The first time I went to an AT&T Store on the road was not the last. It was with my cousins, for the purpose of fixing one of their phones. While there, I invested in a black rubber body glove for my spacephone, purchased just a few weeks prior. It had slipped out of my hands two days after I bought it, and while she was more or less fine, the cement of the sidewalk did indeed scratch her face. After the body glove, her face never changed. Her soul died on me in Chicago, but that’s another story for a later date.
Next was food at a Friendly’s across the street. My chicken strips came with waffle fries, but the fall air was crisp and I decided to skip on the ice-cream.
With an exchange of hugs and kisses we dropped our younger cousin off on the hills of the Syracuse campus, and my older cousin and I slid back into her car and headed west.
As we floated along the New York State Throughway my thoughts drifted towards the rolling slope of the Genesee Valley. This would be my third time visiting my alma-matter since graduation sixteen months prior. I was excited to see professors and the few colleged friends I still had, and the possibility of catching an epic Livingston County sunset always made my eyes gleam. But the excitement of adventure and possibility that would eventually become my daily companion was still weeks away from settling in my stomach. My stop in Geneseo was a chance to check in on a life past, not a contribution to a life future.
But first came Rochester, which, for all intents and purposes, was a nap on my cousin’s couch. She lived in an apartment complex well outside the downtown inner loop, complete with a community tennis-court and thin dry-wall interiors. It was much more vibrant and airy than her boyfriend’s place, and the stacks of board-games and half-finished knitted scarves confirmed that my cousin did indeed live there. While she settled down at a table to do doctoral work, I turned on her TV, found an old episodes of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and proceeded to drool on her futon for the next few hours.
Forty minutes before sunset my friend Kristy pulled into my cousin’s parking-lot. I had known Kristy since freshman year and had managed to keep up a substantial friendship, as she had briefly moved to New York City a few months after graduation. She now lived in Rochester, and had agreed to drive me the twenty minutes down to our old stomping-grounds. The sun drifted below the horizon as we headed south on 390.
If there is one thing the village of Geneseo breeds as much as open and enriched minds, it’s alcoholism; so it was only fitting that our first stop was one of the tiny town’s five watering-holes. The Vital was the sports bar among them, and boasted one of the larger selections of draft beer, as well as quality wings and a tasty Cajon dipping sauce. It was early on a Monday evening, and we had the bar mostly to ourselves. Beers, conversation, and chicken ensued.
We parted ways in the parking lot, and I walked down Bank Street towards the university proper. It was a steep slope I had slid down hundreds of times before, but never with quite so much weight in my backpack. The air was a tad crisper than it had been in Syracuse, and the Green’s grass shone brown in the orange glow of campus lights.
In a somewhat cerebral manner I headed straight for the basement of Blake B, an academic building on the north side of one of the school’s main quads. With an anticipatory squeeze, the loose door-latch popped open, and I was in. The lights were off and the rooms glowed green and red with LEDs and digital displays of all sorts. Most of the interior doors were slightly ajar, and the buzz of transmitters and hum of a turned-down loop-show brought back a flood of memories. I went over to the wall of the main studio and perused the racks until I found a suitable track, sat down, adjusted the mike, checked my levels, and flipped the switch:
“You are listening to 89.3FM, WGSU, Geneseo - The Revolution. This is EmceeSweetTooth, back in full effect for a limited time only. ‘wanna give a shout-out to all Shrews out there, both thirst and not. Here’s Pseudosix with ‘Under the Waves.’ 585-245-5586 is the number to call. Keep your ears tuned here to 89 3, the place to be, WGSU, Geneseo. The voice - of the valley.”
I spent the next twenty minutes spinning records, not knowing (and not caring) if anyone was listening.
As I stepped out of the station I momentarily hesitated. I knew full well where I was going next, but just as I had instinctually headed to the WGSU studio, I was presently in an instinctual deadlock. There were so many rooms, apartments, and corners of the town I had once called home that my body wasn’t sure which way to turn. If it had been freshman year I would have headed to my dorm on south campus; if I was senior year it’d be up to my apartment at 5 Main. But it was 2010, I had a diploma stuffed in a closet somewhere in Newton Massachusetts, and there was no longer a home for me in Geneseo NY. So down the hill to Orchard St. I went.
I had met Sarcophagus Funk (as one is want to be called) my junior year, when, as a freshman, she was assigned to work-study in the theater department’s scene shop. For two years we spent many an hour side-by-side, hanging source-fours or ripping Masonite. She lived with three of her friends (all of whom I knew vaguely) in an upstairs apartment at the back end of the town’s frat row. School had been in session for less than six weeks, but their place was already fully colleged: littered with ankle-high stacks of laptops and textbooks, festooned with posters of Pink Floyd and Robert Smith, lit by lamps adorned with nylon leis, and boasting elements of an oft-used gravity-bong in the middle of all the other clutter.
In a relatively extreme act of grace, Sarcophagus gave me her bed for the next four nights, sleeping herself in a basket-like chair in the living room that looked more like a birds-nest than a piece of human furniture.
