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Wednesday, May 27, 2009
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Category: Art and Photography
'This Happened'
By JARET FERRATUSCO.
“Look, I’ll be honest with you,” I spoke quietly, exasperatedly, into the telephone. The setting of the sun behind a row of tall buildings bathed the hollow street outside in the unsettled gray of an unwashed tub, creating an encroaching shadow that was both understandable and yet somehow unwarranted, for this gray shadow had begun also to penetrate my apartment. It floated around the room lifeless and still, hovering inside the small enclosure that was meant to be taken as a hall, where I sat hunched over in a thin wooden chair by a small table where sat the telephone and the keys I always set down there upon returning home from work. With my forehead ground into the palm of one hand, coiling the telephone cord lifelessly around one finger, I breathed anxiously into the receiver, and because this was getting harder and harder for me to put into words, I continued slowly and cautiously, wanting to make out as if I were just trying to get the picture across clearer, when in fact I had no clear picture at all, and I was very nervous, and truthfully scared. And at the mercy of her. “I can’t understand what’s happening,” I said to her. “I only wish you would just be honest with me. Why can’t you just tell me what’s going on? What happened, can you at least tell me that?”
It had been a very bitter few days lately. They had passed by in an agony, the hours pulling ahead slowly. Somehow, directly caused by this circumstance, time itself had needed to be wound up again but without anyone around who could do it properly, leaving it and everyone within it completely swallowed. And pushed to a slow crawl. But really it was just me, dealing with the present situation, and thusly unable to stop it infecting—like a plague—the entire world I lived in.
Being that one half of my real life had lately been removed from perpetual existence (the part of my life that I actually worked for, to achieve something with), that left, desolately, just work.
Each day at work had been endless; I’d pass a handful of forms slowly into somebody’s grasp, and it had seemed an age as they would lean forward across the ocean’s length of the desk to receive the stack from me. My co-workers had droned into my ear with a supernatural sluggishness, an inconsistent slow-motion, rounding out every last indelicate note until the sound was as dull as the tip of a baseball. But I guess my body heard things being said this way and responded and functioned somehow reasonably to it in the face of the slow, terminal crawl, because I’d kept going, and I had made it through. But now, at the end of the week, I was left feeling that if I did not receive some amount of clarity—even just the smallest amount, the tiniest—about this subject from her, I would be simply incapable of surviving through the next work week.
The small hallway here that was really just an enclosure, not large enough for the table and this chair both, really, became cold and darkened by the draft from the opened window and the falling gray blanket of the deadened sun.
I stared out the window at the slowly morphing blurs of the building across the street.
One day could seem to last forever sometimes, but when nightfall approached, the rules definitely did not apply. With swiftness, with a great violence, sunset always would succumb to nightfall. As slow as life was, twilight had for the most part a fleeting existence. Akin to the butterfly, or a struck match.
“Why can’t you just be honest with me?” I asked her again, hoping she’d just quit stalling or walking around the subject and hand me something I could make some kind of sense of. It was simply intolerable that one person should have so much power over another without this power having anything to do with owing money.
In my hands I felt there was the void of a world where once, though I had certainly not realized it, I sort of had the whole wide world. Comfort, for one, had been a luxury I never considered tangible until it was so meticulously taken from me on a cold morning by the message she relayed to me on the telephone conveniently before the two of us would be forced to end the call in order to leave our individual homes for work. Security was another issue—I had apparently been a secure person before without even having the grace to just realize it, but now I was not. In today’s world, today’s immediately terrifying sunset world, comfort and security were fantasies, and I was left the unimaginative dreamer, unable to conjure enough of their individual elements to mend together into a world firm enough within which to lose myself or stand upon.
I could not put my head in the clouds and gloss this over. I could not even see the clouds for the sunset. Even now, outside, the gray shadows in the street were turning bruise-blue, and soon enough they would become black.
Just exactly like a struck match was everything, not just the sunset; my relationship with her had been that fast, too. The years don’t matter. A match could be held onto for an indefinite spell, but still, when you grazed it upon brick . . . that’s it. Our relationship was the same way. I hadn’t known this until just a couple of days ago.
These past few days have been longer in scope than the years I spent with her. Pitifully, I noted this, ashamed of myself for its acrid truth. And I felt scared again. And confused.
Consequently, my life had almost certainly, and with extremity, changed when she left. The lows that had once been at the base of my existence were now its ceiling beams, the peaks of my rooftops, and the rising sun; those old worries were now the heights I ascended to. What had replaced the old lows in my life had come from some unrealized and wholly fantastical abyss beneath those other, unproblematic and silly ones; needless lows, like work, and bills. And the traffic on the roads after work. What fucking jokes to have been told to me. And the punchlines. My acceptance had all been punchlines.
