Peace

Blank stares and the occasional amorphous amorous compliment over the blare of trumpets, in a basement bar past midnight, feeling like a bomb shelter in the blitz, the outside world a cigarette strewn landing under a star-obscuring awning- her hand brushed mine, we sat side by side as I crawled inside my fifth pint of bitter (feeling british) and resolute in my wet charm. I told her not to believe anything I said, and launched into an abbreviated life-story, one that included an entirely fabricated account of working in a tincan fish factory on the coast of British Columbia. I invented a hero, by the name of Fernando, a best friend, of sorts, who always showed up as my own personal deus ex machina (luckily Fernando had hit big enough on the craps to bail me out, and we bailed out of Atlantic City over to Phili, where we knew this girl we both had been itching to see. Fernando was the charming one, and so I ended up on a couch, and at five in the morning, chose to call Dale, and see if he could make it down in a pinch and deliver me back to New England. He showed up a few hours later, and shortly thereafter we were waiting in the wind-shorn streets of Scranton, waiting for the bars to open.)

I could elaborate, but the condensed version is this, her eyes were constantly in mine, and mine were pulled away from hers only to stare into my beer for the next fiction to leap into my head, and then I'd look up with renewed frenzy and relate how I once slept on an abandoned house boat on the Neckar river, and woke up in Frankfurt, the owner not realizing his stow away, and how I had to swim to shore when he refused (after much shouting and cursing) to stop the boat and let me off.

This story I had told in better days with less at stake, under the feint disapproval of my love at the time, but more often to amusement, and in those better days I'd tell how I got a nasty infestation from sleeping in a sail closet. But this was the hygienic version. Best not to leave any damning hints out in the open, and open sores to scare off the prey.

Cigarettes, and the awning looked like a haunted house, with all that smoke trapped up there. A guy named Bruce asked if I was in a band, and when I said "no" told me I should be in one. Bruce looked like a skull with a ponytail pulling away from a hair recession, and the goatee was the only vital part of him. He told me he did graphic design, and I believed him; he was gravely graphic, graphically grave.

Back inside to the alcohol soot-stained fog of a bar at 1 am, the lights rising and falling like a funeral wail, and no numbers in sight, no fat calves bursting from miniskirt to comfort me, no hiked up, punched up breasts swallowing my imagination like some dinosaur in a tar pit. I was alone, supremely and serenely alone, naked, drunk, and my disappointment felt like a vestment, and my last drink the last thing there will ever be to save me, subside my rage and bring down silence and peace.

I walked home in a faint whisper of rain. I crawled into bed, received a phone call, smoked, and fell asleep.

A Long Time Coming (part 3)

She dropped me off at the Pierre Public Library, and told me to get a leg up in case I couldn't get into school right away. And so I did. I headed right for the mystery section, and pulled three books at random off the shelf. I flipped to page 50 and then forward from there. There's almost always a good sex scene in the first 50 pages of a mystery, unless they're old, or christian, or both. “She allowed her honey-colored breasts to fall out of the simple white bra, and I bent forward to lick her nipples with renewed exuberance.” Not bad, I thought. Not bad at all. An ace on the first book I picked up.
I flipped forward, then back again, and then wrote down the title and page number in my tattered little notebook (whose first page was missing. I didn't want to read my mother's bouncing mash of feel good hallmark sentiment cheering me on to “find myself,” every time I looked for something worthwhile to read. And the only thing I ever thought of reading, then, could be found in the first fifty or hundred pages of a cheap paperback.
Or not, as I found by looking through the two others. I rushed forward, not in pages one through fifty, so then a hundred through fifty. Soon I was at the end, finding the dashing detective, or writer, or doctor, platonically hugging the ex-prostitute. The next one had a Scientist finding out his research university was being funded by a shady group, and the cadavers he opened daily were their victims. There was a black girl, and a white woman, but the menage a trois that seemed promised never arrived.
I looked up from my little pile of books, knowing that I was giving it up with how slyly I looked for adult supervision. There was a girl standing at the end of my aisle, in bright blue shorts and a tank top. She wasn't skinny, or tall, or fat, or short for that matter. She turned away from the bookshelves, and started walking towards me. Her face was pretty, freckled in a way, and her breasts, which I hadn't really been impressed by in profile, rounded out, to the side of her, seeming to hold her hands at her side, and making perfect half moons against her stomache. She saw me staring.
“What are you looking at?” She didn't quite snap. The emphasis was on the are, like she was in some Mystery! program on PBS. Mystery! had poor sex scenes, mostly people my mom's age sucking face and then lying in bed.
“The Peril in Ward 9,” I held up the book, hoping my misinterpretation would work.
“I know what you're doing.” She said flatly. “Turn towards the beginning. It's extra early, and not very good.”
I did what she said, and found, to my amazement, another unclasping bra.
“Thanks,” I said, and tried to smile.
“My names Steph, do you go to school around here?”
“Not yet. I just moved.”
“Huh. I go to Feneston Regional. But we call it Penistown. See you around!”
And like that she was gone. I was frozen. I read the page in front of me. She was right, it was downright terrible. All vague metaphors and ways of referring to the bits that weren't quite like refering to bits. It all sounded like an ad for curtains. I thought of Steph, and Penistown, and how I'd never heard any girl say penis, and how I just had. I hoped I was going to Feneston. I really did. And I kinda felt like crying.

