Little girls and hungry rats.

The neighborhood was full of blonde braids and balloon animals on leashes. Little girls sat on stoops throwing pieces of bread at the sidewalks below. One by one and one by one, the little girls tore uneven pieces off loaves of challah and dark seeded rye. They tossed pieces until the rats grew full and scurried away into the gutters, leaving the sidewalks strewn with uneaten bread and pale, yellow leaves. Soon, the little girls were called in for lunch. It began to rain. The bread became bloated and the sidewalks turned spongy. The city smelled like yeast. Later, the rats emerged from the gutters, their eyes shining bright. The little girls were sent to bed without supper.

The Delivery Boys Have All Gone Missing

New York was homogenized, cleaned out by Giuliani and his karma police. We were bequeathed the expensive shreds of what was left. This was all in the last will and testament to Manhattan, articulated in the free pamphlets piled high next to subway ticket machines. The fine print about credit cards and one speed bicycles and bomb-sniffing dogs is in there. It reads like poetry if you are, and you should be, a lawyer. It reads like an admissible villanelle. But no one reads the fine print, and no one notices the delivery boys have all gone missing. The hard boiled detectives are all sleeping in. Old cigarette smoke is bottled and sold on side street bodegas. Skyscrapers buckle in the deadening wind while handymen fix New York from the gutter on up. We take what was left for us and try and remember to leave a suitable tip if the delivery boys ever return.

It’s a lullaby from a giant golden radio.

I’ve got Blonde on Blonde on my portable stereo. It’s a lullaby from a giant golden radio.

Nada Surf – Blonde on Blonde

(From KM.)

Her back to my back, to his back, to the mirror.

The rain was forgiving, in the sense that it eventually dried up and faded into a lukewarm sunset. The fat girl’s t-shirt, however, was not. It buckled under her shoulder blades and the lines that filled out her back. Her hair hung limp to the side in a ponytail, little wisps of brown hedging down her neck. The bartender was a playwright in disguise. The fat girl wouldn’t be able to fit into a disguise. I wondered what he wrote about her. We made eye contact just once in the mirror and went on ignoring each other, eying the fat girl for note taking and the like—her back to my back, to his back, to the mirror.

Cabin Fever

In college, we would leave campus and drive a few hours north of Boston into the backwoods of Maine and spend the weekend at my friend’s cabin that, while equipped with electricity and running water and most of the creature comforts that had become necessary to our winter of 2005 survival, lacked two major components: television and internet. So, in the backseat of my used Saturn, we wrapped a towel around an oversized plastic container with a matching bottom, a little metal bowl and a big sack of grass. We sat around the kitchen table drinking glasses of aggressive red wine and took hits off the gravity bong, allowing the plumes of smoke to overtake the lofted cabin and lull us all into a quiet, post-adolescent thoughtfulness, the herbal smell dissipating only days later when we packed up our possessions—the plastic-cut jugs, the empty bags of grass, the wine bottles and corkscrews and university sweatshirts, the video camera with philosophical-leaning footage of questionable taste—, loaded them back into the Saturn and drove off with the headlights on bright, our eyes twinkling and our lungs darkening in the dusk.

Weekerthan

My bed feels like a garden and my legs feel tethered to it like weeds. Maybe it’s the vicodin, but it wasn’t the wine. I didn’t drink a sip of wine tonight. The week was corkscrewed open and poured close, down my throat, until I curled under the blankets and let myself go. The vicodin, I swear, I had to take because of my back. I slept on it all wrong. And once I fell out of a window. Once I was even in an upside down car. This week, you could say, was an upside down car—except, instead of crashing into rocks, it was served on them with a lemon. You could say that, you know. There are pictures and bottles and rumors to prove it. Too many police officers and not enough heavy breathing. But what happens at the end of the long, autumn nights? Where do we keep the umbrellas when the rain has stopped coming down? I lie slack in bed and ask questions with or without the wine. The vicodin, I promise, won’t answer.

Even the elephants

Henry took Wallace to the circus one afternoon to watch the trapeze artists. He told Wallace that they were the closest thing to a god he had ever believed in. The two sat near the front, right up where it reeked like elephant shit. Henry bought a box of cracker jacks and shook out the surprise super-mood ring. It turned fuchsia, which decoded meant wild, which Henry wasn’t sure he was. He tapped it on his knees a few times before putting it in his pocket. The clowns entered in a car, spraying each other with water pistols and turning cartwheels on each other. The audience laughed and cheered, and as they quieted down, Henry turned towards Wallace.

“Wallace, do you ever worry that you’ll never get married?”

“Sometimes.”

“My mother told me once she thought I’d never get married.”

“Are you worrying?”

“My mother’s sister, Auntie Bette, used to always come to visit on holidays. She was old and unmarried, but very elegant looking. Not your typical old maid. But when my father heard she wasn’t dating anyone, he immediately started going through a list of every single friend he knew to see if he could set them up. And Auntie Bette was great about it, always smiling and writing down numbers of men she would never call. But I… I would hate to walk into a room and immediately have people assume that something was lacking in my life.”

“People can be insensitive. I wouldn’t worry it until your forty. Then, you can worry. I think it’s natural, when you’ve made it big, to wonder. So long as you’re not worrying yet.”

“Yeah, I feel pretty silly getting all worked up about it, but why put off for tomorrow what you can make yourself crazy about today. Then it made me wonder if I’d wind up marrying somebody that I didn’t like all that much just because I was afraid of winding up alone. And I’m not quite sure which would be worse. But then again,” He paused to eat a handful of cracker jacks, “I suppose it is completely silly to worry about at this point.”

And maybe it was, but Henry was only eight years shy of forty. When was he supposed to start worrying? Everything was going faster, time was slipping though his fingers faster than peanuts. He stared at the trapeze artist, watching her flip gracefully in the air, spin, circle, curl, dive and miraculously grab the swing and the last possible second before plummeting. He felt a wave of pleasure wash over him.

“She’s so close, so close.” He stood up, tossing peanuts over the heads of children sitting in front of him.

“Hey!” hollered a little girl in a deep scarlet sweater.

Henry grabbed her by the shoulders, “There’s no net!” he yelled, smiling maniacally.

“Henry!” Wallace stood up, alarmed, and tried to push his friend back down into his seat.

The girl screamed.

“Don’t you understand? There’s no net– There’s no fucking net!” He was laughing frantically now, still grabbing the child and spitting caramelized popcorn in her face. He was causing a scene. The little girl began to sob violently, and Wallace tackled Henry. The clowns had to help hold him down while the lion tamer called for help. Children were in hysterics and parents were sticky from their tears and cotton candy. Everyone was shouting. The tall man was trying to maintain some amount of order, but even the elephants looked disturbed.

11/13

It’s Friday the 13th. Don’t get arrested. Whatever you do, jesus, do not get arrested.