Sitting in the library, it seemed like the best plan was to put the entire business out of her mind. It would be better, she thought, if the rest of the semester – the year, her life – went by without another thought of all the nagging questions planted during her conversation with him last week. She was a person completely independent of all the forces around her. She was a force of nature, a creature unimpeded by the pressures pounding on everyone else. She was a rock, she was convinced, and nothing would shake her from the path, the path she had chosen, the road she had been on for something like half her life.
Then they sat innocently talking about life and family, but he kept making sharp turns, doubling back into her carefully constructed world when she was least prepared. The conversation lifted long-hidden questions up from under the crinkling leaves and blew them in her face like the bellows at the fireplace. She returned home and settled onto her old course, only with lurking, devilish doubts scooting between the study carrels and mocking her like schoolchildren in a strange neighborhood.
If she stopped to let herself think about it, the doubt broke through her fierce resolve – the trait in her most admired by her father – and ran roughshod over her carefully composed emotional architecture. Things were to move through the approved channels in this structure. Emotions weren’t admitted on an ad hoc basis. There was a process. She would flag these steps along the way in her conversations, saying, “I’ll have to think about this more,” and literally queuing it up for deeper reflection at some designated later hour. This was the way of maintaining control, and not in an unpleasant way.
To be sure, she wasn’t a cold or distant person. Rather, she enjoyed the sensations – from head to heart – that accompanied the emotions she felt deeply – unconventional feelings she characterized with unemotional words like “connection” and “synchronicity” and “grace.”
And this distracting, infiltrative feeling now, this was the first one to breach her defenses in quite some time, the first to mount such a campaign not merely to call the question about a relationship or a job, but rather to put all of it on trial.
The library was useless, she thought as she walked across the crumbly path to her apartment. This strange little half-loop of apartments had been her refuge for months and months, shared with friends and strangers alike. Living in the half-life of graduate school – too much work to call life easy, nothing like a career to convince people she wasn’t somehow slumming – she found the people accepting. They had seen graduate students come and go, but some never left, slipping into the brackish world of academia like a pair of worn-out shoes.
People around her here had long reconciled the idea that they wouldn’t know her long; she was destined for greatness, despite her unsurpassing modesty. She believed in the plan, and she made that clear. Her footfalls – sometimes coming fast as she hit the fine gravel for a morning run – echoed around the courtyard with a sense of purpose.
She reached the outer door of her little building, and stopped short, as if someone called her name. She half-spun and felt her pockets for her four little keys on a ring, and nothing was there. The bag on her shoulder was quickly searched, then the smaller bag inside that one, but no keys were revealed. She stood still for a moment. The functional part of her immediately knew to retrace the steps, back along the crumbly path, across the block of slightly shabby university-owned housing where untenured professors bring their acolytes for harrowing peeks into the world of academic dead-ends, over an ocean of asphalt for continuing education students, through the unguarded night entrance for library employees and heavy library users and back to the carrel where she began her reverie.
But her feet wouldn’t move. Rather, she stood stock still, feeling like the air flowing into her lungs was just enough to keep her alive. She wasn’t gasping for air, but she felt that any movement – any expenditure of energy at all – would have brought her to her knees. Her mind was unmoored and alit on a story her grandfather told about a Spanish superstition that a man who survives four attempts on his lift is protected by God. Her grandfather had joked that there were better ways of getting closer to God than dodging all these bullets. She knew she had kept everything together despite adversity and suppressing the wanderlust that nipped at her heels. But the tiny sliver of instability, the chink in her armor barely noticed after their conversation last week had grown somehow. She felt a chill and glanced up through a lock of hair loosed from her barrette. The clouds she knew were hovering overhead shifted silently to reveal a mottled half moon that looked as if it was shining for someone else.
To sit still, he thought, would be a great gift. To cease this numbing, jittery peregrination, zig-zagging for this reason and that to talk and talk and talk would be a kind of peace he hadn’t felt in a long time. It was his own fault, of course, this life of movement and jawboning. His restless soul had been trained by fears and an inner voice never satisfied to keep moving, not making much of anything from the people he knew to the places he connected. Just go and go, never stop, like a shark, moving forward to drag water into its lungs.
But here, in this desolate airport, trapped in the hours-long gap between stand-by flights, there was no possibility of movement. The goddamn building was a circle and he had wandered it once and then twice before giving up on being different from the few other airport waiters. The absurd time of day, his flat batteries and read magazines meant there were no distractions, no strangers in the airport café, nothing to steer his mind away from her.
