Friday, February 12, 2010
check out chum!!
check out chum, literary magazine non-ordinaire: http://chummagazine.wordpress.com.
Monday, November 2, 2009
The Mime
The Louvre was not far from the hostel at 6, rue de Fourcy. She walked along the quai, past the massive, regal Hotel de Ville and along the Quai de la Megisserie. Paris was raining its January drizzle in the courtyard of the Louvre. It was all made of stone except the sharp, daunting prism. She came to a peripheral arch under which a mime stood, moving slowly and carefully. Walking closer she saw that he was dressed as Charlie Chaplin. He played with the air, fraying it delicately with his fingertips, plucking flowers.
While she watched she thought of her lunch the day before and how over-anxious she had been. She'd panicked, allowing herself to be aspersed like some stupid American at a sidewalk cafe, which is exactly what she was. For 125 francs she'd gotten rid of the hunger and of three days' worth of money. For 125 francs she'd been treated like a little princess with pate and a big bottle of laxatavious water, only to be made fun of as she was paying the check, as she walked out the door. Today she'd had an apple. She thought the mime could probably understand her sudden feeling of poverty.
He watched her out of the corners of his eyes while he stumbled drunk under the arch. It acted as an umbrella; the one resting on his shoulder was full of holes, as was his tuxedo overcoat. She stepped toward him like a little girl to a clown. He became a hobo begging for change. When she caught his eyes directly he stopped, setting his invisible cup on the ground. “Ca va, mademoiselle?” he looked at her through the mist.
“Oui, ca va. Et vous monsieur?”
“Oh la la, une Americane princesse. Tu es en vacances, missssss?” The informal “tu” was an insult, or an attempt at concocted familiarity.
“Non, j'etudierai a Cassis.”
“ah oui, cest bien ca. Tu admires Charlot?”
“Oui,” she took some change from her pocket and placed it almost soundlessly into the bowler in front of him. He said he had no family. and that he was depressed and was a street performer because his wife had died. He had a plate in his head and took her by the wrist to have her hit it. “It doesn't hurt, don't worry,” he said.
He put two fistfulls of change and a few bills in his pocket and the bowler on his head. “Would you like to walk?” he asked. They walked along the Rue de Rivoli to a cafe on Rue Saint-Bon. The district was busy with tourists, business people and celebrities; celebrities being those who carried themselves around primarily to be looked at, stopping to pose in front of a window or particularly attractive corner, sauntering through a collection of tables in front of a brasserie or marketplace for show. They were there for everyone else's benefit, selfless animals of flesh longing to be dissected as art. Outside the Marceau he bought grilled chestnuts from a street vendor. They came in a paper cup, carefully overflowing into her hands. “Fait attention, ils sont chauds.”
“Merci bien.”
They sat in the smoky cafe. The waiter came and they ordered cafe and crème, with little chocolates on the side and a crowded atmosphere of people in and out creating an illusion of purpose. He told her about his wife. She was beautiful. Black hair and an enormous figure. She was sure he meant voluptuous.
“We had a son also. He ran away when his mother died.”
“It's so sad. I'm sorry.”
“Oui. Have you experienced something so sad?”
Not at all.”
“But Charlot, he drew you in. You sympathize with him?”
“He was a genius at expression. He had a universal way of communicating ... through his face and eyes and movements. His themes are sad. Everyone has felt sadness of some kind.”
“You could be a mime.”
“You think so? I don't know,” she smiled. “I'm pretty shy.”
“I teach people to be mimes,” he said. “I have taught the best mimes in the city.”
“Really?” she was getting tired of him.
“For you I will charge nothing for the first lesson. If you don't like it, you don't have to come back.”
“Do you have a card?”
He searched his pockets and patted his jacket front. “I have none with me. ... I am out of them.”
“Well, do you have a phone number where I could reach you?”
“I could make you dinner, mademoiselle, and give your first lesson.”
“Do you live near by?”
“No. No. We must take a taxi.”
“But taxis are expensive.”
“Do not worry, mademoiselle; Char-lie will pay!”
She decided to do it only for the free meal. She felt bad using him but a little sinister, too, like the girl in “The Little Thief.”
The taxi took them through the building-walled streets to the outskirts of Paris. She hoped she'd be able to find her way back. His apartment sat above a white wall in the Montrouge. She was careful not to step on what lay in the stairs, though it was only trash and broken things.
as she looked around the main room of his apartment she felt a sense of self in all that lay or hung about. a few framed photographs and prints placed delicately on the walls, a vase of plastic flowers and a deck of cards. a record player sat alone in a corner. The flimsiness and sparseness was frail as a paper flower. She imagined herself as one of the decorations, resigning herself to sitting perfectly silent and watching with still eyes. She stared for a moment at a print of a woman lying on her back. at first she thought her hands were by her sides, then, focusing carefully, realized one of them was between her legs.
“Seule,” he told her. “alone, like me.”
“What's for dinner?”
“anything, mademoiselle. For you, so much of anything.” He touched her shoulder. She was so hungry her stomach hurt. He turned to put on a record while she looked out the window. “J'ai deux amour ...” sang the chanteuse, “Mon pays est Paris ... J'ai deux amour ... mon coeur est ravie.” He took her by the waist and spun her around. She followed as the trees and sky flashed by out the window, as the woman on the wall kept the same expression. He pulled her close to him and through his baggy black pants she felt a small hardness. Something in her went suddenly out of place. She dropped out of his arms and onto the couch. He stood above, looking her in the eye. “No need to be nervous, mademoiselle.”
“are you going to make me dinner?”
“You are so tense. Come in and lie down,” he tried to pull her toward his bedroom.
She remained rigid. His expression was lurid and sweaty, the pancake makeup running down his face. She stood up and ran to the door.
He stood staring at her, a suffering lump of black and white.
It took her a moment to undo the latch, and she felt herself start to panic, as though someone were chasing her, and very close behind. In the closet she noticed wire hangers holding two large and sloppily-placed blue suits and one rumpled red tie. The record was over and the needle hung on at the center. The sound would have been relaxing over dinner. One of them could have gotten up to change it. “You relax, mademoiselle,” he could have said then.
Two days later she sat on a red tour bus with other students from the American school. They had already seen the Eiffel Tower, Jardin de Tuileries and Notre Dame. The driver stopped for lunch on Rue Serpente, just off the Boulevard Saint-Michel. On the corner of Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel a small crowd had gathered around a mime. Brian, a young man in the group, pointed him out to the rest. “He's good, check it out, he's dressed like Charlie Chaplin.”
“I know him.”
“You know him?”
“Well, you know ... I met him outside the Louvre.” Like a voyeur she watched him work -- a slot machine doling out wooden nickels. He became a temporary and surreal part of the scenery, then disappeared into the nightshade of a turning corner.
Cristen H. Jaynes
While she watched she thought of her lunch the day before and how over-anxious she had been. She'd panicked, allowing herself to be aspersed like some stupid American at a sidewalk cafe, which is exactly what she was. For 125 francs she'd gotten rid of the hunger and of three days' worth of money. For 125 francs she'd been treated like a little princess with pate and a big bottle of laxatavious water, only to be made fun of as she was paying the check, as she walked out the door. Today she'd had an apple. She thought the mime could probably understand her sudden feeling of poverty.
He watched her out of the corners of his eyes while he stumbled drunk under the arch. It acted as an umbrella; the one resting on his shoulder was full of holes, as was his tuxedo overcoat. She stepped toward him like a little girl to a clown. He became a hobo begging for change. When she caught his eyes directly he stopped, setting his invisible cup on the ground. “Ca va, mademoiselle?” he looked at her through the mist.
“Oui, ca va. Et vous monsieur?”
“Oh la la, une Americane princesse. Tu es en vacances, missssss?” The informal “tu” was an insult, or an attempt at concocted familiarity.
“Non, j'etudierai a Cassis.”
“ah oui, cest bien ca. Tu admires Charlot?”
“Oui,” she took some change from her pocket and placed it almost soundlessly into the bowler in front of him. He said he had no family. and that he was depressed and was a street performer because his wife had died. He had a plate in his head and took her by the wrist to have her hit it. “It doesn't hurt, don't worry,” he said.
He put two fistfulls of change and a few bills in his pocket and the bowler on his head. “Would you like to walk?” he asked. They walked along the Rue de Rivoli to a cafe on Rue Saint-Bon. The district was busy with tourists, business people and celebrities; celebrities being those who carried themselves around primarily to be looked at, stopping to pose in front of a window or particularly attractive corner, sauntering through a collection of tables in front of a brasserie or marketplace for show. They were there for everyone else's benefit, selfless animals of flesh longing to be dissected as art. Outside the Marceau he bought grilled chestnuts from a street vendor. They came in a paper cup, carefully overflowing into her hands. “Fait attention, ils sont chauds.”
“Merci bien.”
They sat in the smoky cafe. The waiter came and they ordered cafe and crème, with little chocolates on the side and a crowded atmosphere of people in and out creating an illusion of purpose. He told her about his wife. She was beautiful. Black hair and an enormous figure. She was sure he meant voluptuous.
“We had a son also. He ran away when his mother died.”
“It's so sad. I'm sorry.”
“Oui. Have you experienced something so sad?”
Not at all.”
“But Charlot, he drew you in. You sympathize with him?”
“He was a genius at expression. He had a universal way of communicating ... through his face and eyes and movements. His themes are sad. Everyone has felt sadness of some kind.”
“You could be a mime.”
“You think so? I don't know,” she smiled. “I'm pretty shy.”
“I teach people to be mimes,” he said. “I have taught the best mimes in the city.”
“Really?” she was getting tired of him.
“For you I will charge nothing for the first lesson. If you don't like it, you don't have to come back.”
“Do you have a card?”
He searched his pockets and patted his jacket front. “I have none with me. ... I am out of them.”
“Well, do you have a phone number where I could reach you?”
“I could make you dinner, mademoiselle, and give your first lesson.”
“Do you live near by?”
“No. No. We must take a taxi.”
“But taxis are expensive.”
“Do not worry, mademoiselle; Char-lie will pay!”
She decided to do it only for the free meal. She felt bad using him but a little sinister, too, like the girl in “The Little Thief.”
The taxi took them through the building-walled streets to the outskirts of Paris. She hoped she'd be able to find her way back. His apartment sat above a white wall in the Montrouge. She was careful not to step on what lay in the stairs, though it was only trash and broken things.
as she looked around the main room of his apartment she felt a sense of self in all that lay or hung about. a few framed photographs and prints placed delicately on the walls, a vase of plastic flowers and a deck of cards. a record player sat alone in a corner. The flimsiness and sparseness was frail as a paper flower. She imagined herself as one of the decorations, resigning herself to sitting perfectly silent and watching with still eyes. She stared for a moment at a print of a woman lying on her back. at first she thought her hands were by her sides, then, focusing carefully, realized one of them was between her legs.
“Seule,” he told her. “alone, like me.”
“What's for dinner?”
“anything, mademoiselle. For you, so much of anything.” He touched her shoulder. She was so hungry her stomach hurt. He turned to put on a record while she looked out the window. “J'ai deux amour ...” sang the chanteuse, “Mon pays est Paris ... J'ai deux amour ... mon coeur est ravie.” He took her by the waist and spun her around. She followed as the trees and sky flashed by out the window, as the woman on the wall kept the same expression. He pulled her close to him and through his baggy black pants she felt a small hardness. Something in her went suddenly out of place. She dropped out of his arms and onto the couch. He stood above, looking her in the eye. “No need to be nervous, mademoiselle.”
“are you going to make me dinner?”
“You are so tense. Come in and lie down,” he tried to pull her toward his bedroom.
She remained rigid. His expression was lurid and sweaty, the pancake makeup running down his face. She stood up and ran to the door.
He stood staring at her, a suffering lump of black and white.
It took her a moment to undo the latch, and she felt herself start to panic, as though someone were chasing her, and very close behind. In the closet she noticed wire hangers holding two large and sloppily-placed blue suits and one rumpled red tie. The record was over and the needle hung on at the center. The sound would have been relaxing over dinner. One of them could have gotten up to change it. “You relax, mademoiselle,” he could have said then.
Two days later she sat on a red tour bus with other students from the American school. They had already seen the Eiffel Tower, Jardin de Tuileries and Notre Dame. The driver stopped for lunch on Rue Serpente, just off the Boulevard Saint-Michel. On the corner of Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel a small crowd had gathered around a mime. Brian, a young man in the group, pointed him out to the rest. “He's good, check it out, he's dressed like Charlie Chaplin.”
