It’s pretty much the best short story I could ever write.

Certain names have been changed.  Hope no one is offended.

The night begins with coffee.  It is a ritual that I started years ago, back in undergrad.  Back then, we hardly slept.  About one hour after dinner, when I finally worked up the strength to be productive, there was a ritual that surrounded myself and the coffee pot in my room:

1. Rinse coffee pot.

2. Let the pot refill with water quickly, followed by slowly pouring the water into the machine.

3. Fill the machine with the proper amount of beans.  On an average evening, it’s a half-pot, so six scoops is enough.  Not-so-average evenings: 8 or 10 dependent upon both the amount of work that requires being done and the amount of hair-pulling you wish to subject yourself to.

4. Do not – I repeat – do not go back out into the living room.  Do not talk to anyone. Do not walk out to the bathroom, that can wait.  Do not answer your roommates when they ask you where all of the cream cheese went. You will risk getting sucked back into video games, alcohol, and the imitable other rituals: late-night pizza delivery, conversations about faux sexual experiences, and debates on such imperative topics as how to build a self-sustaining island out of 2-liter plastic bottles.  Do not leave the room.

5. Sit.

6. Breath.

7. Sip.

8. Work.

9. Repeat 5-8 until exhaustion.

This worked well because I had a unique setup.  The coffee machine wasn’t just in my room.  I owned a desk large enough that I could keep the coffee pot within reach at all times.  Computer; center.  Book I was reading; left.  Notes for homework; right.  Coffee pot and mug; far right.  Everything I needed was within arm’s reach: accessible, switched-on or held open with bookmarks or pens like paperweights.  Complete access, a microcosm.  Did I mention that the coffee pot was in my room?  Do not go into the living room.

There was also a soft scald of previously-spilt coffee on the hot plate.  It created a caffeinated stench that still reminds me more of morning-afters and watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with whoever had stayed over than its obvious meaning: at some point in the night, my hand had wavered.  I had missed.  There was so much missing that the smell became a part of the universe.

This worked well.  For a long time.  There were always assignments and things to look for meaning in.  If a story wasn’t due, a critique had to be written.  If a book didn’t have to be written about, it had to be read.  The weeknight provided time for all of the things that had nothing to do with the ball-kicking, girl-talking real world.

It was solace.  No matter how boring the work was.  No matter how frustrating.  No matter the caffeine-twitch.  It was solace.

Do not go into the living room.

The bedrooms we return to are no longer the palaces we kept in college.  We now do practical things like pay rent.  Vintage yellow lamps have been replaced by the perfectly-circular fluorescent light bulbs that cast sterile, hospital light across everything we own.  We have learned to live without.

The nights have become dense, too.  Those lavish and vapid openings that one could move about in freely before are crowded, crammed, squished like clowns in subway cars during rush hour.

There are still signs of childhood.  Nightly, before entering my room, my eyes cross paths with a stuffed figurine.  Made of purple yarn and stuffing with a tusk sticking out its front.  It is a narwhal, hand-crafted, a gift.  There is also a Bob Dylan figurine, again, hand-knit.  Plane ticket stubs litter the top of the desk, too.  Mostly to Chicago or back to New York.  The aberrations are the ones that clutter the most, though.  There is a return-flight stub from Paris to Chicago, a mark of a month of strange bewilderment and absolute wonder.  New York to Indianapolis, Indiana.  A 2-day trip to attend a funeral for a friend who passed at age 27.  And who can forget the trip to Las Vegas?  No trip could more properly define depression and profound excitement for life at the same time quite as well as a weekend in Vegas with a person you’ve just started dating who you know will leave you upon your return home.

These things fill up the empty world that once was so comforting.  They are reminders of blonde-haired girls and late-night conversations about how to compost more efficiently in the city.  The thought of that conversation drives eyes over to the desk I currently work at.  There is a stack of envelopes, pieces of paper, notices of credit information, billing statements – far past overdue – loan repayment documentation, and an angrily-scrawled letter from my mother that somehow begins with, “You should be ashamed” and ends with, “Thank you for being our son.”

The desk is unmanageable, a sea of guilt and carbon-printed mistakes so work is done in bed.  A  pile of pillows against my back, my computer delicately balanced on my knees, half-scrunched to my chest.

When it becomes too much, when the cats outside scream out in heat, when all three of us in the apartment have decided enough, we congregate outside of our cluttered, tiny worlds, first in front of the coffee pot again, then eventually in the living room where the lights of the city skyline stream in across our three faces.

“It’s only 2,” Mike tells me.  “Yeah.  I just can’t work anymore.”

He knows the drill and Amanda does, too.  She returns from where the coffee pot is with a bottle of whiskey and three empty glasses and Mike has already cued up a TiVo’d episode of The Office.  The windows are wide open and the cats only scream louder.  This is too predictable a situation, too comforting, to leave.  My only other option is to return to the Amazon-like bedroom at night.  I do not wish to stare at billing statements from collectors and loved ones anymore.

And there is a process for this ritual, too:

1. Pour yourself a few ounces into one of the mugs that Amanda hands you.

2. Lean back on the couch, look at whoever is sitting across from you, and make conversation.

3. Disregard the TV’s picture and the sound of canned laughter coming from the other side of the room.

4. When an awkward pause occurs, comment on what has JUST been said on the TV.  This keeps everyone moving forward.

5. Always.  Always turn the conversation inward.  Change the subject constantly to your current situation.  While you wish to stay informed of everyone’s goings on, the truth is you are drinking.  You are worried about you.  You have escaped from the jungle of your bedroom and you are free but freezing out here without the warmth of affirmation from work being done.

