You’re an asshole!” she shouts and a beer bottle busts above my head, sends brown bits of glass down behind me on the floor. I turn around and watch the foam splattered on the floor and trickling down the kitchen wallpaper. I finish mine while she’s hurling more obscenities.

I hurl the empty bottle to my left, not towards her in the center of the room; it busts on the wall and leaves a dent.

“Yeah, I know,” I say, “but I’m leaving, so fuck off. Enjoy your life, sweetheart.” She’s upset because I had slept with her roommate while she was at work this morning. Apparently the roommate told her. I’m guessing that the roommate is actually the crazy one; she’s much more attractive, and the attractive ones who sleep with the strangers their roommates bring home usually have a few loose screws.

But I couldn’t help it. I went home with the (now) angry, less attractive one because I figured it was going to be easier. The odds are a lot better of going home with a girl and her not asking many questions if you lower your standards a bit.

Anyway, I grab my bag and split. It’s a fairly sunny day in Denver. A bum catches my eye, and I ask him for a dollar before he can ask me.

“Well… uh, no,” he says, “Sorry.” It’s always best to preempt the bastards.

The phone booth on the corner has a sticker advertising a cab company stuck inside it. While the phone’s ringing, I check out the street sign and realize that the bus station is on this street. I hang up. I ask the same bum which way it is to the bus station, he tells me it’s about a mile south. I give him two bucks and start walking.

It’s $106.50 one-way from Denver to Phoenix, which leaves in five hours. I pay cash because I did pretty well last night at the bar before I went home with whatever-her name-was who just hurled the bottle at my head. I pulled three wallets and netted $182. I’ve got just about enough left to eat some dinner and breakfast until tomorrow night. In Phoenix, I guess.

I don’t know why I’m going to Phoenix except that I remember that I had a pretty good time last time I was there.

Call it an art form. Performance art. Not quite subversion in the traditional sense as it’s sort of a one man inside joke which I rarely divulge to anyone, ever. What I do is survive entirely off the grid by stealing from strangers, directly from their pockets, taking their wallets and emptying them of cash without them ever knowing. It’s really quite easy; people get drunk at bars in just about every city in the world and crowd together just trusting that no one with the requisite skill and motivation is standing behind them relieving them of whatever money they’re carrying.

I get dinner at some chain restaurant, and it’s pretty crowded, people filling up the little waiting area and bumping past each other to ask the hostess if their table’s ready yet, or to use the bathroom, or whatever. Some thuggish kid is trying to look real tough with his girlfriend. His pants are so goddamn low, the wallet slides right out. There’s only 20 dollars in it. Maybe the girlfriend’s paying. They both sit down next to me, and the girlfriend gets up to go to the restroom. She leaves her little purse on the bench. Her boyfriend is yelling about something on the cell phone. Her wallet’s right there. Inside, there’s 30 dollars. I have the fettuccine alfredo and a large milkshake, leave a 15 percent tip, and walk to the bus station as the sun is going down over the buildings, so the sky is full of running colors but the streets are dark already.

The ride to Phoenix is just over 23 hours. I always travel overnight, so I miss a lot of the scenery. This way, America seems to be one very large, very homogenous urban landscape.

On the bus, there’s some grad student, sounds very gay, talking about how French films are more interesting than American films because the ending is often ambiguous, like it’s not conclusive, and anything might happen after the credits roll. Next to him, a guy with a beard and cowboy hat nods, makes small remarks, and watches nothing happening out the window. I kill the time with magazines and a small bottle of Scotch.

When I wake up, it’s definitely feeling more Phoenix than Denver; it’s hot as a bastard and dry. But still, it’s very much the same. I pick up a paper to find out where there’s a good bar night tonight, Thursday. If I can’t find someone to go home with, I’ll get a hotel and try to bring someone there. Or not. Or maybe I’ll buy a bag of drugs. It’s not as cheap as a room, but some cocaine or amphetamines will make some easy friends, and it’ll probably be a good time. And there’s nothing quite as satisfying as buying some dealer’s overpriced gram of coke and then taking his wallet with it.