“I know him.”
“You know him?”
“Well, you know ... I met him outside the Louvre.” Like a voyeur she watched him work -- a slot machine doling out wooden nickels. He became a temporary and surreal part of the scenery, then disappeared into the nightshade of a turning corner.
Cristen H. Jaynes
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
100 Years From Now
I have only ever heard my mother call one man “Sir.” I call him Capt. Edie, and the only person who calls him by his first name is his wife. He is a doctor. But mostly he is one who never stands on ceremony. Ten years ago he told my mother she had to quit drinking before it killed her. They sat at his kitchen table and he looked across and told her, “No more beer.” My mother is a writer.
Out back of his house now he cooks two steaks, one medium, one rare. The flames sear through the meat, turning its blood brown. I think it smells good even though I won't eat it. Mrs. Edie has been vegetarian for 25 years.
“Did you graduate yet?” he asks me.
“Magna Cum Laude.”
“Good. Good. ... Your health good?”
“Yes, Captain. Except I finally got the chicken pox last year. That was bad. They had to give me pills to stop them coming.”
“I had a surgery last year. The doctor asked me when I'd had my coronary bi-pass. I never had one. I had a coronary without knowing it. My blood pressure's good now. I hope to get ten years more out of life. ... I know that's nothing to you.”
I looked at him, not wanting to disagree. “Ten years is a long time.”
“I have to get this perfect for her.” He turns the steaks another time and when he takes his off the flames go all the way down.
Their house has many things in it. Collections from when Mrs. Edie shut her gallery down and things brought home from Japan and Europe. Many things make squares; tables, paintings, sets of things. Capt. Edie has a collection of 25 muskets from more than one war. The are made of metal and wood designed as simple as death. They hang on the wall safely, in a hallway filled with painting supplies. In his bedroom is a cabinet full of scrimshawed whaling tools made of ivory.
Mrs. Edie brings vegetables and bread to the table as we sit. Capt. Edie holds a curiously large pepper mill above his meat. He pushes the top and we look over, responding to a sound like a battery-operated battle toy.
“What the expletive is that?”
“It's a pepper mill.”
“It lights up.”
“It was a gift.”
“It's heavy.”
“They're fancy people, the Morrisons.”
“Must be the batteries.”
“You have another book coming out?” Capt. Edie says to my mother.
“It's due in six months and she only has eighty pages!” I'm trying to be light, or carefree. It's just something I throw out there. A light gibe, maybe. I never teased my mom about anything.
“Miss, in a hundred years it's not going to matter if she starts today, next month or next year!”
But it would if she'd never started the book or never finishes it, I think.
“How is your steak?”
“Terrific.”
“If it's too rare we can put it back on, the coals will be hot almost an hour.”
“It's great, Sir.”
“You should never sign a contract until you've finished, then you know it's yours,” he says.
When I was eight Capt. Edie gave me a scrimshawed ivory bodkin made into a necklace with four-pound test.
Tonight I lie on their couch under heavy blankets to fend off the severe air conditioning wondering what it will be like a hundred years from now and which things will matter and which won't. It seems someone will keep the scrimshaw and the muskets, as they are already so old.
Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
Miami Beach 1998
I have only ever heard my mother call one man “Sir.” I call him Capt. Edie, and the only person who calls him by his first name is his wife. He is a doctor. But mostly he is one who never stands on ceremony. Ten years ago he told my mother she had to quit drinking before it killed her. They sat at his kitchen table and he looked across and told her, “No more beer.” My mother is a writer.
Out back of his house now he cooks two steaks, one medium, one rare. The flames sear through the meat, turning its blood brown. I think it smells good even though I won't eat it. Mrs. Edie has been vegetarian for 25 years.
“Did you graduate yet?” he asks me.
“Magna Cum Laude.”
“Good. Good. ... Your health good?”
“Yes, Captain. Except I finally got the chicken pox last year. That was bad. They had to give me pills to stop them coming.”
“I had a surgery last year. The doctor asked me when I'd had my coronary bi-pass. I never had one. I had a coronary without knowing it. My blood pressure's good now. I hope to get ten years more out of life. ... I know that's nothing to you.”
I looked at him, not wanting to disagree. “Ten years is a long time.”
“I have to get this perfect for her.” He turns the steaks another time and when he takes his off the flames go all the way down.
Their house has many things in it. Collections from when Mrs. Edie shut her gallery down and things brought home from Japan and Europe. Many things make squares; tables, paintings, sets of things. Capt. Edie has a collection of 25 muskets from more than one war. The are made of metal and wood designed as simple as death. They hang on the wall safely, in a hallway filled with painting supplies. In his bedroom is a cabinet full of scrimshawed whaling tools made of ivory.
Mrs. Edie brings vegetables and bread to the table as we sit. Capt. Edie holds a curiously large pepper mill above his meat. He pushes the top and we look over, responding to a sound like a battery-operated battle toy.
“What the expletive is that?”
“It's a pepper mill.”
“It lights up.”
“It was a gift.”
“It's heavy.”
“They're fancy people, the Morrisons.”
“Must be the batteries.”
“You have another book coming out?” Capt. Edie says to my mother.
“It's due in six months and she only has eighty pages!” I'm trying to be light, or carefree. It's just something I throw out there. A light gibe, maybe. I never teased my mom about anything.
“Miss, in a hundred years it's not going to matter if she starts today, next month or next year!”
But it would if she'd never started the book or never finishes it, I think.
“How is your steak?”
“Terrific.”
“If it's too rare we can put it back on, the coals will be hot almost an hour.”
“It's great, Sir.”
“You should never sign a contract until you've finished, then you know it's yours,” he says.
When I was eight Capt. Edie gave me a scrimshawed ivory bodkin made into a necklace with four-pound test.
Tonight I lie on their couch under heavy blankets to fend off the severe air conditioning wondering what it will be like a hundred years from now and which things will matter and which won't. It seems someone will keep the scrimshaw and the muskets, as they are already so old.
Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
Miami Beach 1998
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Johnny!
Johnny!
The bus station was nearly four generations old and was like an old shell. It felt to him like an old mother whose favorite reminiscences are selfless rather than romantic. It had been pieced together very plainly, out of necessity. He liked how it all was necessity in a bus station – hot, greasy eggs and toast with little packets of condiments for hamburgers and cinnamon rolls that stuffed you for the long trip. Cigarettes, fare information on a tack board, toilets, sinks, mirrors in the ladies’, coffee. But he wasn’t going anywhere. At first he couldn’t remember who had sat down on the bench first, the old lady coming from Charlottesville, or himself. She wore a purple feather hat that looked as soft as the one breast he had ever touched and, even though it was odd, he wanted to put it back in its old hat box for her, when she was done with it, and put it under his bed every place he went, or lie his head beside it when he slept outside. ‘That old hat box …’ he laughed to himself. He hadn’t even spoken to the woman yet, but he felt her warmth, even in the warm air; the warmth of many years. He remembered after a moment that he had sat down first. He felt lucky. She was delicate, but strongly made. There weren’t too many people you could say that about, he thought. The door to the station was open – they hadn’t started the air conditioners in that part of the country yet, and the slow intermittent breeze it let in was promising. She immediately felt his attention, but couldn’t make out a guess of good or bad, which was unusual for her. She had a hand on each knee with no rings. He hadn’t seen very many old women without rings. He thought maybe she had arthritis.
“Where you from, son?” she said, throwing the last in carefully as an imploring safeguard.
“California. Where are you from?”
“N’Orleans.”
“Oh, wow.”
“I was born there,” she said. “In the summer …” she paused in her blue and white, respectably dusty, cotton dress and white leather sandals – clearly a gift from someone, he thought. “The air back there is what turns people bad, into thick, romantic messes … the air makes you slur your words, not the alcohol like people think.”
“I don’t drink,” he said to please her even though it was true.
“Good,” she said. “Quite a few pro-fessional drinkers where I come from … might as well be actors the way they go out for that sorrowful drama.”
When they called her bus and she got up, putting one hand on her purple hat for a moment, he felt abandoned. “Bye,” she said sweetly, “You take care now.” She shuffled past him. He waited for her bus to leave before going out. Its air brakes released and the engine filled itself with power. He rose. The warm air surrounded his skin like a halo and as he walked through it he felt what she had said.
He’d never been sick – he didn’t remember ever having had the chicken pox, not even a headache. He’d traveled alone for four years, sleeping outside or renting rooms in places that weren’t the quietest all the time, but were either gray or dusty or felt gray and dusty and immediately quiet. He was a thin boy; 16 and tall and strong, with short brown hair and murky green eyes the color of the muck just below the surface edges of a shallow summer river.
He had left his mother waiting on the beach for her husband who’d gone off to get more beer for her small body and his fat hairy one; he’d realized even then that it was killing her faster. He’d gone home to get his backpack with one book, Hunger, four razors and a bag of pretzels, some Cokes, a stick of his mom’s gum, an extra shirt, some socks and boxers. He had decided not to take any of dork-ass’ cigarettes, because he didn’t want his mother to get in trouble for it. And he’d decided not to bring his toothbrush either because a guy he knew from school had bragged recently about not brushing his teeth for two weeks, and even though he knew it was stupid, he wanted to try it. “When you finally brush the shit off they feel amazing,” the kid had said. He’d get a new one later.
The day he left home he had fifty dollars and threw rocks into the short, mutant bushes by the railroad tracks, and lay on his back thinking about his mother and how his History teacher, Mr. Ball, might actually miss him because he had really liked his report on dirigibles the week before. He waited two hundred yards away from the tiny train station slightly afraid because he didn’t have a flashlight and didn’t know what would be in the haunted attic of the boxcar he jumped into. He had fallen asleep and woke to the cold of twilight. He knew the evening train would be along soon.
Four years later he’d been to 48 states and still had the same backpack, covered in band patches, his copy of Hunger, and his Ramones T-shirt, which he wore all the time. He traveled alone, following the steps of his black Converse like the steps of a successful older brother. He didn’t drink but smoked sometimes; it put him more at ease with the older, friendlier, more worn down people he met when he sat in a crowded coffee restaurant, truck stop or bus station, or sat on the curb to drink coffee and some old lady stopped and asked if he knew the Lord, or some bearded man stopped to ask for a cigarette and maybe offer him drugs or a cell phone. What he learned as he went from place to place, from scene to scene in the wide, flattened U.S. he didn’t necessarily note, but let soak in like a deep suntan. He got scared sometimes that no one knew him and wondered who he was even talking to when he thought about things. A couple of times he had thought he was going crazy. He wanted someone to read his thoughts, to want to.
He had never been to New Orleans. Smutville had not intrigued him because he knew somehow that the Jack-the-Ripper genuineness was over. He went finally because of the old lady with the purple hat. He had been walking from Anaconda, Georgia to the ocean; it was April and he hadn’t seen the ocean since September. He considered her significant enough to change his course.
II.
He had been sleeping outside in the Ninth Ward, which sits next to the Quarter and is its poorer, soldered brother. It’s full of old, formerly grand homes whose depression has swallowed their tenants, and it is where Desire and Charity moon over the past, bordered by Elysian Fields. It has the air of a silent film star eighty years out of its element, who, while everything is booming around them, maintains an air of silent supremacy that is in large part confusion. The Ninth Ward seems to be in permanent hiding. He made a little camp across the street from the Mississippi river, whose banks there are abandoned cement docks with abandoned metal warehouses on them, and soon discovered that no one came out that way anymore. He walked a few miles next to the cement riverbank mourning the several fallen fish shacks and took in the hushed dignity of the old trees who have seen it all come and go and fall, and who now watch it go into the slow isolation of the failure to streamline sun tea and red pickled eggs. He was sure they wanted the dirt banks back, which they had shared with the river. As he walked along the one-lane, uprooted street in the afternoon he pictured the young old woman with the purple hat walking from her big, white home to Patsy’s Fish Shack for dinner. She had a man in a white button-up shirt and bluish-gray pants with her. She was so red-smiling, fresh and delightful that he smiled openly at the piece of color she was against the browns and greens of the wild riverbank.
After a few days he wandered the way of the Quarter. He came across Elysian Fields and Esplanade Avenue feeling the buzz of it coming at him. The North and West edges of the Quarter are quiet; he stuck close to the edge of the Mississippi and came upon Decatur Street, on the West side, and the first place he stopped was Molly’s. He went in because it was airy and empty and he could smell the Chinese food. He sat at the bar and asked for some coffee and a menu. He was dirty but didn’t smell and didn’t look too bad. His Carhartts and Ramones T-shirt were a little holey and he carried his green backpack like a student, maybe. It was eleven-thirty in the morning. The bartender, Judah, gave him some black coffee and two packets of Sweet-n-Low. They could hear Long in the back cursing in Vietnamese, saying “Johnny!” in between, and they smiled at each other.
