coffee, cigarettes (and brandy) revised
2005.04.24 15.08
coffee, cigarettes (and brandy)
Smoke swirls around taking the place of oxygen in the beautifully dilapidated old kitchen pushing one hundred years with its high ceilings, breathing in your cigarette secretions. Sometimes ideas come slow, you tell yourself. You take a drag. You know no one will call, but you unplug the telephone. Waiting for inspiration is like waiting for Godot, you tell yourself. It’s not what happens when you are inspired, it’s what happens while you are waiting to be inspired.
Times were hard. Times were often hard for you. You were looking for a break. A crack in the sidewalk to slip into. Good things happen to bad people, you know all too well.
"
Typing is your way of speaking. Everybody knows speaking isn’t where you shine. You would rather not speak. You would type or write your words to anyone who would listen. As long as you could keep your mouth shut. Bad things happen when you speak. You never meant it to be that way though, so there is no use in pretending like you don’t know how it is.
A few dollars on your bed, scattered among your few possessions, half a pack of State Exress of London 555’s, a pile of clothes that you don’t wear, three pairs of brown shoes, black and white checkered bedsheets, a probably stolen television that you bought down the street for forty dollars. Fragments of your life diluted among garbage. And then there was you.
You type again. "Imagine someone pressing rewind, everything going backwards. Imagine feeling for some reason that your life is a cinema, that you are being watched by someone. Maybe everyone."
You liked the doors to be locked. You knew no one would come, but you liked the doors to be locked. You liked the music to be just right. "Mood Indigo" blared quietly, the Duke serenading you from his grave. You go out to the store to pick up some liquid inspiration. You know you are taking a step in the wrong direction. Tonight, you take your first class in writing.
You type some. You stop. You smoke a cigarette. You type some more.
"
John Lennon said the time passes slowly and soon enough I felt empty again and I knew that you would not be there. But I waited anyway" you type. You wonder what it means. I sat on a cold bench, waiting. I honestly thought you would be there. I guess at first I thought you would be there. That youthful optimism was long gone by now though, long before my foot started pulsing, my leg moving up and down. Up and down. Up and. And down. This was the only place in the city where I could imagine that I was back where I had come from, even though that was the last thing I ever wanted to do."
You always wonder why stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You wonder if anyone is ever in the middle of anything. At what point are you in the middle? You wonder if that’s what people strive for, the middle. Don’t exclude yourself when you say ‘people.’ You are a person, even though you don’t feel like one. Or maybe you just don’t know what it feels like to be a person. You type some more.
"It’s not as if I had anything better to do. Honestly, I would have been doing the same thing elsewhere, just a little more comfortably. It was cold out tonight. I stood up. I put my hands in my pockets. The bench stayed where I found it. There weren’t many people around that time of night, but all witnesses could say was that they heard splashing water."
Brandy. Brandy and coffee. You made a terrible cup of coffee. You didn’t have enough sugar in the house to make it good. You had to ask the neighbors. You had sworn off the liquor and cigarettes, and you rarely drank coffee. You believed caffeine was the source of delirium. Serious delirium. Now you were dining and dancing with all three. The Duke playing his grand piano to your left, John Lennon accompanying him to your right, Rachmaninoff writing the notes as they are played. Coffee, cigarettes and brandy. You took another drink. This is your nights work.
You haven’t been out in weeks. Your life has only two dimensions, both searingly inane. Scratch that. I would like to welcome Mr. Wes Montgomery to the table to help me continue where I left off.
You sat on the bus waiting for something to happen. You were lucky to get a seat tonight. Two boys got on the bus and took up the seats behind you. One was a little more drunk than the other. The other was there only for background noise, a voice to reflect off of. The drunk boy might as well have been talking to himself. But he had his friend. Friendship is one sided in more cases than none and in less cases than one. This was the case tonight.
"Do you want to go to the bar and see them?" the boy asked the drunk. "They can fucking kill themselves if they want to see me" the drunk said. "When she like came up and introduced her boyfriend to me, I was like ‘oh man, that’s a fucking bummer’ but she blew Aaron so whatever." The bus I was on replaced the train during the weekends. Everyone on the bus needed to be on the bus. The bus stopped. The door opened. "Is this the bus?" a man asked. Everyone on the bus started laughing. The door slammed. "This is a bus," said the drunk. The bus moved quickly as if it had somewhere to be. Anywhere other than driving around, picking people up who need picking up. The drunk boy and his less drunk friend behind me got off a few stops later.
You rode the rest of the way with the brothers, the hombres, the puerto ricans, some kids from Harlem on their way to Brooklyn on a dark, cold night. "throw up a H for Harlem" one of them said. You corrected his grammar silently. You rang the bell before the driver passed your block. He kept going anyway. He stopped by the train station.
You started the walk home. You at least knew what blocks to avoid. You were wearing bright blue polyester pants and loafers with little tassles on them that flung around when you walked. Everyone you passed was wearing basketball jerseys and Timberlands. You listened to gangster rap on a cd player and headphones. You rapped along with the songs you knew outloud. You sounded ridiculous. You looked more ridiculous.