Looking
He was walking around in the clearance area downstairs, looking. They were supposed to meet here, right? He was pretty sure that, yeah, this was where they were supposed to meet. The email had been very specific - the shop on the lower level of the Air and Space Museum, and that’s where he was, ready to go. His bags were packed, and to commemorate the occasion he had even grabbed a cool-looking shirt with the SR-71 Blackbird - his favorite jet - on it. But the occasion had yet to come.
He walked around the store a couple more times, looking here and there, but every face was strange, and no one was wearing a salmon-colored shirt. Soon enough, he gave up and started killing time by looking over, for the third or fifth time, some of the many things for sale in the shop.
A series of identical blue-and-silver pens, encased in cheap plastic attached to cheaper cardboard, hung in rows on a small swivel stand. The cardboard boasted that the pen could write upside down, and even in temperatures ranging from -30 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit.
He didn’t know why anyone would want to write in temperatures like that. The one time he had been in -30 Fahrenheit, he had driven to a local convenience store with his brother to grab some drinks. Three steps from the truck to the door had given him enough cold to last all night; on the drive home - a short, five minute jaunt - they had let the drinks sit nestled in the snow in the back end of the truck. The drinks had frozen by the time the truck pulled in to the driveway.
On another side of the swivel stand, stuck neatly in lines to a plain-drab single sheet of metal, were circle-shaped, fingernail-sized magnets, golden-colored little doodads. A small coin - smaller than a penny - with an inlay of a skyline of skyscrapers was suspended between a raised ring with “Smithsonian Institution” etched in black serif lettering. You could flick the coin and it would spin rapidly around, or you could gently push the coin until you saw that the image of the skyscrapers was on both sides. He wondered where those buildings were, and who would design such a useless little trinket and then sell it in a museum of priceless aviation artifacts.
Next to the stand was a table with things about the Wright Brothers - DVDs, models, books. A children’s book with “The Story of the Wright Brothers” written in rainbow coloring on the cover caught his eye. He flipped through the cardboard pages, glossing over the brightly-illustrated pages and block-texted, simplistic retelling of the very-complicated story behind the first airplane.
He set it back down and picked up a thick, grey-white card sitting in a tray next to the book, “1903 Wright Flyer” printed in 16-point Times New Roman on the card to the right of the the Smithsonian Institution logo. “On a chilly windswept beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wilbur and Orville Wright inaugurated the aerial age with their historic flights…”
Next to the tray of cards, someone had left a similar card about a newborn panda cub. “The National Zoo’s giant panda, Mei Xiang, gave birth to a cub early in the morning on July 9, 2005. It was learned during the cub’s first exam on August 2 that the cub was a boy…” It didn’t say anything about the cub’s father. Did they even know who it was?
He slid the cards into his back pocket and decided to leave. He passed by a vintage poster - “The Little Aviator” - and stopped briefly to read the poem.
Boys had boats
their favored toy -
Not I
when I
was just a boy.
I dreamt of wings
for soaring high
and cutting wakes
in yonder sky
And where my hero’s
footsteps went -
I’d follow
in the firmament
The man at the cash register was nice enough as he rang up the t-shirt. He hadn’t seen anyone wearing a salmon-colored shirt pass through, though. Oh well.
Waiting
He was standing alone in the gift shop at the Air and Space Museum, waiting, surrounded by objects and people, wearing his best pink shirt. He wasn’t sure what else he should have worn. When people asked, he said it was salmon, because technically it was true.
While he waited, he read “fun facts” off of thick little grey-white cards that he had found scattered in trays around the store. The SR-71 Blackbird is considered the world’s fastest operational jet-powered aircraft… Globe is derived from the Latin… In October 1957, the “beep, beep” from the orbit of Sputnik, the first satellite, was truly heard around the world…
He briefly wondered why, out of all the massive things involved in every massive event, people always chose to focus on the small things. Small steps, short beeps, big blue dots. He kept waiting.
Maybe he should buy something, a souvenir or something. There were paperweight Earths, Smithsonian baseballs, Solar System marbles. All small things for sale. And then there was him, on the diamond-plate walkway, waiting, waiting, waiting in his salmon-pink shirt, and then…he saw a sign.
Visit the clearance sale section on the lower floor.
He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. He glanced around, and he spied a Newton’s cradle, and he felt very tired, and he wished that he could rest, just for a moment, but he knew he had to wait.
Gala
“Hey, yeah, I see you. I’m up on the top floor here. You see me? Yeah? Alright, I’ll see you in a minute.”
“No, no, take the other staircase, the third one from the door. Yeah, the other two take you to completely different buildings. Alright. See ya.”
“I didn’t see an elevator when I came in, no. Did you say it only takes you to the basement? Odd. Call me when you find it again.”
