(Excerpted from Invisible Driving by Alistair McHarg, a memoir of manic depression available from Amazon.com.   http//www.invisibledriving.com)

        How wonderful life is when you’ve dropped out of the mainstream. You shop when there’s nobody else in the stores. You drive when there’s nobody else on the road. Everything is more convenient. It was dusk. The sweet darkness was falling on the landscape like snow. I was heading into town while everyone else was heading out. They growled, inching along, individual cells in an enormous mechanical snake of cars, winding along the river. I was gliding along with barely another car to contend with. Refreshed, rested, meticulously dressed, puffing on a marijuana cigarette, right arm resting on the top of the passenger’s seat, I had the swagger of Rasputin mixed with the nonchalance of Fred Astaire. Prince of the City. Master of the Puss Corps. So much to discover. I could be anything to anyone. What do you need to know, I can tell you. The strangest thing of all was, I had been this amazing, charismatic monster all along and just didn’t realize it. It took being thrown out of the corporate mainstream to discover the extraordinary powers I had. To the tune of Native New Yorker I was singing, You should know the score by now, you’re a monitor lizard. A monitor lizard with pretensions to the title of Komodo Dragon.

I returned to the Bourse and found Claire, again seated, reading, surrounded by her fascinating work. I looked at a large painting I hadn’t noticed before. It was a close-up of a bicep with a tattoo which said, Art - Craft With An Attitude. There was another one next to it that had a huge black dot on a white background. It was titled, “Art is the shortest distance between two points, one of which has no known location.” I was knocked out by her stuff all over again. I picked myself up off the floor and waited for the next round to begin. We began our conversation where we’d left off. No matter how offbeat my references were, she seemed to stay with me. Was she as brilliant as me? Another visionary? Another truth teller who’d had the blindfold removed? It seemed impossible, but wherever I went, she went along too. I kept looking into her eyes, she never flinched. A companion for my new incarnation. The others were kittens, playthings, snozzlers, but this was an equal. Someone who could keep up with me. Someone who knew the difference between rabazibby and naparoochie, and it’s amazing just how many people don’t. I was stunned. She closed up her booth. With no awkwardness at all we decided to go have a drink. There was a marvelous place in the Bourse, Oggi’s of Paris. Very chichi. Lots of mirrors, elaborately arranged fresh flowers, high fashion, steps to various levels, polished chrome. Said to be a favorite haunt of the South Philadelphia Mafiosi. When we got inside I immediately felt more comfortable. Having recently been there I already knew the entire staff by name. My ability to remember names was astounding. Add that to my ever-increasing list of abilities which proved beyond debate my superiority to the horde. The herd. The common people. But don’t misunderstand. Noblesse oblige isn’t all bad. Like any true prince I loved the common folk and deeply felt my obligation to their welfare.

Claire looked less comfortable. Her mode of dress was peasant under glass. Jeans. AHH. Jeans, the fashion cliché of the century. Let’s banish jeans back to Colorado to adorn the butts of cowboys should there be any left. But still, I wasn’t going to fault her for a little thing like that. She had on a nice sweater with swirls of purple, pink, and blue, over a black turtleneck. Massive, silver earrings. After we’d been talking for a while I realized that one of the earrings had Yes stamped through it and the other one said No. While I was uncertain about what my new identity would be I was absolutely certain that it would be out of the mainstream. Jazz singer. Poet. Performance artist. Snozzledrostopist. Collage creator. Talk show personality. It made perfect sense that a woman like this was right for me. A woman who understood the artistic mind. A woman with whom I could share my extraordinary, unorthodox adventure. A Eulipian. The universe had sent me my little reptilette, the lucky girl who was going to share in the incredible bounty I was about to reap.  So. Get it? I was smitten, swooning at the thought that I might not be taking this fabulous journey alone. Really happy. All the evidence was there. Amazing how things were falling into place for me. The less I tried, the better things worked out. As though I was being directed, prompted. As though my life was controlling me, and I was just tagging along for the fantastic ride. As though I was serving a higher calling, something I didn’t understand. All I had to do was be careful to read the signs, stay alert, and the harvest was all mine.

I asked her if I could walk her to her car. To my surprised delight, she’d taken the trolley, since parking was so impossible. I offered her a ride home and she accepted. This was going like clockwork, I thought, pinch me. Ouch. We walked to my car. There was a parking ticket on it which I tore in half and carefully deposited in a trash can. One simply doesn’t litter, unless one is a kitten. Littering is Not U. We began our drive. It was starting to rain a miserable, cold, sleety rain which, had it had any self respect at all, would have been snow. She started to give me directions to her house. I knew the area, West Philadelphia. A North East equivalent of Beirut. Past 30^th Street Station, past Drexel University, past the University of Pennsylvania, across 40^th street where the panorama turns very black very quickly and the income level drops like a spent roman candle. I’d lived out that way briefly, years before. A very dangerous neighborhood indeed. Home of the infamous MOVE tragedy, when the city government actually bombed a house containing some black, radical anti-social types and burned them like so much barbecue chicken. Instead of trying to put the fire out, the firemen watched as an entire block went up in flames. Not that the termination of the MOVE desperados was any great loss mind you. You see, telling the truth goes beyond political correctness, beyond being liberal, beyond being sensitive. Telling the truth means that everybody hates you.

When I let go of society I gained the power. Even T.S. Eliot, that bloodless sack of shit, said humankind cannot stand very much reality. Well I’ve got reality on sale, kids, how much would you like today? Would you like small or large fries with that? Not a neighborhood for faint hearts or cream puff liberal white boys from the suburbs but then, the universe was sending me here and who was I to argue with fate? Radical, ultra-liberal whites, low income to no income blacks, lunatics, homosexuals, drug dealers, crack addicts, extippitox slatch-heads, alcoholics, Koreans, Vietnamese, thieves, musicians, homeless, latchkey children, expatriates, political revolutionaries, college professors, and Claire’s house. The cliffs. From here I could see infinity, no bourgeois material trinkets to distract me. But I’d better not slip up. Like the mighty Laura Nyro said, they hang the alley cats on Gibson Street.

She showed me her house and I found a parking place in front of a Cadillac with four flat tires. I looked at the house. The only thing missing was thunder and lightning. I fully expected werewolves to start howling in the distance. It was quite typical for the neighborhood. Three stories. In the naked city. But folks. Gothic. Stone. Perhaps a hundred and twenty years old. Elaborate ironwork over all the windows and doors. Large porch. Completely dark. An abandoned building next to it was in an advanced state of decomposition, more like ruins than a house. It was the kind of neighborhood where even the trees didn’t look natural. Quite simply I knew then and there that I was entering another world. This house was going to be mine. This would be my world headquarters. This would be where I returned after my rave review round the world rock tours. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alistair’s All Reptile Review. This would be the castle where I kept my kittens. This would be where the art would happen. There was magic here, snozzling of a sort almost completely unknown in this part of the world, this was a place of madness, of divinity, a clean slate for me to write on.