I’d been with Natalie for two years and never slept with anyone else. That’s not true, of course, there’s always an exception. I try to put it out of my mind, to forget it ever happened. I’m not afraid to look in the mirror and ask the hard questions. I can’t pretend something didn’t happen, when I know it did. I can lie under oath, if that’s what it takes. But I can’t hide the truth from myself.

Most mornings I’m awake at seven, whether I’m sleeping over at Robert’s apartment or not. Sometimes we make love in the morning; more often, as time passes, when we go to sleep, we’re too exhausted to do anything except roll into one another’s arms, or turn on our sides, away from one another, without even saying good night.

Now he closes the door of his study and says “I have a lot of work to do” and I sit on the couch in the living room with a book open and try to concentrate.

I was thirty-two when I met Natalie. My twenties are mostly a blank. More one night stands than I can count. Books. Papers. Long nights in my room smoking cigarettes and reading till my eyes dimmed. Some nights I smoked a joint to put me to sleep. I was thirty-four when I met Robert on the subway. At that age, Melville had already written Typee, Omoo, Mardi, and, of course, Moby Dick. It’s possibly the greatest tragedy of American literature that he did all this work and no one cared. A few people cared, but not many. Thirty years after he died. That’s how long it took for people to take him seriously.

“You need a therapist,” Desiree says, when I tell her about Robert, and of course she’s right, now more than ever. I went to my first therapist when I was a junior at NYU. My father had stage-3 lung cancer and I took the bus to Lenox every weekend; he and my mother had separated years before but were living in the same town, maybe a mile apart.

The Rail is proudly serializingDelusions of Being Observedby Lewis Warsh from the Oct ’16 issue through the Fall of ’17. Please join us every month for a new installment.

We didn’t live together, except for the time in Provincetown, where we go for weeks at a time, starting right after Christmas when no one is around. Time slows down when the world is void of people and when you go outside all you see is the ocean, the shells and pebbles embedded in the sand shifting under your feet, the cold sky overhead and the whitecaps pummeling the shore.

Natalie calls out of the blue while I’m standing on the sidewalk outside the Museum of Modern Art. I’m going to be in the city for a week, she says, starting next Tuesday. Can we see each other?

Now he’s going to say something, but no one’s listening. Now he’s going to get dressed, whatever he wore the night before. Now he’s going to sit on a chair in the living room and tie his shoes.

Now he’s going to say something, but no one’s listening. Now he’s going to get dressed, whatever he wore the night before. Now he’s going to sit on a chair in the living room and tie his shoes. Now he’s going to walk towards me, with his eyes on the pavement, as if he didn’t see me.

I get up just like everyone else and I eat a day-old donut and drink a cup of coffee. You can buy two day-old donuts on the corner for fifteen cents. We’re talking March 1971, if you want to know exactly. I’m living on Oak Street, in San Francisco, right across from The Panhandle, a half-block from Golden Gate Park.

As it turns out, I’m not happy with the view, which looks straight down into the parking lot below, not to mention the smell of the dumpster every time I open the window (I like to sleep with the window open, no matter how cold), so I ask the man at the front desk, Ralph, so the name tag on the front of his shirt informs me, whether there are any other rooms available.

The train was delayed, but when it finally entered the station, and after I found a seat near a window and hoisted my suitcase onto the rack, I noticed that the woman sitting across the aisle was a person I had known in high school.

It’s important to let the grass grow a little while longer. It’s not necessary to cut the grass—let it grow for a few more days. You can wait until it’s up to your waist, then you can cut it.

She had been teaching for twenty years and in all that time she had only slept with one student, a young woman named Arlette. It was during the time in her life that she referred to as “the worst time” when talking with friends.

They were driving south on Route 13 through Maryland and Virginia when a blond shirtless young man appeared with his thumb in the air on the side of the road. Elizabeth guided the car onto a strip of gravel fifty yards ahead of where he was standing, rested her arms on the steering wheel, and stared at his figure in the rearview mirror.

You remove the blinders for a moment & see the light/& then it’s gone…

Outside Boston
"You look just like your father."



A man reaches out and pats the top of my head; the gesture accompanies the words, a disembodied hand parting the curtains of air. The words are spoken to please my father, of course, who stands alongside me, a firm hand on my shoulder to emphasize possession, but I don’t know what it feels like to feel proud— is this it? I don’t feel I’ve done anything to deserve the compliment.

Self-criticism
by Lewis Warsh

Winter 2003



I shouted & said things I didn’t mean.



I lied to people I loved.



I didn’t pay taxes for 20 years.



I told my mother that my problems were

all her fault.