“His delivery guy’s late,” she said. She had bleached blond hair and lots of soft wrinkles. She wasn’t old, but she smoked and did shots with the customers, which was hard on her looks. “He’s never been this late before.”
He drank some of his coffee and looked over at the doorway at the back of the bar that lead to China Dragon, where he could hear Long banging around in his tiny kitchen. In a minute he came through the bar carrying a large, warm plastic bag.
“I go deliver myself!” he said as he passed.
“Wow,” she said, “He’s never had to do that before.”
While he was gone his phone rang several sets of times.
“Should I get it?” she said once.
He shrugged. He wanted to help her but didn’t know what to say.
Judah stood there smoking and looking at the window, out at the hard sunshine. The tense light that strained in through the dirty humidity gave a glow to the bar that made him feel like he was inside the walls of a thick green glass bottle, like one he had found by the railroad tracks outside Tuscaloosa. The phone kept ringing and he could tell it made her nervous.
When Long returned he came through the bar looking like a cartoon madman. His eyes were huge in his round head and he bore his way through to the calling phone like an African locust.
“Too many order!” Long shouted after several calls. “Johnny,” Long yelled to him through the door, “You come here!”
He looked over just with his eyes and then back down at his coffee, waiting.
“He’ll give ya free lunch,” Judah said like a mother to her child. “And you’ll make some tips.” She smiled. Her teeth were brownish but almost straight. He raised his murky green eyes to her and thought she was pretty. She was wearing a fuzzy pink vest.
He looked over at the door. They could hear Long on the phone again.
“Johnny! I got four delivery now …” He literally sounded as though he were drowning in a large steel vat of warm friend rice, sinking through the peas and carrots. He put on his backpack and headed for the back of the bar, picturing the face of the old lady for a second, whom he had taken on as his vision of peace, which he would have felt unfair doing if it weren’t for the fact that it took no effort on her part.
“Johnny, okay – here address,” Long pointed at one of the tickets on the plastic bag.
‘This guy assumes a lot,’ he thought.
“Hurry, hurry … lunch rush. When it over you go, other Johnny come later. Here key to bike outside. You go now,” Long pushed on his shoulder. He wanted to punch him, but just took the stack of bagged Styrofoam to his chest and walked back into the bar.
“You got a map?” he said to Judah.
She had a smoker’s laugh. “You’re not even from here, honey?” she shook her head, smiling as though some great mischief were unfolding. “Shit -- let me see those tickets.” She drew him a map on a napkin with only the street names he needed, with numbers in between showing how many streets separated them. He liked her long, pink nails. He had a great respect for gaudy femininity.
He nodded at her. “Thanks.”
Long is Chinese but from Vietnam and is less than five feet tall. His restaurant, China Dragon, sits behind Molly’s bar on Decatur Street in a fortification of indolent businesses that are all part of the original Ursuline Convent. His delivery guy, who he calls Johnny, slang for incompetent, lumbers down it every day twenty times at least almost popping; a slothering, bloated slab wobbling on a junk bike delivering Long’s food that is the staple of several below-minimum-wage shop keepers who restlessly wait through each day and week for their alcoholic checks. Johnny makes between forty and sixty dollars in twelve drudging hours, which he spends immediately at the Abbey, two doors down, before going home with his friend Carver who makes sandwiches at the Red Fish Grill; or more often than that Johnny stays out all night, when people are kind, and then goes to work for Long in the only brightened morning.
Johnny, real name Frank, called Franco, Fat Frank, Frankie, Big Frank, Big Man, drinks a lot of coffee from Molly’s bar, which all the bartenders give him for free, sometimes slipping milk in for nutrition. The old wooden benches in Long’s “courtyard,” the paint mostly gone and splintered, surround two black tables, meant for diners, that are washed in a white and gray filth that is visible in the daylight’s reflection coming straight down past the square of apartment buildings which hangs over the run-down scene like an empty bull ring. People come to visit Frank while he waits for an order, which Long doesn’t like. They sit across from him and bullshit about certain strippers, especially the new ones to town, and their friends’ drunk- and drug-capades, most times giving him a few shots out of a cliched flask.
Longs cooks and takes orders by phone from eleven to eleven inside the 10’ X 8’ shack and calls, “Johnny!” when an order’s ready. Frank takes the plastic bag, puts it in the front basket of his limping 1960s Schwinn, and saddles the narrow alleyway heavily past the garbage cans which fill the side entrance to both Molly’s and Long’s. He rides the edge of falling over like a kid on cough syrup through the Quarter, so fluid and slow that he seems like a figment of the heavy-lidded humidity.
Long doesn’t like Frank, but he’s worked for him for a year and Long is used to drunks; he thinks of them as less than men, and considers them deserving of their self-made slavery. Not too many tourists come that far up Decatur, tending to stick to the trendy recycled blues cafes a few blocks down on the other side of the street, next to the Mississippi River. Molly’s is a place where the local drunks feel comfortable, though they are sometimes joined by the tourists who consider themselves a little smarter and more adventurous than the average T-shirt and sunscreen sporting dough people. These “travelers” occasionally order some Chinese food from Long and dine in, but choose to eat their food in the bar rather than in the cut-off courtyard.
Long is a pervert, and perverts are well liked in all parts of the Quarter. Tall and short women with big breasts stretching threadbare tanktops come behind Molly’s to squeeze Long’s girlishly smiling face between them, and he laughs out loud but doesn’t give them anything for free, not even one eggroll. They’re perverted too and they like that he’s short and strange and fearless.
III.
He rode Long’s ten-speed faster than Long’s strong but short legs had ever been able to. It was easy to find addresses in the square Quarter; its straight-forward layout didn’t match the manipulative lives of the people who brought themselves there. As he passed, many locals would try to catch his eyes in theirs and search for imitable meaning. He liked the performers who did their Vaudevillesque acts in the middle of the street, and the mimes who stood stark still covered in gold metallic paint or dressed as Uncle Sam. On Bourbon he was struck by how colorful even the trash was -- how it played off the scenery and people as though it were more alive than they were. All day he underwent the bastardization of the old Quarter with its drifts of white tourists, sweating his ass off. When it began to slow at four o’clock, he was offered a job:
“You fast boy. Johnny no-show, you want job?”
He was amazed he asked. “Yeah, I guess.”
Long got him a bowl of plain white rice and he watched Long pour the juice from a pot of boiling artichokes into a pitcher and take a glass.
“You drink, make you strong.”
He ate his rice at one of the lone black tables and brought his bowl to Long, who was washing large steel pots and oversized utensils, when he was finished.
“Where you stay?”
“I have a place.”
“You be here ten-forty-five.”
At eleven that night he walked through Molly’s where the crowd talked at itself loudly and Judah had gone home. He walked up Decatur, the young, white locals carrying plastic cups down the sidewalk past him as down their own hallway. He was glad to go unnoticed through everyone’s illusion of command and charm and each block had less people until he was out of the Quarter.
Once he was safely inside the deserted area where the fish shacks were, he took his thin, dark blue acrylic blanket out of his backpack and lay on the broken grass and hard dusty dirt with his backpack behind his head. It was a loyal backpack and kept its shape for him to lie his head on comfortably every night.
He looked up at the uncommitted sky and the few visible stars. He had the old familiar thought that it was stupid to plan on anything, that we just live and die. It was a thought he had almost every day at some point, and every night before he could relax. A breeze came through and he thought it smelled a little salty. He hoped the old lady was around, sitting on her daughter’s porch, and wondered what she was thinking about. He knew old people stayed up late, several old people had told him they needed less and less sleep as they got older. He pictured Judah’s long, pink nails running down his stomach, but a thought of Long prevented him from anything else. ‘I outa kick his ass for calling me Johnny all the time …’ He had liked the artichoke juice thing for some reason, and thought maybe Long would be alright if he didn’t have the short man’s complex or whatever was going on with him. He thought of his mother for a second before he fell asleep, but then drove it down as he focused outward on the night and its sounds of small animals rustling in nearby bushes and the river’s millions of eddies swelling and recanting a few hundred yards away like a long birth canal to the ocean.
He woke just as it was getting light and stretched hard. His last dream had been about a girl he had liked in school. They were on a boat and the water was rough. They were both running about the boat tying things down and then his mother’s face appeared in the sky like God to watch him struggle.
He thought the air smelled wonderful in the morning, like certain women, like the old lady, who had their own fresh smell that reminded him of a cool-looking lavender bottle of “toilet water” his mom had kept in the bathroom but never used. He wished he knew the old lady’s name so he could find out where she lived and possibly visit her. He would walk by first, just to check out her house, and then maybe pass by one evening when she might be out on the porch cooling off. He put his blanket away and walked up the cement ramp across the road and over to the edge of the abandoned cement dock to look at the slow-moving river. He pictured himself floating in it not much bigger than a wood chip and thought how what you’re surrounded by, what’s on your skin, is so important, whether it’s dirty clothes or a clammy-feeling hand or cold snow in your sock, or the pulling water of a fit and experienced river. He didn’t know if a river was a thing or not. He supposed it was and it wasn’t. He’d seen a river so clogged with logs and mud it seemed destroyed, so maybe it was a thing. But he was sure if the sun got hot enough and all the water on earth dried up, the riverbeds would be like haunted carcasses.
“Frank’s dead,” Judah told him as she poured his coffee. It was nine and he was really early. “The delivery guy you’re replacing?”
He nodded.
“He had a heart attack last night right there at the Abbey, at about three a.m. They said his eyes bulged out and he coughed real hard and fell on his big stomach.”
He pictured one of those huge rubber buoy-balls with the handle little kids sit and hop around on. “Wow … how old was he?”
“In his thirties. He must have had a bad heart, and a bad liver. Long doesn’t know yet, he won’t be in for an hour at least. The guy was a loser, but he was so dependable; you get used to people.”
He didn’t give a shit. He’d never even seen the guy. It was weird he had his job, but the guy might as well have had it fifty years ago for all he cared. He thought about how much he liked bars in the morning, before all the “lucid” conversations, and the lonely thoughts that came in to be executed.
“Why’s Long call him and everyone Johnny anyway?”
“It’s like his insult. He doesn’t like drunks, he hates them, and he thinks everybody here is one, which is pretty much true,” she laughed her rough laugh. “But his restaurant’s here, so what does he expect … one time this big guy came out from using the bathroom back there,” she gestured with her cigarette toward the swinging door that lead to Long’s courtyard, “And started calling Long a short little somethin’ and Long egged him on, calling him a drunk loser and shit, until the guy tried to hit him. Well I swear if Long isn’t the fastest little weirdo I’ve ever seen; the guy couldn’t do it, he couldn’t catch him with his fist or even grab onto him … Long dodged every one until the guy got frustrated and spit on the ground and turned to come back in here, and Long kicked him in the ass on the way out!”
He laughed. It was the first really funny thing he’d heard in a long time.
When Long came in and Judah told him what had happened he only said, “That right” and went to work.
At five past eleven Long called to him for the first order of the day.
“Johnny!”
He went through the bar doors into the courtyard where Long was standing holding the heavy, warm plastic bag.
“My name’s not Johnny, it’s Nathan … and if you call me that one more time I’m not gonna work for you.”
Long looked at him like some people look at the Mona Lisa, trying to find and possibly communicate with her soul. He wasn’t used to real pride anymore.
“Okay. Nathan. Here order.” He handed it to him. Nathan took it down the alley and onto Decatur Street, where a couple of doors down people had placed a few heat-wilted flowers on the sidewalk outside the Abbey.
