xX... let me tell you, school is just GETTING IN THE WAY! ...xX
It is raining.
Not the torrid downpours or freezing showers of London Rain. But the sweet, winsome, almost certainly filthy, charming rain of late afternoon, autumn Harlem.
It crackles as it hits the pavement.
A little girl walks with her mother. They hold hands. Her hair is in thick braids. Her backpack shows some bilingual TV character smiling and laughing. Or something. She turns and smiles at him.
Ok, maybe not at HIM. But she certainly smiles at the bus he's on.
That's got to count for something. Right?
He presses his head up against the smudgy window. The hum of the engine vibrates his forehead. The fluorescent lighting casts unforgiving illuminations.
Two boys listen to music out of a large boom box. They don't appear to be going anywhere. They just sit and listen. They've paid their buck. It's dry in the bus, anyway. And they've got nothing better to do. So they ride it up and down the route. As long as they can. Until the bus driver has to get off and kick their "lazy ass" off.
He swallows and moves his lips into something that might, or might not, resemble a smile. He forgets.
With a "mwusssssphhhh" the bus descends and the door opens.
"IN THE BACK!" A hunched over woman wearing a plastic rain bonnet howls at the driver.
The back door creaks its way open.
Footsteps echo purposefully in his ears. Hardly anyone bothers to chat. The sound of umbrellas opening up, their soft "phump" daring the rain to do its worst.
He gets up.
He grabs his bag.
He doesn't know how.
His feet carry him. His arms lift. His brain and his heart both will him to stop.
STOP. they say. STOP. RIDE THE BUS FOREVER WITH THE BOYS AND THEIR BOOMBOX.
But he doesn't listen to either.
He listens to the sounds of his feet splashing in a puddle as he steps off the bus.
The rain is nothing but a drizzle. The bus pulls away with a heavy, pained lurch.
People jostle past him.
He just stands.
In the middle of the sidewalk.
The drizzle getting his clothes wet. His inconsequential clothes. But clothes.
No one looks at him.
Finally,
He exhales. He exhales. Smiles.
His body merges into one again. All he knows is that he is thirsty.
And,
he is home.
----
He's never been to America before, let alone New York.
The wheels hitting the runway at somewhere around 500 miles an hour scared him. The screech of the tires made him see death flash before him. That split second of absolute chaos, where no one is in control of a three-hundred passenger carrying machine. In his mind, visions of flames and explosions and despair flash. He imagines that moment where you realize that the chaos has won the split second battle. That moment. Is there terror? Or perhaps the brain is too busy figuring out what the fuck is going on that by the time you figure it out, it's a tad too late. Seeing as how you've been consumed in flames.
The man at customs looked diplomatic and asked him questions of no real importance.
But they sounded officious so he did his best to answer them.
He had a magazine tucked under his arm, his passport slipped away in-between an ad for women's perfume and a story about post-Bergman Swedish cinema and it's effects on the design world.
He had skipped that article.
His luggage took forever.
When he walks into the "nothing to declare" line, he feels like a liar. A thief. He notices the cameras, watching him, tagging him. He imagines underpaid high school graduates in cheap suits watching him on a monitor. Drinking their corporate-made coffee in standard issue white mugs and wiping away the spit. The spit.
His nostrils fill with the smell of deasel. His bag suddenly feels heavy. He is hit with the knowledge that from here, from this spot on the pavement where taxi's whiz past him, there are so many choices, he doesn't know what to do.
He could go anywhere.
He gets on a bus.
Typical, really.
To get on the right bus when there are ten wrong ones lined up behind.
----
Thirsty. His mouth dry. his lips cracked.
The place is a slip. Walk right by it, not even notice it.
He notices it because there is a tray of homemade scones in the window.
And the steam from an espresso machine shoots into the air as a woman with kinky hair and long, pink fingernails writes down orders on a pad.
He pushes the door open.
"Hey there!" She calls to him, even though she's in the middle of taking an order and there's a line of at least 3 people waiting.
"Hi!" He calls back, as if he's known her his entire life.
For a moment she looks taken back.
By a combination of things.
But she figures she's seen stranger and smiles.
He takes his place in line, behind a man in a turtleneck and beret.