Those old lows were jokes, just jokes.
I bore upon me an inverted pyramid of self-defacing mysteries unraveling. They slid down the geometry of the triangle and speared my damaged head and heart.
I longed for the old woes. Traffic. Unpaid telephone bills. If I could just start to get fucking angry at something as commonplace as traffic again, that would be a blessing.
Those woes used to feel so claustrophobic and sharp to me, but now they were foggy truths at best. They hovered above me, soaked the air around me in an inconveniencing mist, but still I passed through them easily enough. Uselessly and without effort, as most overblown cares are often walked through in the end.
Traffic? Who needs it? I could take the bus and sleep the whole way. Unpaid telephone bills? What does any of this actually really matter—I can get along in the face of these small things.
But this, now. I couldn’t take this at all.
She had never really lived here, exactly, so to that effect her leaving had been pulled off under the stealthiest and safest of circumstances. There was no confrontation, no sneaking around. As it was I was a person living, and so was she, and we did that together when we were together, and often it was here. So she sort of lived with me, at least as much as I thought she had until now. But when she “left” me, there was nothing here she’d needed to pack up, because her belongings had been safe within the compartments of her own home, a small one-bedroom house only a few blocks away.
Her escape from me had merely been a matter of not coming to me anymore.
Part of what hurt so badly was the ingenuity of this. How very simple and easy it was—the unmaking of this made reality—only served to drive the wooden stake into my heart deeper. I could feel dizziness and rage if I dwelled upon it, so I tried not to. Erasing the slate of my thoughts, I was left to be overcome by the slow crawl of days and hours and minutes.
At one time in my life I might have considered this an impossibility, to depend so thoroughly upon someone. But if I were to weigh the needs against the desires, I still could not find an accurate balance enough to figure out why this was so terrible. Abandonment was its true source. An inaccurate portrait of oneself weighs heavy when one is abandoned; my needs trifle, and my desires become beside the point.
She might not have tried very hard to escape from me, if ‘escape’ is even the right word for it, but it proved much more difficult for me to escape this abandonment.
Her house had generally been in the direction of the bus station where I waited to get to work in the morning, but since she left, a couple of long, endlessly stretched days ago now, I had taken to a longer walk, around a few otherwise unnecessary blocks, so that her small house on the corner was not visible to me on the trek. I could not have stood that for the world; what if I had walked right by her as she was leaving for work in her car? It would look as if I had probably been hovering outside of her house for hours waiting for this “chance” moment, maybe even having slept there through the night in anticipation of it. After all, we left for work at the same time in the morning, only I regularly took the bus because my place of employment was just over the bridge across the river, and hers was in the other direction, nestled somewhere in the clotted nest of downtown.
With the dangers of remaining within my morning work-routine rendered, naturally I fought against the waves that would seek to drown me, and configured an alternate route. In time, the alternate route would become normal to me, and all else would be just trivia.
And in truth, if I had remained in my schedule of passing by her place on the way to work, and under the inconvenience of a very malicious fact of chance I did pass by her and make eye contact, I might have fallen victim to tears and confessions and embarrassing pleas. I might have started begging her, bothering her or even crying to her, or to myself, all of which would not be helping this situation at all but probably putting it in a position to hurt it even more. After this cruel hoax was lifted upon my suddenly ruptured sense of self, I could not—for any amount of desire to make eye contact with her or hold her hand—withstand this kind of embarrassment. Or the black need that would well up and pour forth from my limbs and mouth, to be fed and nurtured only by absence and void.
She had definitely trapped me into a state of dumbfounded uselessness.
Perhaps a person could just get over it, as they say. But how?
Days of silence had passed wherein I’d heard nothing from her. No verbal explanations, no physical presences, not even a follow-up note to clarify the impulsive brevity of the first bewildering, heartbreaking telephone memorandum. Work had somehow kept me alive through the sheer expectations of my position and the monotony of physical movements at my desk. If she had chosen instead to leave me during the weekend, I should think, if she had done this when I was alone and poured the molten steel of it onto me when I was at home for a few days without such work-related responsibility, I might never have left my position on the couch. I would have withered and wilted. The stress levels and fear in me might have advanced an immoral atrophy to the extent that my shriveling body would have faded so deeply as to become nothing but a dead seed on the couch cushion; afterward in immediate history there would be just some unclaimed pile of dust, finger and toe nails, my watch and a pair of pants and a shirt. I could have died. She could have killed me with this had it been done during a weekend. Perhaps that had been an unplanned blessing. I heaved a sigh of relief to note that she had not waited for a Friday to do this.