It’s another nightly ritual, the drinking, the talking, the self-involvement.  We are selfish and hungry and our fingers tap the glass of the coffee table with a vehemence that cannot be described as nervous or angst-filled, but rather with surging talent.  Talent that cannot escape because we are, again, doing real things like paying our bills.  And it is this talent that seeps out of the cracks in conversation.  Mike recites lighting setups he’s worked with throughout the day in a language foreign to me.  A born-conversationalist, Amanda talks about coffee as if it is something so much more than stained water, and the way she does so has me convinced she’s right.  But with all of us turning the conversations inward, nothing gets discussed and nothing gets hammered out quite right.  When cups are emptied and we stand up to return to our own drywall-encased jungles, there is the feeling of half-crushed eggs beneath our feet.

We are children in the city.  Very large children.  Very grown up children.  The movement back to those tiny rooms, to prepare for bed, forces the last five years into sharp focus.  It is with a whiskey-soaked brain that I will decide to stay up, to watch cartoons on the internet while laying in bed.  While the usual effects of drunkenness, the lulling of my head, the steadily more sloping posture, are in full force, so is my awareness in this tiny universe.  Somehow, I realize that tomorrow I must go to work.  I must wake up, go to work, come home, and continue writing and working.  There is a commercial on in between cartoons, for Coke, that a girl and I once both decided was incredibly annoying.  And I realize that I have to keep working to prove that she shouldn’t have left.  I have to keep working so that all those thousands of dollars spent on plane tickets mean something.  I have to keep working so that my mother doesn’t have to start letters with “You should be ashamed” anymore.  It’s crowded in here.  Keep working.

Do not go into the living room.  Keep working.

This is a very, very short character sketch I wrote a little while back:

There is a child being held by her mother at the Bedford Avenue subway stop.  She is sucking her thumb and staring staring staring at a man who is playing the violin and singing loudly.  It is the saddest song she has ever heard and it drips out like the cries that the child knows exist.  She understands that there is pain.  She has fallen and scraped knees and watched as her mother’s hand shakes while it pays bills.  She knows that this pain is in the world, but she has not learned about it yet.  The girl somehow understands.  She knows that she is staring into her future, through black locks falling in front of her eyes, past her mother’s ears, into her future.  She has been programmed to know that this is the eventual end of all things.  But she cannot fathom it yet.  All of this sorrow, somehow, is a part of the life that she knows she will be forced to breath through.  She begins to cry.  Then her mother bounces her and and whispers a frail, “Shhhh.”  For the first time, the child stops immediately.  The man finishes his song.  The train arrives.

Long story short, I made a case that the air is really heavy these days.  That it’s hard to breathe because of all that is going on and every little thing that every single person does is right in front of us.  Sometimes it can even hurt people.

But sometimes it brings them together, for better or worse.  I made an audio recording of it, with a little experimental work backing it.

Click here for the audio.  (right click, “save as” or ctrl+click, “save as” if you’d like to download)

And here is the text:

Breathing in takes far more effort than a decade ago.  I can see it in the way he walks, in the swagger of her hips.  I can see it in the silent protest and the screaming masses, both trying to reaffirm basic human rights and their identity.  It’s right there between that jean skirt and the aesthetic tragedy of the underlying three-quarter length black tights.  It’s apparent again on those new sandals, fashionista shades, and desperately-pale skin.  She intentionally sits in the shade to keep that lack of a hue.  It peaks through the trees as each person moves about and they comment on the hipness of each other’s custom-colored messenger bags.  Across the way is a man reading an essay exonerating both America and the Muslim faith; it pokes its head out from the side of his neck here, too.  It’s all too blatant in the salacious way a committed girl runs her hands through my hair, giggles, and runs away.  It’s in the strained expression of a young boy scribbling in his notebook, face down on the grass.  It’s the reasoning behind those deliberate, ridiculous, and desperate acts to put some meaning into life.  To lighten that air, let it pass through our lungs more easily.

It’s moving now, in through the doors that aren’t held open for the next person and the down the halls where people walk straight lines in groups three-abreast, refusing anything other than a righteously straight path.  It’s opening the door and not saying, “I’m sorry” to a professor as it takes its seat near the back of the room, chewing gum loudly and bumping all on its way past.  It takes a bathroom break, knocking across learning elbows and thinking knees as the instructors and professors give it foul looks on the way in and out.

It raises its hand and begins its singular comment for the hour with a reiteration of its own supposed liberality and ends it with a blatant disregard for racial tolerance, offending every Asian in the classroom.  It floats above and around all the other students’ heads and it fogs the vision of the professor for the remainder of the hour while constantly, incessantly tapping its foot, each beat throwing thoughts of anti-eastern-ism back at the skulls that tried to repel the comments in the first place.  When the bell rings, it will float out of the classroom again, beating everyone else to the doors and spreading throughout the buildings again while cell phones jump to life and iPods begin force-feeding MTV down a thousand throats at once.

It meanders along the sidewalks, floating along, bumping into the heads of a thousand twenty-somethings in a three-block radius.  It shoves a single mind traveling eastward off of a path and out of the way of four minds traveling west.  Where the four minds could have walked two by two, the singular mind is now forced to splash its way through mud left by the morning’s rain.

