Rocked to sleep by some ambient
noise, with a classic, indiscernible rhythm, his head sways and he falls back.
He allows his body to bounce a few volatile times on the cushions behind him,
he calls, “Princess…”
*
I
would have done it, too. A tiny shot in the crook of the arm and it’s like the
best sex you could ever imagine. If you are in real deep, I hear it’s even
better than that. The fast life moves slower than you’d think, and here we are.
Thinking- or waiting too passively to accomplish anything notable, but that’s
all we want- maybe one day the writing scrawled in a hurried hand on the
bathroom stall doors will make it to the main stage- scoring a spread in the
New Yorker, or some Canadian anarchist rag. I’ve always heard, “my word is my
bond,” but when will someone buy into that, or perhaps listen to me for once. A
leap of faith for the pedestrian.
The
pedestrian- because when you think about it, that’s all the little ants are
that walk around carrying three times their own body weight to some mound of
dirt, set in succinct, fairly unreasonable lines of intent. Walking to work, to
the train, car or coffee shop. Staring at the screens and diverting gazes away
from fellow pedestrians, their peers. With all respect paid, they are our peers
and we ignore them. Bumping shoulders with a cringe.
*
On
good days, we’re sitting on the stoop, with the people and the birds. They pick
at the scraps, feeding indiscriminately without a thought in their minds but to
consume enough to carry them through to the next day, the people and the birds.
No one notices the six of us, melting into the steps of someone else’s abode,
pretending our backs are flush against some primitive adobe structure, set in
some far away primitive mountain slant.
It
is a hot day and we wait, like everyone else. But, instead of passively moving
through nothing as the flowing lousy public does, we wait and watch the masses
move. Passive, perhaps in its own right, but with the crystalline beads of
sweat moving in swift streams from our hairline to the crested drip at our
chins, we productively conserve. Pretending we’re not suffering like everything
else in the heat of the day and in the responsibility for moving to then next
spot, to work, the car or the coffee shop. We don’t have enough money to buy a
glass of water, let alone a five-dollar coffee. There is a tin can in front of my feet that I have been
tapping without much vigilance for the past couple of hours, in a meager
attempt to get some lukewarm coinage from a tepid passerby, for the tepid
traveler I look like.
James
and I had been walking for a couple of day before Cath, Kevin and Josh showed
up in the city. My place was down South Huntington, if you turn by the gas
station on route nine, but I haven’t paid the landlord bitch for a couple of
months. The charm my mother taught me, in the guise of politeness, seems to
only work when you don’t owe someone a couple thousand, so we split.
Rose, a friend,
had asked the two of us to jump in on her business plan. Some art collective
they were starting down in Southie. They gutted one of the warehouses and came
across some blind funding to pump the meat into the socialist-cult-commune
artists’ residence Rose has been fighting for since her underappreciated stint
at Mass Art with my brother. I had been thinking about it.
We decided on the
streets that buzz with buses, the hum of some motorized bike, or the rhythmic
peddles of the hipsters’ horse. The paved carpets of the private turned public,
a new gallery display with whitewashed walls. I would call the exhibit; “Fluxus of Post-Modern Shit in Concrete”
with no subjects but the omnipotent subjective data concerning the “real” us
with our “real” friends in “real” time. Little ants on little devices, all
moving in the opposite direction, going to the same nowhere place. That was my
proposal for Rose. She laughed at me, kindly I’m sure, and told me I was an
idealist. James and I decided to cop out and just join in later during an
opening for some free wine and cheese.
*
Someone
dropped a Dunkin Donuts gift card near a bus stop sometime before we stumbled
under the black metal overhang. That’s a paradox or something. We grabbed it
and ran with a little more paranoia in our step them was probably necessary,
given it was mid-afternoon and everyone looked sweaty and bored. It had been a
couple of days since we had had a cup of coffee and when your mouth waters in
anticipation for their corporate, slightly burned beans- you deserve a hot
chalice or two. There was enough on the card to get us all something to put in
our stomachs. Like every other day of our years, we sat and watched everyone
else go about what needed to get done. Against the John Hancock building, his
metal skeleton elegantly exposed with blackened, one-way mirror glass, making a
smooth heated backrest. Forty-two stories of business meetings and phone calls
to China.
*
The
cats still living at my place were throwing a party. While the six of us sat in
a sort of authorial daze, with our own narration of the system in front of us,
sipping coffee in silence- I turned around and Pat, a cat, was sitting next to
James who was next to me. Without my prompting him, he spilled what was
sheltered in our monologues:
“I can’t imagine
where we will end up.”
I kissed him in greeting on his
painted cheek. Cath passed him her last sips of coffee and asked about the
large cart parked beside us. Pat had just started his own “gallery” as he
proudly looked at the collection of ceramics, t-shirt designs and weirdly cut
canvases with his trademark, “The Forty and the Butt: a twist on the children’s
story,” painted on them. If you asked him what children’s story, he would just
wheel himself away because there was no children’s story- it was just a
soon-to-be sensation, so he says. We laughed, he didn’t. He handed Cath a cup
from the cart that she had gotten up to dote on, and invited us to the party.
“It’s your going away digs, Shan.” Smiling at me while he unlocked his cart’s
wheels.
I
hadn’t intended on leaving. I loved our place, where the porch swung
arbitrarily in the slight wind would wave our way, and the kitchen had the
distinct stink of the compost by the back door. My cat was still there, and I
had heard from Kevin who had been crashing there before Cath and Josh showed
up, that Gerry the puss had somehow gotten a hold of Eliot’s favorite frog.
I first met Eliot
in San Francisco, originally a friend of my brother’s from school. He was a
film student, quiet and painfully awkward and even though we had spent a week
together in one of the most exciting cities in America, whenever he looked at
me or brought himself to speak it looked as though he was on the verge of
puking. Sweat would bead on his temples in slow moving tension. His eyes would
redden and beg for mercy. Usually all he would urk out was a formal, “Hello,”
and he would regularly orbit around me, obeying the path of some anti-femme
force field. I mean, I guess, but we had been living together for the past four
years, having assumed my brothers room after he left for Alaska for a
fellowship and he decided to never come back. I had been fucking Pat at the
time, and it seemed appropriate.
We decided to go
down South Huntington for the night and send ourselves off.
Pat
greeted us at the front door when we rang. Naked. We were late for the party,
but he had put enough beers aside for us, knowing we’d show up. He always knew
I would come back. Four flights up and there were kids in a chaotic file,
passively trying to get in the door, to the fridge or the couch. Something-
they looked excited, enough. James leaned forward towards my ear, “Ants,” he
whispered and laughed. He pushed a baggie into my hand and put one in his
mouth. His was brown and mine was white. We’d been broke, together, for about a
year and half now. Not the melodramatic, adolescent broke- the adult broke.
Like if we had any assets, we would have filed for bankruptcy about nine months
ago. And he had a problem. I wasn’t supposed to support it, but damn, he’s a
big kid. He knew the reality of my situation, in the nineteen years I’ve been
on in this city, the nineteen years of life I’ve breathed any amount of air-
nineteen people I knew died of drug overdose, violence, or accidents-
respectfully. We played when we could, but with the last name on the list-
Hannah- I knew I couldn’t get back in that, too personal, too hard, too fast,
to hurt. But, hey…
*
We
were rocked to sleep by this ambient noise. Its classic, indiscernible rhythm
taking James away from me- his head swaying and he falls back. He allows his
body to bounce a few volatile times on the cushions behind him, he calls,
“Princess…” There is a flame that dwindles, but remains lit.
