Writing Invisible Driving (http://www.invisibledriving.com) required taking readers into the world of mania, which is really like entering an alternate reality. Not only does behavior completely change, perception of familiar things changes as well. In mania I adopted an expansive, theatrical persona – or perhaps it is more correct to say it adopted me. Every moment, I imagined, was performance art. I solicited attention and disdained it all at once. My sense of scale was such that I felt quite comfortable “playing Christmas carols” on a most unorthodox musical instrument – the grand hall of 30th Street Station. I wonder now at the arrogance and obtrusiveness. It is quite characteristic of manic behavior in that it is at once fearlessly creative and original, terribly funny, bent, and scary all at once.  
 
            So you cruise. Maybe put on the mirrored sunglasses for affect. Quite a bad affect when you’re driving a black car and it’s the middle of the night. Stop at a convenience store and get a pack of cigarettes and a cup of hot, black coffee. Survey the night crawlers, still can’t get away from fishing, that hang out in these places.
            Put your stuff on the counter and the clerk says, “Anything else?”
            You say, “Yeah, I’d like a ‘Free James Brown’ poster and an eight by ten glossy color photograph of Catherine Daneuve taking a bath when she was fifteen years old.”
            The clerk looks at you with bemused boredom. “Two seventy-five,” he says.
            You look at your watch. “Holy shit,” you reply, “I didn’t realize it was that late.” Before he gets a chance to tell you he’s not interested you put down exact change. Exact change is wonderful. It means you don’t have to wait and wait has become a major four letter word. Giving a clerk exact change is doing him a favor, making his job easier. Giving exact change earns a bonus point.
            As you lay down the money you say, in a nice, conspiratorial stage whisper, “Keep the change.”
            By the time the guy’s thought about it hard enough to not understand, which is quite a while in some cases since a lot of these guys rank just above squid on the evolutionary hierarchy, you’re not Biology anymore, you’re History. Maybe he gets it, in which case you’ve done a mini-set and provided someone with a laugh, a drop of delight. And I’ve seen delight. Maybe he doesn’t get it in which case you’ve amused yourself, and at least you tried to break up some person’s boring night with a little divinely inspired absurdity. In either case you’ve brought your art, your self, your being, into the now.
            It was starting to get light. I thought briefly of another line from that old poem, Dawn is breaking/Dawn is breaking my heart. But it passed. Nothing stayed long enough to hurt. The thin winter sun was prying open the lips of the nocturnal clamshell. Everything was pink. I was feeling full of life. Juicy. Slurpy. Christmas was coming, less than two weeks away. I’d stay in town and search for the spirit of Christmas. Possibly even part with some money for presents. After all, I had a daughter who still believed in Santa Claus. She would be back in town with her mom soon, back from vacation, and spending Christmas with me. She had to have a perfect Christmas. I was recreating myself, my reality, my future, on an ongoing basis, nothing in my life was the same twice, but I certainly couldn’t let a little thing like that prevent me from giving my daughter an ideal Christmas. Even in the midst of all this novelty there was something about a seven year old’s belief in miracles, in Santa Claus, in the ultimate goodness of the unknown universe, that had to be preserved. But for me to be able to get into the task I would have to get myself into the Christmas spirit. This was my assignment for the day. Search for the spirit of Christmas, and infect myself with it.
            I felt like walking so I parked my car in the lot next to 30th Street Station. Thirtieth Street Station is an enormous Greek style train station that stands next to an elaborate yard handling freight trains, local trains, and long distance passenger trains. It’s a conduit for all North/South train travel. The station recalls a day when great power was based on rail transportation, before cars took over. But I’m not here to talk about what the station can recall, I’m talking about what I recall. It’s a massive building with a main hall as large as a football field and a ceiling that’s a hundred feet overhead. I remember as a child arriving in the station, climbing up the stairs from the train into the great hall, and feeling as though I was outside, the ceiling seemed that remote. On a whim I walked into the hall. There were early rising, upwardly mobile businesspeople swirling about, drinking coffee, reading the Wall Street Journal and licking boots just to keep in practice. Waiting for trains to New York and D.C. I looked up at the ceiling, puckered, and blew a note. It rang out in the hall, echoing off the marble, taking forever to decay.
            Some things decay quite quickly, western civilization for example, but the note decayed slowly. I whistled the same note twice, two short blasts. Full bore, lots of volume, nicely amplified by the enormous hall. I drifted into a rousing rendition of “Ding, dong merrily on high.” Walked around the room and tested the acoustics from different angles. People were starting to eye me curiously but hey, was that going to bother me? I found that it actually took so long for the sound to die that I could use the echo as a base and whistle on top of it. Now I was doing the carol as a round, using the echo as a second voice. I found this highly amusing, simply droll, just too too funny, trés amusante, and tried it out with several carols. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. Good King Wenceslas. Joy to the World. The music intoxicated me. People were eyeing me suspiciously, as if to say, it’s awfully early in the morning to be so cheerful, what’s wrong with this picture? I Saw Three Ships. I was wailing now.
            I kept walking around the room as I performed, harder to hit a moving target. I knew that sooner or later some long-suffering lowly hod carrier, some factotum, some dolt, some running dog lackey of the petite bourgeoisie would tell me to put a lid on it. Away In A Manger. To amuse myself I tried different tones and different speeds. With turbocharged intensity I whistled as fast as I could. Then I hit on something that gassed me. Boparoopie. The speed made it possible to hang notes in the air long enough to lay another melody on top of them. So I started whistling discordant pairs of carols.
            First a phrase from Joy To The World. Then, with those notes floating above the heads of my unsuspecting and defenseless audience like angels with erections, (I should point out that it was the notes that bore a resemblance to angels with erections, not my audience, my audience bore a resemblance to alien zombies just back from a shopping trip to John Wanamaker’s), a phrase from Good King Wenceslas. Back and forth. It took some puckering but I was getting such a jolt from it that I just kept going. An impromptu, improbable, Christmas happening in your face you whitebread corn pone brain dead blockhead. Something to tell your better half tonight. This guy, he was whistling two Christmas carols at the same time, it was weird. Rahsaan Roland Kirk, this is my Christmas present to you. A tribute to the immensity of your spirit. A little duty-free gift for the traveler. Roland Kirk, God rest his soul, should there be one, and if there is, fuck you pal, I’m tired of carrying water, do you hear me, was a wonderful jazz musician who, among other amazing feats too numerous to go into here, although I’m tempted, often played two saxophones at the same time.
            When I hit the end of my number, lightheaded from the expenditure of breath, I headed for the door. I scanned the faces for responses.  Some grins, mostly from the souls living closer to the cliffs. Some scowls. If they can’t take a joke, throw them the hell off the bus. Some good old-fashioned confusion, what does it mean? But I felt good. I knew I’d nailed it to the wall. Alistair’s extra-normal tribute to Christmas. Alistair, the man who plays flute, saxophone and train station. I hit the door without any slatch, no stationmaster’s condemnation. A perfectly executed piece of performance art. Out the door he goes. Rabazibby. Striding into the gleam of a transcendental dream. Excused from the room. Existing only in your memory. Almost as if it never even happened.