In apartments, while they sit and eat their hot dogs that “plump when you cook ‘em!” and ketchup from America’s oldest family, it will peter in as gamma rays, slamming into the heads of millions.  After every twelve minutes, four minutes are devoted to coloring it different shades in the pastel range and making them smile at it and want it for their own.

As they get ready for their evenings, they’ll spray it on their hair and wrap it around their neck.  They’ll even throw a few shot glasses of it down their dry throats; it will only make them drier.  They’ll talk about it and it will smile right back at them after they watch the political commentary on the Comedy Network.  Almost as if they are playing a mere game of catch, they will lob the idea of it back and forth and laugh when it drops at their feet.  For some it will be a sixteen inch Clincher softball, for others, an egg that splatters all over their feet.  Either way, they’ll get another one and wipe themselves off and go back to tossing it back and forth.

In line at the pub, they’ll stare at it across the street, thinking about how good it would taste to their half-inebriated stomachs.  They’ll shove the tip of it in their mouths and light the opposite end on fire, sucking it in and blowing it out in the form of a cloud that will permeate their clothes long after a few standard washings.

Later in the evening, they’ll smile as they stare at it in the toilet before flushing their half-digested stomach’s contents down.  They’ll pull crumpled bills from their pockets and toss them on their desk and see the color of it permeate the leaves of paper.  Some of the lucky ones will even wrap it around their or their partner’s half-erect phallus.  They’ll toss it in the trash and they’ll hardly notice it was right their next to them all day long.

But for right now, they’ll look down into their glasses.  They’ll stare across the bar at each other, each face reflecting the same look of disbelief and recognition.  They’ll all gaze right up at TV screens and watch the towers fall for the thousandth time.  Before the image can even begin to create a new emotion in them, they raise their glasses to their lips.  The collective noise of ten-hundred-thousand-million throats swallowing at the same instant will drown out the recognition that they are all breathing a far different air than a mere few years ago – where they could dismiss the atmosphere before, it now clings to their lungs, a killer feeding off of the dead.

There is a hole in Midtown Manhattan.  Not Central Park.  That is an honest park.  Between 40th and 42nd Streets, and between 5th and 6th Avenues, there is a hole called Bryant Park and it is the strangest place I’ve experienced in this town so far.  It’s a place that changes just as fast as all the ghosts that pass over it, underneath it (it’s a hub for five subway lines), walk through the always-lush grass everyday in the summer.

Six months ago I laid in that grass with a pair of jean shorts on and sunglasses, surrounded by friends.  We drank wine straight from the bottle and joined nearly three-thousand other people in cheering as Paul Newman was projected on a giant screen at the West end of the park.  We all sighed together as his character, Hud, mourned the brutal murder of his herd of cows, the only family he had.  We all strangely moved together.

Right now, it’s completely different.  There are construction crews carting off sections of an ice rink that lived atop the hole in Manhattan all winter.  Unlike after the movie, I won’t be riding a bike through the city back to my apartment.  Like the ferocious building and changing of the winter wonderland due to uncontrollable weather change and the city’s ability to sell something everywhere, a doctor recently cut into my knee in three places and pulled a wayward meniscus from where it had been lodged in the joint.  A limp, slightly slower than normal walking pace is the maximum speed that I can move at.  These days, I am forced to walk alone.

But there are times, in this exact spot, when everything is perfectly all right.  Every once in a while, usually with a stiff autumn wind at your back, you’ll find yourself walking towards a friend you’d given up on.  She’s sitting at a table and she sees you from one-hundred feet away, her gaze never breaks from you, nor does her smile.  She hands you a coffee as you sit down, she’s been waiting.  Nothing remarkable has happened, just a normal day that she’s wanted to share with you.  And that’s when you realize that you can’t keep it all straight.  The constant crowds, the maze-like building interiors, the absurd address system that has you crossing the same block three times before finding your destination, the advertising bombardment.  All the changes always happening faster and fasterfaster.

And that’s when she’ll ask how your day was.  You’ll realize that here, now, in this park, with these ghosts moving around you, this is really okay.

But anyway, here’s a draft of a story I wrote about being there.  Comments are welcome.

The stairs are made of metal.  They are that cold, gray-black mesh that you can see through, diamond-shaped holes make every one of the 1365 steps that have already been conquered plainly visible when looking down.  He looks past the dirty white laces of his black, low-top tennis shoes at all of the heads bobbling up towards him.  1365 feet down.  He picks his head up and the same metal grating surrounds him on all four sides.  It is, essentially, a cage with paths going in only two directions: up and down.

“We’ve come this far.  Just keep walking,” he says.  The amount of air he audibly sucks in order to spit the sentence out belies the confidence he’s tried to inject.

She doesn’t remember complaining.  Thus far, she’d only slowed her pace a bit, caught her breath before the final three-hundred step stretch to the top of the Eiffel Tower.  She’d settled with the fact that he might have been right in advising against her cowboy boots for the day.  But they’d worked so well with her skirt and she just couldn’t ruin this outfit she’d somehow managed to assemble with just a half-length mirror and one suitcase for an entire two weeks.  No, she knew better than to complain about foot pain at this point.  She’d slowed, but had kept moving.  “James, I didn’t complain.  Just wait a minute and I’ll be right with you.”

