I lost another fight tonight and so I don’t think I want to go out with the guys tomorrow.
I took a look down at my slacks and they were pressed. The dress shoes looked like I’d picked them off the shelf at Garsonboles. Before I stepped away from the mirror, an olive colored shirt with a light tweed jacket, split down the middle with a tie from Panda Kayson (the most elegant of the Kayson lines). Elmore snipped my hair yesterday, so it didn’t take me long to give my curly top a neat comb-through and I looked ready to fit in with any crowd I didn’t want to, just to show them there isn’t anything out of the ordinary.
At the club I had a manila envelope in one hand and my spectacles in the other. An air of disintegration hung over the people standing outside in a line that stretched around the corner. It was the kind of black cloud that can hang over you when you’re discussing the most oblique possibilities with someone you’re nervous about being with. I found new horrors in a day with pencils poking out from my shirt pocket.
When I was chatting with a friend of mine by the name of Denny, who had brought along with him his new girlfriend Karen, I ran into Hughton’s sister Terry, who had just cut her hair to match a fine new pair of horn-rimmed glasses I suspected came from her trip to Texas. With Terry I walked back toward the front of the line, and I made a very strange and sudden eye contact with May, the first girl I ever really fell in love with. I hadn’t seen a trace of her since a decade or more of complete silence had passed between us. The eye contact lasted a second only and then her eyes fell on some fictitious focus not in my direction. Years ago I came to great tragedy with May. So it isn’t any surprise that the shivers in my spine came back, as well as an odd feeling I used to try hiding but didn’t hide so well.
When I said hello to her twenty or so minutes later I tried dropping the twang in my voice, which I always felt she didn’t like. Actually, I’m betting that my voice was so low she could only have read my lips to understand what I said. It was just one word anyway. Hello. I gave her a smart wave, which was fine in recompense. She commented on the jacket. I agreed with what she said about it.
The speaker we were all there to see had grown a bit of a beard, which I found startling, as in my entire familiarity with his career I’ve never known him to be seen with facial hair. It shattered the guarded barricades of what I thought of him, and I believe an awe of whispers circling the room was the crowd’s way of saying they were taken aback just as much as I. In truth, the presence of the beard and how it held the room was somewhat akin to my earlier assessment that I can fit in anywhere I want to and not be picked from the crowd. When he raised his hand to draw attention to the document pasted on the wall by the overhead projector, the whole auditorium shook with the power of his demands as every head lifted and every eye raced across the lines he’d highlighted in blue. I wanted to be that fist and shake the crowd like he did. I knew envy was real then.
After his lecture I spoke to him for a few moments on what his favorite foods were, touching lightly on his opinions on crime and punishment, on love and war and on the state of the nation. The things he said to me were every bit as profound as his books from the 1980s were.
Outside the club again, I ran into May. She didn’t say a word to me. Her hair was a different color, I think, than it had been the last time I saw her. But then again, the last time I saw her I had been wearing tinted goggles, because I was building something out of phosphate and iron in my lab. At one time, she used to like the things I made. Usually I would find her fondness rather suspect, and with due reason.
She didn’t say a word to me, and after trading good-byes and handshakes and hugs and to a dozen or so people outside who asked if I wanted to attend a restaurant with them for some coffee and seafood, I went back to my car alone. Flies circled about near the trunk, and when I opened it I noted the maggots inside the body there were reaching new stages of size I’ve never known the beasts to be capable of. It’s sometimes amazing how things like this do not attract attention in rundown areas of the city. I made it a point to get this dealt with and solved before the night’s blanket covered me once again with warmth and security and more dreams about black-and-white still photographs that scream at me saying things I just can’t understand.
At the club I had a manila envelope in one hand and my spectacles in the other. An air of disintegration hung over the people standing outside in a line that stretched around the corner. It was the kind of black cloud that can hang over you when you’re discussing the most oblique possibilities with someone you’re nervous about being with. I found new horrors in a day with pencils poking out from my shirt pocket.
When I was chatting with a friend of mine by the name of Denny, who had brought along with him his new girlfriend Karen, I ran into Hughton’s sister Terry, who had just cut her hair to match a fine new pair of horn-rimmed glasses I suspected came from her trip to Texas. With Terry I walked back toward the front of the line, and I made a very strange and sudden eye contact with May, the first girl I ever really fell in love with. I hadn’t seen a trace of her since a decade or more of complete silence had passed between us. The eye contact lasted a second only and then her eyes fell on some fictitious focus not in my direction. Years ago I came to great tragedy with May. So it isn’t any surprise that the shivers in my spine came back, as well as an odd feeling I used to try hiding but didn’t hide so well.
When I said hello to her twenty or so minutes later I tried dropping the twang in my voice, which I always felt she didn’t like. Actually, I’m betting that my voice was so low she could only have read my lips to understand what I said. It was just one word anyway. Hello. I gave her a smart wave, which was fine in recompense. She commented on the jacket. I agreed with what she said about it.
The speaker we were all there to see had grown a bit of a beard, which I found startling, as in my entire familiarity with his career I’ve never known him to be seen with facial hair. It shattered the guarded barricades of what I thought of him, and I believe an awe of whispers circling the room was the crowd’s way of saying they were taken aback just as much as I. In truth, the presence of the beard and how it held the room was somewhat akin to my earlier assessment that I can fit in anywhere I want to and not be picked from the crowd. When he raised his hand to draw attention to the document pasted on the wall by the overhead projector, the whole auditorium shook with the power of his demands as every head lifted and every eye raced across the lines he’d highlighted in blue. I wanted to be that fist and shake the crowd like he did. I knew envy was real then.
After his lecture I spoke to him for a few moments on what his favorite foods were, touching lightly on his opinions on crime and punishment, on love and war and on the state of the nation. The things he said to me were every bit as profound as his books from the 1980s were.
Outside the club again, I ran into May. She didn’t say a word to me. Her hair was a different color, I think, than it had been the last time I saw her. But then again, the last time I saw her I had been wearing tinted goggles, because I was building something out of phosphate and iron in my lab. At one time, she used to like the things I made. Usually I would find her fondness rather suspect, and with due reason.
She didn’t say a word to me, and after trading good-byes and handshakes and hugs and to a dozen or so people outside who asked if I wanted to attend a restaurant with them for some coffee and seafood, I went back to my car alone. Flies circled about near the trunk, and when I opened it I noted the maggots inside the body there were reaching new stages of size I’ve never known the beasts to be capable of. It’s sometimes amazing how things like this do not attract attention in rundown areas of the city. I made it a point to get this dealt with and solved before the night’s blanket covered me once again with warmth and security and more dreams about black-and-white still photographs that scream at me saying things I just can’t understand.