Sparkwood & 21

11:59 a.m., May 13, 2012; Atlas Cafe, Second Table from the Door on the Left Near the Magazines

"You are extremely important in my life. I was thinking of you back when you were living with Jessica."

"Really? Really?!," her voice is a squeal, that of a girl who has just been told she's won a pony after wanting a pony all her years.

"Yes, really. I've been thinking about you for six months."

Their forearms are locked across the table. They stare at each other and talk and laugh, but something happened. Something went wrong.

"I don't know if I told you this, but I went to a clairvoyant. And she told me the next six months of my life were going to be really important."

She says this to him through a stuffed nose. It's not the nose of someone with a cold. She's been crying and hard. She's swiping at her nostrils with the cuff of her shirt. Her hair is short and thin and pulled into wispy pigtails touched with purple dye in messy streaks. Her eyes are ringed in violet and they're swollen and bloodshot.

He's wearing a stiff, clean cap and his beard is newly trimmed short. His eyes are not swollen or red.

He stands up suddenly but smoothly, leans over the table and kisses her hot, wet face. She gives in to it completely, over half-eaten smoked trout on a sesame bagel.

"Let's go," he tells her.

She floats from her chair. He positions her in front of him by grabbing her at the shoulders. Her posture says she'd be a puppet for him.

He leads her body out the door crowded with late morning brunch seekers. As he crosses through the door frame his gaze falls on bare shoulders, darker than hers.

Calming Constant

How splendid it is that no matter what, no matter how, no matter when, there is always writing.

Inelegant

“That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it.” ~Miranda July

35 Cents

In elementary school, there was this afternoon treat for kids whose parents could afford it. Every afternoon, around 2:15, kids who brought an extra 35 cents could leave class and stand in single file line that led to a milk room that held a cooler full of ice cream treats.

There were ice cream sandwiches, red, white and blue rocket-shaped popsicles and even Nutty Buddies, the wrapped cones with the chocolate-nut hats.

Once you handed over your quarter and a dime, you got to pick the ice cream treat you wanted to enjoy in the classroom during social studies. 

If you didn't bring an extra 35 cents, for whatever reason, you sat at your desk while your classmates left to pick out dazzling ice cream treats. Then you watched eat them when they got back.

Temporary Visitor

“The museums are beautiful and amazing, but they are so lonely.”

She nearly killed herself trying to cross the street alongside the Port Authority. She ran directly in front of two taxis just as they were given the green light to go. Clumsily she quickly made her way onto the curb and I asked if she was okay.

“Can I walk with you for a while?”

I asked where she was going then told her that she could.

She quickly asked me if I lived around there and if I lived alone, and I told her that yes and that I did. She asked how long I’d been in New York, and I told her, and then she asked how I did it, living in this big city all by myself.

I said I didn’t mind it at all, and that I found it very easy to meet people in New York.

“Family is everything. It is everything. It is all we have.”

She said it with such gravity, such certainty, that it sounded perfectly true.

I suggested that perhaps without family, friends could serve as companions. She shook her head no and took a drag off a nearly-gone cigarette.

She was in town from Dublin. Her sister has a flat in the West Village, which is where she stayed for ten days. Her marriage to her husband of multiple decades was busted up, her two daughters were away in college and she was “empty nesting all over the place,” she said.

She was on her way to play a gig at an Irish pub. She plays a type of Irish flute or horn. She told me, but I can’t remember. All I could focus on was the desperation in her voice and the blankness of her face.

That’s when she told me, “The museums are beautiful and amazing, but they are so lonely,” and I knew immediately what she meant.

She is so lonely. It’s all she could talk about. Her every breath was a sound of defeat.

“Life is distraction. We are all just distracting ourselves” she said before I told her we’d have to part at 11th Avenue.

She didn’t say goodbye or thanks or anything at all, she just looked me dead in the eyes, blinked and left.

The Screaming Baby

There was nothing I could do. The baby was screaming, and there was nothing I could do.

The plane was full. That is because flights into Newark had been canceled for days due to a record breaking blizzard in the northeast. It was my third attempt to fly home. I had been stranded in Nashville for four days longer then anticipated.

I was ready to get home.

I settled into my seat, pulled out the inflatable neck pillow and fired up a digital version of my friend Betsy's book, City of Ghosts. That is when the screaming began.

= Many infants cry on airplanes, and it is always a bother. They start to whine and you steel yourself for noise, because you are, after all, in a tin can with no way of escape.

But this was not crying. This was screaming. Raw, unbridled, diaphragmatic screaming that only babies can accomplish. Piercing, incessant, teeth-hurting screaming. And there was nothing I could do.

It wasn't my baby. It was someone else's baby, and it was being set on fire. At least, he thought. Unhappy is too gentle a word. This child thought he was dying.

It went on for an hour. Sixty minutes. A long fucking time.

Just when I thought the baby had worn himself into sure slumber the screams would begin again. I started to understand why parents might consider drugging an infant.

At first I was empathetic to the poor mother who was sushing her child as quietly as possible, but eventually I got up and went to the lavatory solely for the purpose of shooting this kid's mom a dirty look. Not my proudest moment but I had no headphones and so was literally sticking my fingers in my ears.

The screaming was all I could focus on. I tried meditating, being present and deep breathing to calm myself. It didn't work due to the screaming.

Finally, blessedly, before I jumped out the emergency door and ended it all, he stopped. He slept. The baby had stopped screaming.

And after a long sigh the next thing I heard was an overly earnest Nashville man who discussed the finer points of the Baptist Church the entire remainder of the flight.