“I could see you were about to say something.”  He lies.  He hadn’t turned to look at her in at least ten minutes.  After three years of spending every waking moment thinking about Mary, he’d begun to suspect he could predict her every move.  That’s how it worked, he’d thought.  When two people are in love, they can read each other’s minds.  She’d proven him drastically wrong more than a few times recently, but still.  He knew that he knew her inside and out and he could have sworn he’d glimpsed her oblong, but fitting, nose wrinkle into the words, “This is ludicrous.”

She shook her feet, wiggled her ankles inside of the confining boots, and picked her pace up.  Only three hundred more.  And she hadn’t even broken a sweat.  There he was, head practically between his knees, lumbering his tiny frame up in front of her.

“You know, you wouldn’t be in such a foul mood if you wouldn’t have had so much to drink last night.  Maybe had some water this morning with all that coffee?” she reached out and playfully nudged him in the ribs as he refused to break pace.

James pushed her hand away and accidentally connected with a woman in athletic shorts holding a small handycam pointed in front of her.  He made a compulsory apology that seemed not to register as she moved past like nothing had happened.

“Settle down.”  She paused, then asked, “Why’d you come here anyway?”  She’d picked up her pace enough that the two were next to each other again, their feet slapping at the metal and their calves aching at the same moments.  They’d walked in unison as a joke many times, both noticing that people gave them strange looks when they did so.  As if they were a pair of Siamese twins, circus freaks.  The conjunction of two beings completely, outwardly, physically, matching with each other, a jab at normalcy.  It made them both laugh when they’d get home and lie down in bed with the Chinese food they’d picked up from around the corner.

He muttered, “You know why I came here.”

“No.  No, I don’t.  Maybe if you’d tell me I could start to figure out what we’re going to do about all of this.”

“Why am I here?  Why are you here?”  He’d come to a full stop and turned to face her.  Faces wandered by staring past her and straight at him and his outburst.  He returned the favor by looking straight past her for a moment at the Parisian cityscape splayed beneath them.  He continued, “You left me.  Not the other way around.”  He took a sip of water from the bottle in his hand and wiped the sweat from his forehead, a futile task under the summer sun.  “And then you just show up here.  Unannounced.  You have no money.  What do you think you’re doing following me here?  Was me getting on a plane and crossing an ocean not a signal enough that I wanted to not be near you?”

The skirt she had on dropped well past her knees, but was whipping in the wind and collecting the sweat from passersby on its edges.  All of them moving through the caged tunnel towards the top.  “If we’re going to do this in public, can we at least keep walking?” she said.

“Fine,” he started climbing again, “I’m listening.”

“You’re not going to like this.”  He rolled his eyes, a gesture she could not see, but a guard on one of the landings seemed to notice, eyeballing him closely as he rounded the corner to the next flight up.  “I came here to fall in love,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your parents told me you were here and that I should just let you be alone.  Especially after what I did.  How am I supposed to do that when I’m in love with you?”  She paused, then continued as if the next statement was more obvious than two and two making four: “And, come on, you ran away to Paris.  You’re just asking for people to follow you.  Especially people like me.”

“What do you mean by ‘people like you?’”

“I mean people you’re so obviously willing to change for.  People that you’ve completely fallen for.  People who transcend that whole, ‘give them an inch, they’ll take a mile’ mantra.  People who know that if we give you an inch of us, you’ll give us a mile of you.”

“You’re a goddamn liar.”

“Are you saying you wouldn’t?  Are you saying that if I claimed that I’d try to make it all right again, that I was sorry, are you trying to say that you wouldn’t come running right back?  Are you saying that you wouldn’t do everything in your power to make it work as well as I’d claim it could?”

“What about you?  You’ve already flown across the world with almost no money just to see me.  I didn’t even have to give you another inch and you took 6,000 miles.”

“What’s a few days and a couple hundred dollars when stacked against you rearranging your life?”

He walked on.

“See?”  she finally broke the silence twenty stairs from the top, “you can see it all from here already.  Let’s just go back down.  You’re tired.”  He was sweating uncontrollably, getting dizzy.  He’d chalked it up to his hypoglycemia or his anxiety disorder or the lack of clonazepan in his blood stream.

“No.  We go to the top.”

“No.  You’re going to fall over.  Let’s go.”  She held her arms out in front of her while other climbers passed by her, not noticing their behavior, like desperate loveless pleads were par for the course atop le tour Eiffel.

“We go to the top!”

“No.  We’re going down.  You’re delusional.  You’re sitting on the steps and you don’t even know it.”  Indeed, he was.  He’d slumped down after his last exclamation.

“You lied,” he sputtered.  He was choking on what tasted like either coffee or vomit.  “You lied.  You said the last time that we fought that you’d be willing to try a change.  That you’d try as hard as I did.”

“And you don’t think I did?”

“No.”  His expression was blank, eyes like two empty caves.

“What about the flying back and forth?  All the times I visited you in New York?” she was trying to attract attention, arms flailing, spilling water out of her thermos on passersby who continued with heads down, seemingly wishing to not get involved.

“What’s a few days and a couple hundred dollars?”

James pounded his way up the last twenty stairs, keeping pace with a group of runners that were scaling the tower as a fun-run.  He almost made a joke of it, swinging his arms back and forth further than he normally would, painting a clown-like smile on his pale face.

