Breezes Unhurled

Something made him mad.  I assume it was something hidden deep, he certainly didn't have any tells, that is, he never told us what it was directly, just lots of shouting.  Turns out we only caught the one-foot waves from the deeper Tsunami.  When his wife turned herself in for blowing his chest out she was blacker and bluer than one of those endangered Japanese monkeys, and she had half a pool stick stuck in the side of her thigh.

When Kevin's older brother asked her about it later he said "she smiled like my Vegas Aunt."

This memory wafts in over breakfast, hot oatmeal and hardboiled eggs.  I like my eggs sliced evenly.  Kevin is there, reading up on this inexhaustible spectacle of a president.  I want desperately to be out of the country.  I had finished work at 3 in the morning.  All day one big long strategic assault on my senses, like a sloth boxing Mayweather, and to drive home without a horizon meant that at three I usually fell into bed.  But today I had looked at the tablet - not sure why - seen the numerous unread emails and texts of the last day - and about an hour into them I looked up feeling that only seconds had passed and decided to make breakfast instead of sleep, remembering having been told as a child that there was nowhere that God couldn't see you and hoping it wasn't true, thinking God was like my little sister who one constantly suspected of sneaking up on you but if you could only distract her with her shows for long enough you could tiptoe out and escape to a secret place. 

A cold morning.

"Wanna go fishing?" Kevin gives an alchemic smile.

"I don't know nothing bout no ichthyology."  A flock of birds showers out of the woods, followed closely by a hawk. 

"If your father never did you won't either."  I think about all the people I've chased out of my life, accidentally and on purpose. Out our windows crammed with paint jars low clouds crowd out the higher clouds, a mad mosh pit in the sky. The sun had yet to even take the stage. 

"What was that guy's name," I asked.

"Who, Ted," guessed Kevin, referring to the guy who vanished after the first round of layoffs.

"No, that guy from the Horseshoe, the one that died." 

"Dunno, why?  My brother would know.  I wonder whatever happened to Ted."

"Could be almost anywhere by now."

We run out of coffee so we squinch into my Mazda. I stash the carton of Pall Malls into the glove box so Kevin can swing his bony popping ligaments into the low seat, and we coast in neutral down the hill to the Starbucks while a guy on public radio reads out the names of fake-sounding soviet era government bureaus.  "The Central Reserve of non-Existent Premises," he intones. 

The wind howls as I park, three wide open spaces out front saving me from having to parallel. I miss the organic democracy of parking in unmarked gravel lots.  

That nutty aroma inside is so dense I feel diminished by it.  The smallish early crowd bridging all the gaps between the Americas, anglo and hispanic, black and white, rich and poor.  An old man by the window shares a table with the two small school-aged girls, imperfectly prim little pixies, puckering his whiskered cheeks to whistle at the rising cup of steam.  A woman is talking to her friend on the phone.  I crane my head seeing that she is older than she sounds.  Ahead of us in line, a short dark man in African vestments orders something, thick, like his accent.

"Manolo" a barista barks, placing a drink on the counter.  An old hunchback nun clutching her knuckles into fists emerges from the restroom.  Red and white flashing lights appear down the street before the sirens can be heard.  An ambulance rears past around the corner.  "Carmen!"  the barista calls.

We take our coffee to go and after I have drunk it I go directly to sleep, Kevin to work, I wake myself an hour later with my snores, I open my eyes and continue to dream, feeling that old electric fervor, the  rootless angry howl.  The apartment is mine all day so I forage in the fridge and walk around naked, seeing this new version of myself in multiple reflections and remembering how it used to look, the original incarnation, the ole' band lineup as it were.   Are there connections between who that person was and who I am now?  I used to be a guy trying to live in a mythical construct and now I'm a guy obsessed with destroying that myth.  My gut had broadened and my chest sagged, I still had my hair but the lines had all changed, standing up as tall as I could I thrust my hips a bit. So like, you know, well yeah.

I hold my breath.  Take a hot shower until the manic panic subsides and my palms are wrinkled.  As I towel off my phone buzzes.  The day takes a whole 'nother direction.

She said to meet her at Caruso's at noon and I didn't protest.  Since the breakup we've been crawling toward better things, is what I tell myself.  But what things?  The inner sky is still overcast, it might snow.  

I pass the Horseshoe there alongside the freeway and see a rowdy guy I know from work braced cowboy style out front, what did we even see in that place?  He's a salesman, the nasty pushy type that I despise, I watch the road and hope he doesn't see me but I fantasize that he does see me and the next time he comes up to talk to me I can let some of my hatred toward him boil out.  That'd be a good way to get fired.  I'm all hot air.  The man on the radio said "In ancient Egypt, the servants of the Pharaohs were coated with honey so that the flies would not disturb the rulers themselves."  I switch it off.  The tires roar across asphalt, like crinkling cotton balls in my ears.