A Long Time Coming (part 2)

We layed out on the single bed in the stale smoke room, and I flipped channels as she tried her best to get her sister, my Aunt Sal, on the phone.
“Goddamn,” she said. “Wrong number again, and thought I knew it by heart.”
She started rummaging through her purse, pulling out a dozen little boxes of make-up, her own script (do-better-ol, apathin, whatever) and a dozen or so sunglasses, some of which I'd seen her wake up in, and all of which I'd seen her stand in front of a mirror, eyes puffy and cheeks ashen, trying on before noon, when she'd have had to been at work hours ago.
I turned the tv off, curled up while pulling the rough comforter over my head to block out the naked bulb at my side, and then my mother was there curling around me and cooing, the pill of hers I'd stolen kicking in as she held me tight, her legs stretching out further than mine. I had stopped growing, but well before her 5'9” and my height was just another thing to hold against herself. And she began to sing. If it weren't for all that Apathol in my blood, I knew I'd of been crying like a baby and asking why. But instead I just lay there, wondering when the singing would stop. I fell asleep before it did.

The next morning, she came up and woke me with a styrafoam cup of coffee, non-dairy creamer, and the television blaring “The Price is Right.” I drank the watery shit down and went to the toilet, while she shouted prices and chain smoked.
“If I hadn't smoked so much when you were young, you'd be taller than your granddad and me combined. Colliers are always tall. It's just a shame how you ended up.” My mother said, as I came out of the shower smelling like a hospital floor for all the cheap soap in the bathroom.
“But aren't you a handsome boy for all that. And damn, if you aren't the smartest Collier in the state,” she said, rolling the L's and omitting the “r” like some Saturday Night Live french accent.
We checked out right before we had to, and found the the highway heading west, and the snow had made everything look white and sharp, like there was nothing connected to any other thing, like the whole world was discreet objects, with snow and nothing in between. Mom found a classic rock station, and hummed along to Led Zeppelin and the Animals before looking for an oldies station, right after Eric Clapton's Cocaine started coming through fuzzy. Then it was Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis and all that.
We took the exit for Mom' parents, down a few unremarkable streets, and up the driveway where my grandparents house hulked, a ranch on a hill, brooding under pines. Gram was in a nightgown and already at the door, she let us in, giving me a kiss smelling faintly of gin. Pops was in the living room, watching an episode of Matlock, fully dressed. He insisted, every morning making my grandmother shave him, and help him get on trousers, dress shirt, belt, tie, socks, sweater (even in august), and shoes. Every morning. Since his stroke, he talked out of the side of his mouth, but he was coherent enough. “Ready to meet death just like I met Beth's parents.” He wasn't going to go to hell in his bathrobe.
I sat next to him, as the show came to an end, and my mother talked to Gram in the kitchen, mostly hushed, the occasional snap. My grandfather had a plate of coldcuts on his lap, from which he took nothing. My mother rushed in, and I could see that if she had not been crying, she was certainly close to it.
“We're going,” she said quickly. “I love you dad,” and she bent and kissed him on his forehead. He inaudibly barked a “I love you.” Or at least, that was what I thought he said. Then we were leaving, and my grandmother was hugging me close and kissing my cheeks and begging me to call her. And like that we were out the door.
Four towns over, mother pulled into a motel with “EFFICIENCIES!” in bold under the neon lit sign, like a half a kitchen were some floor show you'd drive miles to see. I waited in the car while mom went in, and then she hurried out, smiling brightly.
“Grab your bags, hon. We've got a place to stay!”
Oh god. I moved my bags in, and refused to unpack, though she insisted. I knew what these places were like. I knew what happened when we didn't make next week payment, and I wasn't ready to sign up for this cigarette-stale room for the long-haul. Mom made a list:
“1. Get a job.
2. Find a school for the boy.
3. Get some food for the boy.”
In all her lists, I'm just the Boy, like a job, a school, the boy. Mom dealt in vaguries when she put together these lists, so that she wouldn't have to hurt to bad to meet the points. A school meant any school, and a job typically meant bartending some run down place where old men talked in the inexhaustable cryptography of baseball stats and scores. And me, well, I'm the boy, not the son, the one you'd have to give up the nomads life for, not the one you'd have to settle down and work a real job for, get up early to feed and dress. No, the boy would get along in this life, just as well as in any other

