Time Passages
AN: Been a minute, hasn't it? Here's a jump in time, estimate about the late-seventies to early-eighties. Also! I write on Archive under the name 'highwayforgamblers' and there are some one-shots there that I haven't posted here, vice-versa. One more thing—my first story, Dark Alleys—expect an update sooner or later. Okay, sorry, really one more thing: this doesn't exactly have a plot—just sort of a thought dump through the eyes of an aged, jaded Ponyboy Curtis.
One thing about me is that I never pictured myself with kids. Even as a young teenager, the thought of teaching another human being to live, another human being who looks up to me and asks me questions and relies on me just about petrified me—at any rate, I find it increasingly amusing as I watch the college students I teach file in each morning. And no—I don't have any kids. It used to be a matter of not yet but I'm starting to think it'll be not ever.
Time comes, time goes, more granules of sand at the bottom of my hourglass. I think about my life a lot—perhaps a little more than I ought to, late nights sitting at the local diner, cold cup of black coffee in my hand, staring out at the hopeless highway with weary eyes, watching the stubble around my chin grow grayer each day. The diner I bum around has an old jukebox—so reminiscent of my younger years that I can't help but laugh each time I see it—every time I enter, I slip a quarter into the slot and change the song to 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue'. It's all very habitual. Etta, the lady who works behind the counter, pours me my black coffee without asking if I want any, chats me up in her motherly way ("Anything new this week, Mr. Curtis?" "Oh, darling, you would not believe some of the stories of the people who come through here.") while cooking up a new plate of grits on the frying pan. It's been like that for every Sunday since I got my teaching degree and settled down in Broken Arrow, just a few miles outside of Tulsa. Each time I enter that red diner door it slowly becomes more agonizing.
It's very unfitting of me to stay in Oklahoma. As a teenager, I always lamented to Soda about how I'd get out of here one way or another, work my way through college, get a degree and drive straight into the blazing sunset laughing — sayonara! — and never look back. I suppose that's all it'll remain—a pipe dream, a scenario to help me go to sleep at night—because I haven't driven further than the Super K at the north end of town. Never been any further than Oklahoma City for college. Never crossed the border into another state. Never this, never that. There's a lot of nevers in my life.
Etta hums to herself as she sweeps the floor in the kitchen, sounding perpetually content with the world, greeting me with a polite white smile when I just so happen to look away from the rain-speckled window. Brown-skinned, hair tied up in a neat little bun atop her head, empathetic. The kind of lady who'd be your next-door neighbor, who you'd run to as a kid and she'd always have a plate of biscuits, hot and steaming, waiting for you on the windowsill as they cooled.
I manage a polite smile back before looking down into the deep abyss of my black coffee and glancing back out at the red taillights on the interstate, wondering where those cars were going and why they were going there, resting my hand on my chin and watching as the lights blur together in the subterranean bluishness of the stormy gray sky. Rain hits the window, soft in a drizzle. Outside, the air is humid and sticky. Inside, the diner is quiet and empty, deserted except for me and my crumpled napkin, my copy of The Birth of Tragedy, and ever-cooling cup of joe. I sit there with a disgruntled tie, a stained white button-down shirt, and my blazer draped over the booth, looking like some sort of sorry third-rate gambler who's just come back from the baccarat table, pockets empty, paycheck wasted, unshaven and grimy, circles deep underneath my eyes. Bookish, mildewy smell of paper, like an old library. The sound of the clunky jukebox is like the tinnitus in my left ear. The record skips sometimes, repeats, starts over again.
Old memories flash like a broken film camera through my mind as I stare despondently at the glass. A ghost of myself looks back at me in my reflection, scowling. I blink in surprise at the man in the glass—that can't possibly be me, can it?
I remember the days that stretched out in front of me during my freshman year of college—philosophy major, questioning law school, a world of open possibilities before my precious young life. So promising were those days of old—I'm only thirty but I think like an old man—late nights in the junkie dorm room, watching dazedly as my future swirled down the drain accompanied by the reddish tint of blood and dandruff. Laying on my buddy Tommy's old futon, watching the sorry sophomore convulse on the ground as somebody shot a clear syringe of Narcan up his arm. Earlier memories, too—Soda smiling at me as I handed him a handpicked daisy flower, his voice childish and mocking as he said, "Only girls pick flowers!" — begging Darry to take me out with his football friends, my mother softly reprimanding me, my father teaching me to fish. Where'd it go? Where does time go? Like water underneath a bridge, a fast moving river, water tumbling and rolling over expanses of rocks, all racing toward the inevitable end. Wilted flowers and old gravestones. Granules of sand each second. Time.
I hate walking into the diner because it stands as a symbol that nothing's changed—I sit in the same booth, the red one with frayed seats, haphazardly throw my blazer across the back. Every Sunday, like clockwork, after the dinner crowds have long cleared out and Etta's expecting me, I regretfully make an appearance. Somehow I always end up making a left on Fifth Street and pulling into the potholed diner, the open sign flashing red and blue somewhere in my peripheral vision through my haze. It's like existing in the middle—of what, I don't exactly know—two worlds maybe, torn between the past and the present. In my head I'm still thirteen and maybe my parents haven't died and the world is still the way it should always have been—in another world it's the reality I've spent half my life running from: how all of my dreams have been deduced to mere smoke and ashes. Washed down the drain in the mixture of blood and dandruff, gone with the wind as soon as I'd taken the first hit off of that weed. I was so promising, as were the other teenagers of my time, and we'd let the drugs get to us.