He didn’t even have a right to be disappointed. Nothing in their brief interaction had given him anything like a stake. It’s just his way to zero in on the person least likely to give a damn about his opinion and forge a connection, as if he craved deep inside a person who would challenge his thinking and push back on his inflated persona, forcing out the air and making him gasp, feeling something.
They talked late into the night, meandering through a range of shares and keeps, and handing over both, for some reason. She unsettled his illusion of outer calm when she drilled into the ideas he had floated casually about the nature of the human connection most call love. He described, in language he hadn’t used before, the little rivulets he had sensed but not witnessed that course through person when that emotional link is created. He switched easily between pronouns to maintain ambiguity, and found himself describing an unwieldy hybrid of puppy love and vertigo. His brief description maybe lapsed into a form of ham-fisted poetry, but her gaze never wavered.
He stopped, and figured he had said too much, or lost her somewhere a hundred circular words back. Her expression was skeptical and focused at once. The air filled for a moment between them with something almost palpable like doubt or guilt or regret. He wasn’t sure if, in that instant, he had crossed some boundary and mistakenly revealed the broken man within, or perhaps made a new friend into an enemy somehow. She remained silent, looking mostly into his eyes while her brow furrowed slightly.
“I’ll have to think about this more,” she said, after shifting her body slightly to face him directly.
The four little keys were missing and frozen for the moment in the space between going inside and finding the keys, she stood staring at the moon’s mottled light falling elsewhere in the little courtyard. The word “reflect” and its derivations hung in her Broca’s brain as she stood with her hand lingering at her waist, all her bags having dropped to the ground, somehow. The sliver of uncertainty he had somehow slipped past her elaborate defenses was metastasizing, exploding into a kind of full-blown paralysis, and she felt lost. The two thousand feet of sidewalk, gravel and macadam might as well have been ten thousand miles. She was rooted to the spot, and her ordinarily nearly inexhaustible energy suddenly disappeared, like the water that rushed violently out to her beloved ocean when the rusty municipal floodgates opened without warning.
First she thought he was mocking her gently, pushing back on her ideas about people and love because she was younger, and kept her parents’ relationship on a pedestal. She refuted this position absurdly by revealing more than she planned – more than she normally would to a good friend let alone someone she barely knew. She confessed momentarily without shame that this idealized relationship was built on a shaky foundation, and he seized on this without malice to dig deeper into his ad hoc thesis about the elusive nature of love, even for those whose lives were inexorably linked. His arguments – a rhetorical stroke of luck, he admitted – folded comfortably back into each other, reinforcing earlier doubts he had evinced about the way people make decisions about their lives and then won’t subject them to revision. None of this was new for her, and if she had the ability to step outside herself at that moment she surely would have seen his careless episode of devil’s advocacy as simply that. But standing on the gravel path a few feet from her door, absorbing all those doubts and questions and comparisons like body blows, she wasn’t capable of any such defensive maneuvers. Her stomach lurched some, she mentally recorded, and the fine hairs on her arm were standing up, but not from the cold.
He walked home feeling ugly and wondering if he had made a fool of himself. It was not a feeling he enjoyed. His mouth tasted ashy from too much wine and the hot dry air from the fire, and no doubt from talking. The fearful sensation that he had angered her, or snowed her under with his possibly insane ravings, or portrayed himself as a black-hearted skeptic all played in his mind as the snowfall picked up.
He was talking to her, and he was responding to her, but he was equally troubled by the dialogue happening in his head throughout. His life was this struggle to stop moving, to moor itself, to be at rest. As a squall of snow danced in the sulfur streetlight, his quick pace carried him past an break in the row of cabins separating him from the creek in the valley below. The sound of the water -- amplified as it bounced up the valley's steep ascent -- snared him and his heard turned slightly toward the muted roar. Even this pause felt like a failure.
When he was a boy, he feared the basement of his home, believing irrationally that once he began the voyage up the staircase, he could never tarry. He was to pound up those 13 steps without so much as a hiccup to impede his progress. Every time -- every single time -- he climbed those stairs, an image took vague shape in his head of some shadowy evil a pace, an inch, a hair behind him and ready to pounce if only he would hold his step for an instant.
