Three Magi: Baudelaire

A Winter's Tale

Note to the reader

This story is the third in a series of four “Christmas” pieces. The short introductory essay (Rimbaud) can be read here, and the second (Hölderlin) here. Part 4 will come out January 9th, once a wintry post-holiday sobriety has settled in—for readers in the Northern hemisphere, that is!

To all the readers in South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, Australia and the equatorial regions: I understand that, at least weather-wise, we’re quite likely on different pages right now. I appreciate you hanging in there with me. I’m writing these from the 45th parallel north, so for me it’s cold and snowy.

I’ve included some music (about 29 minutes worth, in playlist form) that I strongly associate with the time covered in this story. I also linked two other albums below that I associate with December and January.

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Oskar Schlemmer, Three vertical profiles (1920)

The Greyhound

When I was 18 or 19, my friend M. and I took a bus trip from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Denver, Colorado. If I remember correctly, we stayed up through the night and boarded the bus at around 3 in the morning. The bus, to our surprise, was almost full.

The driver was a middle-aged man, dressed impeccably, as though he were the captain of an ocean liner rather than a Greyhound driver for the night shift in one of the seediest corners of America. He had a cartoonish enthusiasm and wakefulness about him that would have been distressing—I do not like being driven by other people, in any case—were it not the middle of the night: we didn’t have to worry about him falling asleep at the wheel.

M. and I packed a few flasks of vodka for the ride up. Once we were out of the orange glow of the Albuquerque streetlights, we slid down in our seats, drinking furtively and looking at the various characters on the bus: tweakers on a downturn, guys who looked like they weren’t allowed near schools or had no-fly restrictions, off-duty prostitutes and human-shaped piles of clothing topped with wool hats and shining eyes, intoxicated in ways that made our vodka-sipping look like physical and spiritual child’s play.