My parents are dead—that's life, that's the way it was supposed to be, that's the way it will remain until my feet can no longer walk this Earth anymore. Maybe, when I open my eyes again and step across the sublime threshold between the real world and what we discern as Heaven, maybe my mother will be there, smiling down at me despite my extensive list of miscellaneous sins, my father behind her, open arms and bright blue eyes. Maybe then it will have been worth it. Maybe that's why nothing's changed.
Maybe—that's a funny word. So much hangs in the balance when you begin a sentence with 'maybe' — "Maybe I'll miss the draft," Soda told me one October afternoon, although the next day a yellow manila envelope appeared in our mailbox with his name stamped on it — "Maybe the court judge won't split us up," Darry said the morning after our parents died, even though there was a fatalistic quality to the way the words rolled off his tongue that had filled me with a deep sense of dread — "Maybe Johnny wouldn't have died had I not run into that church," I'd thought as I pored over my English semester theme, wondering about the butterfly effect. Maybe. That's what got me so interested in the art of philosophy—how much I'd thought about the butterfly effect in the years after Windrixville. Looking back down from the window at my book of Nietzsche, back out the window. Raindrops speckle the window, lightning splits the sky like a fractal, dividing the clouds and separating the gray from the purple.
"Well, that's life, eh?" Soda had told me one lazy summer afternoon, a month before his draft card had come in. Sitting out on the back porch, up to our old shenanigans like no time had ever passed, sneaking sips of Darry's beer when he wasn't looking. "Good breaks and bad breaks—you know, like a game of poker. Break on a nine, better start over again, huh?" The sunlight hit his face and he smiled, squinting one eye shut, lifting his beer to clink with mine.
"You don't stop living just because you lose somebody," Darry had told me one night over dinner. "I thought you knew that."
Life. What for? The American Dream? White picket fence, just as Dad used to tell me about, spreading his hands out wide and pointing to the tall fields of cotton that sprawled out in front of the historical marker, conjuring scenes of antebellum houses and large backyards and grand staircases? Two kids and a dog, a nice housewife to show off to your buddies, a steady job, and then what? Follow that dream—the societal dream—rather than your heart, even if your heart pulls and gropes the other way toward a wilder, more fantastical dream that you wish so dearly to chase even though you know you can't? Conform or be cast out. Conform, even though you just want to gas up the station wagon, drive it until you can't anymore, stand laughing into the blazing sunset, happier than you'll ever be and as happy as you'll ever get? And my father—who worked tirelessly to provide this so-called dream for us—ended up creating something better than the American Dream—he ended up creating a loving family, our old house without a picket fence but rather a metal gate that I wouldn't trade for the world, no dog (our old yeller cur dog had passed), three children rather than two, a loving wife who was more than an object to put on display. They loved each other. They loved us. They still do.
I like to think of it as the American Rule. No dream of mine has ever been in the vicinity of a white picket fence. As a teenager, I wanted to write books, I wanted to make a movie, I wanted to read everything, I wanted to record a song, I wanted to become an osprey. In my sleep I imagined soaring high above Oklahoma, waving down at people I know — there it is again, sayonara! have a nice life! — and when I woke in the morning I'd be trapped between my euphoric state of slumber and reality, still half-dreaming in a state of weightlessness, sitting on my bed and staring at the blank space on my wall while my mother clapped her hands in my doorway — "Wake up, little colt!" — and I'd snap back into reality in a fantastic state of mind because I'd dared to dream. But I'm seeming to find, as I stare into this black cup of cold coffee, that dreams are called dreams because most of the time they are so elusive that to chase them would be trying to catch smoke eddying into the air with your bare fingers. So close, and then—! Gone.
"The future ain't what it used to be," Soda had told me miserably one night when we sat awake in the living room, his head in his hands, his scars from Vietnam pink and stark in the moonlight. He turned to look at me, his cheeks slick with tears, his face blue in the watery light. "Used to have all of these ideas, man. Now they're gone. I can't think about anything except death." I hadn't understood what he meant, then — "It'll get better someday," I reassured him, as always — but I'm starting to taste the metallic quality of my lie, still prominent on the tip of my tongue all these years, old conversations and exchanges I've once had coming back to me and building up in my system like floodwaters in a reservoir.
I take a sip of my black coffee. It's bitter on my tongue. My mouth tastes of pocket change.
"Closing time soon, honey," Etta says sweetly, wiping her forehead with the back of her forearm. Gives me that warm, motherly smile again. "It's always a pleasure to see you, Mr. Curtis. You come back again, now."
I down the rest of my black coffee—it goes down my throat like turpentine, bitter and stinging—before I set the empty cup on the diner table and smile at her. Dig in my pocket for a cigarette—I haven't given up smoking. "Thank you, miss. I'll be sure to come again."
But as I exit the diner doors, and the red-and-blue open sign in the window shuts off, shrouding the scene into darkness, I hope I never come back again. I glance around at the dim, rain-drenched streets. Slick black asphalt. My car judders to life.
Like clockwork, it's Sunday.