The menu is written on chalkboards and, because the day is winding down, the items are smudged. The pastel pinks, greens, and blues blur together and it seems as though every item is every other item and that instead of ordering a latte you order a cranberrymuffinfreshmozzerellasandwichlatte2for$5.00.
That's what he orders. When it's his turn.
The lady with the kinky hair says,
"Hey baby," and takes his order. When she he pays his $5.00, he has to count out the coins and dollar bills carefully. He's never had to use anything like this before. She laughs and helps him, grabbing what she needs from his outstretched palm.
"Where you from?" She asks, crouching down and opening the display fridge to grab a saran-wrapped mozzarella tomato basil sandwich.
He smiles. Maybe Croatia. that would explain why he doesn't understand.
"England" he says after a while, deciding that he doesn't look Croatian for two reasons. One being that he's NOT, in fact, Croatian and the second having to do with his...
"England! Awesome!" She gives him a paper plate as well. "This your first time?" She asks.
He nods.
"Damn right! You can skip the Empire State building. The Statue of Liberty. Radio City and the UN!"
This is because she has just handed him four small, individually wrapped chocolates. The wrappers depicting one of New York's famous landmarks.
"They're shit anyway" She says, "The chocolate taste better than some nasty-ass b.o.!" She gives him his change and latte and sends him on his way with a smile and a toss of her thick hair.
At a table by the window he warms himself up with his latte. He takes off his coat and scarf, men don't seem to wear them here anyway, and hat.
He looks out the window for a while.
Then he looks down at the table.
Then he looks at his hands.
Then he looks into his soul.
And sips his latte.
----
The building is a small brownstone, squirreled away on some street which doesn't seem to belong.
Off busy Amsterdam Avenue,
there is a block- just one- where a small Hispanic man sells fruit, and a young woman works in a box office during the day and uses her small basement apartment as a brothel in the night.
He stares up at a building.
A young woman in stiletto heels clicks down the pavement.
He bites into his papaya, having just bought it. It's juicy.
Pure.
The first pure thing in...
He carries his bag up the steps. There are nine buzzers. Each one with a different name written on a slip of paper and slid, haphazardly, into dirty plastic slits.
He pushes one of the buttons.
He takes a deep breath.
What did he see,
when he peered into his soul?
----
The staircase is old.
There is no elevator.
The stairs wind their way carelessly around the wall. The banister splays its splinters and the paint is peeling off the way. The dirty white paint falls in chips, littering the ground. It almost looks like snow. Instead, it looks like sadness.
The apartment is in the old attic,
what that actually means is that he has to lug his bag up 4 floors, than he has to force open the massive iron door, decorated with all sorts of graffiti'd obscenities, that leads out onto the roof.
From the roof... one can't see much. He tries, though. That must count for something. He stares into the fifth floor of another, much taller building across the street. It's shadow falls over him, blocking the sun like some massive Pre-War saltshaker. That just happens to be 15 stories tall.
----
It's one room.
There's a mattress. A stove and microwave. A small, partitioned bathroom. On the walls are tacked posters of bands, people, places, images. It covers the four walls. Covers the peeling paint. The Smiths. Bjork. The Shins. Joni Mitchell. The Meligrove Band. Pictures of Jake Gyllenhaal, clipped from magazines, are tacked near the window and a serious looking asian woman with eyes like some endless gray ocean is tapped to a cabinet in the kitchen.
He sets his bag down.
Opens the window.
Takes out a cigarette.
The sheets on the mattress are unmade.
There's a carton of old milk in the fridge.
Lights the cigarette.
The rain starts to come down harder.
There's no heat,
He doesn't take off his coat.
He wraps his scarf tighter.
There must be varying levels of "functioning" he thinks to himself.
Certainly I am functioning.
But that's a shame.
For I am not alive.
He sits down on the floor and smokes slowly. Every breath, his last.
He considers heroin. Or whatever people do these days.
But decides not to.
He'd rather eat a papaya.
Standing up,
cigarette dangling from his lips,
He slams the door shut-
A thousand magazine eyes staring after him.
----
"Hi"
"Hey"
"Good flight?"
"Mmhm"
"Find the place ok?"
"Yup"
The boy in the plaid shirt puts on a kettle.
The gas clicks one time. two times.
No flame.
"Sorry."