The bus station was nearly four generations old and was like an old shell. It felt to him like an old mother whose favorite reminiscences are selfless rather than romantic. It had been pieced together very plainly, out of necessity. He liked how it all was necessity in a bus station – hot, greasy eggs and toast with little packets of condiments for hamburgers and cinnamon rolls that stuffed you for the long trip. Cigarettes, fare information on a tack board, toilets, sinks, mirrors in the ladies’, coffee. But he wasn’t going anywhere. At first he couldn’t remember who had sat down on the bench first, the old lady coming from Charlottesville, or himself. She wore a purple feather hat that looked as soft as the one breast he had ever touched and, even though it was odd, he wanted to put it back in its old hat box for her, when she was done with it, and put it under his bed every place he went, or lie his head beside it when he slept outside. ‘That old hat box …’ he laughed to himself. He hadn’t even spoken to the woman yet, but he felt her warmth, even in the warm air; the warmth of many years. He remembered after a moment that he had sat down first. He felt lucky. She was delicate, but strongly made. There weren’t too many people you could say that about, he thought. The door to the station was open – they hadn’t started the air conditioners in that part of the country yet, and the slow intermittent breeze it let in was promising. She immediately felt his attention, but couldn’t make out a guess of good or bad, which was unusual for her. She had a hand on each knee with no rings. He hadn’t seen very many old women without rings. He thought maybe she had arthritis.
“Where you from, son?” she said, throwing the last in carefully as an imploring safeguard.
“California. Where are you from?”
“N’Orleans.”
“Oh, wow.”
“I was born there,” she said. “In the summer …” she paused in her blue and white, respectably dusty, cotton dress and white leather sandals – clearly a gift from someone, he thought. “The air back there is what turns people bad, into thick, romantic messes … the air makes you slur your words, not the alcohol like people think.”
“I don’t drink,” he said to please her even though it was true.
“Good,” she said. “Quite a few pro-fessional drinkers where I come from … might as well be actors the way they go out for that sorrowful drama.”
When they called her bus and she got up, putting one hand on her purple hat for a moment, he felt abandoned. “Bye,” she said sweetly, “You take care now.” She shuffled past him. He waited for her bus to leave before going out. Its air brakes released and the engine filled itself with power. He rose. The warm air surrounded his skin like a halo and as he walked through it he felt what she had said.
He’d never been sick – he didn’t remember ever having had the chicken pox, not even a headache. He’d traveled alone for four years, sleeping outside or renting rooms in places that weren’t the quietest all the time, but were either gray or dusty or felt gray and dusty and immediately quiet. He was a thin boy; 16 and tall and strong, with short brown hair and murky green eyes the color of the muck just below the surface edges of a shallow summer river.
He had left his mother waiting on the beach for her husband who’d gone off to get more beer for her small body and his fat hairy one; he’d realized even then that it was killing her faster. He’d gone home to get his backpack with one book, Hunger, four razors and a bag of pretzels, some Cokes, a stick of his mom’s gum, an extra shirt, some socks and boxers. He had decided not to take any of dork-ass’ cigarettes, because he didn’t want his mother to get in trouble for it. And he’d decided not to bring his toothbrush either because a guy he knew from school had bragged recently about not brushing his teeth for two weeks, and even though he knew it was stupid, he wanted to try it. “When you finally brush the shit off they feel amazing,” the kid had said. He’d get a new one later.
The day he left home he had fifty dollars and threw rocks into the short, mutant bushes by the railroad tracks, and lay on his back thinking about his mother and how his History teacher, Mr. Ball, might actually miss him because he had really liked his report on dirigibles the week before. He waited two hundred yards away from the tiny train station slightly afraid because he didn’t have a flashlight and didn’t know what would be in the haunted attic of the boxcar he jumped into. He had fallen asleep and woke to the cold of twilight. He knew the evening train would be along soon.
Four years later he’d been to 48 states and still had the same backpack, covered in band patches, his copy of Hunger, and his Ramones T-shirt, which he wore all the time. He traveled alone, following the steps of his black Converse like the steps of a successful older brother. He didn’t drink but smoked sometimes; it put him more at ease with the older, friendlier, more worn down people he met when he sat in a crowded coffee restaurant, truck stop or bus station, or sat on the curb to drink coffee and some old lady stopped and asked if he knew the Lord, or some bearded man stopped to ask for a cigarette and maybe offer him drugs or a cell phone. What he learned as he went from place to place, from scene to scene in the wide, flattened U.S. he didn’t necessarily note, but let soak in like a deep suntan. He got scared sometimes that no one knew him and wondered who he was even talking to when he thought about things. A couple of times he had thought he was going crazy. He wanted someone to read his thoughts, to want to.
He had never been to New Orleans. Smutville had not intrigued him because he knew somehow that the Jack-the-Ripper genuineness was over. He went finally because of the old lady with the purple hat. He had been walking from Anaconda, Georgia to the ocean; it was April and he hadn’t seen the ocean since September. He considered her significant enough to change his course.
II.
He had been sleeping outside in the Ninth Ward, which sits next to the Quarter and is its poorer, soldered brother. It’s full of old, formerly grand homes whose depression has swallowed their tenants, and it is where Desire and Charity moon over the past, bordered by Elysian Fields. It has the air of a silent film star eighty years out of its element, who, while everything is booming around them, maintains an air of silent supremacy that is in large part confusion. The Ninth Ward seems to be in permanent hiding. He made a little camp across the street from the Mississippi river, whose banks there are abandoned cement docks with abandoned metal warehouses on them, and soon discovered that no one came out that way anymore. He walked a few miles next to the cement riverbank mourning the several fallen fish shacks and took in the hushed dignity of the old trees who have seen it all come and go and fall, and who now watch it go into the slow isolation of the failure to streamline sun tea and red pickled eggs. He was sure they wanted the dirt banks back, which they had shared with the river. As he walked along the one-lane, uprooted street in the afternoon he pictured the young old woman with the purple hat walking from her big, white home to Patsy’s Fish Shack for dinner. She had a man in a white button-up shirt and bluish-gray pants with her. She was so red-smiling, fresh and delightful that he smiled openly at the piece of color she was against the browns and greens of the wild riverbank.
After a few days he wandered the way of the Quarter. He came across Elysian Fields and Esplanade Avenue feeling the buzz of it coming at him. The North and West edges of the Quarter are quiet; he stuck close to the edge of the Mississippi and came upon Decatur Street, on the West side, and the first place he stopped was Molly’s. He went in because it was airy and empty and he could smell the Chinese food. He sat at the bar and asked for some coffee and a menu. He was dirty but didn’t smell and didn’t look too bad. His Carhartts and Ramones T-shirt were a little holey and he carried his green backpack like a student, maybe. It was eleven-thirty in the morning. The bartender, Judah, gave him some black coffee and two packets of Sweet-n-Low. They could hear Long in the back cursing in Vietnamese, saying “Johnny!” in between, and they smiled at each other.
“His delivery guy’s late,” she said. She had bleached blond hair and lots of soft wrinkles. She wasn’t old, but she smoked and did shots with the customers, which was hard on her looks. “He’s never been this late before.”
He drank some of his coffee and looked over at the doorway at the back of the bar that lead to China Dragon, where he could hear Long banging around in his tiny kitchen. In a minute he came through the bar carrying a large, warm plastic bag.
“I go deliver myself!” he said as he passed.
“Wow,” she said, “He’s never had to do that before.”
While he was gone his phone rang several sets of times.
“Should I get it?” she said once.
He shrugged. He wanted to help her but didn’t know what to say.
Judah stood there smoking and looking at the window, out at the hard sunshine. The tense light that strained in through the dirty humidity gave a glow to the bar that made him feel like he was inside the walls of a thick green glass bottle, like one he had found by the railroad tracks outside Tuscaloosa. The phone kept ringing and he could tell it made her nervous.
When Long returned he came through the bar looking like a cartoon madman. His eyes were huge in his round head and he bore his way through to the calling phone like an African locust.
“Too many order!” Long shouted after several calls. “Johnny,” Long yelled to him through the door, “You come here!”
He looked over just with his eyes and then back down at his coffee, waiting.
“He’ll give ya free lunch,” Judah said like a mother to her child. “And you’ll make some tips.” She smiled. Her teeth were brownish but almost straight. He raised his murky green eyes to her and thought she was pretty. She was wearing a fuzzy pink vest.
He looked over at the door. They could hear Long on the phone again.
“Johnny! I got four delivery now …” He literally sounded as though he were drowning in a large steel vat of warm friend rice, sinking through the peas and carrots. He put on his backpack and headed for the back of the bar, picturing the face of the old lady for a second, whom he had taken on as his vision of peace, which he would have felt unfair doing if it weren’t for the fact that it took no effort on her part.
“Johnny, okay – here address,” Long pointed at one of the tickets on the plastic bag.
‘This guy assumes a lot,’ he thought.
“Hurry, hurry … lunch rush. When it over you go, other Johnny come later. Here key to bike outside. You go now,” Long pushed on his shoulder. He wanted to punch him, but just took the stack of bagged Styrofoam to his chest and walked back into the bar.
“You got a map?” he said to Judah.
She had a smoker’s laugh. “You’re not even from here, honey?” she shook her head, smiling as though some great mischief were unfolding. “Shit -- let me see those tickets.” She drew him a map on a napkin with only the street names he needed, with numbers in between showing how many streets separated them. He liked her long, pink nails. He had a great respect for gaudy femininity.
He nodded at her. “Thanks.”
Long is Chinese but from Vietnam and is less than five feet tall. His restaurant, China Dragon, sits behind Molly’s bar on Decatur Street in a fortification of indolent businesses that are all part of the original Ursuline Convent. His delivery guy, who he calls Johnny, slang for incompetent, lumbers down it every day twenty times at least almost popping; a slothering, bloated slab wobbling on a junk bike delivering Long’s food that is the staple of several below-minimum-wage shop keepers who restlessly wait through each day and week for their alcoholic checks. Johnny makes between forty and sixty dollars in twelve drudging hours, which he spends immediately at the Abbey, two doors down, before going home with his friend Carver who makes sandwiches at the Red Fish Grill; or more often than that Johnny stays out all night, when people are kind, and then goes to work for Long in the only brightened morning.
Johnny, real name Frank, called Franco, Fat Frank, Frankie, Big Frank, Big Man, drinks a lot of coffee from Molly’s bar, which all the bartenders give him for free, sometimes slipping milk in for nutrition. The old wooden benches in Long’s “courtyard,” the paint mostly gone and splintered, surround two black tables, meant for diners, that are washed in a white and gray filth that is visible in the daylight’s reflection coming straight down past the square of apartment buildings which hangs over the run-down scene like an empty bull ring. People come to visit Frank while he waits for an order, which Long doesn’t like. They sit across from him and bullshit about certain strippers, especially the new ones to town, and their friends’ drunk- and drug-capades, most times giving him a few shots out of a cliched flask.
Longs cooks and takes orders by phone from eleven to eleven inside the 10’ X 8’ shack and calls, “Johnny!” when an order’s ready. Frank takes the plastic bag, puts it in the front basket of his limping 1960s Schwinn, and saddles the narrow alleyway heavily past the garbage cans which fill the side entrance to both Molly’s and Long’s. He rides the edge of falling over like a kid on cough syrup through the Quarter, so fluid and slow that he seems like a figment of the heavy-lidded humidity.
Long doesn’t like Frank, but he’s worked for him for a year and Long is used to drunks; he thinks of them as less than men, and considers them deserving of their self-made slavery. Not too many tourists come that far up Decatur, tending to stick to the trendy recycled blues cafes a few blocks down on the other side of the street, next to the Mississippi River. Molly’s is a place where the local drunks feel comfortable, though they are sometimes joined by the tourists who consider themselves a little smarter and more adventurous than the average T-shirt and sunscreen sporting dough people. These “travelers” occasionally order some Chinese food from Long and dine in, but choose to eat their food in the bar rather than in the cut-off courtyard.
Long is a pervert, and perverts are well liked in all parts of the Quarter. Tall and short women with big breasts stretching threadbare tanktops come behind Molly’s to squeeze Long’s girlishly smiling face between them, and he laughs out loud but doesn’t give them anything for free, not even one eggroll. They’re perverted too and they like that he’s short and strange and fearless.
III.
He rode Long’s ten-speed faster than Long’s strong but short legs had ever been able to. It was easy to find addresses in the square Quarter; its straight-forward layout didn’t match the manipulative lives of the people who brought themselves there. As he passed, many locals would try to catch his eyes in theirs and search for imitable meaning. He liked the performers who did their Vaudevillesque acts in the middle of the street, and the mimes who stood stark still covered in gold metallic paint or dressed as Uncle Sam. On Bourbon he was struck by how colorful even the trash was -- how it played off the scenery and people as though it were more alive than they were. All day he underwent the bastardization of the old Quarter with its drifts of white tourists, sweating his ass off. When it began to slow at four o’clock, he was offered a job:
“You fast boy. Johnny no-show, you want job?”
He was amazed he asked. “Yeah, I guess.”
Long got him a bowl of plain white rice and he watched Long pour the juice from a pot of boiling artichokes into a pitcher and take a glass.
