Today, I slept on a bench in broad daylight and it was liberating. I was cold in the morning when I dressed to leave (my polished wood floor touched cold to my feet) and I was out in the open in a state of containment against the frost-glassed air before I uttered a word or thought to the world to say Good morning.
The sun made me exceptionally nice; I was a black pane of solar panel; the warmth leaked through like raindrops through a creaky roof, makeshift. And then I was filled, and asleep.
I woke when the sun was setting.
It shone in my eye and it hurt
blinking, blinking.
I had the urge to crawl like a snail against the ground until someone
picked me up, but I stayed motionless. The
soothing thought of a boat slicing through and across a mirrored lake just after
the lifting of rigorous paddling, flowed into my head; but I wasn’t sure if I
had forced it there. Emotional
states passed through me in succession:
I had that feeling of being late, but to nothing, really;
late to nothing. People
around me minded their own, hands gripped deep in their pockets, as if each
owned possessively the cube of
space around them; they reminded me of when I was a child in my room, with my
door locked close behind me.
From somewhere, a small child, about five or seven, ran up towards me without hesitancy. He ran up to me with his eyes unwavering, except seeming to formulate thoughts, questionings. It was like I was his father, setting the foundation for him, watching over him while he was loose in this park; he, like we were two sole characters in a play, or two ends of one private phone conversation, only conscious of me, even as he chased after his friend, or laughed running towards the ball rolling. I was a little kid again, and I understood his joy perfectly. The cold air and sky that pressed down on our heads felt freer than life. I realized an irritation suddenly, of the fact that he had looked at me earlier like someone as old, and matured and capable, as to be his father.
I sat where I was, but forgot I was sitting; as he ran off, away, into the distance, I ran with him in my mind, wavering left and right like leaves caught in crisscrossing wind, he and I. I thought of the jungle gym in the schoolyard, the wood panels and plastic structures, and I went through it once again: an unrefined take on the gymnast’s floor routine, skip over this railing, land over and through that tunnel; the spiraling slide climbed upwards, sprawling; and the fireman’s pole smooth on the swing down; I was Batman! The sand was my claimed land, my own cave (complete with sun!). I came back to, still, sitting on the bench, smiling stupidly towards all of the park, the pedestrians not noticing, the kid now gone. I felt I had all of a sudden fallen, but somehow dropped off on neither side of some fence, and I was alone.
Things began to fade, edges of leaves and grass got evasively softer. The surrender of the day, oftentimes saddened me as a child; and the glass-view of it from my cubicle by the window somehow always hollowed and softened that sadness. Or sterilized and ameliorated it, on good days.
I noticed stomach pangs, and,
reluctant and stagnant in my legs and body to move, slowly got up,
thinking to eat.
When I was about to leave the park behind, I looked back and saw an old
wrinkly man and his wife, seated comfortably on my bench feeding pigeons with
crumbs from a paper bag. I had not noticed a single pigeon when I had stayed there all
afternoon, but now there were dozens, and more were on the way to join the fray.
Approaching Fifth Street, I saw a hotdog stand with no man, over
on the corner. My stomach and
curiosity carried me across the street as I approached the manless cart peering
left and right between steps, acting as to avoid turning cars even while there
were none, really in the hope that
I might swiftly self-serve to a
hotdog on the corner of Fifth and End Ave, free. In middle school, I
was admired with the ability to get things for nothing: beepers unwanted from
the black market, Juicy Burgers from a friend that worked the register, sodas
stuffed in baggy jean pockets. But
there was actually a man at the manless cart, a man turned out to be a boy,
sitting on a stoop on the other
side. He rose and his form erected up from invisibility like one of
many mechanical components to the hotdog stand. The stoop’s
function became his elevated platform when a customer approached, and he
stood taller suddenly than me to flip open the metal lid compartments of the
cart, tongs ready in his other
hand. His headphones stayed on;
every once in a while, his head bobbed
metronomal dips to the obvious
music, which I could not hear.
I suddenly, near painfully, wanted to hear. I imagined him offering an earpiece across the cart to me.
“Ketchup’n’mustard, sir?” He held the dog delicate in the palm, balanced, in the form of a question. I nodded. “Sauerkraut?” I grunted yes, the muscles working my speech, bordering my mouth, not budging—and the sauerkraut piled on and the red and yellow beneath disappeared. “Cheese?” Save on cold pizza in the morning, I hate cheese, is one of the things I always have to explain to people. I said No.