There’s a club called The Abattoir advertising a band called The Randy Savages playing tonight. Some kind of creepy shit, but it’s a wild crowd. I introduce myself to some outgoing girl and ask her if the band’s local. I’m not from around here. People are always more friendly to random strangers if you just say that you are new in town. Me, I just got into the local university’s grad program for cinema. Just checking out the city for a few days to find an apartment. I explain why French film can be more interesting than its American counterpart. I take a few pictures of her and her friends with my camera. I tell her I’m staying at a hostel, but she says that her friends will be coming back to her place tonight, and that I could join them.

I’ve been living this way, homeless and among strangers, for so long though that I barely remember what it’s like to actually know anyone in particular, but I’ve met so many people, had so many conversations on so many topics, that I feel like I know everyone before I even meet them. I’ve had countless women practically fall in love with me, crying when I leave after only a handful of days, and I consider it fair to say that I love them, in some collective way, as if it’s the same girl, some archetype; a smile in Baltimore, a set of hips in Atlanta, I can feel the shape of her shoulders held in my hands in what seems like Chicago in a bed with a down blanket.

In a bathroom, somewhere near downtown Cleveland, the mirror’s fogged over, the drain’s plugged in the shower so that there’s an ankle-deep pool of scummed white water slowly drizzling down, away to wherever, and the bar of soap, the towels, toothbrushes, the sink itself, all belong to someone else—the young woman named Cadence scrambling eggs in the kitchen, who, according to the small mailbox hanging next to the front door, bears the last name “Szczur,” though when I asked her she said “Scissor.”

I live like this because I do not want to have anything. I have given up everything, left it, gone on without it. I’m in a constant state of departure. The goal is to deny, at some level, the law of cause and effect. The future is the same as the present except it’s somewhere else with another set of people strikingly similar to other people I’ve gotten to know slightly, and the past is whatever I feel like saying it is. I eat when I’m hungry, sleep when my eyes close, get on a bus when I’m done with where I am. Wake up on a couch in Texas, watch headlights go by the overnight bus to Florida, fall asleep on a beach, wake up God-knows-where in an alley or next to a river convinced that my face is frostbitten, sleep on stranger’s shoulders taking subway trains back and forth along their lines, getting robbed and giving up random people’s wallets and money, buying drugs, buying fake drugs, watching the sun set when I felt that it should be rising.

I think this is Portland. “Gin-tonic, heavy on the tonic, please,” I say, after a nod from the bartender, sweating through his t-shirt, another nod and he wipes his head, reaches down for a glass, a bottle, sets the glass down, squirts soda water from a carbonated hose while pouring bottom-shelf gin and scanning the bar, breathing through his mouth. He replaces the hose and brings me the drink, looks down at the five-dollar bill in front of me. “Keep it.” Thirty seconds, maybe? A way as good as any to measure time. I take the lime slice out of the drink, lay it down, and all I can think of is the familiar smell of scotch tape. I think this is Portland. It is raining, anyhow, people coming in wet off the street, scuttling in to protect their done-up hair.

I just came from Vancouver, Canada, where I smoked a lot of pot with kids living seven to a house for a few days, talked about how I was just checking out the city while I was moving from New York down to San Francisco, and I’d always wanted to see B.C. The kids seemed to rarely work, there were always at least a few people at the house, and nobody seemed to know who had invited me there or really cared to tell me to leave, so I just stayed and paid more than my share of the beer. One of the girls who lived in the house (there were two) had collar bones like a train yard viewed from a plane circling over the city waiting to get clearance to land. She had ghostly grey eyes that I recognized from what I think is Atlanta on a different girl of possibly the same ethnicity (I forgot to ask, but I would guess Czech). She was very nice and held my hand while she showed me around the city. She smiled a lot and was a very good painter. I looked forward to seeing that same smile on someone else somewhere down the line.

When I left, I got a few people’s phone numbers and email addresses and let them know they’d be welcome if they ever came to San Francisco. I figured San Francisco did have a nice ring to it, and that I could certainly find some college kids to chat with, flatter their intellect by going on about postmodernism or railing against it, whichever rolled off the tongue easiest. The trip will cost $104.50, about a dime a mile, take almost 27 hours, and will possibly end early if I like the looks of Sacramento during the layover.