But now it was the weekend, at long and dreadful last, and I was not much better than I had been a couple of days ago when she’d told me that her and I should no longer see each other. In that confounded little un-conversation half the length of a succinctly spouted shopping list.
Now it was the weekend.
This everlasting afternoon, the long and sour night, and then the lonely morning to come of after. And two days of it repeating this way.
Three whole nights of it before I could be saved—if work could ever really save someone in this respect—by the workweek. But I was seriously in doubt of my strength, and even if I made it back to the workweek alive, how could I stand five days of that? Without her I could not. Or maybe I might have at one time, say, if she were simply on vacation. It would not have become the slightest bit of a problem if only it had been vacation, or merely out of town on business. But she’d left me. That’s permanent. That’s not just absence, it’s desertion. People die that alone. It happens in the desert, and in senior housing units at the hospital ground.
I could no more face this night alone than I could the following two days, or the following five days of the workweek after that. She would have to account for this if I were to go on as a reasonably functioning human being. I would need her, here and now, to explain this situation to me, for I clearly had no way of doing it on my own.
So I asked her a third time, feeling impatient and not a little put out by her silent insistence on hovering like a deeply bruised cloud over the situation without raining on it properly. She would have to be coaxed. She must be expected to account for it all.
But she would not.
She danced around the subject in a way that suggested the subject was in itself so vast a field or territory that her dances would inadvertently take an infinite amount of time to circle. So she danced, and danced, and hovered, and hovered, holding the innocent ground hostage to the threat of a storm. At least storms could eventually be over—in this I saw no end.
And then a click came to the line, and a curt communication from the operator, stating that if I should like to continue on the line, I would have to deposit another fifty cents.
Sighing so deeply that my body temperature dropped considerably, I shivered in the thin wooden chair in the small enclosure by the door and my teeth chattered.
“Can you hold on for just a moment,” I asked, the answer to which came forth by means of a sigh from the operator’s mouth. Fishing around in the deep wells of my cloth-only pockets, I seemed to be coming up entirely short on any sort of monetary worth. The click on the line sounded again and the resolute operator repeated that I would have to deposit fifty cents if I wanted to continue this conversation. With the operator pressing me this way for the money, and me trying my best to produce it, I could not see why I should also have to contend with her sighing on the other end, as if this were difficult for her.
Such a preposterous thing this was, that I sighed again, even more deeply. In return, the operator sighed back, stronger still. Possibly mocking me?
Goddamnit, this made no sense and it was not right. And I stood up, shouldering the telephone, groping inside my front pockets and then the back pockets with a violence that could only be evidenced by the desperately frustrated.
But in the end there was no coin change to be had, only a crumpled one dollar bill. I asked both her and the operator to hold on, placed the telephone receiver onto the small table in between the cradle and the small lump of keys on my keyring, and I raced through the kitchen pushing the hair out of my eyes impatiently, nearly diving into the bedroom. I collided with the bed and knocked it askance. Immediately upon doing this I felt a small change occurring in me.
I felt rather flatly like a cold grave. With no emotion left alive, as cold and lifeless as the grass grown over the plot. My body itself felt like the grave, within which was buried the body of someone of no concern. A cold, lifeless, unaccountable grave. One that had been sitting untended for decades.
It produced in my flesh the kind of goose bumps that only ever seem to legitimately occur in moments of supreme embarrassment. To myself I cursed the operator, while simultaneously convicting myself for enduring.
And all the while, relentlessly, I pictured her face, now planted at the silent telephone, growing cobwebs, my absence from the other end of the line proof of the leviathan that was the waste of time that was me.
I punched a pillow off the bed and it struck the floor softly.
In the small nightstand next to the bed there would usually be leftover change that I would use for the bus to get to work. Diving into the small drawer, tossing aside blank letters, unopened telephone bills, friendship rings, some pills I stopped taking because I couldn’t sleep after taking them, stubbed out pencils and other things I did not need, I searched vigorously but in ultimate fruitlessness for the change, knowing the operator would not be happy to be kept waiting like this and meanwhile feeling so catastrophically sorry and pitifully enraged that I could not have been better prepared for this happening.
Time was getting very, very short, I knew. And if I pushed it, taking too long to find this small amount of change, my ex-girlfriend might just hang up on me and let both the operator and I to our own devices.
The operator would no doubt become even more inflamed if this were to happen, cunningly waiting alone for me to return, saying absolutely nothing at all as I would unknowingly deposit the correct change so that I was paying only for the guileless insult of returning to an empty line. It would only serve to reason that this sort of vicious attack was imminent in my future, considering all of the other hell that had come upon me, so when I arrived at the conclusion that there was no change at all in the drawer of the nightstand, I threw it over onto its side. The bedside lamp crashed to the floor with a dull thud, and were it turned on, it might have blown out with a pop. Instead, however, it was a scene without that much drama; just a lonely man in his bedroom throwing furniture around.