When he reached the top, he held his hands up over his head and looked back at Mary whose mouth was still agape at his last comment.  It was true, he was angry at her, and she at him.  But the past two weeks had been so lonely, it felt good to at least have something to rail against.

“Are you done with your Rocky impression?” she shouted up the final steps.  He ignored the sass, noting that you could really see the entire city from atop.  The strangest part about Paris, to him, was that there were hardly any buildings taller than four stories.  The city’s sprawl seemed remarkably organized, Tuillerie Gardens pointing perfectly out to the Louvre which spread its walls majestically and formed the center of each surrounding neighborhood, like one cohesive vision.  Like someone had planned each individual neighborhood, like someone had organized everything into perfectly European clichés.  He smiled at the thought of complete control.

She sidled up next to him and took his hand and sighed, “This is never going to be okay, is it?”

He then said the first honest thing all day, “No.  It’s not.  But goddammit, it’s good to have you here.”

]]> http://www.dinterference.com/2009/02/23/the-eiffel-tower/feed/ 3 http://www.dinterference.com/2008/09/25/in-between/ http://www.dinterference.com/2008/09/25/in-between/#comments Fri, 26 Sep 2008 05:08:19 +0000 Mark http://www.dinterference.com/?p=44 A long time ago, Ms. 12×2 asked me to try writing a story. She outlined that I should not think of the story ahead of time, the story should all be written at once, and I can only begin writing when a song (of my choosing) begins and I must stop when the song ends. I finally did it. You can find the story below, along with a link to download the song (right-click/Ctrl+click, then Save As).

Sunset Rubdown, Us Ones In Between, 4 minutes, 26 seconds

He doesn’t look anywhere but directly in front of him. Wind whips past, over his sunglasses, as he pushes harder down on the pedals and a skyline rises from the clouds ahead. He is surrounded on all sides by a red cage, barring him from drifting into traffic, shoving him into the paths of the slower-moving overweight women with their children.

He can still taste it in his mouth, the two-day-old coffee he reheated. He’d sipped the last three mouthfuls all at once while looking in the mirror and thought to himself, “god, this feels like myself.”

He can’t understand the buildings that he’s descending into. It’s okay. The people next to him don’t understand it either. Their eyes connect, but it is only to avoid slamming into each other at high velocities, only to avoid broken bones and headaches. He passes on the inside lanes and the outsides, shoving his knuckles into the walls of taxi cab windows. He feels no pain against his fingers, the combination of anger and pain creates a warm pool of water that his hand dips within. Inside of the cabs, he pats the riders on the back, telling them it’s not their fault. Caressing their jaws. Telling them that no one here knows anyone. That that’s okay. That if they all fall down today, at least they’ll be laying on top of each other, hair intertwined, coffee-drenched breaths pungent, understanding of, if nothing else, each other’s yearning for somewhere else.

Billy Was Right.

I’ve put a lot of things in my mouth for girls.  No, I’m serious.  The amount of things I’ve thought were horrendously revolting at the time of my stuffing them in so as to impress or a female is insurmountable.  There was a point in my life when I held the firm belief that the true way to any girl’s heart was to tell Billy I wasn’t a “sissy.”  To tell him that he was a “butt head.”  To take his dare and eat a worm in front of Jenny on the swing set.  Billy was right.  I was a sissy.  The vomit on Jenny’s shoes proved it.

These days, I’m one wet-wipe away from germ-o-phobe status and I possess the same taste palate as I did back on the swing set.  I get by on pasta, sandwiches, and anything I can purchase at the local café where they know better than to ask me if I want any veggies on my ham and cheese sandwich.  They even bypass the “soup or salad” question by handing over the damn minestrone without argument.

Needless to say, this affinity for all things bland has caused its fair share of difficulties in recent years, mainly in the area of dating.  I got around it for a while by either going out for coffee on dates or simply not getting together until a time when dinner options would be limited to a drive-thru window.  While the quirk of Taco Bell three dates in a row may be cute at age sixteen, watching the stars with a mouth full of guacamole and rat meat lacks a certain conviviality that the twenty-something’s dating world requires.

The conviviality – or is it more cordiality? – I speak of is the degree of distinction one exhibits in all things public.  I can meet for ice cream until I’ve put three dairy farmer’s kids through college, but eventually I’ll be pulled into dining at the type of restaurant that makes my mouth go dry when I walk past.  Without fail, I see what appears to be an entire sea-faring creature, drenched in disgusting shades of green, glistening with (my imagination can only assume) salt water and colon-devouring diseases on every scale.  Its eyes still intact, it blinks at me and begs not to be consumed.  If nothing else, it pleads to be properly cut into unidentified parts like the lucky bovine at the next table.

This exact sort of restaurant is where I ended up three weeks ago.  I’d met this girl at school and our shared love of the city had brought us together over the winter break as companions in all things too heady – no, too pretentious – for our normal friends.  She and I both studied literature and we found ourselves in the unique situation of finally having a local friend, each other, on an intellectual par.  It had been three nights of cafes and bars followed by walks around the deserted city.  I’d even managed to not lose my cool when she ordered a beer that arrived with fruit as a garnish.  Stifling my normal speech about how beer, and your appreciation for it, should not require fruit of any sort, I’d locked in this fourth date where I’d inevitably be forced to stuff something I didn’t know the origin of into my mouth.  Do I try to change the locale of said date?  Do I try to reschedule?  Do I acclimate myself with at least one of the dishes they offer ahead of time so as to be able to smother the inevitable convulsive gagging?