A Long Time Coming (part 1)

Only the unlucky believe in luck, my mother used to say, and we believe in luck. She said this after I got kicked out of Sanford Day School, my third expulsion this year, for selling my ritalin to overachieving girls in AP English. My mother thought my attention deficiency (diagnosed, aged ten) was her punishment for not knowing who my dad was. I knew different. I knew that you don't ever get punished for the things you've done, for the sleeping around or the failures. Otherwise we'd be in a world of misery with no bit of relief, not ever. That there was still some good in the world, meant to me that atonement was coming a lot further down the road than mother could suspect. I had already figured out that you can't have both. It was either justice or luck, and each meant the other was horse shit. But telling my mother that would only get a sigh from her, and a “if you just focused that brain of yours on somethin' for any length of time, you'd be doin something worthwile.”
We were getting out of town on highway nine when she made that sigh, and we were still on nine when the snow started up. Just a few flakes at first, but soon enough we were plunged into a tornado of white, the car wrapped into fast moving blanket of white, and we with it. Mother just held the wheel tight, and started cursing up a storm of her own, under her breath, fogging up her side of the windshields with “goddamns” until we saw an Econolodge on the right. We pulled off and got a room; she borrowed the last twenty in my pocket to get it.
“There's plenty of money where were headed,” she said, and I just tried to forget about what we'd have to do to get it.

A good Start.

Hillbo awoke minutes before noon, and made his way to the stove and set the kettle to boil, dosed out some coffee into the french press, and then went looking for his glasses. It didn't take very long for him to do any of this, or to find his glasses for that matter, as his apartment was nothing more than a decent sized room, with stove, bed, refrigerator, and bookshelves all sharing the same space with a clamor that could seem imposing. There was a bathroom attached, with nothing more than a curtain to seperate it from the rest of the room, and a fire escape out the window over his bed. Hillbo lived on the fourth floor of the only four floor building in a shit-sea-side town, and despite the cramped, coffin effect of apartment, he was grateful to have a good view of the harbor from his fire escape. It provided a measure of relief. After making his coffee, Hillbo climbed over his bed, out the window, and sat on the fire escape. He lit a cigarette, and for the only time that day felt an immense sense of well-being.
It was March, and warm for march, but gloomy. The harbor was quiet, and after two years, he was finally able to sleep through the cacaphony of fishing boats that enlivened the town every decent morning from march until september. In a few months it would be tourist season, bringing with it a brand new type of din, and one that would start later and last longer. For the morning he was grateful.
It was a slow life, that Hillbo woke up into. It was a slow morning (already past noon) and it would be a slow day. Five books lay scattered across his floor, opened to pages at random. Our hero, for he is our hero, smokes, and looks down into the streets and breathes the fish-scented air, laden though it is with bright sea mist.

Our hero starts, leaving the butt of his cigarette in a pot that sports a brown stem, and he starts. He debates a shave, decides to not, showers, dresses, and makes his way down the flights of stairs to the street below. Hillbo starts.

Whathisname goes Wheredoyoucallit

Walking in the snow-down winter, asnd under the snow-grey sky, our hero, who chance would call thomas but I will choose to call by the more generic, well, hero, ponders the lack of anthing to do in this snow-bound midwest city.

He walked here from a street named eighth, and here we are on second, to give you some idea of distance, to a used record store thats on maple and second, not that that will give you any clue as to which city our hero calls home, or any real clue as to where he might live (for all you know, eigth is a bad part of town, or not.)