“Okay, so the elevator is out of service now. Is there an emergency landline there? There is? Try that. Alright, call me back when you have news.”
“It’s out for how long? And there’s no other way out? Hang on, I’m going to talk to someone. Actually, here’s someone right now.”
“So what he told me is, there’s a staircase three blocks south of where you are now. Yeah, apparently this was a speak-easy rum-runner line back in the day. Call me when you get your bearings.”
“Yeah, he said only three blocks. You go three blocks and take the third right at the blinking green stoplight. Okay.”
“Yes, I’m sure there’s a stoplight. He specifically said stoplight. Fine.”
“Oh, it’s a spotlight? Huh. Okay then.”
“What do you mean the street’s closed for construction? Well, can you walk back? Look, I don’t see why you’d be afraid of getting lost. Okay, fine, just get a cab.”
“Alright, if it’s been fifteen minutes without seeing a single cab then maybe you can try finding a bus of some sort. I’ll look one up.”
“There’s a sightseeing bus that goes right by here. The next stop is ten minutes from now just down the road. Take a left and you’ll be at the stop. Yup, okay then. Love you too.”
“Honey, it’s been half-an-hour. What’s up now?
…
The bus stranded you on the other side of town?
Dear, I…think the day might be a bust.”
They didn’t just ditch him. They didn’t grab his clothes right as he got to the middle of the pond, hop in the car, and drive away like he had a chance in hell of catching up. No, that’s a bad joke, way overplayed.
He’s not alone right now. The guys are right there, cheering him on.
He isn’t cold.
Metro
The metro clanked over the tracks. It was afternoon.
“So…how was your day?” Johnny asked.
Kate rustled. “It was alright,” she said after a pause.
The two sat silent.
Johnny absentmindedly rubbed at his wife’s shoulder, thinking of things to say. A father tried to calm his daughter down the tram and Johnny briefly turned to look, interrupting his train of thought. Kate kept staring out the window, slumped beneath her coat.
“I kind of want to go for a walk out here some time,” Johnny finally said. “It’s really beautiful out here, especially this time of year.”
“Yeah,” Kate said.
“You remember when we went hiking once?”
“I think so. You were out of breath a lot.”
“I had fun, especially since I was with you.”
Kate didn’t reply.
Clatter. Clank. The metro went into a tunnel, then ground to a halt. A voice over the intercom sounded: “Now at Junction Station…”
Kate’s phone lit up in her pocket. She checked it. “Oh, I need to get off here,” she said.
“Right now? Really?”
“Yeah.” Kate grabbed her bag and stood up.
“Ok. I’ll see you at home later, I guess. Any idea…”
Kate was out the door. The metro doors closed.
“…when you’ll get home.”
The metro clattered away. Johnny saw her bag disappear behind a pillar, then the station disappeared behind a concrete wall.
Squared Away
This is how I left my room when I left for Basic - messy, unkempt, just totally un-squared away. It looked like a tornado had ripped my room apart. I knew what really happened.
When I got back a year later I wanted to rip myself apart.
It took me the whole day to square my room away, to find the right spot for everything. I even had to go down to the hardware store and buy some things - a new hanger bar, plus the supplies to attach it to the closet walls; some screws and wood and biscuits and whatnot to fix up the busted-up dresser I had put off repairing for the longest time; venetian blinds, because I wasn’t going to put up with a blanket over my window any longer; more and more and more - but I got it done. I got it done.
Dad came upstairs. He had heard me working and it woke him up. He asked me why I was doing all this. We were moving in a month. We had just been renting this place out. The dresser wasn’t even ours. It had just been there.
“Because I have to,” I snapped at him. I was stripping and re-painting the window trim, so I didn’t bother looking away.
“This is wasted effort,” he told me.
I didn’t respond. I had to get it done.
I had to.
Angela Bassett
The movie was humming along just fine, and then it wasn’t. We were watching a Colin Farrell horror/action thriller, and then we were watching Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe facesmashed together like, I dunno, it was the end of ‘Supernova’ and James Spader and Angela Bassett were being dimensionally smashed-together in that pod-thing. It was weird.
After five minutes the lights went up. Three guys walked in; two of them were built like Steve Austin, the third like Jerry Lewis. “We’re experiencing technical difficulties,” Jerry said.
No shit, I thought.
“No shit!” somebody yelled from the middle of the stuffed audience.
Jerry scratched at the nape of his neck. “We should have everything sorted soon enough.” And then they all left.
“How long do you think it’s going to take?” My date asked.
“Not long, I hope.”
It was long. It was very long. Hours long. One guy got up to go - “to the bathroom,” he claimed to no one in particular - but was rebuffed by one of the Steve Austins guarding the door.
