Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "Elsewhere"

Even in the depths of adolescent degeneracy, I
didn’t think of my conquest of Washington Square
Park as anything that important. It had seemed
simple, to me, to master the deals system around
the park. Mastering said system meant that if I
wanted to score a twenty-bag, at any time, I could.
The action around Washington Square Park was
pretty lowly stuff; my entire life in Manhattan turned
out to be pretty lowly. Rather than a small, cozy
college town, what we had here was a fiery furnace,
a big, ugly juggernaut, eagerly ripping anything or
anyone to shreds whose ass wasn’t completely
covered. I somehow managed to salvage for myself
a bedsit in Park Slope, Brooklyn, after crashing for

a while on the Upper West Side and the East Village.
My meandering day to day life, between looking for
straightforward work, looking for work in theater,
trying to get published, and haphazardly recording
music, was a narrow tunnel, over the course of that
year, and if I was going to survive, it wasn’t here. I
found Manhattan to be Deathsville. One day that spring,
I was doing my usual aimless park routine, and someone
was following me. She sat on the bench, on the perimeter
of the park, to see what I was doing. She would’ve noted
I was even skinnier than usual. The eyes, round and brown,
reflected a side angle that tilted slightly to reveal them
as loopy, alien-like. Could be painted. The life-force energy
was still there. This boy, another artist, had a future. Elsewhere.

© Adam Fieled 2026