Concrete Underground (2010) (35 page)

He looked skeptically from her to me, then drained the last of the wine in his glass. "They're really going through with it?"

"Why shouldn't they?" she asked defensively.

"Just seems like it's in kind of bad taste," he ventured.

"It is," I agreed.

Jenny just shook her head dismissively, as if to say that we both couldn't be taken seriously.

Soon we had cleared the table and settled down on the couch in front of the TV. We were watching some sitcom full of slang and pop culture references I didn't understand. I kept an eye on the other two for cues on when I should laugh so I could pretend that I got the jokes. I was afraid they might get uncomfortable otherwise.

"Oh, I almost forgot," she said suddenly as she jumped up from her seat to retrieve my gift. "Open it."

I slowly untied the silver ribbon and tore away the blue wrapping paper, revealing a large white box. I opened the lid and pulled out a mass of crumpled blue tissue paper. At the bottom of the box was a grotesque black gunmetal mask, covered in boils and with a large bulbous nose. I lifted it out of the box and looked at Jenny.

"What's that?" Jenny asked in confusion.

"Why are you asking me? Didn't you wrap this?" I asked her.

She shook her head. "No, I had it wrapped at the store. They must have got your present mixed up. It was supposed to be a computer for you to write with."

I looked back at the mask in my hands and began to laugh uncontrollably.

"What's so funny?" Nick asked.

41. All Your Dreams Ground to Dust

Dawn was just breaking, but the air was still gray and cold enough that I could see my breath. I wore a hooded sweater that I found in the coat closet by the front door; it had a Police Officer's Association logo on it so I assumed it was Nick's.

I hadn't slept at all that night and instead just sat up waiting for the morning to come. As soon as it was late enough for the first joggers to start emerging onto the street, I decided to go for a walk.

It's always weird coming back to a place after a long absence. The city was just enough like I remembered to make it disconcerting when I saw something new and unfamiliar. I suddenly felt like a very old man, resenting a world that continued to grow and evolve while I stood still. Every place, every sight that I recognized filled me with a strange, nostalgic sort of comfort - a Halal market, a thrift store, a dirty little taqueria - all refugees from the incessant march to homogenization and corporatization.

I wandered aimlessly for nearly an hour with no particular route or destination in mind. Eventually, I found myself at the corner of Mission and 27
^th
. At first it didn't even occur to me where I was, but then I recognized the alley that led behind the storefronts.

I went down the alley and came to the place where the "Bell-out-of-order" door had been, but it was gone. Instead, there was a solid brick wall covered with graffiti. One piece of graffiti was a warped, monstrous drawing of the white rabbit from
Alice in Wonderland
holding a Dali-esque melting pocket watch with the cover flipped open to the side so that the two circles together formed a figure-eight. The hour hand was positioned just before the four, while the minute hand was two ticks away from the 12. There was a caption to the right of the image, stenciled in block letters, that read:
All your dreams are ground to dust in the gears of time
.

I let out a chuckle.

Doubling back to the front of the building, I found that the store had been reopened for business. I walked in through the front door, noting with amusement that it was my first time coming in this way.

Inside, I found a small, cramped used book store called
Invisible Ink
. The walls were all lined with jam-packed bookshelves that stretched all the way to the ceiling. The front portion of the store was filled with tables placed so closely together that there was only room for one person at a time in the narrow little walkways between them. The table tops were covered with boxes of books marked "Clearance", with even more boxes sitting on the ground underneath.

No one was at the register.

I made my way further in and went up three small steps to the back of the store where long columns of bookcases spanned the full length to the far wall, again leaving only narrow passages between them. I continued down one of the aisles until I finally found the doorway that led to the back room. It was an covered by a curtain of dangling strings of red beads. As I reached in to sweep them aside, I met a woman walking out carrying a box of books. She was startled to see me.

"Oh, hello," she said in a distinctive high-pitched voice, regaining her composure. "I didn't expect anyone in so early. We're not actually open yet."

"The door was unlocked."

"I know, it's a bad habit to be so careless, but honestly my trouble is usually getting people to come in here, not keeping them out," she replied with a good-natured smile. She was a small, slender woman about ten years older than me, her face well-worn with laugh lines around her mouth and eyes. She had bright red hair tied back tightly in a pony tail, the color just a shade too vibrant to be natural, belying a touch of pride that would not let herself go gray.

"Here, let me help you with that," I offered and took the box from her. She led me back to the front of the store and had me set it on the counter next to the register.

She picked up a price gun and started to label the books in the box as she asked, "So what brings you in today?"

"I was just looking for something to read," I shrugged. "Can you recommend anything?"

"I can recommend a great many things," she replied with a grin. "What kind of books do you normally read?"

"Mysteries," I answered.

She screwed up her face. "I don't really care for those myself; they always try to trick you, deliberately throwing in extraneous plot lines just to confuse and misguide you, withholding important information until the last chapter, using vague and misleading descriptions so you don't notice something that should be plain as day." She paused for a breath, shaking her head. I chuckled in amusement. "And it's always too convenient the way everything wraps up so neat and tidy at the end," she couldn't resist adding. "Life's not like that."

"So what would you say I should read instead?"

She paused, staring at me with a searching look. "It's the funniest thing," she said, "but I seem to recognize your face--"

She broke off when we heard the front door open. A young woman in her mid-twenties entered carrying a toddler in one arm and a cardboard tray with drinks in her other.

"Grandma!" the little girl shouted as her mother passed her over the counter to the older woman.

The young woman set the drinks down on the counter and handed one of the white cups to the shopkeeper. "Here's your tea, mom."

I slipped out the front door unnoticed, smiling to myself and whispering under my breath, "I wonder if I ever even had a chance of being happy."