“You drink, make you strong.”
He ate his rice at one of the lone black tables and brought his bowl to Long, who was washing large steel pots and oversized utensils, when he was finished.
“Where you stay?”
“I have a place.”
“You be here ten-forty-five.”
At eleven that night he walked through Molly’s where the crowd talked at itself loudly and Judah had gone home. He walked up Decatur, the young, white locals carrying plastic cups down the sidewalk past him as down their own hallway. He was glad to go unnoticed through everyone’s illusion of command and charm and each block had less people until he was out of the Quarter.
Once he was safely inside the deserted area where the fish shacks were, he took his thin, dark blue acrylic blanket out of his backpack and lay on the broken grass and hard dusty dirt with his backpack behind his head. It was a loyal backpack and kept its shape for him to lie his head on comfortably every night.
He looked up at the uncommitted sky and the few visible stars. He had the old familiar thought that it was stupid to plan on anything, that we just live and die. It was a thought he had almost every day at some point, and every night before he could relax. A breeze came through and he thought it smelled a little salty. He hoped the old lady was around, sitting on her daughter’s porch, and wondered what she was thinking about. He knew old people stayed up late, several old people had told him they needed less and less sleep as they got older. He pictured Judah’s long, pink nails running down his stomach, but a thought of Long prevented him from anything else. ‘I outa kick his ass for calling me Johnny all the time …’ He had liked the artichoke juice thing for some reason, and thought maybe Long would be alright if he didn’t have the short man’s complex or whatever was going on with him. He thought of his mother for a second before he fell asleep, but then drove it down as he focused outward on the night and its sounds of small animals rustling in nearby bushes and the river’s millions of eddies swelling and recanting a few hundred yards away like a long birth canal to the ocean.
He woke just as it was getting light and stretched hard. His last dream had been about a girl he had liked in school. They were on a boat and the water was rough. They were both running about the boat tying things down and then his mother’s face appeared in the sky like God to watch him struggle.
He thought the air smelled wonderful in the morning, like certain women, like the old lady, who had their own fresh smell that reminded him of a cool-looking lavender bottle of “toilet water” his mom had kept in the bathroom but never used. He wished he knew the old lady’s name so he could find out where she lived and possibly visit her. He would walk by first, just to check out her house, and then maybe pass by one evening when she might be out on the porch cooling off. He put his blanket away and walked up the cement ramp across the road and over to the edge of the abandoned cement dock to look at the slow-moving river. He pictured himself floating in it not much bigger than a wood chip and thought how what you’re surrounded by, what’s on your skin, is so important, whether it’s dirty clothes or a clammy-feeling hand or cold snow in your sock, or the pulling water of a fit and experienced river. He didn’t know if a river was a thing or not. He supposed it was and it wasn’t. He’d seen a river so clogged with logs and mud it seemed destroyed, so maybe it was a thing. But he was sure if the sun got hot enough and all the water on earth dried up, the riverbeds would be like haunted carcasses.
“Frank’s dead,” Judah told him as she poured his coffee. It was nine and he was really early. “The delivery guy you’re replacing?”
He nodded.
“He had a heart attack last night right there at the Abbey, at about three a.m. They said his eyes bulged out and he coughed real hard and fell on his big stomach.”
He pictured one of those huge rubber buoy-balls with the handle little kids sit and hop around on. “Wow … how old was he?”
“In his thirties. He must have had a bad heart, and a bad liver. Long doesn’t know yet, he won’t be in for an hour at least. The guy was a loser, but he was so dependable; you get used to people.”
He didn’t give a shit. He’d never even seen the guy. It was weird he had his job, but the guy might as well have had it fifty years ago for all he cared. He thought about how much he liked bars in the morning, before all the “lucid” conversations, and the lonely thoughts that came in to be executed.
“Why’s Long call him and everyone Johnny anyway?”
“It’s like his insult. He doesn’t like drunks, he hates them, and he thinks everybody here is one, which is pretty much true,” she laughed her rough laugh. “But his restaurant’s here, so what does he expect … one time this big guy came out from using the bathroom back there,” she gestured with her cigarette toward the swinging door that lead to Long’s courtyard, “And started calling Long a short little somethin’ and Long egged him on, calling him a drunk loser and shit, until the guy tried to hit him. Well I swear if Long isn’t the fastest little weirdo I’ve ever seen; the guy couldn’t do it, he couldn’t catch him with his fist or even grab onto him … Long dodged every one until the guy got frustrated and spit on the ground and turned to come back in here, and Long kicked him in the ass on the way out!”
He laughed. It was the first really funny thing he’d heard in a long time.
When Long came in and Judah told him what had happened he only said, “That right” and went to work.
At five past eleven Long called to him for the first order of the day.
“Johnny!”
He went through the bar doors into the courtyard where Long was standing holding the heavy, warm plastic bag.
“My name’s not Johnny, it’s Nathan … and if you call me that one more time I’m not gonna work for you.”
Long looked at him like some people look at the Mona Lisa, trying to find and possibly communicate with her soul. He wasn’t used to real pride anymore.
“Okay. Nathan. Here order.” He handed it to him. Nathan took it down the alley and onto Decatur Street, where a couple of doors down people had placed a few heat-wilted flowers on the sidewalk outside the Abbey.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
The Mirage of Mario Sanchez
When he opened his eyes to the stagnant but tidy room -– its high wood walls and floors, the furniture that said, “I know you,” but not too much, and the faint light that outside was the hot sun -– it told him only that he was there. He had read “The Lost Decade” at the bidding of his wife, but he didn’t see the tragedy in it. His wife, Cella, made wood furniture, carving it out in symbiotic patterns that to her went on forever, past the back of the chair and the edge of the cabinet door. He thought her work was nice, and she like an orphan girl radiating through her rags while following the lathe like the back of a centipede, yet he chastised her passion for it and didn’t understand the spiritual and philosophical value she saw there. When she’d asked him to leave he'd thought of it simply as an incentive to get out of the house.
Each morning he puts his right forefinger in his mouth, takes it out for a moment, then tastes it. This isn’t to check the movement of the air. He feels he has become quite perceptive in his exile, and when he tastes the air he feels as though he’s able to taste the distillation of the entire day to come. Today it tastes a little off. Not tragically so, just a little odd -– like maybe a mighty, flabby woman will streak past him, or maybe he’ll see a toddler trotting along licking a huge pinwheel lollipop the size of its face and suddenly it will trip and fall face down upon it, like a sticky shield that will attract ants immediately. Or some tourist who’s had a good day fishing will decide to buy the entire crowd at the Turtle a couple of rounds, which had happened before. It changed the atmosphere of the bar to that of a carnival for an hour or so.
When he’d been with Cella he’d almost always drunk alone, but now every day he came effervescently to the Turtle, called there by what seemed like an obligation to his new identity. There were four bartenders at the Turtle, and he was friendly with them all, but of the four Bob on weekdays and Cat on weekends were his favorites. For the most part he also had more congenial memories of them. Bob let Stephen drink well past his obvious limit on many occasions, which Stephen appreciated. He wasn’t exactly a gentleman, but he was a soft drunk; he'd fall off his stool before he’d ever be lewd or obnoxiously belligerent.
It was Wednesday. He’d always hated Wednesdays because he felt that Wednesday was the least dramatic day of the week, save for Tuesday, but he was born on a Tuesday. Wednesdays made him lonely. On Wednesdays he sometimes thought of Cella’s flowery air and how she’d always have the windows open and never seemed to be cold. Sometimes on Wednesdays he thought of changing his routine, maybe just taking a walk, but he never had. And lately the Wednesday gloom had been worse; he was running out of money.
“Come on lad,” Bob the bartender said in a very fake Irish accent, “Tell me what’s got you saggin' or I’ll haveta heave-ho ya outa here.”
“Nothing.”
“But you’re sippin’ insteada sluggin’, lad …” he patted Stephen’s cheeks. “You look sick, sister. Come on, level with me …”
“Alright, fine.” Stephen leaned over the bar, “I’ll let you in on the secret, but when I stop comin’ in next week some time you gotta cover for me … say you heard I went snorkeling in the Bahamas.”
Bob had his ear cocked right over Stephen’s Seven-and-Seven with his eyebrows up.
“I’m broke.”
Bob jumped back and slapped the counter, “Get outa here!”
“Down to my last two thousand.”
“Now that ain’t exactly broke …”
“It’s broke to me,” he sipped his drink. “Especially here.”
“You got that part right anyway … mmm mmm mmm … Mmm! Whatchou gonna do?”
“Don't know ... I may have to call my wife.”
“I hear ya, I guess when you retire too early you ain’t got no feed when the cows come home,” he started wiping the counter and wiped over to another customer, shaking his head as he led himself across the boxing-ring bar. “Mmm mmm mmm.”
‘Why’d I tell him that?’ Stephen asked himself. He felt violated. He hadn’t analyzed too many things about himself consciously, but, faced with the potential of poverty, he realized that he felt as though an edge were dulling. He put a five on top of the twenty that already sat on the bar next to his drink and soaked napkin and stood up. It was early afternoon. Bob was resting on one hip talking to his customer with his back to Stephen and didn’t notice him walk out of the open-air bar.
Stephen had had four drinks but was still very sober. The sidewalks of the small island were half taken over by elephant-ear sized leaves and as he attempted to stroll he felt self-conscious veering around them, as though people might think he were stumbling. The sidewalk seemed unpaved, uprooted as it had been by Banyan tree roots, uneven, rural-seeming and coarse. What was he going to do without money? He couldn’t imagine having to do the jobs that people had -- every day! The rent for the small furnished apartment with the polished wood floors was a thousand a month. It was the 27th. He didn’t know how long he could last on a thousand dollars -– he’d never added up his expenses. Regardless, he’d soon be out of a place to live. He was sweating through his white ramie shirt and envisioned himself suddenly eclipsed by the sun, going mad in a dark alley like Jack the Ripper. ‘I was almost a lawyer ...’ he thought. But the thought of working felt like the word entrapment. Entrapment. ‘Not only trapped, but framed, like a defenseless moron. Framed.’ He stumbled through the streets, though to passersby he was only walking; a well-dressed man on his way to meet someone or out on an errand. An ordinarily brilliant soul rotting in the embalmed body of a rich man, flawless.
He had walked about three blocks when he turned down an alley-street which had music diffusing into the humid air from someone’s back yard. Stephen realized he had a cigarette in his mouth, though he didn’t know how long it had been there. He had felt hurried, but deliberately slowed to look through the gaping red hibiscus that seemed to grow wild there to a little white house that was as bright as a bleached white sheet; his wife always used white sheets and shook them out in the breeze of her open windows. There was a clearness around the little house. It had a little wooden blue jay next to the house number. As he passed it he noticed an old gentleman at the side of the house, partially on the lawn, partially on the unpaved drive, which was bordered by an old wooden fence, standing in front of a wooden table. “Lo there,” he waved to Stephen. Stephen stopped and took the cigarette out of his mouth. “You lost?” he smiled and looked up from what he was doing.
“No, no,” Stephen cleared his throat and lit the cigarette. “Just out for a stroll.” He felt his face –- he shaved every morning and it was smooth.
“You live aroun’ here?” the man had an accent Stephen didn’t know. He was pointing bits of color and white onto a board with a small brush.
“Yes, sir.”
“You an’ your wife?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s your wife on theese fine day?”
“She’s at home –- doesn’t like the heat.”
“Wrong place for her then,” he laughed.
“That’s what I tell her.” He looked past the old man to where things began to get blurry.
“You wan’ to come an’ see?” he pointed to the piece of wood on the table.
Stephen walked among the rough white rocks until he was a few feet from the old man. Their chalk stuck to his black dress shoes. He peered over the space as though the old man were behind a partition, roped off.
“Come closer.”
Stephen could see what the old man was painting with his fingers and a brush whose bristles were splayed out like an old toothbrush, like the one he’d had as a kid.
“Ice cream,” said the old man. “Not like to-day –- real ice cream … glace.” There was a man with a cart vending ice cream by white and red bathing cabins on the beach. All the colors were bright and proud, natives. “That man was an entrepreneur,” the old man said, “He know where to sell hees ice cream.”
“It’s wonderful,” said Stephen.
“I give eet to you when I finish – tomorrow.”
“Oh no …”
“Don’ worry, I give to you. I no charge a poor man.”
Stephen looked at him. He held his dying cigarette at his side. He looked down at the table and saw everything on it like a pinwheel spinning; brushes, bright circles of paint, tubes, a cloth, the wood with dried and drying paint all over it. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said.
