Catering is like the mafia in that it’s difficult to escape. It feels like you’re in it for life and that if you leave, worse things will follow. One gets used to working nights and having the days for all sorts of self-care, because civilization has kept you alive but in a wrecked state. I could leave at any moment but, after masquerading in bartending and French service, I’m more inbred than tigers.

I sizzled with despair and resurfaced wounds. I sensed the police of time overtaking me. I wanted good things to circle, not vanish and be overtaken by ghosts. The angel that had been on my shoulder since the age of six had retired to the empyrean—the angel that gave me a good family, that gave me summers off, that allowed me to create my own existence, as if the industrial nightmare hadn’t the right to impinge on my freedom.
***
Instead of serving food, I worked as a bartender. I stared at the wobbling swirls and labyrinths of a Van Gogh print. I announced over the intercom: “Drinks have all been fashioned without dyes and coloring and exploitation.”

Harry, the catering captain, rubbed his mouth. “Get some fresh air.”

“I’m dizzy.”

“You’re having a whale of a good time, Charlie Brown.”

“You have the personality of a grief counselor.”

“You’re fired,” Harry said.

“Miraculously I’ve never been fired.”

“Beat it. Ciao. Go to clown school.”

“I saved you during your episode,” I replied. “My acting degree and mime diplomas—help, I owe $96,438!”

Harry looked down, crestfallen. “Is that the night I threw chairs around? Can you work tomorrow?”

“I insist on higher pay and a new title: Captain of Charisma.”

“How about Captain Kangaroo?”

“I’m not good,” I said to Harry. Then turning to a group of academics: “Forget about all that French literary theory. Glaciers are melting.”

“That amusing guy,” one of the older men in white loafers said with a smile.

I was too drunk to stay, too damned drunk to leave.
***
The night flaneur amidst the magic of lights: On 57th Street I found myself walking behind an old couple: a man in a tuxedo, a woman in a blue gown, holding hands. They were either saints, or a new marriage. Beautiful. Next, I was beside a woman with black hair, jodhpurs, orange scarf. She exuded the panache of those Jazz-Age aviators from the cornfields. She had emerged from one of those modeling factories and glided down the street, wandering into a boutique.

I looked through the window into a twenty-something fashion cult with all sorts of gothic and flowery priestesses. Those people do not let reality get in the way of a good time. Someone bumped into me. His lips bulged. He had glistening shoes, catering tools in a bag and a hairstyle of soft spikes. Like vampires, caterers can always be spotted if you know what to look for. We both nodded.

Next, into a brick-oven pizzeria I followed a group of teenagers. I loved the aroma of tomato sauce, crust with cornmeal mixed in, garlic, cheese—pizza, I love you. I loved their raucous behavior, the way they carelessly ate, that none of them wanted to pay, and the way they imagined the future, as if it were something perfect and definite.

Eventually, the alcohol gave way to manic clarity. I went into a café and fired up my computer. Rather than letting my despair carry me to a place of no return, I maxed out my remaining credit line to book a flight leaving the next afternoon.

I headed back to my parents’ house where I had been living for a few months, about an hour from Manhattan. They were away visiting relatives in Canada. I slept off the worst of my drunken fog. In the morning, I took an Uber to a hiking shop where I bought survival supplies, maps, travel books, and thirty peanut butter Clif Bars—adding them to the book of fate. I sank it all into a backpack. On paper, it only sounds like I knew what I was doing.
***
From the airport gate, right before getting on the plane, I finally left my parents a voicemail to explain my disappearance.

Here it goes. I flew to Quito, Ecuador; took buses up through the mountain waterfalls of Baños, then down into Tena and Coca. Next came a twelve-hour motor-canoe down the Napo River to the remote border outpost of Nuevo Rocafuerte, where I slept on a dirt floor. I had been searching for this, in dream and in nightmare, since childhood.

The amazing thing about life is that one day you’re on a wheel with countless other rats but, once you insist on changing, the geodes of life crack open, the water begins to fall again, the ground becomes sacred. I can think of quotes by Goethe and Tolstoy, but I don’t want to pretend that I have any answers. Okay, just one, in case anyone is in my head, in case anyone is out there: If you’re doing what you’re supposed to, then it will be like invisible hands push you from behind. I can’t even say for sure that that’s by Goethe, but I’ve come to believe in his All is One notion.

Maybe you can’t go wrong if you don’t look for something extra. I bought passage on a rusty cargo ship into the depths of the Amazon basin. The captain, standing by the hull of rubbed-out blue-and-red color, wearing a white jacket with gold epaulettes, looked like Napoleon after Waterloo.

He strutted over, looked at my backpack and asked, “¿Se olvidó de sus palos de golf?”

I replied, “Ese es el problema. No golf.”

I got there. It was stunning to be deep in this new world, undestroyed by the human paradox, looking past moss-fringed boulders and villagers staring from a backdrop of sun-pierced forest.

 

Richard Marranca has two essays in Engeslberg Ideas; humanities journalism in The Collector.com, Ancient Origins.com, Popular Archaeology and others; and stories in The Raven’s Perch Magazine and Coneflower Cafe. He recently retired from full-time teaching but will return in springtime to part-time teaching (in humanities and religion) at Montclair State University in NJ.