“What about some chips and soda with that dog? ...Oh yeah: beans?” No, no. The boy asked me for a dollar fifty, and probably was thinking, You cheap bastard. He took his time setting each disturbance to his cart back to its original place, smiling with seeming pleasure as I left.
It lasted me until I crossed the
park, and I lingered on the warm salty
taste, savoring every bite. The
sun was gone from view except for its odor in the sky, and people behind
windshields were midway back from their jobs away from home.
I could never imagine starting and ending a day at work through traffic,
so I took the subway everyday. A
car honked from somewhere as I stepped down from the curb (though
my light said WALK) and I retreated.
I thought of Ellyn at home by now, and thought of those days of me and her, and nights, way before the word Romance was an understanding between us. I loved playing at her’s more than all of the neighbors’ houses—she was the one that would create midnight jungle adventures in the backyard, and she would make up ways every week that the kids could all run away and then run the city, or the entire country!; and Ellyn of course would be President. Her curls dangled like Tarzan ropes, and I would tug at them, just so she would yell and get mad at me. The day now wore to sleep and the night air began to lay siege to roads and buildings across my city.
After some time, I approached a street that I had known, but not
anytime recently, maybe in high school. The
street was as a whole familiar, but I couldn’t recognize any place in
particular; so I walked toward
the second bar counted down the block, which
was pulsating with chatter and noise, and was overfilled to the sidewalk.
As my forward
movement through the throng pulsed incrementally by the peristaltic pushes,
pushes, of bodies, I imagined a storefront vomiting out bodies….
A nauseating thought, to think of it.
The heaviness of air, the must, the perspiration that could be felt in
the air like wall’s sweat, all rushed to approach me as I entered.
Somehow it was pleasant unpleasantness, as the cold space that was mold
to the city and skyline left me at the door.
I reached the bar area, though not the bar ledge, where every spot within arms-reach to the bartender was filled, physically, to the brim. I still tried. A hand tapped me on the shoulder, hard; it felt more like a poke, poke, poke.
“Lenny! LEN-NY!” I could barely turn my neck far enough to see from where those pokes and shouts to my ear had come from. Goddamn this place was unbearable! I managed to push a young boy on my left (boy? What was a boy doing here?! Or am I just too old?) out of my way to retreat from the gravitational chaos of the bar, and saw it was a colleague from down the hall at work that I say Hi to regularly. I didn’t know his name.
Hey, hey! how’s it going.
He gripped me hard on the other shoulder now, “Listen, we got a table in the corner and two pitchers—care to join?” What the hell is with this guy touching my shoulder?
Sure, and I followed his pea-shaped head swimming ahead through the crowd until we reached a dark corner at the far end of the place. Suddenly, I felt uncomfortable joining my colleague, or anyone, and I wondered why the hell I was in this crowded bar in the first place.
Those sharing the pitchers around the small circular wood table were Mike, the balding older brother of my colleague; Jeremiah, a smiling man; and my colleague’s sharp-featured and attractive girlfriend, Jamie, who swept her silky brown hair up and over a revealed shoulder, affectionately, as he sat down next to her again. “This is my friend Lenny!” he announced, as he poured me a glass. I’ve definitely seen Jamie somewhere before, I thought. That man hasn’t stopped smiling; and are they all here to celebrate his promotion today or the sort?, I also thought. Maybe Jamie went to my high school. Or at least she gave the impression of one of those unapproachable girls I fantasized for, out of reach.
Immediately, once I situated myself, Jamie zeroed in on me, while her arm stayed wrapped around my colleague’s, asking me where I knew her boyfriend from; and her boyfriend answering that he knew me from work, down the hall; and we three got into a flow of conversation that included how he noticed today that I wasn’t there, and how I called in sick, and how I didn’t look sick, and how that was brilliant, and how it really wasn’t, and something about where Jamie worked but I did not catch that. What was that? and they didn’t hear me and moved on in conversation. I was still trying to remember if Jamie had gone to my school. I tasted the hotdog and sauerkraut still deep on the back of my tongue, lingering. The chatter coming from behind us was getting even louder, though we only noticing we were getting deafer, and screaming louder to convey sentences across the air.