---

Jenny bought me a tiny little computer so I could write more. I asked her what she thought I should write, but she didn't have an answer.

I told her that staying cooped up inside her condo was stifling my creative energies, so every day she drove me to the State University library so I could have a more inspiring environment to write. For three hours a day I'd sit on a bench outside the library and watch all the college girls walking up and down the steps leading up to the front entrance. I never even turned the computer on.

The first day I struck up a conversation with an attractive journalism student with brown hair and sad eyes for the better part of an hour. Once I got her going, she did most of the talking, practically gushed her life's story to me. At the very end I tried to convince her to switch majors, but I didn't think she was going to listen to me.

The second day I didn't talk to anyone.

The third day a blind man came to visit me.

"They said you'd be here," he said as he took a seat next to me without waiting to be invited.

"Yep, they let me out a few days ago," I answered without looking at him, keeping my eyes on a blonde in a miniskirt who was bending over to pick up her dropped cell phone. "I would have looked you up, of course, but I've been busy."

"Of course," he replied.

I turned to look at him for the first time. His clothes were ratty and torn and covered with stains. His thick, wiry black hair was shot through with gray as was his unkempt beard. His hollow eye sockets were hidden behind large, black sunglasses. His tough, leathery flesh hung loosely off his frame, and though he was still heavyset, he looked somehow less robust than I remembered him. He looked frail, like he was made out of sticks and crumpled leaves.

"So how the hell have you been keeping yourself, Bri-Bri?" I asked.

He snorted.

We sat in silence for a few minutes.

To my surprise, I was the one who finally broke the silence. "Look at us, a couple of sad old men on a bench."

"We're not that old," he replied.

"Yeah, but we look it. And I feel like an old man now. Everything is unfamiliar and confusing, My whole life is gone, taken from me. There's really nothing for me in this world anymore. I don't belong here."

"No, you don't," he responded. "Neither one of us does."

"It's too perfect. I don't think I'll be staying around much longer. There's just one last thing I've got to set right, then I'm gone."

"Where will you go?" he asked.

I let out a chuckle. "You always did have a shit sense of humor."

---

I found Jenny in tears that night. She wandered off while I did the dishes. After finishing, I headed back to my room to get ready for bed and found her sitting on the edge of the futon, crying. My notebooks from Oak Hill were laid out on the bed.

"I thought you had been writing all that time you were there," she said as I entered the room.

"I was."

"I mean real writing. I thought you were doing more plays, stories, anything. Not all this--" she pointed to the notebooks "--this nonsense."

"I was crazy, Jenny," I said. "I wasn't trying to write anything profound or meaningful. It was just a way to pass the time."

I picked up one of the notebooks and flipped through it. It was filled with pages and pages of jibberish - nonsensical ramblings, half-true recollections of my childhood, pornographic fantasies, descriptions of the other people in the hospital, bits of other books that I could remember.

At first I had been writing within the lines. Then I filled in all the margins and other blank spaces. Then I filled in the tiny blank spaces between lines, then between words. I wrote on the pages and re-wrote on them several times over. In a couple of the later notebooks I even deliberately used a lighter ink during my first few passes writing in them so I could go back later and rewrite over it in darker ink.

Jenny look at me with tears in her eyes as if looking at a stranger. "I don't understand what happened to you."

42. The Bad Guy

I fell violently ill on the night of the play.

And when I say
violently ill
, I mean two straight hours spent hugging porcelain and aggressively expelling every last morsel of foreign matter from my stomach. I mean profuse sweating and hallucinatory fever dreams. I mean heading towards the light.

"I don't think he should go tonight," I heard Nick say on the other side of the closed bathroom door.

"He's just a little nervous - opening night jitters. He'll be fine," Jenny replied.

When we finally left, it was already twenty minutes after the scheduled start of the pre-show cocktail reception, as my sister repeatedly pointed out.

On the drive over, Jenny fretted hopelessly, a nervous wreck. Nick was pissed off at her for not listening to him and fussing too much. And I just sat quietly in the back seat, hallucinating pleasantly, oblivious to it all.

---

A woman in male drag yelled at me from her perch atop five-foot tall stilts, beckoning me to come inside and witness the wondrous spectacle that was about to unfold, which was so amazing and fantastical that it would make me doubt my very senses. She wore a bright green coat with full tails, a pair of yellow corduroy slacks long enough to cover the stilts, a purple bow tie, and a green top hat with purple trim. She had a monocle in her right eye and a fake curly mustache drawn on her face in Sharpie. I stared at her for several minutes while Jenny and Nick exchanged pleasantries with some people they knew outside the theater. When I felt Nick tugging at my arm, I took that as my cue to follow them in.

Jenny handed our tickets to a large, burly Mexican wearing an old-time strongman leotard. Two slender, effeminate teenage boys in blue wigs and blue corsets were handing out playbills. I took one and read the cover:

Concrete Underground

or,
The Harlequin

A Tragic Comedy

by Dedalus Quetzal

Goldfrapp's "Oompa Radar" blasted through the house speakers as we made our way through the front lobby, which was packed with patrons crowding around carnival sideshow performance artists - a man in a jester's costume juggling fire, a female sword-swallower dressed as a gypsy, a naked snake man with a forked tongue and green scales painted on his skin, and a pair of teenage girls who appeared to be conjoined twins in black lace lingerie and heavy gothic makeup. One of the twins played a ukulele while her sister sang in French:
Ange, je peux me voir dans vos yeux.

I was pretty confident that at least half of this was actually happening outside of my fever dreams.

After we found our seats, Jenny and Nick immediately left to continue circulating among the audience, finding people they knew or wanted to know. Jenny seemed upset that I chose stay behind at our seats. From time to time I would see her point me out to whomever she was talking with. I decided to read the playbill, hoping it would both kill time and effectively hide my face.