I will tell you the things that he thought on his way from eigth to second, if you will bear me out a moment. He thought:

Can I really afford to be doing this?

He thought:

This album is good and I need to buy it.

He thought:

Valentine's day is close, and while I don't have a valentine, per se, I would like to show

1. Coworker who I am attracted to but cannot sleep with
2. Ex-coworker I am friends with but not attracted to
3. Ex-friend I want to sex all over the place
4. Ex-girlfriend I want to sex all over the place

That I still care, in a monetary fashion.

How much money is supposed to, every day, represent affection, your narrator, I, wonder. Well, so much for that. In the pull and throws of this debate, between selfish needs and the pursuit of flowers, which equal an unspecified amount of sex at an unspecified time, our hero walked. Through sleet, I might add, though it is late for me to add it.

Now, another thought, which popped into the previously eluded upon argument. A memory, of perhaps a thousand years past, or maybe just from 1999. And that memory, envolving a stuffed bear, and a night where our hero, who is not afraid to admit this quite publicly, to friends at least, performed adequetely in bed no less than five times. But it is the stuffed bear, and the lack of flowers, that strike our hero, and not the prolific sexing.

It is also this, that in 1998 they shared a latte, and a slice of cheesecake at what now, the narrator knows, is a conveniance store, but then was a cafe. It is also this, that later the same year they would fuck like rabbits on the day after our hero's house burned to the fucking ground (my expletive, not his).

I demand obscene occurences. I demand this.

Walking Out, Down

They called eachother nicknames; they called eachother cuntface. They wore coats and scarves; books held under arms and hair unkept. There were twelve of them when they moved into town, god knows how many now.

In a house in allston, they first started building out, and up. Lean-tos sprouted up like tumors, growing out to the sidewalk. Then the porch on the roof of the squat garage in back, that grew a bridge over to the second floor the next day, and the day after, the bridge got a roof.

Every day you walked down that street, the average neighborhood street, triple deckers closer to the square, and two story houses towards the other end, and you saw them, building, always building, welding, hammering. One owned a pick-up truck, and every morning it was piled high with materials, items scrounged from trash cans, dumpsters, lumber bought at home depot. By mid afternoon the truck would be empty and the house was changing before your very eyes.

In the evenings they'd stop, and you'd see them walk down to the coffee shop in the square. They'd be out of the dirty t's they wore as they remade the house, coats and scarves, books under arms, and they'd talk, and bring spiral bound notebooks, drawings the first draft of what would change by the next evening.

No one knew who granted them the permit, and it took at least the summer before they were shut down. By that time there was a four story open tower on the garage, and off the front porch, a mast rose up to at least twenty feet above the roof, with a crowsnest and a rope ladder. A pirate flag flew up there.

September came and they were gone, and the house was dismantled. I was gone too, moved to another neighborhood.

But I'll walk that way sometimes, and you can see the scars, from when some nameless but named young men moved into a house, and tore it apart and made it more.

The Daily Grind

Grind. Dose. Tamp. Pull. Steam. Pour.

I've been there for two hours already when the door opens. She's always there, a little old tanned lady, and she always orders the same thing. Single small latte, in a paper cup so she can go outside and smoke. She always asks how I've been, and I reply "I'm alive," and she'll laugh, even though we've had this conversation nearly every day for ten months. A few minutes later her friend shows up, a round middle aged woman with glasses and short fingers.

Grind. Dose. Tamp. Pull. Steam. Pour.

This morning was different. She doesn't show. The first hour, I think maybe she slept in. The second, I wonder if she's visiting family. Her daughter lives in Connecticut.

Other regulars are streaming in, each common face I know so well. High nasal voice, gay middle-aged and crippled, Fritz walks in. I've told Fritz my name at least two dozen times, but he still calls me "guy." He looks around, asks me where she is. Fritz doesn't have any money, and he relies on Natalie, that's her name, to buy him coffee.

Natalie didn't show that morning. Nor the next. Three days later her friend shows up with an open invitation.

We bring coffee to the funeral. We buy Fritz his first coffee of the morning for the next few days.

Grind, dose, tamp, pull, steam, and pour. And that ends up changing in a little way, and there's a little hole in the morning. But I grind, I dose, I tamp, I pull, I steam, and I pour. A single latte, and I pour it out.