I glanced over briefly and saw Mike and smiling Jeremiah chatting with
each other, much more easily, in their own world at their
corner of the table. I had
an urge to leave my conversation and join theirs.
I wanted to understand smiling Jeremiah’s smile.
I wondered if Mike realized he was balding down the sides—bombshells
dropped heavy on patches of soft grass, now weedless and sproutless; or, more
like a deforested walking path, cleared by a strong-armed machete.
I wondered if my colleague worried about balding because of the precedent
set by his elder counterpart. I
turned back to my colleague in front of me—confident, laughing boldly at
something, the beautiful girl
draped and attached over his arm. His
black hair stood confident, showing off.
I wanted her. I wanted her
attention. I wanted so many things
suddenly.
I wanted to grab his hair and
tug it forward until his goddamn head bowed.
Then he would shut up so I could talk to her.
I began telling a joke I had heard
the other day in a stand-up comedy routine
on TV.
I had fears and feelings of
weariness that the joke would not have the same effect, or any effect at all, me
telling it; but then I feared the awkwardness to stop, and thought of her eyes
on me without looking at them. I
remembered the one time I had my blood sample taken, staring as hard as anyone
ever had at the crack within the flaky paint on the clinic’s wall.
I worked hard to push back my sudden inadequacies. I focused to build up the joke piece by piece; I worked the anticipation as if it were soil to be toiled with my blood and sweat; as if maybe I faced some imminent winter starvation. Midway, when I looked up at them, they were encapsulated in my stream of words, their four eyes seeing no bar full of people behind me, no crowd, not even me, in fact only hearing the joke as if it were one palpable thing, about to explode in their faces. I was roused, now looking into her eyes, and continuing on more intensely. New feelings that were familiar somewhere in me surged into my mind and my moving lips engorged with action like I was suddenly plugged in. I forgot the day, the streets outside, and what I was at that moment and what I had become; and then I was there, at the end. I said it. And after a long second, the reaction exploded in front of me, Jamie falling back, then falling forward in her chair, her arms withdrawn from his, flailing up and down, slapping the tabletop making the beer spill over the tops in miniature splashes. Mike and smiling Jeremiah were both still and looking now too, and I could hear her laughter over the crowd, her voice booming over all of theirs like a giant in mockery of the twitching whiskers of mice. My hand, before on the handle of my mug, now lay limp on the table, and in her slaps, her fingers once touched over my fingers on the table, and lingered there for a moment more, before withdrawing. She continued laughing, the intensity graduating downwards with each pulse, like coughing, and wheezing; and only sometime then did I notice my colleague, stone still, with little change over his face than when we had chatted earlier, before I had begun my joke, silent with the energy sucked wholly, laterally, next to him. He hadn’t even cracked a smile, or at least if he had, the remnants did not show. Missing a slight beat, he moved the conversation onward.
I did not remember anything of what was said afterward, because even at
the time I heard none of it, though my lips moved on cue, and my words flowed in
when they were summoned.
I was ready to look down at my watch any second now, and say I had to go,
to announce to all, including myself, the beginning of my journey home, to my
apartment at my day’s end. As
this idea occurred to me, without warning Jamie got up and left with an
inaudible gesture. I saw her work her way disappearing into the crowd, which was
now thinning, towards the RESTROOMS sign across the other far end.
Her long hair swept left and right as she walked, seemingly clearing a
path, closing and resealing as she passed.
She was gone from sight.
“So you also in the human resources department, Len?” came the
question from smiling Jeremiah. All
three other men at the table now looked at me.
My colleague didn’t attempt to answer for me; his arms folded sitting
back against his chair. Mike smiled
openly now, too, while he looked at me, almost as if with the explicit purpose
to single out his younger brother at the table.
I felt something similar to stage fright.
Yeah, no…well, I work to input
the orderings for the master list of the city, and well yeah; no I don’t work
at human resources really, and I had the strongest desire to not
have conversation directed toward me; to not
be the spotlight right now. So
what do you two do?
There was definitely then the thickest silence at our table amongst the
commotion. Even in my sudden feelings, the heaviness was unmistakably
objective. My colleague anchored
the bulk of silence at his end in the shadows, sitting back in his chair.
