And so everyone has their secrets, secret woes, secret fortunes, is that so surprising? Selene was a writer. She wrote really bad reviews. Perhaps they were good, fantastic even, among the world of reviewers, but if you ask me, that game is a coddled one. This made her like me even less, which I did not think was possible. I called her a professional critic. “I comment on trends. I point out their flaws, I point out what’s useful in them.” “Fantastic,” I said. I was filling up little plastic containers with salsa and she was popping the lids on. “I don’t understand what your problem is, why do you even care?” “When someone has a problem and I think I know the solution, I speak my mind, that's all.” “I don’t have a problem.” “Clearly. Listen, you’ve got criticisms for what other people are doing. Huge surprise. Massive surprise. You see something wrong with the world, feel something deeply off and not falling into place in a majorly catastrophic way. It’s making you hopeless and making you believe there isn’t a proper way things work. That you could do everything right, everything you’re supposed to do, and you would still get ignored, get shafted, get isolated, do harm, be a burden. Yet there is still something about you, some shining light, that you know, if you could only manifest it fully, or even a damn quarter of it, that it would help you and everyone else. Am I talking sense or not?” She nodded, two strands of hair on each side of her forehead dangling down like vines. Her brain was a damn rainforest full of much more than critiques on the desert, but no one ever bothered to tell her. That was the real critique of the masses, that they swallowed individuals and boiled them down to nothing. Generation after generation of faithlessness. “That’s why I’m writing,” she said. “That’s why I haven’t quit.” “Well it’s going to turn into why you quit. Believe me. It’s why people quit what they’re passionate about. And they do it gladly, with a desire to stomp it out. Unless they get a handle on it.” But we could not fill up little containers of salsa for more than ten minutes. There were customers to serve, coffee to pour and croissants to warm. For the rest of my shift I could feel her sitting next to me in some theater, it didn’t matter how far away she was, we were both sitting and looking up at the screen and we needed to know what came next in the story. Months had gone by since I left home. I was working the words every day but it felt like chipping away at a planet made of cement. Sometimes I thought about Milky Way Joe. He was a kook, but he was human in that golden way which gets lost from time to time in history. Paris in the twenties. Every day I wondered what it would be like if no one had cell phones. What it would be like to know people. To have friends. Have a lover. It was more than that and Selene was putting it into picture for me. Everywhere I went I watched what people were watching, and it was always other people. People wanted people. People needed people. And yet if people were stars then the darkness was growing and the void between stars expanding. I felt it. Selene felt it. Everyone felt it, you needed only to dig the tiniest bit below the surface to find the strife. It was right in the middle of my connecting dots that I got the call. It was Milky Way Joe. “Rocco. Rocco? That you? If that’s you on the other end here give some kind of sign. I’ve got news, I’ve got page number one through one hundred. I’ve got the damn holy spirit wrapped up in a to-go bag. Rocco? That you Abraham?” “Well give me some time to answer,” I said. His energy was unrestrained, he was cosmically frantic, he was rocking San Francisco. “Okay good. Good. I have to talk to you.” “Did you call me Abraham?” “What? Listen, I’ve only got a couple minutes.” And he was chewing something. “MW are you eating something?” “What? No, I only read at night. I can’t have any second-hand material coming in before midnight, it needs to be all me, all bone and no stone.” “All right, slow down. Chew properly whatever you’re eating. How are you doing?” “I’m doing great man, thanks. I got your phone number from someone down at the bookstore. I had no theory whatsoever that you were a key stomper.” “A what?” “A key stomper, you know, a letter lover, a cloud precipitator, a starving David.” “What?” “A writer. A writer Roc, I didn’t know you wrote. I read your book. It’s fantastic. I was through it like someone going through it, you know? Someone having a rough time, but instead it was me reading your book and I loved it, it was a revelation, a damn trip to the outer limits, it was my comforter.” He was out of his mind, Milky Way Joe was, but it was just what I needed to hear and feel. The world needed Joe’s hope, as wild and unpinned as it was. “Ah crapola. Listen Roc, I gotta go, I’m helping Loretta clean her van.” “All right, all right, no problem, just call me back.” “Listen Roc…it’s Gettysburg. Tom Gettysburg. I found him.” “Who?” “I’ll call you back.” And he hung up. A week went by and it was a restless one. Everything was gray and beaten down. I came out of the grocery store and a man with a dirty face was eyeing me down, and he said “London town.” I said “What’s that?” and he went “London town.” I drove home, took a shot of tequila, threw up, and wished Milky Way Joe would call me back and tell me who Tom Gettysburg was.