“Why is Steve Austin guarding the door?” My girlfriend asked.
I didn’t know. “I dunno…”
Someone tried the back exit by the screen - still showing the Spader-Bassett still - but it was chained up. When someone tried it later it was cemented shut. People went for their cell phones, but they were all missing. Confiscated, no doubt.
I grew hungry. Everyone grew hungry. Everyone grew tired. People fell asleep, curling up in corners of the theater, wrapping themselves in downy-blue blankets. Steve Austin grew tired, too; he had a shift-change with Ed Sullivan. Night shift guards are old, ex-cop near-retirees. I learned this from the Pierce Brosnan/Salma Hayek/Woody Harrelson romantic comedy ‘After the Sunset’.
In the middle of everyone’s sleep, perhaps seeing his chance, someone tried to get past Ed Sullivan. We were all woken up with a scream; Ed Sullivan walked back, licking blood off his fingers, and we never saw the man again. No, I take it back - sometimes Ed Sullivan would be eating something, and we always knew who it was. Ed knew we were hungry, too - Ed always knew - and here and there he’d toss a slab of bloody red meat down the hallway for us. It wouldn’t last more than five minutes. We’re all just animals, after all.
Yesterday a man started moving in on my woman. He already had a woman; he couldn’t have mine too. He grabbed her arm and I shoved him away, snarling. He snarled back; we locked eyes for a moment; I readied the steel pipe, carved from the front row rails; sadly, he backed off, looking away, leaving my woman unchallenged for me, for now. She sat silently and obediently at my feet.
At some point Steve Austin tried to relieve Ed Sullivan. We never saw Steve Austin again either, except at dinner.
He still remembered all of her, each tiny feature, remembered the smell of her tan and the cotton dress, her firm body, the lively sound of her voice, gay and free … The feeling of the just-experienced pleasure of all her feminine charm was still remarkably alive inside of him, but now the most important was really this second completely novel feeling—this strange, incomprehensible feeling that was not at all there while they were together, that he couldn’t even imagine yesterday when he started this, thinking that it was just a silly acquaintance, and now already he couldn’t tell her about it! “And most importantly,” he thought, “I’ll never be able to tell her! And what can I do? How can I survive this endless day, with these memories, with this inextricable torment, in this godforsaken town, above this same glowing Volga where that rose-colored steamer has carried her away?”
(via Construction | Sunstroke)
For Shel
This is what I looked like six years ago. I took this pic for posterity, so that every day I’d have to look at myself as I really was - no human psychology getting in the way, making my mirror image look better than it really was. Every day I’d be smothered by my weakness.
It didn’t work. I forgot, I took more pictures, I got weaker. I’m half the man I used to be, if I was ever a man at all; now it would take twice the effort just to get close to where I used to be. I’m older, sadder, more tired and less hopeful.
All I have to comfort me are my twin sons, about to enter preschool; the memory of their mother, who died giving birth to them; and the gaudy lumps of shitty metal my writing career’s has somehow gotten me.
None of it matters. I will never be man enough to own up to it all. The best I can do is to make a good life for my sons, and to push them to be better than I was, no matter what. Let the devil stop me - I will make them strong, every way I know how.
A Smoking Wreck
I’d been using for a year and it didn’t help, not in the least. No, actually I think it made it worse. I put that last patch on and tossed the wrapper where it is, and then, right there, I just had to have a smoke, right away. I couldn’t help myself.
I don’t know where I got my smokes; I had the pangs and I looked down and, I don’t know, I don’t get it, I had a full pack right in my hand. I hesitated, rolling it over in my palm. It was a brand I hated; I never would’ve bought it back in the day. Not that it mattered now. I cracked it open and smoked the whole thing, cigarette after cigarette, butt after butt. I finished it off and crumpled up the case and for a moment I felt alive. Then for fifteen minutes after all I exhaled was smoke. I was in a fog wherever I went. Then I went home.
I don’t deserve this, man. I did everything I could. I put those patches on, I smoked them, I ate them, everything short of some pretty nasty things that - don’t judge me, not as desperate as I am, not when you would too - I’m actually considering doing. I just want everything to end. I want to end it all.
I sat down in my shitty leather recliner and sighed out a puff of tobacco. The TV was on; I had forgotten to turn it off when I left. One of those anti-tobacco commercials was playing. You know, the ones that sneer at tobacco corporations for effectively marketing their product. It was at the end, and it had just cut away from a cowboy on a fake set to show an old man with emphysema in a wheelchair in a hospital that looked very, very real.
“You could end up like me,” he wheezed out.
Don’t ask me how, but the TV ended up a smoking, smouldering wreck out on the parking lot. It just happened.