I made one more desperate attempt for change in the drawers in the kitchen, but was sorely faced with the dismal proposition of having to change the dollar bill into coins—that meant having to find a way to leave the house without the two participants hanging up on me during my absence. Not like I cared much about the operator, but I did care about the girl who abandoned me giving up, but in order to do this right, it was clearly in my best interest to keep them both placated until I could rectify this situation with quarters.
So I returned to the telephone with a short speech prepared, finding that the operator and my ex-girlfriend were involved in some sort of conversion, the nature of which was promptly hidden from me as they ceased speaking upon the first notice that I could hear what they were saying. It threw me off completely.
When I tried to speak up I found that my words were labored, my breath needlessly pumping up steam through the engine for an imaginary train. One breath wasted, the next in trying to catch up also wasted, and so on until I realized I had been long out of breath without even saying the slightest in regards to this critical predicament of funds. Regardless, I had a situation to face and there was no way out of it.
Managing the sort of composure I would normally take under somewhat dire circumstances at work, and equally as effectlessly, I spoke nearly as if I were dumb to the fact of immediately recognizable vocal charades.
“I have only just a dollar bill, and no change,” I said.
The frustrated nervousness in my voice was almost palpable, almost tangible, like I could pluck the vocal notes off the windstream and flick them off into the underbrush.
“Is there some way I can mail in the payment later and remain on the line now, and possibly pay a late fee or something like that, by mail?”
A short span of silence followed, shared by all three of us, and then the operator once again insisted that I put in the correct change or have the call terminated.
Without any more solutions through which to enable more time, I was forced then to cave in. Though I spoke downward into the telephone with a defeated, lowered head, I felt as though for sure I were succumbing to something as limitless and vast as the sky, and the atmosphere. That hushed silence inside the earpiece held legions. It lorded over me, as black a cloud as one which would contain only the ash of powerfully destructive volcanic eruptions.
It would have to involve me leaving the apartment, I said, to change the dollar bill into coins.
There would be no choice in the matter, I said, but to leave the apartment.
The operator’s ensuing spate of silence was a physical pressure on me coming from all possible planes and angles, like a shrinking metal box with heated sides, compressing and melting me simultaneously. After what seemed the passing of a generation, the operator finally allowed that he/she would wait it out, though it took longer for my ex-girlfriend to correspondingly consent. Shaking, disillusioned and wracked with panic, after waiting for the operator’s approval and then also having to wait for my ex-girlfriend to do the same, I found myself at a point in my life where madness could not be held easily at bay; I would tear into the throat of a rabid dog and eat from its meat, and punch through solid brick and mortar with my naked fist. It was madness either beckoning me or, alternatively, being dumped on me like a bucket of scorching boiled water. I would destroy nations, flatten whole towns.
Diluted and more accurate, what happened was that I started to beg.
“Can you just please hold on?” I whined into the telephone, ashamed but holding myself in a barely moderate self-control. “I swear I won’t be a moment. Please, just don’t hang up, and I’ll be back in just a couple of minutes, and I swear after this I will never call you on the matter again.”
In time, she did agree, and after receiving full sincerity that the call would not be maliciously terminated in my absence, I set the telephone receiver back onto the table between the cradle and my keyring, pulled my jacket on and grabbed the keys and left the apartment, choosing not to fasten the door so that I wouldn’t have to fumble breathlessly with the abnormally fussy bolt lock upon re-entering, which would hopefully save me just that much more gracious time. I truly had every determination to return to the call as expressly as possible, so before leaving the building to find an outlet for changing the dollar bill, I knocked upon my neighbor Sandy’s door as a last effort to keep the seconds from turning into minutes or hours or days and the rest of my life.
She should be home at this hour, I reasoned, and knocked again. Sandy would regularly be home at this hour. I could usually hear her through the thin plaster walls that barely separated our individual apartments from one another. I knocked patiently, for the third time.
But as tonight was Friday, it was not entirely unexpected that my repeatedly rapping upon her door went unheard and thus unanswered. Why anyone would be home on a Friday is a question best left answered by the lonely, and as I was only just newly lonesome, I felt I was not the best person to ask, because all the answers I would have been capable of furnishing seemed straining to withstand the bleakness and the inherently vague guilt of being dumped for what appeared to be no reason at all.
The pale brown wood of her door motioned toward me. It sang to me. It asked me to knock, while also chiding me for it. The hollow resounding puffs of silence as each knock went uncared for were swallowed in whole, and with each bite the door grew stronger, and more hungry.
