like they do here. go to new york city and live with theresa and create a new life. theresa will help. i'll call her and let her know you're going. theresa is art's half-sister of Polynesian descent, a double-divorcee and an attorney.

it was his dead wife's sixty third birthday that tuesday night, i later found out, as we drove back into a familiar darkness of everyday life in Castleford, with a symphony of aphids, crickets and pallid-winged grasshoppers ululating in the woods, a mouthful of winds gurgling over the valley, a feminine racket of distant sirens, a collage of stars in the cavity of the night sky, the giggling of water streams, and a temporal shroud of a solitary longing, curried and peeled at the perimeter of my hallucinating township; out in the ream of a divergent reality, beating and baring the venomous fangs of a communal dispossession, a disintegrating rhetoric of progress in the reflection of a broken immunity.

i live, now, in a two-bedroom apartment on Central Park West and 85th Street. The east window of my bedroom overlooks Central Park; i can clearly see a ridgy, shallow reservoir with a fountain spouting water, ten feet high, at seven second intervals, the sunshine dazzling against the metal rims of bikes, shadows of geese, Hollyhocks, Roses of Sharon and Squills undulating in whispers of the somnolent breeze, and a few strollers hopping on the west side pebble patches. i will talk more of my city life at a later day, at a more opportune time, but i want to lean out to you and say, loudly and clearly, that powerful people are not invincible and people, in the rat race, along the spokes of a professional hub-bub, do not love you for who you are. the pinnacle of a razzle-dazzle, feisty and rambunctious cityscape begins in the evolution of a second self, in the molting of a real identity and in the donning of a neo-pathology, a purpura of multiple selves constantly bemoaning a struggle to survive, an unnatural existence and the definition of truth lies so far away that you sit and wonder, often, where am i?