Some time passed, possibly, or maybe it was only a minute or two. The door behind her opened and the spell was broken when her downstairs neighbor said, “Hey, V_______.” She recovered slowly, mumbling inside herself as she bent to pick up the bags. From a few inches closer to the ground, she could see the four little keys maybe ten paces back along the path, looking dull in the sulfur streetlight and somehow dodging the cold light of the moon.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Thoughts on My First Visit to Jerusalem
I came to Jerusalem to train some NGO people on using the media for something or other. The trainings are going well. Jerusalem is a strange place.
On the Nature of Time: The people here obviously live in a parallel universe, where every assumption has a caveat designed to make life more complicated and difficult to manage. I'm here during the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah (started last night) and the Muslim month of Ramadan (starts tonight). These two holidays represent the beginning of new years on each religion's calendar. They also represent the end of daylight savings time, roughly. Except the Arab's I'm meeting with in the West Bank are falling back tomorrow, while Jerusalem and the rest of Israel is falling back Saturday. I can go back in time as long as I can get through the Israeli checkpoints into Ramallah.
On Explosions: The odds were very slim that I would encounter anything like a real explosion of any kind while I was here. Jerusalem probably hasn't had a bombing in a few years. But because I am naturally paranoid, I must remind myself relentlessly of this fact, and walk around the city freely repeating like a prayer under my breath "nothing will explode." Therefore, when I diesel truck starts just as I'm walking by, and I jump half out of my shoes, it is from preparation that I am jumping, not fear.
On Explosions II: My second night here, traffic was very bad crossing Jerusalem. The roads, which normally function at capacity, were suddenly buckling under more cars than they could bear. The reason was that two mysterious packages were found and destroyed in controlled explosions by Israeli police. As I listened to this story at dinner, I remembered sitting in my room after my training and hearing what sounded like an explosion through the opened window. I dismissed it as more of my paranoia. Who's paranoid now?
On a Backpack: Today I went to explore Jerusalem's Old City. I've been to other open-air markets in the Arab World -- most notably Khan el-Khalili in Cairo -- and the Old City isn't much different from it. It's like Khan el-Khalili with the most important sites of three major religions sprinkled here and there, seemingly at random. There are tons and tons of useless cheap Chinese-manufactured junk, acres of fresh fruits and vegetables, complete with incredibly loud hawkers who wail the price and quantity of their wares at startling volume. My favorite piece of Chinese crap was a backpack with a picture of Snoopy and the word "Spoony," like he was America's favorite beagle, and he loved to cuddle.
On the Old City: The most compelling characteristic of the Old City is its mystery. There is no signage to speak of, no way for ordinary people to maneuver without whipping out a map and inviting aggressive targeting by beggars, shop-keepers and rolling limes from the fruit market. I decided on a system where I would walk aimlessly until I found a store with something cheap enough I wouldn't mind buying it. Better still would be if I wanted said item. Anyhow, I would go in, and buy whatever, and then use this exchange as an excuse to ask directions. This was a good plan except for two problems: 1) I am bad at following directions; 2) these directions make exactly no sense whatsoever. To find the Holy Sepulcher, an Armenian man told me to take a left and another left, presumably at "streets." I bought a photograph from him. I bought fabric from a man who told me to make two rights, "go something of five meters" and make a left to find the Dome of the Rock. Hours passed and by the time I bought a very expensive bottle of water to get fresh directions, I was told it had closed for the night. The two lefts in fact took me directly to the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher.
On the Whimsical Nature of the Location of Things: I found the Holy Sepulcher and went inside. Truthfully, I wasn't really thinking as I headed over there what exactly old Sepulcher really was. Of course, this is the church built on the ruins of the very place where Jesus crucified, and where he was interred after said crucifiction. This is a very serious place. It is two lefts from an Armenian photo shop. Following these directions, you approach this church from the left, or, as I'll randomly assign it, from the East. There is a large courtyard where exhausted pilgrims breath. heavily and lounge on two thousand year old rocks. On leaving the Sepulchre, I notice a small passageway on the right, or, as I've randomly decided, the West side of the courtyard. I pass through this passage, and arrive in a spot I stood an hour before, COMPLETELY UNAWARE THAT THE FINAL RESTING PLACE OF CHRIST WAS TEN FEET AWAY.
On Approaching the Final Resting Place of the Human Form of Jesus Christ: I approached it completely unawares, and found before me a stone tablet not roped off and protected from people and the elements, but rather touched, kissed, fondled and kissed again by all manner of people. Pasty Europeans toting plastic bags loaded with who-knows-what from market stalls right outside were besotted at the site of the stone tablet on which Jesus was laid in the tomb alleged to hold him for a mere three days. There are no signs inside the Holy Sepulchre not in Greek. I only knew this was, in fact, a resting-place stone because a gigantic mosaic directly behind the slab portrayed a dead Jesus laying on a stone slab. I was not prepared for any of this, and I leaned casually against the wall accidentally checking out the underpants of prostrate Christians and wondered what the fuss was about the slab. Then I noticed the mosaic.