“Good,” said the old man. Stephen nodded once. “See you tomorrow,” the old man said as Stephen turned and walked as lightly as he could down the rough drive to the sidewalk.
He felt like having a soda, a pop, like when he was a kid. It seemed he hadn’t had plain soda since then. There was a store on the corner across the street from his apartment. As he turned onto the sidewalk he glanced back toward the old man who was not there any longer. He looked around and down the alley-street. There were some old men three houses down playing cards at a square table at the edge of a flat driveway. There was an old woman two houses down from them and across rocking on her front porch. There were two chickens criss-crossing each other in a hurry, and the sounds of them and children from a block over. There was the music coming into and out of the air like breath. He looked back up the old man’s drive –- no old man, no table, no glace. Stephen turned around and went back the way he had come.
Once he was back at the apartment he sat on the bed.
‘Man,’ he looked around at the contrived living space. ‘I’m going to turn into a freakin' nutball.’ He lay back and watched the ceiling fan until he fell asleep.
He was hot and crumpled and uncomfortable, wanting incredibly much to let go of his mother’s hand, though he knew he couldn’t. His mother was beautiful, as all mothers are to their sons.
“Mama, can I please have some glace?”
She looked down at him and out at the sea. He was aware of strings from his brown cut-off trousers tickling his knees. He was barefoot.
“Do you have a nickel, son?”
“No.”
As they passed the ice cream cart Stephen noticed it was the old man vending -– he being himself as a boy and also outside himself, watching. He looked longingly at the white-handled wooden cart, knowing the sweet smoothness of the mango glace that was inside. The old man took out a shallow paper cone and filled it half with mango and half with mammie ice cream, and handed it to Stephen.
“I’m sorry, sir, not to-day,” said Stephen’s mother, her red-brown hair blowing almost away from her in the sea breeze.
“Don’ worry, ma’am,” the old man said, “You get me back an-o-ther day.” He bent down to Stephen and whispered as he handed him the glace, “I no charge a poor man.”
Stephen sat up straight in bed with his slicked black hair stuck to his forehead and face. The room was so quiet; he had never known it to be so. The noise of cars, mopeds and people talking, even yelling, seemed to be in a bottle tossed away from the captive and self-contained silence of his room. He sat up in bed, the lining of his light blue pants making a slick sound against his bare legs. His childhood room had been light blue, “sky blue,” and his mother had painted white clouds across it. Cirrus and cumulus, he remembered. He put his hands over his face and brought them down slowly, sliding with the thick sweat. He couldn’t even feel the ceiling fan it was moving so slowly.
‘I know I have a pencil,’ he thought, ‘If I could only draw something …’ He went over to the table by the window, but there was just a pocketknife on the dark varnished wood. In the kitchen, set off barely from the livingroom at a depth of four lonely feet, he found a golf pencil in the silverware drawer. It was from Oregon. He smelled it. He sat on the bed with the yellow and white striped sheet that had been furnished him, with his stubby golf pencil and an American Express bill envelope and commenced to draw a portrait of Cella. ‘Just a line,’ he thought as he tried to define the details of her face in his mind, the real shape of it. ‘Just a line to begin –- a line is all you need.’ He placed the pencil to the envelope and his hand drew a quick, curvaceous line for him; he hadn’t realized he was shaking. He quickly retracted his hand from the paper and closed his eyes. ‘I’m a bastard … a real bastard.’ He looked around the room; wood table, chairs and nightstand, wood doors, wood-framed clock, driftwood hanging on the audacious stucco wall, wood everything, it seemed; the windows even had wooden shutters. ‘It’s all drawn,’ his thoughts stuttered as he imagined someone, people, making all that his room alone contained. ‘Everything.’
He sat still until the dark came and the now strangling complexities of his little room softened; he was a stranger to his room at that hour, yet he felt welcome, as though it had been waiting for him. Soon he would start the throwing up, the convulsive terror of withdrawal, but as the liquid sense of a warm night settled over him he wanted only to sit in peace; a few moments more as captain at the end of his pirated plank.
Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
Seattle 2001
Each morning he puts his right forefinger in his mouth, takes it out for a moment, then tastes it. This isn’t to check the movement of the air. He feels he has become quite perceptive in his exile, and when he tastes the air he feels as though he’s able to taste the distillation of the entire day to come. Today it tastes a little off. Not tragically so, just a little odd -– like maybe a mighty, flabby woman will streak past him, or maybe he’ll see a toddler trotting along licking a huge pinwheel lollipop the size of its face and suddenly it will trip and fall face down upon it, like a sticky shield that will attract ants immediately. Or some tourist who’s had a good day fishing will decide to buy the entire crowd at the Turtle a couple of rounds, which had happened before. It changed the atmosphere of the bar to that of a carnival for an hour or so.
When he’d been with Cella he’d almost always drunk alone, but now every day he came effervescently to the Turtle, called there by what seemed like an obligation to his new identity. There were four bartenders at the Turtle, and he was friendly with them all, but of the four Bob on weekdays and Cat on weekends were his favorites. For the most part he also had more congenial memories of them. Bob let Stephen drink well past his obvious limit on many occasions, which Stephen appreciated. He wasn’t exactly a gentleman, but he was a soft drunk; he'd fall off his stool before he’d ever be lewd or obnoxiously belligerent.
It was Wednesday. He’d always hated Wednesdays because he felt that Wednesday was the least dramatic day of the week, save for Tuesday, but he was born on a Tuesday. Wednesdays made him lonely. On Wednesdays he sometimes thought of Cella’s flowery air and how she’d always have the windows open and never seemed to be cold. Sometimes on Wednesdays he thought of changing his routine, maybe just taking a walk, but he never had. And lately the Wednesday gloom had been worse; he was running out of money.
“Come on lad,” Bob the bartender said in a very fake Irish accent, “Tell me what’s got you saggin' or I’ll haveta heave-ho ya outa here.”
“Nothing.”
“But you’re sippin’ insteada sluggin’, lad …” he patted Stephen’s cheeks. “You look sick, sister. Come on, level with me …”
“Alright, fine.” Stephen leaned over the bar, “I’ll let you in on the secret, but when I stop comin’ in next week some time you gotta cover for me … say you heard I went snorkeling in the Bahamas.”
Bob had his ear cocked right over Stephen’s Seven-and-Seven with his eyebrows up.
“I’m broke.”
Bob jumped back and slapped the counter, “Get outa here!”
“Down to my last two thousand.”
“Now that ain’t exactly broke …”
“It’s broke to me,” he sipped his drink. “Especially here.”
“You got that part right anyway … mmm mmm mmm … Mmm! Whatchou gonna do?”
“Don't know ... I may have to call my wife.”
“I hear ya, I guess when you retire too early you ain’t got no feed when the cows come home,” he started wiping the counter and wiped over to another customer, shaking his head as he led himself across the boxing-ring bar. “Mmm mmm mmm.”
‘Why’d I tell him that?’ Stephen asked himself. He felt violated. He hadn’t analyzed too many things about himself consciously, but, faced with the potential of poverty, he realized that he felt as though an edge were dulling. He put a five on top of the twenty that already sat on the bar next to his drink and soaked napkin and stood up. It was early afternoon. Bob was resting on one hip talking to his customer with his back to Stephen and didn’t notice him walk out of the open-air bar.
Stephen had had four drinks but was still very sober. The sidewalks of the small island were half taken over by elephant-ear sized leaves and as he attempted to stroll he felt self-conscious veering around them, as though people might think he were stumbling. The sidewalk seemed unpaved, uprooted as it had been by Banyan tree roots, uneven, rural-seeming and coarse. What was he going to do without money? He couldn’t imagine having to do the jobs that people had -- every day! The rent for the small furnished apartment with the polished wood floors was a thousand a month. It was the 27th. He didn’t know how long he could last on a thousand dollars -– he’d never added up his expenses. Regardless, he’d soon be out of a place to live. He was sweating through his white ramie shirt and envisioned himself suddenly eclipsed by the sun, going mad in a dark alley like Jack the Ripper. ‘I was almost a lawyer ...’ he thought. But the thought of working felt like the word entrapment. Entrapment. ‘Not only trapped, but framed, like a defenseless moron. Framed.’ He stumbled through the streets, though to passersby he was only walking; a well-dressed man on his way to meet someone or out on an errand. An ordinarily brilliant soul rotting in the embalmed body of a rich man, flawless.
He had walked about three blocks when he turned down an alley-street which had music diffusing into the humid air from someone’s back yard. Stephen realized he had a cigarette in his mouth, though he didn’t know how long it had been there. He had felt hurried, but deliberately slowed to look through the gaping red hibiscus that seemed to grow wild there to a little white house that was as bright as a bleached white sheet; his wife always used white sheets and shook them out in the breeze of her open windows. There was a clearness around the little house. It had a little wooden blue jay next to the house number. As he passed it he noticed an old gentleman at the side of the house, partially on the lawn, partially on the unpaved drive, which was bordered by an old wooden fence, standing in front of a wooden table. “Lo there,” he waved to Stephen. Stephen stopped and took the cigarette out of his mouth. “You lost?” he smiled and looked up from what he was doing.
“No, no,” Stephen cleared his throat and lit the cigarette. “Just out for a stroll.” He felt his face –- he shaved every morning and it was smooth.
“You live aroun’ here?” the man had an accent Stephen didn’t know. He was pointing bits of color and white onto a board with a small brush.
“Yes, sir.”
“You an’ your wife?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s your wife on theese fine day?”
“She’s at home –- doesn’t like the heat.”
“Wrong place for her then,” he laughed.
“That’s what I tell her.” He looked past the old man to where things began to get blurry.
“You wan’ to come an’ see?” he pointed to the piece of wood on the table.
Stephen walked among the rough white rocks until he was a few feet from the old man. Their chalk stuck to his black dress shoes. He peered over the space as though the old man were behind a partition, roped off.
“Come closer.”
Stephen could see what the old man was painting with his fingers and a brush whose bristles were splayed out like an old toothbrush, like the one he’d had as a kid.
“Ice cream,” said the old man. “Not like to-day –- real ice cream … glace.” There was a man with a cart vending ice cream by white and red bathing cabins on the beach. All the colors were bright and proud, natives. “That man was an entrepreneur,” the old man said, “He know where to sell hees ice cream.”
“It’s wonderful,” said Stephen.
“I give eet to you when I finish – tomorrow.”
“Oh no …”
“Don’ worry, I give to you. I no charge a poor man.”
Stephen looked at him. He held his dying cigarette at his side. He looked down at the table and saw everything on it like a pinwheel spinning; brushes, bright circles of paint, tubes, a cloth, the wood with dried and drying paint all over it. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said.
“Good,” said the old man. Stephen nodded once. “See you tomorrow,” the old man said as Stephen turned and walked as lightly as he could down the rough drive to the sidewalk.
He felt like having a soda, a pop, like when he was a kid. It seemed he hadn’t had plain soda since then. There was a store on the corner across the street from his apartment. As he turned onto the sidewalk he glanced back toward the old man who was not there any longer. He looked around and down the alley-street. There were some old men three houses down playing cards at a square table at the edge of a flat driveway. There was an old woman two houses down from them and across rocking on her front porch. There were two chickens criss-crossing each other in a hurry, and the sounds of them and children from a block over. There was the music coming into and out of the air like breath. He looked back up the old man’s drive –- no old man, no table, no glace. Stephen turned around and went back the way he had come.
Once he was back at the apartment he sat on the bed.
‘Man,’ he looked around at the contrived living space. ‘I’m going to turn into a freakin' nutball.’ He lay back and watched the ceiling fan until he fell asleep.
He was hot and crumpled and uncomfortable, wanting incredibly much to let go of his mother’s hand, though he knew he couldn’t. His mother was beautiful, as all mothers are to their sons.
“Mama, can I please have some glace?”
She looked down at him and out at the sea. He was aware of strings from his brown cut-off trousers tickling his knees. He was barefoot.
“Do you have a nickel, son?”
“No.”
As they passed the ice cream cart Stephen noticed it was the old man vending -– he being himself as a boy and also outside himself, watching. He looked longingly at the white-handled wooden cart, knowing the sweet smoothness of the mango glace that was inside. The old man took out a shallow paper cone and filled it half with mango and half with mammie ice cream, and handed it to Stephen.
“I’m sorry, sir, not to-day,” said Stephen’s mother, her red-brown hair blowing almost away from her in the sea breeze.
