He wears his hair like a wig, his clothes like a disguise...

He bought a magazine and moved on, but the image remains: an empty disguise of a man — perhaps born that way, perhaps created — or perhaps an artifact, an accidental scrap of flotsam tossed up by an eddy in the currents of existence.

You may laugh, but I know such things are possible — and not all of them are as insipid as the Disguise Man that buys butt porn from out shop every Thursday at 2:30, like clockwork.

* * *

It was in the winter of ’85, when I was an awkward teenager in a small Massachusetts town when I rode with my friend Gabe and his older brother into The City.

As I write this in San Diego I can only feel a bit smug about how the meaning of “city” has shifted for me, but then and there Pittsfield was The Place To Go if a kid wanted to do anything after dark.

That night we were headed out — looking to take in a movie, I think — and it was a bitter, cold winter night. The sky was distant and clear, the starlight razor-sharp. As the three of us, muffled in down jackets and floppy garage-band knit hats, trudged through the snow to where the van sat, idling roughly, warming up for the drive, Gabe’s mother called from the front door, “Watch out for black ice!”

Frozen between house and waiting butt-rusted van, the three of us heard three different warnings, and, like teenagers everywhere, held in our reactions until we were out of earshot, only smiling and nodding for the mother’s sake.

As we pulled out of the iced driveway ruts, I couldn’t hold in my reaction: “Guys, did your mom really just say, ‘watch out for black guys’?”

I liked Gabe’s mom — Lucy was her name, I think — but she was odd sometimes, claiming to see ghosts and visions. The village was pretty white-bread compared to Pittsfield, so what I had heard made a sort of sense, but I hadn’t taken her for the racist type.

Gabe laughed. “No, black ice -- you know, clear ice on the pavement -- it looks black, it’s hard to see, and slippery as all hell.”

Gabe’s brother, Larry — I’d forgotten his name — Larry laughed, too. “That’s better than what I heard: ‘Watch out for black eyes’!” As we laughed, he slowed his van to the speed limit as we passed out of the lit area of the village and onto the long country highway to Pittsfield. Black ice territory if ever there was one.

“I guess we should watch out for all three, just in case!” I said, and we all started laughing again, when something bolted across the road. It was just a fleet shadow in the headlights against the mottled snow-and-tar of the road, and Larry swerved, sluing the van until it almost tipped, and we wound up ass-to in the opposite snowbank, panting and gasping and clutching the bitch-handles.

“Shit,” we all agreed, and Larry cut the engine. For minutes later we could hear it tick and ding as it cooled to match the frigid winter night around us.

After a moment Larry got out of the van to assess the damage. The second the door cracked open, wind as bitter and forceful as any New England blizzard-driven gale whipped into the van and filled our vision with dancing snow crystals. “Shut the door!” Gabe and I yelled, and Larry slipped out into the night, shutting the door tightly behind him, but the damage was done, and any warmth the van had built up on the drive was lost. We slipped our gloves back on and clapped ourselves on the shoulders as we waited for Larry to return with the verdict.

With the lights off and the snow swirling around us, we couldn’t see for shit out the van windows, and we had no idea what was keeping Larry so long. After a bit, the van rocked one, twice as he gave it a shove -- whether in frustration or an attempt to gauge the situation we didn’t know.

“He’s sure taking long enough,” Gabe griped. I laughed and joked that he’d gotten lost, and then we sat in silence, our breath steaming in front of us, for another raft of minutes.

I opened my mouth three or four times, starting to say something fearful, thinking better of it, forgetting my resolution and starting another “what if?” -- when we were again beset with a flurry of hard crystalline snow as Larry opened the door and shrugged back into the seat.

We let him sit for a full minute, puffing more winter-breath into the interior of the van, before demanding answers.

“What happened? What took you so long?” I asked, too tired and worried to keep the fear from my voice, to comfortable with these friends to try very hard.

“Damnedest thing,” he said.

I held my breath, imagining cracked blocks, flattened tires, stove-in grills.

“We hit something, I guess,” and then he stopped again.

“What’d we hit? How’s the van?”

“I damnedest thing. I don’t know what we hit.”

And he gestured for us to see for ourselves.

When we all trooped out into the cold to see what Larry had seen, we knew no more than before. Smeared in the seam of a long dent across the front flank of the bus was a black streak, like tar. But it smelled like nothing -- unless it smelled of snow and night and the slightly dampened gloves through which we dipped our fingers in the stain and smelled the sample thus collected. None of us dared taste it, but I felt sure it would taste like nothing, too. When we thought to look again, the next day under the chill glare of the 8am sun, there was nothing left. Our gloves, too, were left unmarked. Just that long dent creasing the front of the bus.