I first visited London in the fall of 1978.
My girlfriend Lisa was a model for Elite. The New York owner John Casablancas thought her beauty might sell better in Europe. The blonde from Buffalo was only 5-7.
We lived next to the Chelsea Football Stadium and had never left the apartment on match days.
Chelsea supporters fought before, during, and after the game outside the Butcher’s Hook.
Lisa watched the brawl from our window and said, “I have to go to work.”
“There’s no walking through that mob.”
“Maybe not for you, but I can walk anywhere. This casting is important.”
She pulled on a white leather coat over her mini dress and hurried out the door. I tried to follow her, but she was swallowed by the fracas. I returned inside the apartment and waited for her call.
The phone never rang and after the mob dispersed I ate at workers’ cafe.
Bangers, bacon, eggs, beans, and toast.
My day was free and I wandered around the city.
King’s Road.
The British Museum.
I had read about a tunnel under the Thames to Greenwich linking the Isle of Dogs shipyards to the grounds of the Royal Observatory. Mostly for the dockworkers. Workers of the world unite.
Few people trod through the tunnel. Even fewer were on the grounds of the Royal Observatory. The upper-classes on England were at war with the workers in the late-70s and the battles were for the hearts of the young.
I emerged from the depth to the center of all time.
The clock here governed all time across the globe.
The BBC World Radio Service announced the hour according to Greenwich Mean Time.
In the early 1970s I had studied math at university. In Multi-variable Calculus I argued against the value of the speed of light. Everyone chorused Einstein’s calculation was a constant.
I had argued that while the speed limit in America was 55 and none of us drove that slow. My professors, except for Rene Marcus, considered me a simpleton and I dropped LSD to divine the turn of time.
The clock ticked slow and I thanked the stars the speed limit was not 45.
Four years later I stood at the center of time for Earth and watched my watch’s third hand tick off every second.
My Texas Instrument Chronograph was on the same beat.
I was in synch with the planet.
At least for humans.
Universal time was no longer the sole possession of the Royal Observatory, but that day I was seduced by the International Terrestrial Reference Frame and fell into a standing coma. A man in a white coat asked, “Are you all right?”
At first I thought he was a Bedlam intern coming to take me away, but he was a groundskeeper and I said, “Just struck with awe.”
“As well you should be.”
“Tempus fugit.”
I returned to the tunnel and walked its length in silence. My feet measured time. I was 28.
Throughout the 80s I lived in Paris.
The City of Light.
I ran nightclub doors.
Also in Hamburg, Nice, and London.
I was the toughest man in all those cities.
Mostly because the Bufalos had my back.
And I had theirs.
We didn’t look at clocks or watches. Our time was determined by the end of the night and in those years no one wanted to end the night young.
But I hadn’t forgotten math, because I was now 32.
Candia was younger than that.
Nothing stalled the clock ticking like a younger woman. She was crazy and I was crazy in love. I wrote down the measures of time we spent together. Numerology was a refuge for the mad and no one was more mad than an older man in love with a young woman. She was seeing someone else. Maybe two someones. I had to get away for the moments between her going and coming, because math had no control over love.
In September of 1985 I fled Paris for England by hydrofoil.
The Prince Of Wales traversed the Channel in forty minutes.
I rode from Dover to London on an ancient train, eating a bacon sandwich in the cafe car.
I didn’t give a shit about gaining an hour of time.
I stayed with my old friend AJ in Queen’s Park and tai chi teachers never graded you for tardiness.
We drank at his house. A bottle of vodka. Sleep. Oblivion.
In the morning AJ proposed a trip to Stonehenge.
“It is the equinox.”
“The autumnal equinox?” The equinoxes are the only times when the edge between night and day is perpendicular to the equator. They along with the solstices set the season. The passage of the moon determined the months and the passing of blood for women.
We were of the stars and I still didn’t believe 186,000 miles per second was the fastest speed in the universe.
“Even Captain Kirk knew there was no speed limit, but on Earth the seasons have forever been bound by the moon and stars.
AJ and I drove west out of London.
The city had existed before the Romans over 750,000 days ago, however today mattered only for today and today was a beautiful autumn day.
Especially in a burgundy Rover
The Avesbury Circle was one of the greatest works by our neolithic ancestors.
The Picts.
They understood the passage of the stars, moon, and sun.
And they created beer five thousand years ago.
They spoke an extinct language, but I remained a Pict.
Lords of time.
We walked the northern avenue.
The light was golden.
I touched the stones and was transported back thousands of years.
Everything in me said, “Get naked. Understand time with the wind on your flesh.”
Time flowed through my skin.
AJ slapped my shoulder and said, “Snap out of it. We have a lot of ground to cover.”
At the next stop a mist rose over the burrows.
I stood by the mound.
I saw my dead grandmother.
And all time before.
E=MC2.
Time is not constant and out the corners of my eyes peeked the past.
And then we reached Stonehenge.
The sun pierced the stones.
I cried on my knees.
AJ lifted me to my feet.
“Is there something wrong?”
“No, five thousand years ago I was here.”
“And we’re here today.” I started to take off my clothes for the sun and the cosmos.
“Not now.” AJ bought me back to the Rover. “I know someplace better.”
We headed east.
A great mound lifted from the Wilshire plain to the height of the pyramids.
“Silbury.”
“One thousand men worked ten years to build it.” AJ sounded like an expert. “It’s over a hundred feet tall.”
“Can we climb it?”
“By the ancient route? Of course. But no photos.”
We climbed to the top. I stripped naked. AJ joined me. We spread out arms to the sun. Time passed through me from a billion miles away from the solar system’s course across the edge of the Milky Way.
I was one with all the elements
The evening was getting cold. I looked at AJ. He was crying too.
And like that we were lost to the eternity of an spring sunset.
As we all are.
E=MC2 does not apply to me or mine.
Not in this world’s time.
I didn’t care. Oceans measure time and the movement through the cosmos.
I am 69 now.
In 1960 I was so much younger then and still am now.
No matter what my age.
