the womb:(things you can't find on shelves...yet)

from Grand Returns

  1.

Welcome to a Friday.   Just after five. The evening news plays on mute above the rather extensive bar.   A white boy in his early 40's equipped with a low-grade shirt and tie (I smell the TJ Maxx in Bayridge) and lack of a jacket screams schoolteacher, most likely beginning English or history, something as generic as slow-mo shots of guys walking toward the camera five abreast. It also explains why TJ's full-blown hammered at a time of day when most people in this town are still trying to get away from their desks, still dealing with that last e-mail they couldn't dodge or that pile of something superfluous that must be cleared before their weekend departure.

This is not to in any way say that I don't envy the desk life.   Case in point, were I of a personality type that could handle office politics without going postal, were I not a nocturnal being who deals with sunlight in the same way that the average woman might deal with premenstrual cramps, were I one who did not despise the very concept of wiggling onto rush hour trains twice a day in the name of a check that always has the same numbers on it, minus taxes and health care premiums,(checks that when compiled produce an amount on the actual return line at the end of a 1040 form refund) then I would be one of those people.  

But instead I am me, seated here in the obligatory Brooklyn artist wardrobe: hunter green t-shirt with the image of Fela on the front, the faded jeans, and dark brown Tim boots buffed to a shine. The only surprise might be the A's cap low and tilted to the left, as local sporting goods retailers tend to keep a limited selection of sports paraphernalia from teams other than those that have a direct following within the Empire state.

I once had a 30 year-old woman tell me that I was forever trapped at 16, back when every kid in New York was wearing backpacks and doing the East Coast stomp.   In other words she was calling me a 26 year-old washed-up wanna be b-boy that needed to get his ass over to Men's Wearhouse for their next off-the-rack sale.   Fuck her and the husband she was looking to cheat on. But we'll get to that later.

If you believe in the movies then you believe in happily ever after (You are also a bumbling idiot but that's a discussion for another time as well).   For you, the viewer, the character exists in your mind only for the journey that you see: a heroine/hero's defeat, followed by a journey, followed by her/his triumph (feel free to substitute 'defeat' with inciting incident if you want to be technical). You as viewer embrace the assumption that the character remains on top after the credits start to roll, that she/he spends the rest of his life in a euphoric kind of bliss as they are done fighting battles and overcoming the opposition for the rest of their time on this mudball of a planet.   But it ain't always like that.   As a matter of fact, it's never like that.

The ironic thing is that in the end love ain't really got much to do with any of it.   Love is something you can manufacture if all of the variables are right.   I mean as a guy, depending on who you are you can find love between the perfect pair of legs, in the curves of soft but muscular thighs, or the way a nipple hardens as it kisses the center of your palm.   As woman you might find love in a pair of kind eyes with open ears attached.   And it's a love you'll believe in if only because it feels better to believe an outlandish lie than to know that it's complete bullshit.  

     If they have the right parents, the right pedigree, the right degree, the right dick size, the right religion, the right drink of choice, the right chain, the right height, the right lips or the right guard raised until the heart is certain that it's sure, then it's easy for you to find a reason to say I love you, even it's only because you give her the time of day that her Daddy didn't back in those formative years when she really needed a lap to sit on.    

The minute they fit the profile the DJ fades in Alicia's "Fallin," and you're dreaming about the Friday morning you'll wake up and tell your baby let's take a two-hour flight to Toronto so we can get down to Cuba and get married in front of all of her people because you barely give a fuck about your own anymore.  

That's the moment when it all becomes too real, when one of you realizes that sooner than not part of the pair will be giving up a crib so that you as couple can become an express version of a family.   And that beast then has an even bigger one chasing behind it, a grizzly of a foe that leaves embroidered invitations, joint accounts and "Honey I'm home" in it's wake.   And that's the monster you either juke or jam down your throat, depending on your particular predilection.  

I am not so happy to say that I swallowed that blue pill. I bought into the dream of L-O-V-E because it was so much more pleasant than the truth of a life that was fading fast, a patient cut open on the table with tubes in every vein.   I was trying to save something that wanted to die while she was inching towards the plug on the respirator while my back was turned.   Still I kept pressing down on that spot at the solarplexis, hoping to jumpstart a heart that had been frozen over long before my ship had ever docked.  

People say they want something real.   Then they get it and it becomes a white-hot potato between the clasped hands they used to pray for it. Full acceptance means endurance and discipline and focus.   Such things are not to be found within the various spheres of purgatory where I reside. I have looked into the eyes of an eight-legged widow and found nothing.   I have played the game of love only to be weighed, measured and found wanting.

Here and now I live in a world made up of only myself, a world where all the things I own, all the hits that appear on the counter when one googles my name, all the looks I get from drunken dudes as I roll past them into the party as they try to figure out where they know me from.    I wanted to be here.   But not like this.  

"Do you know this song?" A brother twice my age, complete with Kangol and beige guayabera, asks his bartender after having just dumped several dollars in quarters into the jukebox for the sake of nothing but his own amusement.   He's drinking Remy with this weird mix of limejuice with a dash of Corona as his chaser.  

Our bartender is Martina, a woman in her late-20s fresh out of the Czech Republic. She wears jeans that showcase her serious lack of an ass. Her top does the same for ample cleavage covered in oil and glitter.   I know she has done time on a pole somewhere.

My elder asks Martina if she knows the Rod Stewart song playing. He explains that it's the best written song he's ever known.   I find this extremely odd: Rod Stewart having written the greatest song ever known to man, from a black man who is obviously a product of the 50s and 60s? Hmm.   But I digress.  

Martina doesn't know the song.   And she probably doesn't care to.   But Kangol man is tipping well and is obviously a regular so she plays along, as she does by touching hands with other gentleman at the bar, leaning in so that their breath can touch her flesh, giving them what they want as a means of seducing them into ordering more rounds and filling her tip jar.   At night's end she will most likely take it back down to Kings Highway or somewhere similar and share the loot with the fam. I respect her. Use what you got to get what you want.   For the life of me I can't remember who sang that.

Kangol man has the voice of a father, of someone who has brought some kid up in the ways of his means and ethics.   He urges his less than a goddess to pay attention to one particular part, a lyric that says something to the effect that the worst thing that ever happened to him was meeting the ever-present her.   This is when I bring my glass to his with a quiet clink.

"Cheers," I say softly.   He reads me like a subway ad.   

"At least you understand," he says.

I most definitely do.   So I, in turn, run down my own list of songs that are currently off limits, songs that remind me of the times when I had too much time, when I was still wiping up the residue of what hadn't been, when I found myself scouring my apartment for the scant traces that remained: things bought, things borrowed, things unswept during my monthly attempts at cleaning.   I had searched for anything to let me know that it hadn't just been in my mind, that we had once been a living breathing thing, even if our remains in the present were to be found in the pages of a novel out-of-print, a movie no one went to see, a bright and sunny disposition that gave way to the darkness within which I now reside.  

My darkness is not the thing of evil men who use their fists to express what their hearts cannot, or those who enter the night armed with conventional weapons in search of a warrior's death because a farmer's life was too trying.   It is a place free of the syrupy sweet, devoid of negotiation and making plans, of the power games that come with gender politics, of the pain a different version of myself once came to associate with the overused phrase called 'compromise'.  

In my darkness there is only myself.   The blood in my veins hungers for nothing but the salve of self-preservation.   These days it's all about me. And I'm rather cool with that.

 

 

 

 

ight, single and std-free. I have a college degree and no kids.   So according to statistics, that makes me a great catc