I don't see her car and so it feels conspicuous walking into Caruso's, like she's going to pull up behind me, but when I turn around to look she's gone.  What I had wanted was to be her slick secret, a cavernous tunnel into which she could disappear, but she burrowed down and then didn't like it,  she cut me deep, coming up for air and in the process uncovering my insides, I'd been bleeding ever since.  Less cavernous than gaping, less slick than sickly. People like me who hide their problems until they can find no solution except to kill their darlings probably shouldn't be allowed to procreate.  Maybe that's why I pushed them away.  I thought about Trish.  I often do, though we were only together for a short time.  You can never control the thoughts, never prepare for them, they rush in unimpeded, I open the door to the restaurant accompanied by a gale, a loud chime rings.  Be right with you.  I think about her when they interrupt the music at the grocery store to announce a sale, when I'm dialing a client's phone number at work.   Two please, two minutes ‘hun.  I think about Claire, that sweet secluded girl I wooed relentlessly but couldn't figure out how to give any pleasure so I gave up and got mine instead, twice, before she blew away too.

A woman's hand on my shoulder.  Hi.  Nicetoseeyou.  We sit by the window where its slightly secluded but cold.

"Things are good, nice... odd, I guess.”

“Be more specific,” she says.  Her voice has a texture I could wrap myself up in.

She wears glasses because she'd “slept with these contacts in, again.” Her face looking older in glasses, not old, more adult, elongated.  I stretch my legs until they hit the metal bar under the table. I resist the urge to reach across the table and remove her glasses, rub my knuckles against her temple.  I also resist the urge to jam a fork through my dorsal filaments whilst simultaneously pulling away from the table at a sprint, instantly ripping my hand into a Y. 

We order tea and water.  Real big spenders.  She asks some pointed questions, trying to show concern, I think, trying so hard not to look at me askance, that sad emphatic skepticism, that I feel bad for her feeling bad for me.  Why are we even here?

“And how’s your family?”

“My Uncle Russell died,” I say.

She arranges the packets of sugar and sweetener, each in amongst its own kind, bottom to bottom, top to top.  “I’m sorry.  I just…”

We let it hang there.  The waitress returns with our drinks and we drink them.  She checks her phone, giving it more attention than it deserves.  Just like me.

It's been a year," she says at last.  No wonder she asked to meet me.  "I just thought, I didn't want you being too hard on yourself.  There's no formula to this, no spec sheet, it's just, it's hard enough to let yourself love anyone, flaws and all, and then to have all these layers of the past holding you back every day.  I just...”

"Layers," I repeat.  A hint of burning bread wafts in from the kitchen, like a piano with the A^b out of tune.

“Do you know what I mean?”

I nod without looking at her, almost smelling the perfume, or imagining I smell it, her transparent reflection in the window says that this is hard for her.  I should have known.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m okay.  Are you okay?”

"I’m empty as a pocket."

"Who said that?"

"I dunno,” I say, “I might’ve come up with it myself.  Y’know, I am pretty clever."

"Paul Simon," she says, putting her phone back in her purse.

She has to go.  Rather than cavil about the bill I say goodbye.  We don’t hug.  I don’t get up.  I watch her.  I watch a young woman walk in, with tan legs, and when she scooches into her chair across the room her skirt flashes up a bit and my heart leaps at the bareness of the upper thigh.  I blush, imagining the regions I cannot see, all flayed and warped into torrid sexual positions and I laugh out loud at what a joke I have become.  When does it all stop?

Never.  It never stops.  The ego, the pent-up anger, the wandering eyes, the bottomless lust - all together they just might be the breath of life, inhale, exhale, what else is there?

I thought we'd been doing a good job of being inconspicuous but now I suspect that I was wrong.  Too many eyes are looking at not me.  I wish I was a chameleon.

Carrying myself out into the fresh air like breezes unhurled.  Walking back to the car I cast no shadows.  Better get some more sleep before I go back to work.  The sky is a glaucous dome.  Maybe I’ll stop by the Horseshoe.  My stomach gurgles like a man trapped at the bottom of a well.  “There’s no escaping.”  I say.

What was that guy’s name?  It’ll come to me.

Retro Invite Only

Sorry Britney, there's somebody on the other line
Hit me baby, some other time, perhaps
-Alexander Graham Bell

The place felt like Brooklyn heights, someone said, but I disagreed having never been there, and decided to eavesdrop on someone else's conversation instead. This time the poet who I fear and despise. Mostly just fear. Tall, wide slanted green eyes, eating with her fingers and sucking both the meat out of the crabs and the jealous spite out of everyone nearby with her charm. They all hated her. The poser. The success story in a sea of Punk Scene Princesses who make up in mascara what they lack in social conformity.

