Sunshine on an Open Tomb. Tim Kinsella

and over, I’d hear these same stories repeated.

      Everyone always forgets, I do also have one good ear.

      I completed my long string of C’s 10 years ago, Yale Class of ’77.

      The frat mixers were awfully formal for parties thrown in thick-walled old houses with couches on the porch.

      Dozens of people splendiferous with restaurant recommendations packed in elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder, wobbling cups of punch, and plates of carefully prepared knuckle-sized bites.

      The chatter, reflecting back on itself, would aggregate into a dense shriek.

       I’d like to buy the world a Coke.

       Have a Pepsi Day.

      Harrowing social times for me, my cool and self-conscious years, obsessed with underground rock legend Cy Franklin.

      The squares all pumped their fists in crowded stadiums, seduced by lasers and smoke, battlefield metaphors to suppress any potential temptations toward inward reflection.

      But I fixated on Cy Franklin’s primal amateurism.

      His humble rebellion forced me to confront head on what a ridiculous, clumsy, ugly, pathetic, contemptible, and vain wretch I was, attempting to cultivate some contrived persona thru superficial stylistic gestures, pitying myself and my mushy ear and the steel spike in the center of my vision and the impossibility of ever being understood by The Family, like an iguana in the razor grip of an alligator’s jaw.

      If I wasn’t anxious, I was anxious that I was about to be anxious, confounding cause and effect.

      The frat mixers would swarm me into their collective unconsciouses.

       Fly the friendly skies.

       Ajax has the power.

      Thru waves of pressing flesh, faces emerged, warped large and leaning in close, chewing and laughing, open-mouthed.

       Bet you can’t eat just one.

       Panasonic: just slightly ahead of our time.

      Imagine how the buzz of a swarm sounds to each individual insect wrapped up in the squash of it, all their little eardrums?

      That’s radar, or its opposite?

       He’s Family, him—over there.

       He’s useless. What a waste.

      The Family taught us to remember one thing about each dimly sentient blob we meet and ask about that one thing every time we see them.

      I’d struggle to lift my hand above my waist.

       You mean he gets all that money and he never has to do anything?

       Oh, how nice to meet you. Any relation to The Hitlers of Boston?

      I’d bite at the air, desperate to hoist myself above the throbbing crowd to breathe.

       Let your fingers do the walking.

      Still, senior year, SkullnBones tapped me.

      That Tomb was grimy as Paris, and musty with mold and incense.

      At the initiation, my sneezing fits slashed the drama of the flickering candlelight, my throat tickled until it clenched.

      And that’s the thing about anxiety: the symptoms confound cause and effect.

      The brothers under the skin did not appreciate my ruptures of giggling.

      With their cold-blooded reptilian erections, those Bonesmen really do deserve their exceptional dominion over the expanse of this mysterious and poisoned watery orb.

      Here’s the SkullnBones initiation ritual: The brothers under the skin surround you, all in their hooded robes, and one guy dressed up like Don Quixote even, and you’re lying in this coffin, and you have to wax your alligator while recounting your entire sexual history blow-by-blow as they all watch and listen attentively.

      So there I yanked my gelatinous shaft in that coffin, quaggy as King Charles II of Spain.

      I told them I wore sweatpants first time I blew my Family seed into a worldly girl’s mouth before I’d even discovered the explosion for myself.

      “Duh, unga-bunga.”

      I told them how French kissing on a park bench one afternoon, I massaged some young deb’s plentiful bosom while her friend sat next to her, clacking on a wad of gum.

      I sprained my wrist when I jut a hand down the front of her tight jeans.

      “Duh, unga-bunga.”

      I told them that my first time thrusting into someone, I was shocked that a boy looked back at me when I glimpsed myself in a mirrored closet door.

      “Duh, unga-bunga.”

      I pumped and dandled myself in that coffin, stifling the tickle in my nostrils, scraping away at my memories, limp like King Charles II, weighted down with expectation and tradition.

      My first love was a townie near Hyacinthignatzi, that magical land where even the garbage supposedly smelled delicious.

      Summers we’d see each other.

      Her older sister had her own apartment and let us hop into her bed.

      My First Love’s dexterous generosity in humiliating herself was like erotic charity.

      And I was like a horse on a trampoline.

      Sitting up Indian style with this skinny bucktoothed poet, her investing every bit of her tiny tongue, I shocked us both by shooting up and over my shoulder.

      But I froze when it came time to tell the brothers under the skin this story.

      How I must’ve looked bolting from that tomb, sprinting, the robe rippling in the wind behind me, my sandals slapping against the pavement.

      Panicky that some agent would pounce from a bush and tackle me, I stuck to the middle of the street.

      That final block before arriving home to my marble sty, realizing that no one had followed me and not wanting to create a scene, I slowed and lowered my hood.

      I waved to an old couple on their porch watering their lawn.

      And not really looking, I had to leap out of the way of a screeching car turning a corner quick right at me.

       CHAPTER 7 Re: The Homelan

      The Homelan was originally known as The New Atlantis.

      The New Atlantis had been discussed in Alexandria, Delhi, Mecca, and Tibet, long before any European statesmen knew of its existence.

      Ferdinand and Isabella’s Inquisition was a “governmental” agency, not a “religious” one.

      After driving The Muslims out of Spain after an 800-year reign, Ferdinand and Isabella wanted a shortcut to Jerusalem to wage more Crusades when their man Columbus smacked into The Homelan.

      Thomas Morton and his Maypole—revelry is resistance— was like The ’60s in The 1620s.

      The Puritans called it a cult: consorting with native women, arming native men, celebrating Venus and her lusty children Cupid and Hymen, singing sloppy drinking songs in their tilted antler hats.

      Morton was The Homelan’s first patron saint of counterculture, like Lenny Bruce or Timothy Leary.

      He was starved, banished, held in stocks, jailed, and generally harassed for his utopian leanings.

      Upon Capital City’s founding, the plots of land were numbered.

      And they