But She Was a Tramp

Cabs are an expensive, but sometimes necessary purchase for people without a car. It's pricey, sure, but if you can make it to your destination alive, you sometimes get some really choice stories to tell afterward.

I took a cab to Bernal Heights after a long, long session at a hair salon in Laurel Heights. The bus ride would have been 45+, and I was just ready to get there. I easily hailed a cab in this ritzy little neighborhood, and told him to head to Bernal.

"That's where the Beatles house is," he told me. "Well, was."

I told him yes, it sure is, and he detected my Southern accent.

"Where are you from?," he asked me. I told him Tennessee, and he immediately began reminiscing excitedly.

"My first love was a little gal from Mobile, Alabama. Boy, did I love that girl. I followed her everywhere."

I grinned at his recollection of his Southern charmer.

"That accent used to drive me wild," he said, his voice trailing, his memories obviously flooding back.

"But she was a tramp," he said suddenly, then laughed enough to fill the whole car.

"She was divorced at 17, that one. I am pretty sure she was cheating on me before we even started dating."

If that's not one hell of a line, then I haven't heard any good ones before.

He dropped me off safely at Ian's door, and I gave him a wad of cash. And I watched him drive off, beaming, through the clear of the passenger's side window.

Everything but the Girl

I didn't notice until the elderly woman who boarded had to take a giant step to avoid stepping on her.

Her legs were crossed in the aisle, her hands primly folded in her lap. Her head hung, but her chin did not rest on her chest. Instead her skull bounced around with each bump the bus took like an apple attached to the end of a pipe cleaner. Long strings of drool slipped from her parted mouth and onto her blouse.

"Is she okay?"

A young man in a worn Red Sox hat was asking the bus driver about the young woman. The driver waved his hand at the Sox fan. I couldn't hear if he responded.

The young man took his seat all the while shaking his head.

I watched more saliva fall from her face.

The half a dozen passengers on board all looked in her direction from time to time to see her head springing around on her neck.

She was far, far away. Her legs and hands were still crossed when I got off.

Maybe You Had to Be There, but I'm Creeped Out Now by my Bed

Last night Ian and I went to bed at my apartment after a night of camping. We were both very tired despite naps, because even though his equipment is top notch, we still slept on the damn ground. Downhill. Which we discovered well into the night when I rolled onto his sleeping pad and smashed his face into the mesh. Then I pushed him in the back. (All while asleep, mind you.)

We went to a bed that was right side up, all things aligned, and promptly fell asleep. Sometime in the night I awoke to discover that the sheet was now somehow on top of the comforter. Not in part or on one side, but it was as if a giant had come in and flipped the sheet and comforter completely.

I woke Ian by telling him that the sheets were now on top.

"What?," he asked me.

I repeated that the sheets were now on top, and asked if he would help me flip them back.

And he did. I think.

I only remembered the strange sheet reversal incident just now, when preparing the bed for tonight's sleep. In recalling it, the situation seems even more bizarre. How did the sheet get entirely flipped? Did that even happen?

I wrote Ian: "Remember last night when I woke you up and said, "The sheets are on top," and we flipped the comforter? Or did I dream that?"

He replied almost immediately: "I remember the comment and sort of the flipping, yeah."

So, it did happen. I wasn't dreaming. But that means that somehow in the night the sheet and comforter reversed themselves fully while we slept. Is it possible through a few tosses and turns that our covers flipped themselves all the way over, lying completely flat, as if someone had made the bed that way intentionally.

Fucking creepy, I tell ya.

Drink Days, The First One

"Would you like another cocktail?," I asked.

I was working my first night behind the bar. She was drinking Marker's Mark & 7-Up. The bar actually was hooked up to Coca-Cola products, so in reality it was a Maker's & Sprite. But no one ever ordered that. At a bar it's 7-Up or else you couldn't order the classic 7&7, and that is that.

Her drink was about three-fourths of the way dry. I heard the wet thud of melded ice slide into the flat, glass bottom of her beverage.

She was blonde. Even in her mid-30s I believe her hair was naturally very pale. She was short, athletic looking with ruddy cheeks. She leaned forward onto the bar's top on her forearms, one shin in the barstool. She used her other leg to push against the brass banister near the floor. She got very close to my face.

"Would you like a cocktail," she said. It was not a question. I peered back at her, a wet rag in my hand.

I was nervous about being a drink slinger. Bartenders know shit, and I didn't know shit. "If you don't know how to make something, speak up. Just tell them. There is no shame in being a rookie." Words of wisdom from my trainer ran laps in my head.

"Would you like a cocktail." She repeated herself. Again, this was not a question.

The bar was relatively empty that Sunday night. There was NFL football on both big screen t.v.s. I was scheduled for my first shift on a slow night so I could get my sea legs. Despite a small number of patrons, Sunday night was when the regulars came out en masse. At this bar, perhaps at any bar, the regulars were also fully committed alcoholics.

"Lemme give you some advice," she slurred at me with an old money accent that reeked of Kentucky, disappointment and privilege. Her empty drink was the first she'd ordered. From us. "Never ask if someone wants another cocktail. Don't be gauche." Her final, declarative sentence clung in the air.

Her eyes were glassy and blank. She was still leaning onto her arms at me over the bar. Her fists held the laquered wood, and her knuckles were white. She pulled her lips back over slick teeth, and smiled a smile draped in bourbon and condescension.

"Can I get you one more, man?," I heard my trainer ask a guest in the corner.

"Yeah," the gentleman replied. "One more."