He kisses her on her mouth
She says save it for the stage
Oblivion swirling in her cigarette smoke
the fools, the bastards, the women
fighting men as flames arise
such a juxtaposition, this life
with its invisible music, in visible blood
hearts lie all around
the mosh pit, dying.

I read on the wall. This is her party. Scrawling violent drip-ink splatter sketches on the minimalistic gallery surroundings and each with its own poem beneath. I've been invited because we once dated. Briefly. Not really. We made out. A couple times. So much of love is circumstance. She had asked me what the deal with the mask was.

"We all wear masks," I had said.

"Symbolically right, in the little white lie sense. But why are you actually wearing a mask?"

"Trying to get away from things, I guess. Trying to fit into the river of darkness. I just want everyone to be happy."
She took a strong swig of a weak drink and eyed me like I'd been standing by the door all night and just come into focus. I had. But that's how she had looked at me. And then her cell phone beeped and the ambient bar noises suffusing the air rose and howled like a train and I stepped out for a smoke in the solemn solitude of the cathedral black city night sky. Half a million thoughts in my head. Which is more impenetrable, the directions of the unknown or the concourses of the human heart?

"Why are you here?" someone asks, ruining the remembrance of things past.

"I'm allowed." I say. I had again walked outside for a smoke. Life imitates flashback. Always, but tonight I'm afraid a look in her eyes would be devastating.

"I wasn't insinuating..."

"I'm card carrying," I inform her, "I have my poetic license. Wanna see?" I reach down to cup my crotch but she simply laughs plaintively and walks away into the luminous emptiness of the party. Me and my sepulchral party sense. Overhearing two women talking about their sons,

"The boys are getting so big... so much stronger. I hope they make it to the finals," and suddenly I have a vision of the world as a nuclear wasteland of both proud and slouching storefront mannequins all blank eyed and blindly going through the motions of their daily lives, not knowing that they're selling something (themselves) in the display cases of time.

"The problem with wearing a mask is that you want to be somebody else, and you fail to recognize that their problems may be worse than your own." A feminine voice like liquid steel; hot, wet, and burnt-egg sulphuric, "the kind of problems that leave you shaking long into the imperturbable nights."
It was her. Come out to have a smoke with me. The girls within didn't seem to mind her absence. Easier to snarkily criticize her exhibition with her out of earshot.

I felt homesick and out of place. I felt a feverish heat venture out all over me in tiny little ringing waves. She saw further into me than I was comfortable with, and I suspected that she could see further still, over yon mountain, compromising even my deepest darkestmost defenses, and I wanted out of the light. "Nice of you to come," she said, and kissed me.

I have kissed Brazillian girls, their tongues acting little forcible reacharound subterfuges.
I have kissed French girls, in tempestuous sweeps and whorls that are perquisite preludes to hotly anticipated nothings.
I have kissed Danish girls, and been carried away by by their intrinsic shifting surls and deep deadly twitters.
I have kissed Korean girls, light as a feather and softer than solace.
I have kissed Italian girls... sigh...
I have kissed South African girls, mutely mouthing endless words without meaning all the while...
...But her kisses were the epitome of elegantly crafted detachment. Her kisses left me parched and dry of free association. Her kisses you couldn't practice for; and it would split your heart to dream about them.

"You didn't call me back," she says.
"Buy me a drink," I offer raggedly, pouring out the words like hiccups.

Gesture. Step. Smile. Together we glide back into the party. Everyone is looking at you. Everyone whispering scalding little critiques. You're with her, she looks immaculate and where did you come from? You look like a schlub. Speckled brown jacket. Horrible gray pants. Bad-mannered, not very witty. Say something witty!

"Tom Collins," I say. "Tom Collins is a dry drink. Billy Collins is a wet poet."

Lame. She doesn't laugh. She sits huskily, looking at me clear and pure, making me want to melt into the shadows.   "Still wearing the masks I see," she says, "what are you hiding from these days?"

"I like telling people I've read books that I haven't. Saying I went to better schools. You know..." The world is a big place. There should be room for all of us, both who we are, and who we wish we could be.

"I thought you didn't finish school..."

"Yeah, well..." I think back to one of my own poems:

I'm neck deep (in water)
"Is it love?" she asks
"Is this the Ocean?" I retort
I just can't tell anymore

"...I just can't tell anymore."

When one door closes, fuckin' reopen it!
- Fergie