“Indiana wants me. Lord, I can’t go back there.”
- R. Dean Taylor
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9:38 a.m.: Stop at the barbershop to drop off my new CD. “I like the cover art,” Raymond says.
9:39 a.m.: It’s by Biva from Pompano, I tell him. She does lots of sneaker art.
9:40 a.m.: “I can’t even put it on until after 11,” Raymond says. “You know the rule.” It’s the only rule I know and the only one I’m willing to abide by, I say. I just wanted to leave it on my way to work.
9:43 a.m.: “What’s your recipe? I forgot,” Robert says coming out of the back with a coffee pot. I don’t have a recipe and don’t even drink coffee but I love the fact that Robert always asks me that - and in that way - so I make one up.
9:43:28 a.m.: Black, with two parts cream and four parts sugar, I say. And don’t stir it. I like everything to settle on the bottom so I have a big treat waiting for me. You know, like the juicy bottom of an Italian ice. “You a caricature,” Robert says shaking his head.
9:44 a.m.: He always says that to me. I think he means I’m a “character” but I like the idea of being a caricature better – all big ears with a forever forehead and chunky cinder block teeth jumping out of my mouth.
9:46 a.m.: Robert hands me a cup of coffee and I thank him profusely because he is the nicest man in the world. And I’m not just saying that. He has plaques and citations to prove it. In fact, the owner doesn’t’ even let him cut hair here anymore ‘cause he’s too old. They just keep him around because he’s so nice. “Which is no small thing,” Raymond told me one afternoon. “You remember that.”
9:47 a.m.: “You can take it with you. It’s our to-go cup,” Robert nods to me. No it’s not. It’s clunky and ceramic and is covered with a portrait of a bright moon and a raven-haired woman. “Yes, it goes, it comes back. It’s our to-go cup,” he insists. OK, thanks, I say.
10:09 a.m.: On drive to work a voice on the radio is singing, "I'd like to kiss you way back in the sticks…And I'd like to check you for ticks." That's so sexy.
10:18 a.m.: At a stoplight a UPS truck pulls up beside me with the driver side wide open. Check out driver’s legs.
10:19 a.m.: Nice calf muscles.
10:20 a.m.: Think about how I always wanted to be a UPS or Fed-Ex guy but never thought I could make the grade. The drivers all seem too energetic, healthy and incapable of getting lost. But now I’m thinking maybe I could be a DHL guy. They seem a little rough around the edges, like maybe they drink orange soda for breakfast, dodge paying child support and are indifferent about whether their girlfriends ever bother taking their tops off during sex. And get lost…a lot.
10:33 a.m.: Red carpet girl is standing outside our building looking at the sun. “Getting some natural color,” she says. “It’s the latest thing but it’s a pain in the ass. You have to be outside.”
10:34 a.m.: How you doing? I ask her. I heard you fainted or something at the Muvico over the weekend. “Yeah, and I get the one uncute paramedic in the universe. Ain’t that the fucking way, baby.”
10:34:14 a.m.: That is so the fucking way, baby.
10:48 a.m.: Tiara confides in me that the boss has destroyed every bit of creativity she ever had. Hey, I say, if creativity were grapes that man would have crushed enough of yours by now to keep a small country in cheap wine until the end of time.
11:12 a.m.: Wonder if Raymond is listening to my CD about now.
12:04 p.m.: Get heartbreaking card in the mail. There is a picture of a bird outside a cage looking in and the words detail how the person was moved by something I did. The sentiment makes me cry a little…for myself.
12:05 p.m.: And you, my love.
12:07 p.m.: “Hey, what’s with the face?” new guy asks. I moved somebody, I say. “Where to?” No, emotionally. I moved somebody. “Give me a break,” he says.
12:19 p.m.: Go to lunch alone.
12:33 p.m.: Eat six grape leaves.
12:41 p.m.: I spot this lady climbing on the playground set and I keep looking for a kid. I figure some toddler must be up in one of the tunnels or something.
12:44 p.m.: There is no kid. She’s on her own. She’s a tiny woman but she’s wearing high heels and it’s a very awkward sight as she tries to cross the drawbridge to the slides on the other side of the castle.
12:48 p.m.: She drops to her knees at one point and then gets a heel stuck between the planks of the bridge. I almost *leap up to help her but then I’m like, help her with what?(italics) What the hell is she doing? She’s not climbing in a fun, goofy way. She’s nimbly creeping along in a very disturbed manner. In this one act she has completely ruined the word “playground” for generations to come. I think that’s enough reason not to help her.
12:50 p.m.: Plus I’ve got slimy grape leave hands.
1:14 p.m.: On way back to office I come across the strangest scene. The area behind our building is filled with over 100 cop cars. The vehicles are all brand new and still have the factory stickers on them. Options include Kevlar trunk packs. This must just be some kind of holding area because the cruisers are branded with all different cities and counties.
1:17 p.m.: If you’re out late one night you should really stop by and key all the ones from Miramar or Polk County just for fun. Call me and I’ll go with you.
1:18 p.m.: Suddenly get the urge to lie face down in the middle of the parking lot while surrounded by the cop cars. Just for practice.
1:21 p.m.: As I’m heading back into the office HR lady stops me and plucks a piece of gravel off my chin. Thanks, I say. I was just surrounded by cops and they forced me to lay face down in the parking lot with my hands behind my back.
1:39 p.m.: The company is holding an advancement seminar this afternoon and everyone was invited but me so the office is empty.
1:45 p.m.: No use working when no one can see you working so I decide to call it a day.
2:12 p.m.: On the drive I look down at the to-go cup that is still full of morning coffee made by the nicest man in the world. I can’t wait to bring the to-go cup back.
2:13 p.m.: And I can’t wait to get home. My cinder-block teeth are protruding out through a haphazard grin in anticipation. I am getting to the bottom of my life and I’ve got a big treat waiting for me.
2:13:09 p.m.: She’s moving out tonight.