"It's ok"
"No, it's not. It sucks"
"Ok it sucks"
Smelling the milk, he drinks tap water.
----
It's a strange scenario.
He left for New York three years ago.
They hadn't spoken in years,
except for a few e-mails,
which,
eventually,
he just stopped responding to.
Don't ask why.
Then, quite out of the blue, he phoned.
And, now, here he is.
One 6 hour flight later, of course.
He attempts to theorize on how, in fact, the boy in the plaid shirt survives, living on 137th street.
He's a skinny white boy.
With pictures of Jake Gyllenhaal and various black and white ads for boxer-briefs, tacked onto the wall.
----
Downstairs his conscious was yelling a million things at him.
Why did he come to America?
For some reason he must've thought that things were going to be different. That, on a different soil, the problems that existed in the land of rolling fog and castles, the land of magic wands of exploding snaps, that the problems in that land wouldn't translate to the land of apple pie and patriotism.
Fucking retarded.
Just because you put on an accent and hide a wand,
it doesn't change anything.
He wanders Manhattan. Looking for something. For anything.
In actuality, he just doesn't want to return to the apartment.
He doesn't want to return to those magazine eyes,
to the fake bulge in the underwear ads.
To the boy in the plaid shirt who's gas doesn't work.
To the boy in the plaid shirt...
He is 14.
He is at school.
This is before the boy in the plaid shirt has begun wearing plaid shirts.
Now he is just the "crazy irish best friend boy".
They are drunk. Like most little kids, they've simply mixed disproportionate amounts of various liquors that shouldn't be combined and downed it all.
Now, twenty minutes after the downing, they lay, face down, on a large armchair. They're still small enough so that they can share an armchair.
It is 2 in the morning.
"I think I'm going to throw up" he says to the boy who isn't quite the boy in the plaid shirt, yet.
"Yeah"
"I don't think that was a good idea"
Always looking out for the good idea.
"Yeah"
"I think I'm going to throw-"
But the boy who's not quite the boy in the plaid shirt has just kissed him.
Of course it's not really a kiss,
they're 14.
It's more like a sloppy pressing of lips.
It's messy.
In a way, though, it's kind of magical.
but not really.
"fuck"
He hobbles to the bathroom and throws up. He spends the rest of the night over the toilet, gagging and throwing up and, when he showers and rests and continues the next day, he won't ever mention that kiss.
Two years later, however, he will ask the boy who's migrating to plaid, if he is, in fact, a "flaming fag"
Inopportune, you'll agree.
The boy migrating to plaid will just stare at him.
"I'm sorry?"
"Just a question"
"No. Not JUST a question"
"Can you answer?"
"You're a dickhead"
"Fuck off"
----
A note, fastened to the refrigerator with scotch tape.
Be home around 7. Don't touch anything in the fridge.
----
It's 12:30.
The boy in the plaid shirt has yet to return.
He reads a magazine.
He reads a book.
He reads tea leaves.
He stares out the window.
He looks at Jake Gyllenhaal. Hoping for something. A connection. Please god, he thinks, let me UNDERSTAND.
The underwear models do nothing.
In his heart, he doesn't understand how something like this can kill a friendship.
In his mind, he does understand.
In his mind he is disgusted
In his mind he pictures-
In real life he hears the door open.
The boy in the plaid shirt is not alone.
With him is an older man. With a goatee and a slight belly.
He stands up.
The boy in the plaid shirt is drunk.
They don't say anything.
anyone.
There is silence.
"Would you mind clearing out, mate?"
The older man giggles.
He couldn't be anymore offended.
He shrinks.
He grabs his bag.
The door slams behind him.
He stops.
His sobs comes out in muffled screams.
He is splattered against the peeling wall, listening to the sounds emanating from the inside.
His sobs are painful. Each one shakes his body. Each one hurts.
----
He goes into the line for residents.
It's shorter.
And, finally, he's not a tourist.
Drug dogs prowl the line.
This is how it must be,
he thinks as he hands the man in the cap his passport.
home again.
There are some things that he just won't ever understand.
Fuck.
That's ok, he supposes.
When he steps out of the over air conditioned terminal-
it's raining.
The torrid downpours of London.
And he would have it no other way.
xX... REVIEW please!! ...xX