On Touring the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: From the Jesus slab, a visitor can walk around the church if one wishes to increase one's own befuddlement. There are alcoves in which beautifully detailed mosaics of Mary, Jesus and other biblical luminaries are installed, often over a jumble of Greek letters and perhaps a display case carefully illuminating a piece of rock, or a different piece of rock. There are several of these as you encircle what is clearly the centerpiece of the whole shebang, the tomb of Christ. Here, more tourists, with unattractive t-shirts, matching badges advertising their tour company (presumably so they aren't inadvertently subsumed onto another tour and sent back to a different country by accident), and noisy collections of shopping bags again congeal. A priest is singing to his followers and the rest of us while an enormously loud but completely concealed pipe organ blaringly joins him for the chorus. Then he stops, and a soft-spoken British priest tells the people that their introduction is complete (in Latin?) and now, four at a time, they may enter the tomb of Christ. An African Franciscan monk steps in to handle crowd control. Immediately, there is nearly a fight between a disorderly Russian tour group clearly attempting to cut in line (they didn't even listen to the singing/organ combo!) and an extremely orderly German group waiting in a line with fanny packs and some walking sticks.
On the Streets in the Old City: Like the other ancient city/open air bazaars I have visited, Jerusalem's Old City has an extremely loose definition of the word "streets." Streets are essentially any passageway navigable by something as large as a housecat, or larger. And there are cats here, slinking down impossibly narrow shafts and looking at you as if to say, "too fat for this "street" idiot?"
On the Very Nature of Oldness: This is one of the world's oldest places. There is so much oldness here, the age of things seems to be taken for granted. Oldness is worn by buildings in America in grand style. The floors creek reverentially and most everything is protected from humans by velvet ropes, plexiglass or signs that explain we're not to use flash photography. Nothing gets to be old in this way in Jerusalem. Probably such restrictions would put half the city off limits. Pilgrims slobber freely on Jesus's own cold stone. God knows what they do in side the tomb. I stumbled upon some Coptic church (seemed important), and was directed to go look at the cistern where holy water is drawn. It's a good echo chamber. Trash floats in the water, and what looks like a campfire, or arson, is evident across the open space above the water. Ancient churches across Jerusalem sport television antenna like midwestern homes in the fifties.
Two cell phones. Cheap/easy
Garbage
Semantics Wall, Palestine, Jerusalem
On the Nature of Time: The people here obviously live in a parallel universe, where every assumption has a caveat designed to make life more complicated and difficult to manage. I'm here during the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah (started last night) and the Muslim month of Ramadan (starts tonight). These two holidays represent the beginning of new years on each religion's calendar. They also represent the end of daylight savings time, roughly. Except the Arab's I'm meeting with in the West Bank are falling back tomorrow, while Jerusalem and the rest of Israel is falling back Saturday. I can go back in time as long as I can get through the Israeli checkpoints into Ramallah.
On Explosions: The odds were very slim that I would encounter anything like a real explosion of any kind while I was here. Jerusalem probably hasn't had a bombing in a few years. But because I am naturally paranoid, I must remind myself relentlessly of this fact, and walk around the city freely repeating like a prayer under my breath "nothing will explode." Therefore, when I diesel truck starts just as I'm walking by, and I jump half out of my shoes, it is from preparation that I am jumping, not fear.
On Explosions II: My second night here, traffic was very bad crossing Jerusalem. The roads, which normally function at capacity, were suddenly buckling under more cars than they could bear. The reason was that two mysterious packages were found and destroyed in controlled explosions by Israeli police. As I listened to this story at dinner, I remembered sitting in my room after my training and hearing what sounded like an explosion through the opened window. I dismissed it as more of my paranoia. Who's paranoid now?
On a Backpack: Today I went to explore Jerusalem's Old City. I've been to other open-air markets in the Arab World -- most notably Khan el-Khalili in Cairo -- and the Old City isn't much different from it. It's like Khan el-Khalili with the most important sites of three major religions sprinkled here and there, seemingly at random. There are tons and tons of useless cheap Chinese-manufactured junk, acres of fresh fruits and vegetables, complete with incredibly loud hawkers who wail the price and quantity of their wares at startling volume. My favorite piece of Chinese crap was a backpack with a picture of Snoopy and the word "Spoony," like he was America's favorite beagle, and he loved to cuddle.
