Let’s go ‘round one more time
                              Harry Chapin – Circle


Hard wired and soft brained and with a courageous misunderstanding of our own place in life, a man I called “the Doctor” and I broke laws and damaged psyches, sideswiping our way through long nights and airless days long ago, that somehow leave me thinking of him as I stand in a Yerevan park trying to communicate with an Armenian Jehovah’s Witness.

One famous binge of behaving poorly required our participation (the Doctor and me; not the Jehovah woman) at a mid-Chicago institution called the Weed. At an hour I don’t often see anymore unless occasioned by a bladder or a deadline, we reached the establishment astoundingly in better shape than those who’d already put their wheels down there. To reach our perches we had to step over a large man having a rest squarely in mid-floor. “That’s Butchy”, the Doctor said. “Resident drunk?” I asked. “No, he’s the manager.”

From the Lodge and plenty others in Chicago, we did Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge in Nashville and the Outlook Inn in Louisville and Parody Hall in Kansas City and the Reno Room in Long Beach. Club Deuce in Miami. Hog’s Breath Saloon in Key West. The Frolic Room in Hollywood, the Small World in San Juan, Puerto Rico and an unknown dance hall in Dominican Republic where women had hinges for hips and men just held on for life fueled by rhumba and rum and our interpreter owned a pair of shoes claimed to have been worn by baseball great Benito Santiago.

In our day Doc owned the Chicago North Side through his words, and owned respect on the South Side because of his discernment in knowing when to not use them. We sunburned ourselves in Wrigley Field losing with the Chicago Cubs baseball team, but were nonetheless the whitest patrons on the other end of town in joints where the music was blue and the clientele black, plus two.

We lied to each other when we had to, like the morning I congratulated him on the evening’s girlfriend in an attempt to assuage his complaints about her mustache. We bailed each other out when one got rolled on a bus or got crossways of local authority.

The Doctor is now a columnist at a prominent Chicago newspaper. And I have found prominent obscurity in Yerevan, where the days and distance between collide in the happenstance of a proselytizing religious acolyte and a Communist holiday and the unlikely convergence of all this.

May 1, -- a day appropriated by the Communists from the Americans to honor workers – is a day that, in the world that now seems less real than this one, would have found the Doctor and me reading a Daily Racing Form or a sports page in plans of the wagers we would lose in Saturday’s Kentucky Derby – North America’s most famous horse race.

Yet, on this May Day, here I stand indulging a misguided Armenian woman of size as she begs my patience while she thumbs through the contents of her “Watch Tower” magazine looking for the “Anglee” section.

God help me (so to speak), because in my brain that is no doubt less functional than might have been guaranteed were the above diary the definitive list of ill-advised escapades, the woman’s witness and the Communists’ loss of their day and the fact that I don’t even know the name of a single horse in Saturday’s big race are a meld and a meltdown that’s just a bit too much globalization here outside a café, Malibu, named for a California beach resort and on a street, Mashtots, named for the creator of the Armenian alphabet responsible for the words the woman is trying to get me to understand.

In a fit of frustration she simply looks skyward and starts shouting: “Jehovah! Jehovah!”, and I don’t know if she is praying for help or praying down some sort of glossolalia that would even out the language field.

“Chem uzum, Jehovah!”, I stammer back, hoping that I have effectively drawn the right words to say: “I don’t want Jehovah!” What I want is a Racing Form or a sunburn from a lost baseball game or to trip over Butchy or to be handsome and bulletproof again in a world where the Communists still run this place and I could curse cultists off my doorstep rather than feel compelled to be polite because this is their turf and not mine.

Instead I went to an Irish bar and had an Armenian beer. And when I left – I swear I am not making this up – I had to wake the manager to pay him.