I never claimed that logic is my strong suit.

Nor are manners, I realize, as she quickly points out that the male is typically expected to sit closer to the door, so as to protect the woman from any sort of intruder or danger that may leak in from the outside. Her awareness that this is, in fact, a real date and that I’m not solely trying to sleep with her has visibly changed her normally pithy and cynically humorous face into cold, stern tendons strapped across her cheeks.  The absurdity of her suggestion – that I am to protect her from any danger – is not lost on me.  She seems to think that we are, in fact, not inside of a restaurant, rather a religious battleground; and that, somehow, my body mass will protect her from the coming Rapture.

My hyper-awareness kicks in and drowns this thought from spurting out of my mouth.  Instead, I occupy my self-destructive tongue with mouthing the words on the menu as I read, all of which are written in French, a language I haven’t studied in over four years.

I told you that logic wasn’t my strong suit, so I settle this conundrum by suggesting we share a few larger plates, and tell her to order whatever she likes.  I zone out, my mind adrift with relief that I’ve avoided embarrassing myself and possibly even seemed polite, as she orders in perfect French.  Seeing as how I don’t understand a word between she and the waiter, I concentrate on things more important: the wax melting off the candles, whether or not I remembered to shut off my bedroom light.  After she orders, I’m able to hold conversation well and manage to yank some form of intent beyond another free meal from my date.  She goes as far as suggesting that a long walk home would be nice later on.  I think to myself, “But only if my stomach isn’t inside her purse yet.”

The ambiance is dark and warm inside the restaurant so we slip into a pleasant conversation about the role of politics in American and British pop music.  Needless to say, I’m hitting home runs on the distinction scale and happily putting to use four collegiate years of pot-induced music analysis at the same time.  Fish eyes and shark fins can’t touch me now.

The waiter brings our food and all the confidence in the world can’t fully prep me for the disgusting display laid out in front of me: three platters steaming like a broke-down Chevy.  Mind you, they smell like burning rubber, too, and I picture an ebullient James Dean shaking his head at me while I gag.  This time I listen to what the waiter says as he sets the plates down in front of us.  “Deux plats de foie gras entire cuit.  Sauteed porcini mushrooms.  An order of frog legs and a bottle of our finest Sauterne.”  My limited French vocabulary springs into action as my throat begins to spasm.

My internal dialogue spikes off the charts as it gets more and more flustered with how I’m to handle the situation.  Each translation brings me closer to embarrassment.  Foie gras.  Duck liver.  Mushrooms?  I only eat one sort of mushroom and I don’t think they serve psychotropic drugs here.  Sauterne?  I loathe dessert wines.

I look across the table.  It’s at this point that I realize I haven’t matured one bit in twelve years.  “It looks delicious,” I blurt out with full confidence.  This is, indeed, not me at the table.  This is some sort of hybrid me.  The prospect of sexual fulfillment has combined with my urge to always display the proper level of distinction and has created a beast that will say and do anything to execute his social roles.

The me that is hiding behind curtains of immaturity is screwed.

I’m again focusing on the lit candles, staring away from our meal as much as possible.  In an attempt to salvage what might be my own death, I pour my entire glass full of wine.  She stares at me with her mouth ajar as I top off my drink; I can only assume this is for not pouring her glass first.  While I’m quickly remedying my mistake, dumping enough wine to get Seabiscuit tipsy into her glass, she’s accelerating my death by placing one of the two livers on my plate.  She smiles as she does so and it takes the hybrid me’s entire strength to keep the real me from punching her teeth out and demanding she pay for this disgusting mess.

The hybrid wins.  I scoop two of the frog legs and a heaping portion of the porcini onto my plate.  The depths of my stomach swim up to my throat and the depths of my crotch rocket themselves to replace what has to be a brain no more complicated than a dog’s, merely chasing a stick to bring back to a fat, oily owner.

She’s staring.   My hand has a fork in it.  The fork has a piece of liver on it.  My mouth is moving and I have no clue what is coming out.  My lips keep forming words but the glare of her eyes throw me back to twelve years ago.  There is no girl across the table from me.  There is no liver on my fork.  There is Billy and Jenny and there is a twenty-seven dollar per serving worm.

There’s also no turning back.  On the playground, if I would have simply run away, I would have been able to handle the constant chastising from Billy.  He would have kept making fun of me, laughed at how I was scared of girls, thrown rocks in my face.  All of that would have been bearable.  What I wouldn’t have been able to deal with was Jenny.  In my mind, with no sort of visceral evidence, she cared about how daring and manly I was.  But she’d probably never take my hand in hers whether I ate the worm or not.  I let myself get dared into a situation where embarrassment to an exponential degree was inevitable.  I didn’t even need Billy there this time.

It’s a flash.  There’s no real expanse of time between when the inflated duck liver hit my tongue and when the synapses in my brain fire to induce vomiting.  All at once, I’m regretting eating lunch, breakfast, effectively my own words, as I agreed to dine here.  I’m conscious of what’s going on enough that I can keep my eyes wide open throughout the entire event.  Her eyes glance down to my hands that have begun shaking.  I can see her mouth begin to open as my upper torso bucks and spasms the first time.  She’s yelling the first syllable of “Oh my God” in what sounds, to me, like the low rumble of slow motion footage.  My mouth is wide open and the gagging noises stemming from my throat sound much more high-pitched to my own ears.  The first few drops begin to fly out past my lips and I can taste the acid they’re dripping with even though they’ve jettisoned far past my tongue.  The next wave pushes through much faster and all at once I’m covering an entire plate with a pinkish substance that possesses the same texture as the ground-up, water-logged, white bread that you can’t stand to grab from the bottom of the sink before opening the drain.

