When I saw the neighborhood I knew right away: Proclub was collecting--disability, warrants, cats. Maybe all three. Even the bungalows looked like they'd methed through the last of their platelets, wood siding jawboned raw and blighted with paint-resistant pine wilt. I imagined a bay window coming off in a bed sheet, the house sitting down to play Fur Elise anyway. Proclub didn't have the dignity. Nobody did.

I sat down on the couch, lit a cigarette, thought about Meghan. There were hearts that beat, and hearts that got beat. Which was mine?

By the time I finished the smoke I'd turned the place upside down. No Proclub. Just a few shitty ideas. I started to wonder whether there had ever been any Proclub in the first place. From what I'd gathered, anyone could have done it. Even me. Was I being set up? Or was it all, as Sam would say, a more spiritual sort of embrasure? For better or for worse, there was no sports equipment to find out, and no Burn Buddy either.

I jack-booted the china cabinet, zoomed in on a pewter spoon, used it to work the slugs from grandma's patellaes. Sirens blared in the distance. I slipped out, stepped on the bike, kept to back roads.

Oh backroads of my backporching, yonderbellied youth! Sunny planeshadow palisades! Speckled elmlight aenigma! Already here in the gloom of my shitpaneled warren, I scan the vernal zephyr tussle musiclike amid my Joescalp, that besthair golden kingshat of two oh-oh two! Pictures, autographs, windows glinted up with emotional vaportrails tearing off, ripped out of time... a... tear... a marble tear plummeting toward my lifemap, staining the city dark, followed by... a hair, no longer golden, scored and gray, like a cricketthigh. Meghan, ex-Meghan, my four basically ex-children, bright forms abstracted one deerbodied morning, for it is rain I hear dropping now--not a tear, but my pen, falling to the carpet, my joehand curling fistward... time...

WHAT DID YOU DO WITH YOUR FIST, JOE?

Nothing...

WHAT DID YOU DO WITH YOUR FIST, JOE?

Nothing...

LOOK AT THEM JOE THEY WERE NOT ELLIPSES JOE!

I thought they was walls!

(Boredom, carpet, boredom, knees)

When I got to the hospital I told the nurses that I worked for Perkins. That I had a drinking problem. That I'd puked in the fryer. Turns out I'd overestimated the damage. My manager didn't even notice the ointment. Just asked where I'd been, what the fuck happened to the pizza.