“Don’ worry, ma’am,” the old man said, “You get me back an-o-ther day.” He bent down to Stephen and whispered as he handed him the glace, “I no charge a poor man.”
Stephen sat up straight in bed with his slicked black hair stuck to his forehead and face. The room was so quiet; he had never known it to be so. The noise of cars, mopeds and people talking, even yelling, seemed to be in a bottle tossed away from the captive and self-contained silence of his room. He sat up in bed, the lining of his light blue pants making a slick sound against his bare legs. His childhood room had been light blue, “sky blue,” and his mother had painted white clouds across it. Cirrus and cumulus, he remembered. He put his hands over his face and brought them down slowly, sliding with the thick sweat. He couldn’t even feel the ceiling fan it was moving so slowly.
‘I know I have a pencil,’ he thought, ‘If I could only draw something …’ He went over to the table by the window, but there was just a pocketknife on the dark varnished wood. In the kitchen, set off barely from the livingroom at a depth of four lonely feet, he found a golf pencil in the silverware drawer. It was from Oregon. He smelled it. He sat on the bed with the yellow and white striped sheet that had been furnished him, with his stubby golf pencil and an American Express bill envelope and commenced to draw a portrait of Cella. ‘Just a line,’ he thought as he tried to define the details of her face in his mind, the real shape of it. ‘Just a line to begin –- a line is all you need.’ He placed the pencil to the envelope and his hand drew a quick, curvaceous line for him; he hadn’t realized he was shaking. He quickly retracted his hand from the paper and closed his eyes. ‘I’m a bastard … a real bastard.’ He looked around the room; wood table, chairs and nightstand, wood doors, wood-framed clock, driftwood hanging on the audacious stucco wall, wood everything, it seemed; the windows even had wooden shutters. ‘It’s all drawn,’ his thoughts stuttered as he imagined someone, people, making all that his room alone contained. ‘Everything.’
He sat still until the dark came and the now strangling complexities of his little room softened; he was a stranger to his room at that hour, yet he felt welcome, as though it had been waiting for him. Soon he would start the throwing up, the convulsive terror of withdrawal, but as the liquid sense of a warm night settled over him he wanted only to sit in peace; a few moments more as captain at the end of his pirated plank.
Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
Seattle 2001
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Friday, September 4, 2009
The Slave Trader
The Root Cellar
Cari had observed him like a ghost during their relationship. She knew he still allowed himself to listen to John Coltrane and drink scotch after work and into the evening, even though he'd told himself he wouldn't and would ride his bike after work instead. At least it kept him from thinking about her too much. His fear of alcohol dependence was a small price to pay. He had gotten the apartment while he was studying for the bar. She had nodded to herself when she saw it; it was much like the one he'd had his first year of law school; white, sterile, uncomplicated by history. Within his comfort zone. He set up the calfskin chair and ottoman his grandfather had given him next to the wall of windows. He termed this his “command center,” after his father's home office. His father was a tall, facetious assistant vice president of customer relations, always a little too fat and self-satisfied to make it all the way up. Marc bragged that his father had once been considered a potential nominee for California governor, knowing deep down that it had been a shot in the dark, something an assistant chief of staff had thrown out at a cocktail party and no one had taken seriously, except in a fraternity frame of mind. “Yeah, Bud, go for it! I can see that face on yard signs ... you're better looking than the governator!”
His father had had a heart attack four months earlier. His grandfather had died of a heart attack at 61 and he knew it wouldn't be a long time for his father. His mother had she and his father on Weight Watchers and tried her best with her limited knowledge of what was healthy to keep him fit. But he snuck cheap beer onto their sailboat every other weekend, skiffing around the bay by himself. He was a man of almost no real ambition, but with enough respect for pampering to keep up the appearance of having some in order to get paid. Marc had never stood up to his father, or even refused a can of Bud from the doughy hand of the man he had lied to since he could talk. He remembered his father asking him about his dreams when he was little, because he was on ADD medication and nightmares were a side effect, and he'd told him he had dreams of sailing when he had actually dreamed of snakes piling on top of him, slithering around his room and into his orifices.
Marc came out of the shower, the start of a Saturday with no agenda except to review some documents for Monday, which could wait until Sunday. He liked waiting until the last minute sometimes, just to be rebellious. He sat in front of a chocolate croissant and coffee and thought, “I am happy, though I work for the side of the insurance companies. I am happy though I am worse than a DA and don't even theoretically represent any person ... I am happy.” He looked back down at his plain coffee sitting on the bamboo mat, then out the window across the room. From that angle all he could see was the building across the street, but from the command center chair, he could see the river. It was finally the beginning of summer, but this didn't matter to him much. He would go hiking by himself, or bicycling with Real from work, a skinny fifty-two year old with nothing to offer in the way of conversation except Wall Street Journal article summaries and recaps of the two trials he'd had that year.
He looked at his bookshelf. On the bottom was her copy of Tender is the Night. He hadn't been able to get rid of it and realized that he always thought of how it was there, trying to hide on the bottom shelf, but never acknowledged it. He thought about watching Five Easy Pieces and making out on the couch with her the summer before, so thin and beautiful her little body in his big lap, and making love with her in the warm night in the little house they'd shared in law school that was like a farm house and suddenly wanted a cigarette. He had one in a plastic bag that he'd saved from law school, his emergency cigarette for exams that he had never smoked because he had her to call instead.
He remembered the night of the Christmas party, afterward sleeping alone in the room with no curtains, curled up waiting for someone to tell him what to do.
“Oh my goodness!” she had said, smiling and starting to traipse across the back lawn of his new boss' house in Beaverton, the lawn dewing over in the late night cold. “That was the dullest thing ever ... an insult to the word party!”
She'd looked over at his face, stern as she stopped in front of her car door, her expression falling into disappointment like a child being reproached after thinking they'd done well in the Christmas play. They had gotten in the car as at dawn when everyone doesn't talk out of respect for others' sleepiness. Onto the cold suburb road they had driven, it reminding her of long drives she would take alone in college, watching the silhouettes of the hills around Corvallis fold out onto each other, knowing she wasn't alone. She had grown up outside of Sullivan, New Hampshire, on 20 acres. She had told him about the deep yellow Banny eggs that were almost all yolk and the wild turkeys running out of the forest and hanging out with the chickens in the sometimes dusty, sometimes muddy clearing between the chicken house and the pond. What she missed most, she had said, were the cool evening frog songs that would come up from the bordering forest that hid a little bog about the same time as the fireflies started blinking on and off like little lit up potato bugs while she and her brother hit the last few volleys across the badminton net. This hadn't struck a chord with him until he hung out with her the summer of their third year of law school when they lit candles in the back yard of their little farm house and he had felt the summer evenings come on strong like they had never existed before.
After the “party” he had floated through a red light without realizing it, and turned into a strip mall. The grocery store was still open. He parked as far away as possible from it, so far away that she wondered where he was going when he got out of the car. She sat watching him walk, he always looked heavy when he walked, being so tall and thick and dressed in clothes that didn't fit him.
She got out and walked after him at the pace he was going, watching him enter through the automatic doors as though through a portal. He wandered down a fruit and vegetable corridor and over to the side aisle, stopping in front of the pomegranate juice to stare at it. She came to stand beside him in line.
“Is there anything else we need?” he asked.
She thought of several things. “No, I don't think so.”
In the car his body felt heavy as though he had gone swimming in his clothes, and did not turn the key.
“What's wrong?” she had said, knowing how futile the question was.
“I'm not like those people, they weren't even talking to each other. Where were they? Did you see the flowers, silk roses! in the bathroom?”
She was relieved, until she realized she couldn't respond honestly without pissing him off, because she knew he'd take the job anyway.
“You don't have to talk to them, they don't have to be your friends,” she said, even though she couldn't imagine working every day with people who had spent three years studying to end up defending insurance companies and seeming fine with it, and for whom alcohol didn't even make them interesting.
She thought of the young man, pre-law school Marc he had told her about. He who had gone after work to have a drink at Smyth's around the corner from his tiny apartment in Manhattan, then sat on the roof reading J. M. Coatzee (which she knew was a problem, but blamed it on immaturity, his lack of experience), watching the neighbors barbecue and feeling a foreigner. This was the man she wanted to love, not the check shirt insurance pinch-hitter sitting next to her in the Volvo. But then again he had also been a paralegal in Manhattan, and before that had worked for Wendell Wilke in D.C. He had been turning his clock key in the wrong direction maybe always. And his parents, a mother who kept his room exactly the same, down to the little twin bed not made for bringing anyone home, and the model sailboat and the blue walls, and his father, the might as well be an insurance adjuster or shoe salesman who had a speaker in his pillow piping classical music to help him sleep.
“Let's go,” she'd said.
He looked at his Blackberry. Her number was still in there. He felt a wave of happiness as he thought of hearing her voice. He looked out the window at the Steel Bridge, black and harshly industrial, reminding him of nothing but black-faced coal miners he'd seen on the cover of a book at Powell's earlier that week, no relation to the Steel Bridge, only just as professionally removed from him as those who'd built it. After a while reading Coatzee in the command center, he wound his way around the Columbia to a trail he'd found in a book and hiked until he almost passed out, stopping to sit on a log eating red beans from a can and wanting to cry but not allowing himself to, fearing this would be the beginning of the end and he would end up moving to Hood River and opening a motel.
After work on Monday he felt a little satisfaction at turning in a brief he'd been working on since the week before. He walked two blocks over from the big pink reflecting pool of a building where he worked to Mary's Club and sat in the corner drinking scotch and thinking of her body in the flashing light of the credits of Venus, and her smiling in the tall grass on the top of Mt. Pisgah. They had hiked the gentle hill that was a mountain in Eugene together at least once a week after classes, taking the thin trails through the grass, sometimes sitting in it, he in his big straw hat. He had told her of his grandfather who was fond of wandering, sometimes walking into the forest on family trips in the valley, not to return for hours. He watched the young blond woman in front of him dancing topless for twenty minutes, then went home and sat by the window in his white apartment with the big black bird Picasso and the Deibenkorn he didn't even like until it was time to masturbate and fall asleep counting backward from a thousand, just to be sure.
In the morning he felt like he had melted into the bed and couldn't move. It was cold outside his white down comforter, the window was open. It was grey. He decided to take a personal day and called his assistant.
He thought of her right after he got off the phone. They'd gone to Bend to wade in the river and he'd asked her if she wanted to live there after law school. He had always said things, just to see what they felt like. He didn't really mean them, but she took them to heart. She wanted to live in Bend, have a big garden and a root cellar, can jam and sell it at the Christmas market. “Real life isn't like law school,” he'd said. “But that's the cool thing about Portland, we can have those things there, too. I can't start my career in Bend.” She'd gotten a job at the courthouse as a clerk while he studied for the bar. They'd gotten an apartment together initially, until she got tired of feeling herself become obsolete.
He put on some running shorts and his grey Princeton t-shirt and walked over to the courthouse. He sat on one of the benches next to the elk fountain, across from a man with a miner's beard who was smoking with ruddy yellowish fingers swaying. He felt he knew something. He felt this man, more than any other he had ever seen, could give him advice. He looked up to see her walking up Madison Street toward the courthouse. He watched her, a field mouse, walk across Fourth Avenue. He ran across the park and caught up to her.
“Marc,” she looked horrified, but she was not surprised.
“Hi!” he smiled big and intensely as he had not done since he father gave him a stuffed elephant for passing preschool.
“Hi.”
“How are you?”
“I'm okay.”
“Good. Listen, come have coffee with me.”
“We have a hearing at 8:30.”
“I want to move to Bend.”
“Good for you.”
“Bend ...” he waited for it to sink in. “Let's move to Bend.”
“What?” she smiled like someone had just fed her silicone pudding.
“I want to move to Bend with you.”
“I'm seeing someone,” she lied. She hadn't dated in a month.
“Who is he? Is he a lawyer? Do I know him?”
“He makes bikes.”
“Nice. He makes bikes.”
“It's none of your business. Law school was a mistake for me.”
He looked at her like his eyes were made of buttons.
“I thought you wanted to be a big corporate lawyer, your dream to live in the West Hills and have to work in a city.”
He looked at her. She was so pretty, she had her mother's Native American cheekbones.
“I don't care about that as much anymore.”
“You wouldn't be happy without your career. Even though I never understood how doing insurance defense would help you become a corporate lawyer. There aren't any corporate lawyers in Portland, and if there are, they're all very, very old.” She missed him for a second. She remembered sitting in the park across from him by their house in law school where they would meet during lunch, or after classes. His face had reminded her of a pencil tracing, delicate, like Rimbaud's. He had been so willing to lean back into the grass and just sit there. He had said, “I like being quiet with you.”
