Edgar Casey's Atlantis, My Life & My Soul

My friend Dina, from Texas, insisted that I move in with her friend Barry and Rodger, his 90- year-old dad, on 181st St. My then current situation was stressed by the fact that my roommate had just placed a personals ad in some rag and she was dragging all sorts of unknown beings into our domain, while I was fearing for the safety of my television, or flatware.

So, I take the bait, hire some Israeli's to move me (lots of added charges announced before they would unload my chattel), and get settled in a grand old apartment building on Manhattan's upper West Side. Dina lived upstairs, sharing another big apartment with several graduates of Findhorn. (But they weren't growing anything.)

Months passed. Barry, a musician, and Dina, an opportunist, were an "item." Also they were followers of an ersatz guru who had started out as a voice coach or something like that. Together they spent a lot of time away from the apartment following the guru, especially on week ends. It didn't take me very long to realize I was Papa Rodger's caretaker. Nothing formally stated. Just heavily inferred. You know, the Guru must be fed and anyone with any human feeling would not want to leave Rodger alone, would they?

There was an abortive attempt to convert me to Guru Thang, but Dina and Barry did not know I am a graduate of West Texas where lives a plague of proselytes stationed in every cranny ready to snatch one up into even more shame and remorse. No thanks. I did relent to one Guru evening thrown in Upstate New York by some successful movie music maestro. The spread was enormous and Dina chased me around the rooms trying desperately to get me to "put on some lipstick." Then Guru Thang called all the women into a big room and closed the door for some kind of session. We went around the room telling our names and declaiming what we "do." My answer to that question is usually, "nothing." But, woop! Mr. Thang rests his countenance upon me and says, that is NOT your name, your name is Jestina! (Which I immediately deemed rather tacky.)

The next day, after a fearful icy and snow-blinded slide home in Barry's automobile, the pair were on the phone with Mr. Thang's right-hand-man. (Probably, really.) There was some agitation. I had received- A NAME! Did I not now want to supply some gratitude by making a contribution? It felt like when some relative gives you a hand-me-down gingham shirt and your mother pointedly (with usually an elbow) reminds you to be a grateful wretch.

So I bow out of the guru business, and am left with Rodger, all the while watching poor Barry taxi Mr. Thang prospects hither and thither, using time at his age better spent sleeping, at least sometime. He was a rather slender, I should say, wiry man. It's hard to gauge the health of this physical type for me. But someone living among us entertained an horrific bout of audible nausea one Sunday evening. The tile of the substantial bathroom rang in sympathy. I was more worried about contagion.

Several weeks pass, and I receive a phone note at work. "Call Dina." So I called.
"Sandra, we've lost Barry."
I thought, "Lost?"
"He died this morning."
I immediately reinterpreted what I had heard. Certainly she meant Rodger. I offered my shocked sympathy and needless to say did not hurry home that evening.

It was well past dark when I placed my key in the heavy door. Just as I opened the door wide enough to see in, Dina's face met me. She was still dressed in bedclothes from the night before.
"Barry's still in his room. Do you want to see him?"

Honestly, I have avoided death like a plague. I rarely attend funerals, unless it is one for a grandmother, or once, my own child. But I am a polite Southerner and when invited I usually say "Yes" rather than offend someone. Dina said little else and I found myself moving through very thick silence towards Barry's room, which I had never before entered.

He was there. Lying simply on the bed clad in a t-shirt and pajama bottoms. His hands were thrown up in a gesture of surprise. His eyes were open. I, tentatively believing in life after death, did not want to gawk. Unseemly. Watching myself experience this, I found I was wondering what sort of etiquette was applicable in a situation like this. I actually did not know Barry very well, and looking at him in his doubtlessly most vulnerable moment seemed woefully inappropriate. Actually, thinking back upon it, it was.

Barry was not "removed" from the abode until after midnight. Someone allowed that there is but one coroner's wagon for all of Manhattan. I can't believe that, but times of death can render one gullible. Like one's own soul is drawn toward its own end, magnetized by the event of the withdrawal of another and conscious energy is diminished leaving you open to vagrant suggestion. The condition simulating that of flight. Flight from rather than transcendent ascent.

At that time in my life, I was performing stand-up comedy at small open mic venues around the island. It's a riot of freedom experience, open mic. You are not being paid, and nobody in the place gives a rot enough to throw you out. So, I was at Downtown Beirut a couple of days after Barry's death, and a guy came in during the "show." He had parked a big hog motorcycle out front and walked right in to join the few comics sitting around the ragged room who comprised the usual audience. Luckily I was taping my set because this patron choked with laughter, pounding the table as I made my observational comments at Barry's expense. I was fueled by his response for months. (Comics don't really laugh at other comics.)

My girlfriend, Meredith, hooked me up with a performer who had told Mer that she wanted to write and produce a show, so I met with her. I gave her the tape of that night's Thalian "flow" and she took it with her to listen later due to time constraints. I never saw it again. When I asked her via phone to send it back, she all but cussed me out for thinking she had enough time in her life to keep up with the whereabouts of my tape, much less getting it back to me.

So, Barry's soul rose to Heaven. My tape fell into the maelstrom of a stranger's madness. But I still love New York (City). my Atlantis, my life and my soul.

You may know that Casey deemed New York as the new Atlantis, or was it the original one, whatever. He may be proven right as the sea level rises. Wall Street goes first. Will it be ready?