On the Old City: The most compelling characteristic of the Old City is its mystery. There is no signage to speak of, no way for ordinary people to maneuver without whipping out a map and inviting aggressive targeting by beggars, shop-keepers and rolling limes from the fruit market. I decided on a system where I would walk aimlessly until I found a store with something cheap enough I wouldn't mind buying it. Better still would be if I wanted said item. Anyhow, I would go in, and buy whatever, and then use this exchange as an excuse to ask directions. This was a good plan except for two problems: 1) I am bad at following directions; 2) these directions make exactly no sense whatsoever. To find the Holy Sepulcher, an Armenian man told me to take a left and another left, presumably at "streets." I bought a photograph from him. I bought fabric from a man who told me to make two rights, "go something of five meters" and make a left to find the Dome of the Rock. Hours passed and by the time I bought a very expensive bottle of water to get fresh directions, I was told it had closed for the night. The two lefts in fact took me directly to the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher.
On the Whimsical Nature of the Location of Things: I found the Holy Sepulcher and went inside. Truthfully, I wasn't really thinking as I headed over there what exactly old Sepulcher really was. Of course, this is the church built on the ruins of the very place where Jesus crucified, and where he was interred after said crucifiction. This is a very serious place. It is two lefts from an Armenian photo shop. Following these directions, you approach this church from the left, or, as I'll randomly assign it, from the East. There is a large courtyard where exhausted pilgrims breath. heavily and lounge on two thousand year old rocks. On leaving the Sepulchre, I notice a small passageway on the right, or, as I've randomly decided, the West side of the courtyard. I pass through this passage, and arrive in a spot I stood an hour before, COMPLETELY UNAWARE THAT THE FINAL RESTING PLACE OF CHRIST WAS TEN FEET AWAY.
On Approaching the Final Resting Place of the Human Form of Jesus Christ: I approached it completely unawares, and found before me a stone tablet not roped off and protected from people and the elements, but rather touched, kissed, fondled and kissed again by all manner of people. Pasty Europeans toting plastic bags loaded with who-knows-what from market stalls right outside were besotted at the site of the stone tablet on which Jesus was laid in the tomb alleged to hold him for a mere three days. There are no signs inside the Holy Sepulchre not in Greek. I only knew this was, in fact, a resting-place stone because a gigantic mosaic directly behind the slab portrayed a dead Jesus laying on a stone slab. I was not prepared for any of this, and I leaned casually against the wall accidentally checking out the underpants of prostrate Christians and wondered what the fuss was about the slab. Then I noticed the mosaic.
On Touring the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: From the Jesus slab, a visitor can walk around the church if one wishes to increase one's own befuddlement. There are alcoves in which beautifully detailed mosaics of Mary, Jesus and other biblical luminaries are installed, often over a jumble of Greek letters and perhaps a display case carefully illuminating a piece of rock, or a different piece of rock. There are several of these as you encircle what is clearly the centerpiece of the whole shebang, the tomb of Christ. Here, more tourists, with unattractive t-shirts, matching badges advertising their tour company (presumably so they aren't inadvertently subsumed onto another tour and sent back to a different country by accident), and noisy collections of shopping bags again congeal. A priest is singing to his followers and the rest of us while an enormously loud but completely concealed pipe organ blaringly joins him for the chorus. Then he stops, and a soft-spoken British priest tells the people that their introduction is complete (in Latin?) and now, four at a time, they may enter the tomb of Christ. An African Franciscan monk steps in to handle crowd control. Immediately, there is nearly a fight between a disorderly Russian tour group clearly attempting to cut in line (they didn't even listen to the singing/organ combo!) and an extremely orderly German group waiting in a line with fanny packs and some walking sticks.
On the Streets in the Old City: Like the other ancient city/open air bazaars I have visited, Jerusalem's Old City has an extremely loose definition of the word "streets." Streets are essentially any passageway navigable by something as large as a housecat, or larger. And there are cats here, slinking down impossibly narrow shafts and looking at you as if to say, "too fat for this "street" idiot?"