I pounded and pounded, my patience stretching. The door swallowed my attempts, vanishing me little by little. It seemed soon enough just part of the night sounds; the sound of a car horn, a dog barking, my useless fist knocking.
Standing outside Sandy’s door, I realized I was wasting time feeling sorry for myself again. I couldn’t afford to waste such precious time with my ex-girlfriend and the operator waiting on me, and out of frustration and panicked realization, I balled my fist while still rapping upon Sandy’s door and gave it one or two unnecessarily hard bashes. I hit the door so hard that my whole arm shook. The thin wooden door gave way a little and creaked minutely with a splintering snap, at which point I stopped knocking.
As no one was in the hall to see it happen, this could not be blamed on me. Or even if it did end up being noticed and someone did blame it on me, there could be no assemblage of proof.
Embarrassed and still slightly unnerved, I stuck my still balled-up fist into my jacket pocket and headed for the stairs, making the single flight down into the lobby in just a matter of seconds. I kicked the front door outward with the foot that preceded my egress, and hopped out onto the street, looking frantically in both directions for a sign of somebody who might possibly possess change for a dollar.
Seeing instantaneously that both directions were apparently deserted and would offer no assistance to myself or my situation, I hooked around the side of the building for the bar two blocks downward, picking up my step with every other step. Before long I was nearly in a trot.
As I glided along the sidewalk, from a short distance I could see old Mr. Dammen crossing the empty street, shirtless, clutching his shirt feverishly in both hands, vaguely wringing it. I focused on his form like land spotted from sea, and it grew bigger and bigger. By the time I reached the halfway point to the bar, Mr. Dammen had crossed the street and we passed each other.
The sour and frantic vacancy in his eyes alarmed me. Pity roosted upon my shoulders, digging its talons inside the meat and muscle so that I squirmed crazily and probably looked like a shambles before the old man. My own situation was dire, but something about the haunted look in Mr. Dammen’s eyes crippled me from excusing that without first confirming whether or not the poor old bastard was okay and everything.
Slightly hunched, and very small, Mr. Dammen held a look of desperation in his eyes that instantly set me off guard. I stopped and asked him if he were alright. Sweating, out of breath, Mr. Dammen looked vacantly down the street, apparently at a loss for words. “Aren’t you okay, Mr. Dammen? Are you hurt?”
Wringing his shirt, rapidly shifting his eyes from the sidewalk to me and back to the street again, he shook his head and kept walking. It was in his eyes: he was haunted.
I could have commiserated but that I had express need to wash myself of this other uncalled for grievance and put an end to the ballooning of my own goddamned shapeless misery.
Mr. Dammen’s eyes glossed over, dead to understanding. He drifted off like an unfastened balloon.
Often I had passed the old man in the neighborhood (and probably always would), sometimes finding him leaned against the side of a building with one hand, checking his pulse with a finger to his neck. Breathing heavy. Worried about something. Muttering. Afraid.
He lived in the building next to mine and often he could be found outside that building injecting insulin into his leg or washing down pills from his many on-hand prescription bottles with small cups of lemonade from the stand a little girl in our building would often set up outside the entrance to his building because residents of that building seemed somehow kinder and more likely to become customers than would the residents in my building; like me who never seemed to notice I might have been hurting her feelings as I would so often wave her aside on my way home from work.
Mr. Dammen shuffled slowly around the corner, shirtless and breathing heavy. His voiceless egress was indicative of a change in the pattern of weather.
Nightfall had fell.
It was cold now.
Loneliness and desperation were my neighbors, while the evening chill played itself on me.
So why then should I be expected to haunt the shadow of this old man as if I were his guardian angel? Let him go and be himself. Crazy as he may be, or just senile.
But fuck, I was still a man with a heart. True, this heart had been lately rather effortlessly shattered, but the pieces still existed, didn’t they? If cared for with glue and precision, despite its bruises, would it not still be held accountable?
It occurred to me that I might catch up to Mr. Dammen and see him to his building, but if so, I might be pressing my luck for changing the dollar bill. Eventually I concluded that old Mr. Dammen would eventually, and with great efficiency—however inefficient—fend for himself, and probably just needed a pill, or an icepack or perhaps merely a rest.
He certainly hadn’t reached the exorbitant age he had by falling down shirtless all the time. I should at least be obliged to give him the benefit of the doubt.
..Which was, in effect, my shield. Guilt trip over. Bye-bye, Mr. Dammen.
