Well, it seems I have missed the boat.

The first person I met on the train out east, three days of rails and tunnels and sleepless nights and sunsets like you’ve never seen before and the worst part of every town you pass through, was a man sitting peacefully across the aisle from me.

I was a younger, more timid version of myself then, but still I had the vivacity to ask of this person their name.

“Gary Dirin,” he said, with a smile. It was a smile that spoke of the ages, a smile that told a thousand stories of a thousand identical smiles before it, and a thousand smiles each unique to their own particular moment of time in the cosmos. Gary Dirin was a man who smiled his entire life at you, and hell upon thee if you couldn’t take it–love, hate, sorrow, regret, adventure, excitement, loneliness and a unique transfusion of zen buddhism and jolt cola with a twist of marxism, that was Gary Dirin in a nutshell and of course that barely broke the surface.

For the next 67 hours, Gary and I spoke in an unending flow of words, ideas rushing together only punctuated by the roar of a train passing on the next track. As we moved closer to our apparent destiny, we talked of wandering the ghetto foothills of tanzania, italian restaurants in working-class Frankfurt, girls we’d loved, hanging out Chicago-Style when it was still called Gary-Style, of high school madness and the joys of proving your enemies wrong in the end, and a million other things.

As we reached New York, Gary got up and offered me a final word of advice: “Keep your chin up, kid,” he said. “Love’s about to hit you a fast one and you gotta see it coming or you’ll make a mess of it and truth’s the only thing gonna pull you through.” Well, he was right and I was wrong, and here I am 18 months later married and soon to be a Dad and happier than I could ever imagine and all I want is to finally apologize to Gary for the words I said back then, but he went to get a snack from the lounge car and never came back, and when I asked the usher what had become of him I was told that Gary had never really been on the train at all, but when I needed him he would find his way to me.

Well . . . the last time I saw Gary Dirin he was downing a margarita and jumping from rooftop to rooftop like some kind of super-hero as I folded envelopes on the 57th floor of an office building, slave to an exxagerated wage lost mostly to taxes, watching Gary chase the harpies of the city until eternity, tossing off his emptied glass to crash to the ground as he stepped once twice three times and flew, dammit he flew right off over Brooklyn and who knows where he’ll end up next, but you know you’ll want to hear the story before last call.

thus spake Rye Bread

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