Mike spoke up: “Well, I used to work at… well I used to work—but I
have decided recently—now—that I’m going to join the rabbinical school to
study to become a rabbi…”
More than at any other point that day, I was interested:
Really?!
That’s… wow, how—
“How the hell do you figure to do this now, Mike,” my colleague erupted
from the shadows, now sitting at the edge of his chair, his upper body now
hovering like leaning cliffs over the table.
“You going to listen to this joker
over here?” stabbing a finger towards the smiling man.
“You’re a few years away from making partner at the firm, and
you’re going to do what this unemployed clown over here has been telling you to do?”
His face now blotted with patches of red even in the dark.
“I’m not doing what anyone
has been telling me to do—least of all you
you uptight bastard,” Mike responded with force.
“I’m deciding what, for myself.”
Within a few attempts, my colleague was choked for firepower and breath,
finally flaring back with, “Well I don’t like what I’m
doing most of the time, either, and
I’m sticking with it; you gotta…” And
in between this continued crossfire and plea of words was Jeremiah’s face, his
smile toned down but still there, looking at me as if into a soft sunset, or the
moon. I felt uncomfortable, as I
was sure he did laying witness to this family feud, surfaced at our table; I
forgot myself, and responded to his smile, giving a subtle laugh.
The arguing brothers did not notice.
Something in the message of his lips, cheeks, his smile confounded my
senses. Something in the code that
was his face, pointed me to a place where I had never thought to look before,
like behind one protruding roof-support in the back attic. And then I realized
Jeremiah’s reaction was not the same as mine: he was not looking off, smiling,
smiling less, in reaction to Mike’s revelation and my colleague’s outburst
and retort; he looked at me. His
eyes held me as if formulating thoughts, asking questions, having a conversation
with me that I was just now beginning to hear.
When I understood this, he gazed off, into the crowd behind me, crowding
the bar, circulating and sustaining the life of this tavern.
I felt lost when he did that. I
felt as if a lighthouse had been turned off, and my lone rowboat there out in
the sea had become solid with all of the blackness.
I got up to leave the conflict and Jeremiah smiling at the table, and
pushed my way through the crowd, back to somewhere where the crowd would swallow
me up, and spit me out. As I saw
the RESTROOMS sign and left the crowd approaching, a hand grabbed me on my arm,
and the touch of it swung me around.
“Lenny.” It was Jamie, and the timid look on her face and in her body,
now standing up, facing me, made her seem suddenly two-faced, and even more
beautiful.
Hey. hey—
“I don’t know if you remember me.
Actually—I’m sure you didn’t, that’s why I didn’t say anything
to you earlier,” and her words thoroughly confused me, but I suddenly felt as
if oblivious to being the hero of some story all along.
I, well, I—
“I was in a few of your classes in eleventh and twelfth grade.
But you probably didn’t even know me… Oh, forget it!” she panted
loudly. “I was thinking about
whether to tell you all this just now, but oh it’s just coming out so stupid,
forget it—”
No, no! and I could have leaned
closer that much more now to embrace her. And
I gave a laugh, Please! Go on…
Her eyes turned shyly down. “…well,
I always sat quiet in the back of the room—for all my classes—and in those,
some of them, you always sat in the front, goofing off to the teacher….”
She continued, with nervous breaths: “And well, I always, never could
get to, find a way to talk to you—I thought you were really funny, and
cute—and then I found out, too, that you were dating that girl Ellyn, so…”
I couldn’t help smiling, pleasantly and boldly with breaths of
laughter. She was like a little
girl; and I was like a boy too, but with the confidence of a teacher.
I felt intimate with her, as if I had been talking to her for years.
Jamie! I remember you from class
now, and I laughed with delight. In
fact, I was actually thinking when I first sat down that I knew you—It’s
just you’ve changed so much since then...
She leaned forward, laughing softly.
“Well, I’m glad you remember. I
was so nervous just now—”
And I rapidly suddenly bent forward and kissed her lips and she jumped,
one nervously surprised tick; but soon then she acquiesced and received my lips
as actions of comfort to her.... It
felt like years. It felt like
kissing Ellyn under the berry tree, my first kiss; it felt like high school and
playing and riding a bicycle with both eyes closed; and looking into the mirror,
your own eyes full with thought, for the first time.
It felt so good.