Satisfied that I had not selfishly abandoned a living person in his probable time of need, I resumed my walk to the corner bar with vigor, becoming more and more enraged that I should have to make this trek at all. Why could she not just hang up and call me back? We had been together for a number of years, and so wouldn’t it rightly be owed to me that much little respect—a simple telephone call to explain to me her reasons for ending it all? Why should I be the one chasing an explanation for something that I did not cause? Or if I were the one to have really caused this crumbling of our relationship, why was it left up to me to figure out that I was in the wrong? If someone wants to blame another person, it should be the antagonist’s responsibility to explain him/herself. Not everyone can see when they are in the wrong, and in certain situations like this it should not be left up to them to figure it out as if by magic.
But even so, if it were the case that this was my doing, how could I have done her wrong, and when could I have done it? In seriously pondering our situation before this new situation had been sprung upon me just days ago, not only could I recall virtually nothing I’d perhaps done to cause the slightest bit of tension or unwarranted offense, but also I could barely recall anything substantial at all about our relationship other than the fact that previous to the beginning of this week I had been her boyfriend and she’d been my girlfriend. More and more I realized that I’d barely even the slightest bit of factual or even hypothetical information about us as a couple; the bare contours of her face were even beginning to slip from my memory. The shape of our hands held together—that little ball of fingers—was not a real picture in my head but a vague suggestion of probable events. I could surely be held at gunpoint and shot in the chest were my life depending on my finding a single direct responsibility for a fault that caused the sudden abandonment of me by her.
So, giving that I could know so little about our relationship, to the highest elevation of ignorance as to the very recollection of how we’d come to be dating at all in the first place, it should therefore be made more apparent that if she should like to break it into two and separate us forever, it should be her duty to offer some manner of explanation for it. That was the very basic fact of the matter, and it was alarming that I should have to go to these lengths to squeeze it out of her. Just one reason, perhaps, might be all that I would need, and instead I am left in the street during sunset, chasing correct change to maintain a telephone call wherein I am only furthermore left, basically, talking myself in dizzying circles.
While without the correct change, meanwhile, she is left chatting away with that insensitive operator.
Not only am I abandoned, but I’m having to physically pay money to fund this abandonment. Even if it’s only fifty cents, it’s still an unruly charge irresponsibly placed in my sole care.
Growling to myself, surely aggravated beyond measure, I enter the dark saloon as if I owned the place and cut into a conversation between the bartender and a customer, asking change for the dollar bill that I thereby slapped down onto the bar.
With their conversation so curtly interrupted and rendered unimportant in such a fashion, both the bartender and the customer looked blankly at me. I could tell they were in awe. I could see that they were in the right to glare at me. A few other customers hunched over the bar did the same. But I was unable to change this.
I needed change for a dollar. I needed this. It had wiped out all pretense to amiable presentation.
Feeling the sudden cold realization of embarrassment, a shiver coursed through me and I shook it off, clearing my heard to start again. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” I began. “I’m sorry for bursting in here like that. It seems I’m in a bit of a bind and it set me off like a firecracker. But, if it’s not so much trouble, I would be very appreciative of correct change for this dollar.”
The bartender wiped his hands on a stained white rag and slowly made his way to the corner of the bar with the dollar bill laid out on it, and after what seemed the duration of the closing credits for an exceptionally winded film, he picked it up. Cinematically, perfectly, he squinted, then pulled his head back, shaking his head with disgust, giving me the impression he found the bill a disgraceful fake. He was doing this on purpose.
All sound had ceased in the bar upon my entrance. The television seemed suddenly muted, the pool tables were abandoned, and the glasses being sipped from were not banged back onto the bar after each taste but gently placed back onto coasters. The only sound was that of the bartender sliding the bill back across the bar toward me.
“I’m afraid we can’t make change for non-customers. You’d have to buy something first.”
A bit taken aback, but considering the sense in this, I went through my pockets again for more dollars in which to possibly pay for a shot of brandy before zipping back to my apartment to put in the correct change for the telephone operator to keep the conversation running long enough for me to gain some small amount of understanding about the sudden dreary situation I had been placed in by the person I had in the past felt was the closest to me.
But there was no more money in my pockets, as I’d unwittingly left my wallet back at the apartment in a fit of disorder since it had not contained coins of any degree.
“Jesus,” I whispered to myself, intensely defeated. Then, speaking up, I asked the bartender, “You wouldn’t happen to serve any drinks for under a dollar would you? That’s all I have.”
“Nothing under a dollar,” quipped the bartender, fast and electrically charged. I felt the echo of my question torched like the wick of a candle, melting me in my place at the corner of the bar.
Looking around the small, cramped establishment, I scanned the old machines and spaces between grimy booths for a cigarette machine, or a candy dispenser, or even a gumball machine. But there was nothing of the sort.
I motioned toward the pool table. “How about a game of pool? I’ll buy a game and leave it open for whoever wants to play? I just want the change and to be on my way.”