*I have never leaped in my life. I am so full of shit.

Love Match

We were at the in-between stage, where you’ve taken your shower for a big occasion too early and you don’t want to put on your dress clothes until the water on your body dries and the sweat is about to begin.
I was already sweating when Sal suggested we play pingpong. We went out to the patio. Dripping, I took the arms of my robe and knotted them around my waist. Sal was not one to play games with. He was the strutter in your high school who kicked off, quarterbacked and played safety. He called his own plays.
He had the arm and the eye. I was no competition, but I always challenged him to petty games. I had claimed I’d beaten him at darts once, but he’d been drinking, and it was a lie. He had beat me drunk.
Picking up the ball for the initial serve, he stammered, “I’m not gonna do it.”
“Do what? Serve.”
“I’m not gonna get married.”
This read spontaneous, and my first reaction was panic. We had become so tight, and for some reason, I immediately thought I’d have to be the one to tell the bride. Then, I realized we were playing a game and if there was some way to use this to my advantage, I could beat him. I could really beat him.
He leaned forward and smacked the ball.
“Why should I?” he said. “Why should I marry her?”
“Love,” I returned.
“I’ve loved other girls and didn’t marry them.”
“Yeah, but you’re ready now.”
“But that doesn’t mean I should marry this girl.”
I stepped back and slid one past him.
He was beginning to scare me with his over-the-net philosophy. This was the guy who previously spoke to me only in a language we had called HUT UN UT TU. But I always knew what he meant.
“I loved Paula more than anyone,” he confessed.
“That was years ago. You don’t go back to your high-school sweetheart.”
“Why not? Why not?!”
“She’s probably blown up.”
“She hasn’t. I checked.”
I cupped the ball and put my weight on the table. This wasn’t spur-of-the-moment, follow-the-bouncing-ball talk. The son of a bitch had been planning this. He’d done research, talked to friends and figured he had half a chance to go back to the beginning of time.
He tensed. “I miss her.”
I was winning the game.
“Whenever I used to tease her, she’d smoke and say, “Don’t bust my ovaries.’ Oh, she was a heck of a guy,” he reminisced.
“And a cheerleader,” I added. “Is that it — you want to have a live-in cheerleader? Those days are gone, even the negatives are lost.”
I reminded him that the end to their relationship had been ugly and adolescent. Something about a knife, a butter knife, but he was using it as a weapon nonetheless. “I could have poked somebody pretty bad that night,” he’d told me. She had forgiven him, but in her father’s wisdom, a knife was a knife.
“And she’s up there, and you’re down here.” I flung my arms north and south.
“I’m a truck driver,” he admitted in a flat tone.
“What about Chandra?”
“She’s Asian; she’ll understand. She’s got heritage.”
“She’s got what?”
“All I can think about is Paula,” he said.
He’d made up his mind, but it was too soon for me. Without another word, I sensed the final decision. His concentration had returned to the game at hand, and I was beginning to lose, badly. He proceeded to bury me.
Now, my mind wandered. It was obvious that the woman you marry could easily be someone else. Someone better. A cheerleader, for instance. We pluck from selections as numbered and contained as a jukebox’s. But is it obvious that any selection amounts to more than L-24? Sal was calling for a replay, and he was betting far more than a quarter on it.
In a couple of hours, he was packed up and heading north. He’d left behind a brand new Yankee jacket, which I assumed wasn’t negligence. I put it on over my robe, which created the illusion I was arriving for spring training, a bit overwhelmed, with a midi-skirt on. But I was on the couch, my bench, and I wondered how in the hell he’d figured this one out. HUT UN UT TU.
Six months later, he’d married Paula and was doing local truck runs on Long Island. He had five different softball uniforms hanging in his closet, three of them bar teams paying him to play. “Everything is BU-TEE-FU,” he’d holler over the phone.
Beautiful.
But was Sal going back for a cheerleader, or is there really such a thing as true love? After all, what is a cheerleader in the forever you promise? One day she’ll be lying there naked, her breasts looking like balloons found in a closet two weeks after the party: Too many children, too many trips down the stairs with the wash.
But she’s there for a reason, locked in. And when she shrivels up altogether, you pin a gaudy, diamond-studded brooch onto a dress, the delicate cloth of which has somehow become heavy and thick. And as your hands fidget, you feel the bony structure beneath, the shell that had been hidden by healthy fat for years. You realize it wasn’t the Cool Water she put on her thighs while exercising in your living room decades ago that imprisoned you. It wasn’t the hat she tilted above dark eyes. It was the fragile frame far beneath the wedding dress, the structure that doesn’t change, the sanctified place where you have come to place your weakness like an offering before an altar.
I weighed the unknown. The predictable failure. You can lie atop a jukebox worth of bodies and never find one to lie beside. You just pick anyone and say, “This is the woman.” But that’s gutless. It’s a Yankee jacket without a real player in it. You can deny your own weakness. You can deny the need for someone who can take you apart, put their hands inside you, one by one.
Or you can get in your semi and ride out to where the air is thin, the moon is a sliver and its sharpest edges point toward Venus. Toward Love — the diamond brooch at the end of rainbows and cheerleaders.
Rah! Rah!

e-mail me at tshine@citylinkmagazine.com