It burns like battery acid on an open sore.  My throat screams with pain as a layer of mucous is disintegrated and my date screams in horror as tiny bits of the substance splash onto her plate, her hands, even parts of her dress.

It all happens in slow motion, actually, all except for the speed with which she runs.  Before the stream can even stop pouring out of my mouth, her purse is in one arm and her legs suddenly achieve Olympian status as she’s out the door in gold-medal time.  My date, bolting to the subway stop, has the same horrified, disgusted look on her face and urgency in her step as Jenny did when she ran home to tell her mom that some gross boy ruined her new shoes.

Once she’s out of sight, I can see that the only things still edible on the table are the completely full glasses of wine.  I take one down, ignoring the bitter taste still in my mouth, and pull the other glass closer to me.  Those other me’s who got me to try the liver have all run away laughing.  The me who ate the liver – and the worm – is in an all-too-familiar state of public mope.  This is not the end to an expensive date I wanted.  Embarrassed in some non-detrimental way, sure.  Dripping with puke, half-drunk, in a crowded restaurant?  Not so much.

The waiter seems to have seen it coming.  He’s strolling up, with a sarcastic sneer on his face.  Never breaking stride, he says, “I take it you’ll want the check now?” as he drops it on the table.  It settles in one of the many puddles of puke.

Billy is right.  I’m still a sissy.  The vomit on the table proves it.

It took asking, begging, even bribing John with promises of baked goods to convince him to drive us the thirty miles to the lake.

All day we watched the sand rise between our toes and the boats float out to the horizon. Jenny and I, we’d brought ham and cheese sandwiches, ate while sitting on top of a crate that probably used to be a place for fish before they were carted off to market. It still smelled like fish. It smelled like fish, but not in a way that would make you wrinkle your nose up. Nothing was rotting, it smelled like the work that was done around the fish. The fishermen’s muscles ticking their living off pound by pound as they pulled life from the sea to the land. We lathered each other in sunblock more to complete the aroma than for protection from the clouded sun.

After collecting rocks that reminded us of our dreams, we tossed them into the water, watching them skip, skim, and then sink down below the opaque surface of Lake Michigan. There was no talk of the trouble we’d be getting in for leaving home for the day.

When the clouds shifted and let the sun through, we smiled for John’s camera. Jenny’s hand touched my elbow, I heard the camera click and, right then, I knew I’d be fine.