He felt old. He felt very, very old. He couldn't walk away, but he did. He kissed her on the cheek in his mind and walked down the sidewalk back over to the strip of mostly empty benches. He glanced at he miner, still smoking and swaying into the distance. “I don't need a root cellar,” he said under his breath as he passed the older dark-suited attorneys and their youthful colleagues in bright unmatching shirts and ties, on their way to morning call. He wandered toward Pioneer Square, feeling comforted by the ornate buildings he knew had been designed by A.E. Doyle, comforted by the Williams & Sonoma bowls he recognized from his mother's kitchen in their display window. He thought of Christmas with his family socked in at the beach near the artichoke fields, little trips, packages of bliss that pockmarked his now unchecked flat-lining trajectory.
Rimbaud had been a sailor; he had sailed to Africa to trade slaves. She had never been able to reconcile the boy who had written the most beautiful poetry she had ever read with a participant in the loss of the most beautiful thing that existed.
Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
Summer 2009
Cari had observed him like a ghost during their relationship. She knew he still allowed himself to listen to John Coltrane and drink scotch after work and into the evening, even though he'd told himself he wouldn't and would ride his bike after work instead. At least it kept him from thinking about her too much. His fear of alcohol dependence was a small price to pay. He had gotten the apartment while he was studying for the bar. She had nodded to herself when she saw it; it was much like the one he'd had his first year of law school; white, sterile, uncomplicated by history. Within his comfort zone. He set up the calfskin chair and ottoman his grandfather had given him next to the wall of windows. He termed this his “command center,” after his father's home office. His father was a tall, facetious assistant vice president of customer relations, always a little too fat and self-satisfied to make it all the way up. Marc bragged that his father had once been considered a potential nominee for California governor, knowing deep down that it had been a shot in the dark, something an assistant chief of staff had thrown out at a cocktail party and no one had taken seriously, except in a fraternity frame of mind. “Yeah, Bud, go for it! I can see that face on yard signs ... you're better looking than the governator!”
His father had had a heart attack four months earlier. His grandfather had died of a heart attack at 61 and he knew it wouldn't be a long time for his father. His mother had she and his father on Weight Watchers and tried her best with her limited knowledge of what was healthy to keep him fit. But he snuck cheap beer onto their sailboat every other weekend, skiffing around the bay by himself. He was a man of almost no real ambition, but with enough respect for pampering to keep up the appearance of having some in order to get paid. Marc had never stood up to his father, or even refused a can of Bud from the doughy hand of the man he had lied to since he could talk. He remembered his father asking him about his dreams when he was little, because he was on ADD medication and nightmares were a side effect, and he'd told him he had dreams of sailing when he had actually dreamed of snakes piling on top of him, slithering around his room and into his orifices.
Marc came out of the shower, the start of a Saturday with no agenda except to review some documents for Monday, which could wait until Sunday. He liked waiting until the last minute sometimes, just to be rebellious. He sat in front of a chocolate croissant and coffee and thought, “I am happy, though I work for the side of the insurance companies. I am happy though I am worse than a DA and don't even theoretically represent any person ... I am happy.” He looked back down at his plain coffee sitting on the bamboo mat, then out the window across the room. From that angle all he could see was the building across the street, but from the command center chair, he could see the river. It was finally the beginning of summer, but this didn't matter to him much. He would go hiking by himself, or bicycling with Real from work, a skinny fifty-two year old with nothing to offer in the way of conversation except Wall Street Journal article summaries and recaps of the two trials he'd had that year.
He looked at his bookshelf. On the bottom was her copy of Tender is the Night. He hadn't been able to get rid of it and realized that he always thought of how it was there, trying to hide on the bottom shelf, but never acknowledged it. He thought about watching Five Easy Pieces and making out on the couch with her the summer before, so thin and beautiful her little body in his big lap, and making love with her in the warm night in the little house they'd shared in law school that was like a farm house and suddenly wanted a cigarette. He had one in a plastic bag that he'd saved from law school, his emergency cigarette for exams that he had never smoked because he had her to call instead.
He remembered the night of the Christmas party, afterward sleeping alone in the room with no curtains, curled up waiting for someone to tell him what to do.
“Oh my goodness!” she had said, smiling and starting to traipse across the back lawn of his new boss' house in Beaverton, the lawn dewing over in the late night cold. “That was the dullest thing ever ... an insult to the word party!”
She'd looked over at his face, stern as she stopped in front of her car door, her expression falling into disappointment like a child being reproached after thinking they'd done well in the Christmas play. They had gotten in the car as at dawn when everyone doesn't talk out of respect for others' sleepiness. Onto the cold suburb road they had driven, it reminding her of long drives she would take alone in college, watching the silhouettes of the hills around Corvallis fold out onto each other, knowing she wasn't alone. She had grown up outside of Sullivan, New Hampshire, on 20 acres. She had told him about the deep yellow Banny eggs that were almost all yolk and the wild turkeys running out of the forest and hanging out with the chickens in the sometimes dusty, sometimes muddy clearing between the chicken house and the pond. What she missed most, she had said, were the cool evening frog songs that would come up from the bordering forest that hid a little bog about the same time as the fireflies started blinking on and off like little lit up potato bugs while she and her brother hit the last few volleys across the badminton net. This hadn't struck a chord with him until he hung out with her the summer of their third year of law school when they lit candles in the back yard of their little farm house and he had felt the summer evenings come on strong like they had never existed before.
After the “party” he had floated through a red light without realizing it, and turned into a strip mall. The grocery store was still open. He parked as far away as possible from it, so far away that she wondered where he was going when he got out of the car. She sat watching him walk, he always looked heavy when he walked, being so tall and thick and dressed in clothes that didn't fit him.
She got out and walked after him at the pace he was going, watching him enter through the automatic doors as though through a portal. He wandered down a fruit and vegetable corridor and over to the side aisle, stopping in front of the pomegranate juice to stare at it. She came to stand beside him in line.
“Is there anything else we need?” he asked.
She thought of several things. “No, I don't think so.”
In the car his body felt heavy as though he had gone swimming in his clothes, and did not turn the key.
“What's wrong?” she had said, knowing how futile the question was.
“I'm not like those people, they weren't even talking to each other. Where were they? Did you see the flowers, silk roses! in the bathroom?”
She was relieved, until she realized she couldn't respond honestly without pissing him off, because she knew he'd take the job anyway.
“You don't have to talk to them, they don't have to be your friends,” she said, even though she couldn't imagine working every day with people who had spent three years studying to end up defending insurance companies and seeming fine with it, and for whom alcohol didn't even make them interesting.
She thought of the young man, pre-law school Marc he had told her about. He who had gone after work to have a drink at Smyth's around the corner from his tiny apartment in Manhattan, then sat on the roof reading J. M. Coatzee (which she knew was a problem, but blamed it on immaturity, his lack of experience), watching the neighbors barbecue and feeling a foreigner. This was the man she wanted to love, not the check shirt insurance pinch-hitter sitting next to her in the Volvo. But then again he had also been a paralegal in Manhattan, and before that had worked for Wendell Wilke in D.C. He had been turning his clock key in the wrong direction maybe always. And his parents, a mother who kept his room exactly the same, down to the little twin bed not made for bringing anyone home, and the model sailboat and the blue walls, and his father, the might as well be an insurance adjuster or shoe salesman who had a speaker in his pillow piping classical music to help him sleep.
“Let's go,” she'd said.
He looked at his Blackberry. Her number was still in there. He felt a wave of happiness as he thought of hearing her voice. He looked out the window at the Steel Bridge, black and harshly industrial, reminding him of nothing but black-faced coal miners he'd seen on the cover of a book at Powell's earlier that week, no relation to the Steel Bridge, only just as professionally removed from him as those who'd built it. After a while reading Coatzee in the command center, he wound his way around the Columbia to a trail he'd found in a book and hiked until he almost passed out, stopping to sit on a log eating red beans from a can and wanting to cry but not allowing himself to, fearing this would be the beginning of the end and he would end up moving to Hood River and opening a motel.
After work on Monday he felt a little satisfaction at turning in a brief he'd been working on since the week before. He walked two blocks over from the big pink reflecting pool of a building where he worked to Mary's Club and sat in the corner drinking scotch and thinking of her body in the flashing light of the credits of Venus, and her smiling in the tall grass on the top of Mt. Pisgah. They had hiked the gentle hill that was a mountain in Eugene together at least once a week after classes, taking the thin trails through the grass, sometimes sitting in it, he in his big straw hat. He had told her of his grandfather who was fond of wandering, sometimes walking into the forest on family trips in the valley, not to return for hours. He watched the young blond woman in front of him dancing topless for twenty minutes, then went home and sat by the window in his white apartment with the big black bird Picasso and the Deibenkorn he didn't even like until it was time to masturbate and fall asleep counting backward from a thousand, just to be sure.
In the morning he felt like he had melted into the bed and couldn't move. It was cold outside his white down comforter, the window was open. It was grey. He decided to take a personal day and called his assistant.
He thought of her right after he got off the phone. They'd gone to Bend to wade in the river and he'd asked her if she wanted to live there after law school. He had always said things, just to see what they felt like. He didn't really mean them, but she took them to heart. She wanted to live in Bend, have a big garden and a root cellar, can jam and sell it at the Christmas market. “Real life isn't like law school,” he'd said. “But that's the cool thing about Portland, we can have those things there, too. I can't start my career in Bend.” She'd gotten a job at the courthouse as a clerk while he studied for the bar. They'd gotten an apartment together initially, until she got tired of feeling herself become obsolete.
He put on some running shorts and his grey Princeton t-shirt and walked over to the courthouse. He sat on one of the benches next to the elk fountain, across from a man with a miner's beard who was smoking with ruddy yellowish fingers swaying. He felt he knew something. He felt this man, more than any other he had ever seen, could give him advice. He looked up to see her walking up Madison Street toward the courthouse. He watched her, a field mouse, walk across Fourth Avenue. He ran across the park and caught up to her.
“Marc,” she looked horrified, but she was not surprised.
“Hi!” he smiled big and intensely as he had not done since he father gave him a stuffed elephant for passing preschool.
“Hi.”
“How are you?”
“I'm okay.”
“Good. Listen, come have coffee with me.”
“We have a hearing at 8:30.”
“I want to move to Bend.”
“Good for you.”
“Bend ...” he waited for it to sink in. “Let's move to Bend.”
“What?” she smiled like someone had just fed her silicone pudding.
“I want to move to Bend with you.”
“I'm seeing someone,” she lied. She hadn't dated in a month.
“Who is he? Is he a lawyer? Do I know him?”
“He makes bikes.”
“Nice. He makes bikes.”
“It's none of your business. Law school was a mistake for me.”
He looked at her like his eyes were made of buttons.
“I thought you wanted to be a big corporate lawyer, your dream to live in the West Hills and have to work in a city.”
He looked at her. She was so pretty, she had her mother's Native American cheekbones.
“I don't care about that as much anymore.”
“You wouldn't be happy without your career. Even though I never understood how doing insurance defense would help you become a corporate lawyer. There aren't any corporate lawyers in Portland, and if there are, they're all very, very old.” She missed him for a second. She remembered sitting in the park across from him by their house in law school where they would meet during lunch, or after classes. His face had reminded her of a pencil tracing, delicate, like Rimbaud's. He had been so willing to lean back into the grass and just sit there. He had said, “I like being quiet with you.”
He felt old. He felt very, very old. He couldn't walk away, but he did. He kissed her on the cheek in his mind and walked down the sidewalk back over to the strip of mostly empty benches. He glanced at he miner, still smoking and swaying into the distance. “I don't need a root cellar,” he said under his breath as he passed the older dark-suited attorneys and their youthful colleagues in bright unmatching shirts and ties, on their way to morning call. He wandered toward Pioneer Square, feeling comforted by the ornate buildings he knew had been designed by A.E. Doyle, comforted by the Williams & Sonoma bowls he recognized from his mother's kitchen in their display window. He thought of Christmas with his family socked in at the beach near the artichoke fields, little trips, packages of bliss that pockmarked his now unchecked flat-lining trajectory.
Rimbaud had been a sailor; he had sailed to Africa to trade slaves. She had never been able to reconcile the boy who had written the most beautiful poetry she had ever read with a participant in the loss of the most beautiful thing that existed.
Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
Summer 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
