He saw him again a couple months later on the bridge, heading into the city, head down, walking fast. He was wearing the same jacket, and in the light of sunset it was clear that his guitar case carried the same silver embellishments of his jacket, its edges and hinges carefully trimmed and framed with duct tape. Seeing this, he remembered thinking how the care that had gone into the taping was incongruous with the value of the tape, it was done as though by an expert goldsmith, gilting a fine music box. "You'd need a razor to do that," he thought.

The first time he heard him sing, heard his music, heard him play, was early one Sunday morning, like five a.m. early, down at the docks across the river from the school. There was usually nothing moving at that hour but the wind, and the wind was usually scarce. But not everything in the city was sleeping this morning. There was a noise coming up from between the warehouses that fingered the railroad tracks. At first he thought it was some machine out of control, needing repair, maybe with a cat caught in it, or a whole herd of cats caught in a cement mixer with wet gravel. Walking slowly down the hill, leaning back to keep his footing, he could see down and in to the warehouse, through a window in the corrugated metal, the glass long-ago broken out of the rusted frame.

A single incandescent bulb lit the cavernous space. The dirt floor was littered with tires, crushed metal cans, radiators, broken tile, stuff like that. Over in the corner was a green tarp spread over something large and ancient. And in the middle of the room, directly under the light, there he was, standing with his feet in their taped silver boots spread wide apart, howling out his songs one after the other, his eyes closed tight, his hands a blur slamming his guitar, his amplifier full on, alone in the center of his music. Well, you have to call it music because there is no other word for it, and the implements he used to manufacture it were the same implements that musicians use, but this was simultaneously more and less than music. If you had had to put a name on it, you might say it was born in acid-calypso-folk, but to do that wouldn't convey the primative potency it had, a wildness that could reach right through you. One thing you would say: it was pure, 200 proof.

Looking down into the warehouse, squinting without knowing why, he could make out snatches of a lyric through the static of the guitar

B-birds fly south for the winter
  T-tides they come and g-go
The moon and s-sun
They hunt and run
   And winds will ever b-blow
Every dreamer wakes at last
  T-tides they come and g-go

He heard enough. That particular morning he was seeking solitude, not enlightenment, and he didn't stop to listen; he walked on. Out of earshot, he sat down on the edge of the loading dock at J.C. Moving & Sto. and ate his croissant and drank some of his Evian

Later, thinking back, there might have one other time he caught a glimpse of him on the train, his weathered face reflected in the glass of a perfume ad, holding the strap on an local as the express went by, but he couldn't have sworn to it.

But now, stepping into George's, in very the last place he would have expected, there he was, sitting in a booth arguing with the Professor, waving his arms and yelling: the King of Duct Tape.





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