I walked into the library trying to make it look like I was walking in on any of the other days that I walked into that library because I went there all the time. There’s the desk over there where the pretty librarian sets her books down and slams the rubber on the cover hard and fast and moves on to the next book. She looked me up and down and waggled her eyes at me. I waved “hi” to her like on any other day.
She waved back at me and when I got past her I saw one of her hands pick up the telephone and dial the first three numbers of a phone number out of the corner of my eye. Her glasses slid off of her nose and she pushed them back up so that they would match with those funny dents they had left. I could hear her speaking quickly but had no time to make out the words because I had to get to my table and my book.
The shelves of books were piled higher than my head, sometimes looking like they were going to fall over, like shelves were on shelves, like the ones that my dad had made in the garage. I had never seen the shelves of books fall on anyone but thought they might because I can remember seeing the tool shelves fall on the car when I was reaching for the wrench to hit the snake.
Did I tell you that I was listening to music? I was listening to music. I had those earphones that stuck IN your ears that always got yanked out if you made your arm move the wrong way this way or that so I was trying to keep my arms stiff and still so I could hear the whole song. I reached up and shoved them back into my head hoping that the ear wax that had built up since last week would be sticky and not slippery and that maybe I could hear a full song at some point in the day.
There was the shelf with “107.6 GRE – 109.3 STU” written on it so I walked towards it, past the windows that let in too much sunlight and past the old man who sat looking at a book but I never saw him turn a page in his life. He said that he was just taking his time and that after working for fifty years of his life, he figured he could take some time every once in a while, “why rush?” and he seemed to think that was okay, but I thought reading fast was fun. So was what I did when I read. There down the aisle next to the – déjà vu – I just had déjà vu. Here is where I’ve been before with the man behind me and the pretty librarian giving me dirty looks. I pulled out a book with a blue cover that said, “Let’s Drink To Your Health: A Self-Help Guide to Sensible Drinking” because Dad had that book and Mom said it had helped him and that I should leave it in the cabinet under the other bottles that I wasn’t allowed to touch because they would make me feel funny.
I looked back at the librarian and she was looking at me through those nice glasses and she was still on the phone looking more and more frantic. I couldn’t hear her over my music and because she was so far away but I think she was saying something important because her mouth kept opening into large “O” shapes and closing quickly as she stamped her fist on the desk rather than her rubber stamp on a page. I did not like the look of that because Dad had made that same motion a few times a while ago and not so long ago too, except there wasn’t a book or a desk there was a “whore” and a “skank” but I liked to call her “Mom” more. That name always seemed nicer but he had insisted that day that she wasn’t “Mom” and I don’t know what confused me more, that he was doing the librarian dance without the nice glasses or books or because I had to start calling mom “whore” since what dad said was right.
The book had pictures and words but I liked the pictures more. I tried to read the words like mom said I should because she said reading would make me smart but they moved too slowly and the pictures were of the men with no beards and buttoned up shirts going to work and coming home and smiling with teeth that looked too white. There were pictures of the men and women hugging and smiling and patting Johnny on the head while he played with his toy truck and not a wrench to hit the snake with. I never saw a librarian in the book, but I think that if she were there she would be pretty like mine but not so angry-looking when she picked up the phone when I came in.
There weren’t any pictures of the men holding the mommies down either. The pictures never showed shut doors down the hall where I could hear the screams until mommy brought me the nice discman that I could put Cds into. There was the nice dad taking his family out for brunch – I remembered when I did read the book that one time it said that it was Sunday and after church they went to “the club.” I never went to the club, but I think my dad did because he wasn’t around much during breakfast and not at all for church. I understood why though, because on mornings that he did stay home I knocked tools off and dented the car and scratched the paint and got black eyes from “what would have to happen.”
I saw the nice man with his painted teeth and his nice hair in the pictures and his not hurting and felt something in my pants get tighter. Mom said that when I feel like my belt is getting tighter but lower down than my belt that I should keep it to myself and not let anyone know because it was embarrassing. I had tried to do that, but pushing it down felt funny and good and so I pushed it down more and more faster. Even though I was sitting at my favorite table, I thought the mean old man might see, so I pushed my tight pants down and felt funny out where they were tightest and so I pushed down again. Over and over but they kept staying tight and raising up and almost touched the bottom of the table top while I sat there I turned up my music and kept trying to push my pants down and the music got louder and that’s okay because I liked that song from the CD that mom had given me.
The man was looking at me but he didn’t say anything and got up and walked away so I guess he didn’t mind me doing what mom had said was embarrassing. Mom was usually right as long as dad hadn’t said something different and he had never really ever talked about anything embarrassing, only done embarrassing things from what mom had said under her breath while she zippered up my coat from the cold and gave me a pat on my rear to push me towards school in the morning.
I looked over my shoulder with my right hand taking care of my pants the way that mommy had said pushing it out of the way and down. And up and down. I remembered the pictures of the smiling faces when those daddies hugged the mommies while I watched the librarian walk towards the door and say hello to Officer Friendly. He had been to my house and my school and he told me not to take pills like mommy did and he told me that the kids at school aren’t really mean that they are just scared like me but that whatever I do I can’t take what they give me if it looks like what mommy and daddy had in the cabinets or in the box that I found in the closet. The daddies in the pictures didn’t have boxes in the closet but they had hair that looked like plastic that never was parted on the other side but at least it was parted the way that my hair was parted and I saw that my hair was out of place and mommy would be mad if she saw it hanging over my eyes so I pushed it back and swung my head to the side and watched Officer Friendly walking over to me.
He put his hand on my shoulder and pulled the book out from under my nose and pulled my arm up and my belt was still tight but it got looser and there was a wet spot on my shirt that stuck to my belly and I pulled it off so that it wouldn’t stick but Officer touched my hand firm and said that I couldn’t move and that he would try to be nice to me but this time I had gone too far and that he had tried to warn me when I went to the library last week. He was pulling me on the arm the way that daddy does except for not quite as hard, he wasn’t twisting my skin like daddy, so I swung my left arm out and grabbed for the book and its blue cover and its pictures and Officer Friendly turned and did something that I had seen him only do to the bad kids. He pulled me hard and held my wrists behind my back and walked me over near the desk where the librarian usually sat and pushed my face down towards the desk while pulling the book from my hands and he tossed it on the place where the librarian always stamped the books down and where she did it like daddy did to me. The metal bracelets were already warm I guess because they sat against Officer Friendly’s belt all day and I wondered if his belt was like my belt. Did it get tight sometimes and did he get pulled from his favorite book with the nice daddies and mommies who didn’t have pills sometimes?
But he told me that he was being nice and that this was what he had to do and he pulled me past the old man who hadn’t really left the library but it looked like he had just gotten done in the washroom and I wondered if maybe everyone’s belts did that the way that mine did and maybe the old man had just gone in the bathroom to not be embarrassed. My headphones were still playing music and they were still sticking far into my ear when I turned around and tried to run past Officer Friendly and get the book because if I was going for a car ride like Officer Friendly said I was I wanted to still have the book with the daddies and mommies getting along with me. I got to the desk and turned around to pick up the book with my hands behind my back and Officer Friendly did another thing that he only did to the bad kids, he swung his arm from one side to the other across my head not my face my head and he said I wouldn’t bruise but that’s what I read from his lips because I stopped hearing music after he had hit me on the ears on both sides.
I was sad because Officer Friendly still wouldn’t let me bring the book with but I tried not to cry daddy said crying was for girls and I am a boy and Officer Friendly kept saying things to me but he was talking faster than I could read his lips and I didn’t hear the doors slide open in front of me when we walked into the sunlight outside that had been beaming in through the windows. Officer Friendly pushed me into the car and he drove for a while and I thought about how much I wanted to hear the music more and my shirt was still sticking to me and how the moms and dads in the book were nice to look at but I had never seen one in real life and now I wouldn’t have to listen to mom and dad yell and that seemed okay and Officer Friendly smiled when he saw that I had settled down and that seemed to make him happy and I smiled too.