And when I pulled back and looked at her, I was embarrassed.
But I was smiling.
She was almost the other person again, distantly beautiful.
She expressed in her still face a gladness that could have been sympathy
or satisfaction that it had happened, but she had gained back confidence,
knowing that she was not the one who had acted.
We met somewhere midway.
Sorry…, I began hollowly out
of obligation.
She laughed an exaggerated laugh, like I were her son feeling bad for
something that was ridiculous. “No
apology needed, really,” she said. She
smiled a smile she knew was beautiful. There
was a silence in the room it seemed, but the traffic in thought passing through
us drowned it out. “And that joke
you made earlier at the table...” she began.
“It wasn’t really funny.”
I was dumbfounded and suddenly confused.
“I’ve actually heard it told before—you stole it from that standup
act on TV,” she said. “And you
even told the ending wrong.” I
restrained from bursting out laughing or covering my face in shame.
“But don’t worry, I wasn’t patronizing you, laughing afterwards. I guess it was all those years-ago’s laughter from my back
of the classroom that I gave quietly, I wanted to have you notice me, that I was
noticing, and that I liked you then, but I could never say it...”
I imagined her... admiring me then....
Well…
thanks. I guess you’re saying it now.
And more than at any point in the night, I was ready to go home.
I looked at my watch.
She knew it was coming. Hey,
well it’s getting late, I’m probably going to get on home.
Thinking of a more fitting excuse, I mentioned the brotherly tension that
had mounted at the table moments ago.
“Oh really? Well it’s
not a big deal, happens all the time like that between those two,” she said.
“C’mon, you can join us back at the table just for a bit more.
We’re leaving soon now anyway, seeing that the brothers over there got
some settling to do on their own,” she added.
I thought of home, the apartment, Ellyn waiting.
No, thanks, it’s okay, I
said. Actually,
just help me tell the feuding brothers, and that other guy—
“That other guy—you mean Jeremiah, my brother,” she said.
I had not realized him to be her brother, and now tried to recall him, to
picture him in that context.
Yeah, your brother.
Help me tell your brother and them that it was late and I had to go,
okay?
She smiled, and didn’t respond. She
looked engagingly into my eyes for a prolonged second, nodded as she turned to
leave, and I watched her walk back into the crowd, her silk-brown hair swaying
side to side, and the crowd parting, then closing, swallowing her disappearing.
I suddenly was alone again, crowds of people in front of me; but now in
some ways different from the other points throughout the day, different from
other points throughout my life, I was alone, with a feeling of at least me.
I imagined, a shade humorously I thought, that I had met myself at this
bar, this night, and that all the characters and props and beers passed spilling
around were just that, characters. I
heard loud, coarse laughing coming from the bar behind me. I continued forward and pushed open the door into and back
out of the bathroom, then pushed my way through the crowd to push the bar’s
front double doors, and walked back out into the cool air of the streets.
I was in my city again.
Something about the street made me remember pieces now.
Those times we stumbled haughtily through, laughing and jabbing at each
other in a playfully intimate crowd, flaunting in the daytime, posing older in
the nighttime, all vaguely came back to me.
I had forgotten those eyes with which I had seen all of this.
Somewhere along the way, I had lost those eyes, and somehow walking now,
at this day’s end, it was like suddenly finding that charm, that small piece
that had fallen through the floor-cracks of my childhood.
I felt around in my pocket, remembering.
All the way, the streets spoke to me and I to it, as if both speaking
nostalgically. The ground moved against my feet rolling out underneath like
film of a movie reel, and once in a while I could feel the subway rumbling
through beneath like a distant, unmattering intensity.
“You hungry honey?” my wife asked.
I’m okay, Babe, I’m okay. I looked at her and thought about us.
How was work today?
“It was good—the kids were good, they presented to me Get Well cards that they had been making with their substitute art teacher when I was sick last week, they didn’t finish till now,”—God I love when she smiles like that so unconsciously—“but that goddamn Principle Rogers, he gets on my nerves ‘cause today...” and she went on and on about that Goddamnrogers and her day at work, and I felt so lucky and grateful and loved her more than I had for a long time; and the day drifted to a vague conclusion with coffee coasters on the tabletop, fading words exchanged and emitted to the silences of TV, and we two cuddling on the couch like when we first fell in love, to sleep.