The bartender shook his head slowly and, detached from interest, began wiping up the rims of tiny glasses from a wet tray pulled from the little dishwashing machine under the bar. “Pool’s a dollar a game. No change to be had from that, my friend.”
Frustrated, I watched the lonely dollar placed onto the bar seemingly collecting dust. It’s pale green design stood out from the dull, cracked wooden bar. “Do you sell cigarettes, potato chips or maybe just a splash of mixer without the alcohol? Anything like that?”
Again the bartender shook his head. “No food here. Not licensed to sell cigarettes either. And the license we do have is limited to beer and wine. No liquor, no mixers.”
A short round of chuckles emanated from the previously silent audience at the bar, spearheaded by the stout guy closest to me, who’d been previously engaged in conversation with the bartender as I’d entered. He took a large swig of beer from his glass and wiped off the wet line of his mustache with a dirtied sleeve. He grinned at me with a fat pink mouthful of gums and a horrifying display of crooked yellow teeth. To myself, in my head, I smartly addressed this subject and smirked at the higher level of dignity I considered was held by me in the face of it.
But when I smirked, I neglected to also do that with a non-physical privacy, and the patron’s grin faded fast.
And then I was posed with a moral dilemma.
This was not the sort of bar where a skinny stranger like myself ought to come around looking for the trouble that these type of patrons were openly in search of. Many times before, on the way home from the grocery store or a film, I’d myself seen bleeding people both passed out and knocked out, on display like puppets or mannequins in the sidewalk or on the curb by the street in front of this bar. It was a place for wild arguments and for fights and violence. I would not want to find myself in whatever position any of those people had unwisely placed themselves in for whatever reason. When the patron’s grin faded I understood that I was to make this situation as short as possible and start winding it up right this very moment.
I could leave the bar without another word, snatching up my dollar bill and simply leaving. But this was the closet establishment for another four blocks within which I could possible change the dollar bill.
If I were to get back to my apartment in time to save my ex-girlfriend or the operator from hanging up, I would already have quite a taxing run back to get there in a proportionate amount of time. The street outside was utterly deserted, except for the possibility of finding old Mr. Dammen still wandering around, but I couldn’t possibly expect to get change from him, not in the delirious state in which I’d just passed him, not that he could be expected to have correct change for a dollar even if he were in the healthiest of moods. There was no time to spare getting four more blocks down the street to the market for change and then doubling back another six to my apartment. I needed change from this place and this place alone.
The silence in the room had given way to murmurs and more chuckles.
The bartender watched me with a silent and very steady displeasure as he wiped off the rims of countless glasses, placing them in a sloppy order back onto the small lining of glasses by the taps on the bar.
I closed my eyes and collected myself.
“Do you have anything, anything at all, for under a dollar? I will purchase from you anything at all, no matter what it is, for under a dollar, in order to gain change for a telephone call. It is very pressing, and I am truly sorry if I have upset anyone. But I need this change, so I ask dependently: Will you sell me something for under a dollar? I do not care what it is I am purchasing.”
With that said, I heaved a great sigh, and it seemed that from somewhere in the room, drifting in from down the block, I could hear that sigh returned to me from around the corner, up the short flight of stairs that led back to my apartment, spilling out from the untended earpiece of the telephone.
The bartender put down his pint glasses and rag, and placed both hands on the bar, leaning in. Scrutinizing me with a hateful stare, he then turned to one side, scanning the objects on the shelves and the bar, then to the other side, taking his time cataloging the worth of the bar’s products and possessions. At last, he reached under the table and brought out the dull stub of a small used-up pencil.
“This,” he said. “You can have this for under a dollar.”
I almost exploded. “That?” I gasped. “But it’s almost useless. Clearly there’s no more than a memo’s worth of writing left in the life of that little stub of a pencil.”
“Well,” explained the bartender (and I did take into account that while this entire journey was in hopeless search of an answer to questions, it was stunning, and heartbreaking too, that this person would be the one offering me explanations and not my ex-girlfriend), “It was worth more than a dollar when I initially bought it. Good pencil, it is. And it’s been a fine one. But it’s used, naturally, so you’ll only have to pay a fraction of its retail cost. Second-hand worth is seventy-five cents.”
“But what would I need a second-hand pencil for?”
“Give it to your girlfriend,” the bartender returned flatly, nearing the end of his patience.
Nearing mine too, and beginning to shake, I tried as best I could to compose myself. “I don’t have a girlfriend. Not anymore.”
“You don’t say?” he quipped, bringing on another surprisingly vocal round of laughter from the customers. I stilled my bones, wanting to ball my fist and pitch it to the insensitive bartender’s smart mouth like a rock or a stone.
