The East Side of Providence in the 1980s was a pretty quiet place, especially after midnight. Driving home from a party or a friend’s house, I’d find myself idling alone at a red light at the corner of Hope and Olney. This was a busy corner most of the day, but, then, it was as still as an unused soundstage. Ahead of me, Hope Street was perfectly clear of traffic, a drag race track before the gun. Looking left and right, I could see into the shadowy distance up and down Olney: nothing. In summer, with my windows down, I couldn’t even hear traffic. The city might as well have been mine.
And yet I sat at that red light. There was no policeman, no other cars in sight. I just waited, waited, and waited for the green. I was a good citizen through and through. I was never in a hurry. Sometimes, though, I’d be tempted to run that red just because I could. I wanted to because I didn’t need it to protect me from an accident. Moreover, there was no one around to punish me for breaking this rule.
I recalled Mrs. Robison, whom I used to babysit for, driving me home. She told me how she ran a red in Wayland Square, not noticing the cop waiting at the corner. She couldn’t believe he gave her a ticket. She told him that there was absolutely no one around, that no one could have been hurt. He gave her a ticket anyway. I could never quite decide who to sympathize with in her story. She was right and so was he.
So, I once stood at this same corner at 1:00 AM while under the full influence of some mushrooms I’d eaten a few hours before. I had never tried these hallucinogens before and had already sworn them off for life. They seemed to turn the world inside out, an inversion that did not make the world any friendlier.
Standing in the quiet darkness, alone with my rapidly busy mind, I stared up at the glowing traffic lights and felt as though I was glimpsing life after the apocalypse. If we all dropped dead tomorrow these stupid lights would keep changing, regulating nothing. Our rules had no real power at all, they could bind no human mind if that mind chose not to be bound. Yet the whole sleeping city, the whole human world, seemed built out of these ‘make-believe’ rules that were–in the end–nothing but an agreement anyone could choose at any moment to ignore.
All this occurred to me, as I waited obediently in my car for the green. I would not be the one to rewrite the rulebooks. The light turned and I drove home. I was living on my own for the first time. Adjusting to living in an empty apartment took some time. I had always liked solitude, but whether in my childhood home or the apartments I shared with friends during college, I could always feel the friendly spirits of my cohabitants when I had the place to myself. I was alone but not lonely.
Now, it was just me, with no spirit but my own. I had just begun to learn that this was enough, that if you sat at the piano or the typewriter in the perfect quiet of your living room and waited, waited without worry, waited with an interesting question in your heart, something always came to you. It was easy to forget, however. I dropped my keys on my table, and they clattered for no one but me. I hurried to bed so I could sleep through to the morning when the city would be awake and alive, again, and all the traffic lights would be necessary.
Closing my eyes, I knew I shouldn’t have run to my bed like that, that I should have waited in the hollow echo of my clattering keys until that empty, lonely, meaningless death feeling passed, as it always did. Strange, I realized as sleep began to claim me, how that most fearful thought had no more power in the end than our little rules we write in our little books. It always dissolved as I changed my mind, my ceaseless freedom being the only rule I couldn’t break even if I wanted to.
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