The Cowboy and the Vampire

The cowboy walks for hours daily, up Maitland Boulevard, down Maitland Boulevard, sometimes along the strip malls of State Road 436.

The cowboy’s wardrobe is no cowboy cliché. His black hat is an open crown felt affair with a wide brim. He wears moccasins, or something very much like moccasins. As often as not, he wears flannel shirts, even in blazing Florida summers. His beard’s scruffy. Sometimes he wears fingerless gloves.

He listens to music, and joyously shakes a device in his hand to the beat of whatever he is listening to, like he is conducting a superior reality like an orchestra.

I am obsessed with him, doing the work of existing, twisting, dancing, in stride.

The vampire is so cliché that he transcends cliché. He wears a black wig, a black cape, and a black tuxedo and vest. His face is powder white. His patent leather shoes shine. He has fangs of some kind.

Once I waited in a drug store check-out line behind him. The vampire feigns a hammy Transylvanian accent.

He appears on Maitland Boulevard just before dusk. The drug store is one of his haunts. Years ago, I went into the store at 3 AM, to find him sitting on one of the counters, a vigil for something.

Alas and fuck, when I see them, I see them from my car. I am a commuter. I am on my way to the campus where I teach. I am on my way to my brother’s house. I am ashamed to say I am on my way to Wal-Mart.

I used to be a solitary walker, though. Walking got me out of the house and into my own mind, an indispensable option for me as a writer. In my teens and twenties, I walked all over Coral Springs, Florida, a suburb lacking both coral and springs, but nevertheless one teeming with nature. Much writing spurred from such flaneuring.

In the spring of 2007, someone left me a message informing me I had been accepted into NYU’s creative writing MFA program. I took my evening walk early. On my iPod, I listened to David Bowie’s epic “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed.” I replayed this song that chugs into phantasmagorical glory several times.

In the fall of 2009, a few months after my father’s sudden death, I watched Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds at the Union Square cineplex in Manhattan. At the time, the movie disappointed me. In the preview, Aldo Rain informed his volunteers that they each owed him a hundred Nazi scalps. For my grief, I wanted to see hundreds of Nazis shorn with hatchets. Despite the film’s ample gore, the few scalpings released no catharsis.

Making my way to the subway after the movie, I found walking difficult. My feet were agony. I limped, my left foot a drag. Just as my father’s foot dragged for the last five years of his life, after his accident. I became him, in his profound absence. We were supposed to watch Quentin Tarantino’s movies together.

Like a voyeur, I have photographed both the cowboy and the vampire, from my car. Perhaps the word like in the previous sentence is optimistic. The photos look as blurry as a legend.

I don’t photographically ambush the cowboy or the vampire on foot. I must not treat them like characters in my story. I must try to live with integrity.

In the fall of 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic, my friend Pat Greene and I walked our neighborhood. Pat is an artist and art curator and raconteur and superior wise ass. Pat wore dark brown hiking boots. He seemed ready to hike anywhere. On our route, there was a nature path of sorts, a weird dirt alley between back yards. The path ended at a rusty, locked fence, which Patrick ceremoniously touched upon each of our visits. Our walks lasted 1-2 miles, not too much for my ruinous feet. Then he moved to the other side of town.

I didn’t speak to the vampire when we were in the drug store queue together—a lost opportunity. He wants to engage with the world, much more than I do. I look up to him. He might be mentally ill.

He’s probably mentally ill.

But he might be beatifically happy.

Today, when I do walk, when I can bear the weather, when my feet have enough form, or my body has enough painkillers, I tend to walk my neighborhood, plus the alley where I walked with Pat Greene. I touch the fence for him.

If I walk along Maitland Boulevard, sooner or later I would encounter the cowboy. I wonder if he would acknowledge me, recognizing a fellow walker.

Knowing what music he listens to would be an extraordinary gift. I’d take that over Shakespeare’s first folio. Perhaps the cowboy would tell me he listens to David Bowie. My guess, though, is that he would be unwilling to explain.

Any question would be unseemly to ask for, since any question I ask would throw off his gait. I must try to live with integrity.

My feet must touch the terra, sans proxies, no matter how inspired.

I must try to live with their integrity.

I am in need of magical shoes.