On the Very Nature of Oldness: This is one of the world's oldest places. There is so much oldness here, the age of things seems to be taken for granted. Oldness is worn by buildings in America in grand style. The floors creek reverentially and most everything is protected from humans by velvet ropes, plexiglass or signs that explain we're not to use flash photography. Nothing gets to be old in this way in Jerusalem. Probably such restrictions would put half the city off limits. Pilgrims slobber freely on Jesus's own cold stone. God knows what they do in side the tomb. I stumbled upon some Coptic church (seemed important), and was directed to go look at the cistern where holy water is drawn. It's a good echo chamber. Trash floats in the water, and what looks like a campfire, or arson, is evident across the open space above the water. Ancient churches across Jerusalem sport television antenna like midwestern homes in the fifties.
Two cell phones. Cheap/easy
Garbage
Semantics Wall, Palestine, Jerusalem
Sunday, February 11, 2007
beer pig stories
“Yeah. So she was like: oh yeah, I love when a guy’s got big balls…”
----------
Where does he find them? That’s the only thing I ever really want to know.
He’ll go on about his dick. His dick in this pig’s hole. His dick going in and out of whatshisname’s girl’s mouth, etc.
I don’t care about any of this shit. I just want to know where he finds them. That’s all. These broads. But I never ask. I never ask or say anything while he’s soliloquizing about his abhorred infidelities. And it bothers me that I don’t. I just hit him with the placating “really?’s” and the “oh shit!’s”. That’s all he needs while he drives like Mr. Magoo and tells me beer pig stories.
The ten-years-ago me, woulda smacked him in the back of the head during one of these tales. I woulda told him that his dick stinks and it’s gonna kill his wife. But I don’t.
It’s probably because my face is fucked up. I can’t talk for any prolonged period of time because it’ll get noticed. My words’ll come out all half-assed and garbled ‘cause I want the staring to cease. I got Thomas’ English Muffin cheeks. Nook and cranny scars from zits. All over my face. I’ve seen people who got it worse than me; but it’s rare.
I used to get nasty zits back in high school playing games that required helmets. The ten-years-ago me. Every tackle would rupture a new zit or zit cluster. My face and chest would be caked with dried blood after a game when I had a good amount of contact behind the plate. This is what led to the moon pocks that I lament today. I would’ve quit the team and taken zany yearbook pictures of all the “most likely to’s”; if I had a crystal ball illuminated with images of my marred, future face.
I notice that when people talk to me, they rub their faces. They probe their always-perfect epidermis with curious fingers to feel if they have what I have. It’s almost as if they’re in a horrible dream where every mirror they look into reflects Edward James Almos. They need their flesh-enrobed phalanges to reassure them that their face remains a still saucer of butter cream. I could complain a hungry dog off a chuck wagon if I wanted to about my facial plight. Truth be told, I could have something worse. Cleft palate would be bad. But still, the dermatological problem sponges up that last little puddle of self-esteem on my confidence kitchen countertop.
----------
“When I saw you up McDonald’s, all sweaty and dirty, that made me so…”
I tuned him out like I literally used to do Jack Tripper right before he made a misunderstanding ass out of himself at the Regal Beagle.
“…She wanted the wang, dude.”
…“Oh shit, really?”
While he unabashedly crafted the golden god-chicks dig me-I fuck it all- self-portrait, I drifted.
With the window down, I could breathe in the spring. Feel the air that reminded me of cutting school with a new pair of sneakers on. Air that was full with the promise of finding someone with the same pet peeves as me: someone who reviles nose-breathers and is also just as concerned about newlyweds who choose Disney World as their honeymoon spot as I am.
His mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear anything he was saying. The whites of his eyes were creeping me out. I homed in on them. I studied the capillaries. The moisture content. The eyelashes index-finger-summoning me. Pointing. Telling me, this is where the truth is. This is where you’ll find the poisonous dog. The whites told me that he does bumps off of toilet-tank tops in the bathroom at DP’s with that guy who looks like Koy Detmer. The whites told me that he’s still banging Chris’ wife. Fat Eric’s fat wife probably got done right here in this very seat I’m sitting in. They said he kicks dogs because his convict father does too. They said he’s the worst kind. There’s no salvation for him. End this ridiculous friendship. He’ll never be the funny kid you grew up with ever again. Your embracing of the Jimminy Cricket role in this cock-sucker’s life is commendable, but ineffectual.
----------
I thought about the new ballpark. We were almost there. At least he loves the Fightin’s. I was impatient. I couldn’t wait for the underwhelmingly less famous pinstripes to take the field. We’d park and get out. His beer pig stories, my hammered complexion and his whites would stay right here in this fucking car. Where they belong.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)