“That won’t do at all, sir. I need fifty cents for the telephone call. Can you . . . please . . . please just lower the price of that useless pencil to fifty cents and I will be on my way?”
The bartender extended his hand, glancing at all angles at the pencil, as if he might be willing to give me a deal but unwilling to do it wastefully or without grave consideration. He considered—and considered—his options, playing the car salesman, checking me out, looking the pencil over, checking me out, glancing at the dollar, then scrutinizing the pencil again.
“Well,” he finally said. “I guess it’s your lucky day, friend.”
He slid the pencil brusquely my way, grabbing up the dollar bill with expert readiness, spitting out two quarters with the other hand as it popped out of the register. The two coins bounced off the dilapidated wooden bar and I chased them around on the floor, standing up afterward to compose myself before heading toward the door without another word.
“What, no tip?” I heard from behind.
Then, from one of the patrons at the bar, “What a fucking asshole…”
Strained beyond compare, my reason was thus pushed over the edge, and without thinking, I heaved up one of the barstools and turned on the small assemblage of bartender and customers and pitched the stool forthright with the intention of knocking one of those bastards off a stool. But the stool went wide and bounced off the bar. Before it could clatter to the floor, the bartender was reaching underneath the bar for what I only assumed would be a ball bat or, worse, a gun, and without giving anyone a chance to consider their own modes of attack I departed the room and ran as fast as I could in zig-zagging motions through two blocks of buildings, not stopping until I’d crossed Canal Street and doubled-up around two more blocks on that side of the road and then made my way back across Canal Street toward my apartment building.
Outside my building, on the sidewalk, Mr. Dammen lay shirtless on his back, on the sidewalk, surrounded by a small crowd of residents from both my building and his, knelt over by a few paramedics who raced in an out of a running ambulance parked in front of the fire hydrant.
I pushed through the crowd, much to the dismay of some of my closest neighbors, and with a desperation I’d never known before took the steps four at a time, so that I cleared the whole flight in just three lunges. Hoping I had not been followed by anyone from the bar—because if I had, my insensitive shortcut through the paramedics and the small crowd overlooking the fallen old man would surely provoke one or two of them into offering a guided tour to my apartment door for anyone from the bar who had managed to track my frantic flight back to the building—I slammed the door shut, ran my fingers through my hair, threw the keys down onto the table beside the unhooked receiver and hung my jacket up.
Exasperated, out of breath and nearing to a point where I stood a fair chance at losing my mind entirely, I placed the two hard-won quarters on the table next to the keys and the cradle of the telephone and sat into the chair, lifting the receiver into my mouth and saying, “Hello?”
She was still there.
We continued our conversation for a long while, but not before I dragged myself in to the kitchen to flip the light on, and not before I had drawn the curtains so that if any of the bar patrons had tracked me to this part of the street they could not clearly spot me through the lit window of my livingroom.
We talked for a long while, and since I was out of breath and out of endurance, and clearly defeated, I did not make the demands I had previously drawn out to her before, and did not make outward accusations that I could stand to regret later. Nor did I even have inner accusations anymore. Overwhelmed and out of my element, I no longer felt anger or disappointment in her. My frustrations had been chased out of me, shaken from my body. My fears were still strong, and my loneliness even stronger.
I found that despite the hollow feeling in my chest, I could possibly and probably live through the weekend, and then through the oncoming workweek. Of course, I would be damaged and lonely, but I would not be dead.
We conversed for a while, through a thousand divisions of subjects I did not understand at all, as I wrapped the telephone cord around my finger lifelessly, pulling it so tight that my bloodless finger began to feel pained, and after concluding absolutely nothing, she said good-bye to me and I was faced with the hard truth that the apartment would be very quiet from now on.
On the extreme whole, I was still very much in need of something, but still I could recognize that tonight I would not have it, whatever it was that I needed. But, I could hope for that something tomorrow. I had nothing planned yet for Saturday at all.
Placing the receiver back into the cradle, I stared hard and long at the telephone, unblinking, almost without taking new breaths.
The telephone on the small stand next to the door in the small enclosure had not been in service for months, or weeks, I don’t think. There hadn’t been a cord to it, even, for as long as I could remember. Since it didn’t need a functioning cord to remain out of service, I hadn’t ever felt the need to acquire one for it. And so it was easy for me to move the telephone past the kitchen, all the way through to the smallish livingroom, and I placed it in a new spot, on the small stand next to the couch. And I placed the two quarters from the corner bar onto the stand next to the out-of-service telephone in case she decided to call me back, and I pulled myself into a tight ball at the corner of the couch, with my shoes on, and listened to the commotion outside die down as the ambulance stole away, either with Mr. Dammen inside of it or not.
9:10 PM
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