When I get home, there is a message from Alicia, on the machine. I call her back and we make plans to meet at a coffee shop downtown in an hour. I swiftly shave, shower, and do all the things I didn’t bother doing before I met with Zoe, get dressed, change my clothes, change them again, change them a third time, and opt to hoof it.
Abandoned buildings and run-down houses spring up all around me like skeletons, corpses left exposed to the elements from when this was a prosperous industrial city. Buildings in which once shoes, machine parts, and textiles were manufactured. All now stand empty, windows boarded over and broken. Train tracks that once shipped those goods to New York City, Chicago, California, all across the country, now sit corroded, held together with graffiti, barely strong enough to hold up when the occasional freight passes through without stopping. The train station that used to check people through when passenger cars still came this way is now a storage building. You can see garbage and papers piled to the ceiling in the upper windows. “Scumbags fear me!” proclaims graffiti on one of the trellises. This has always been a debate whether this is an order for scumbags to fear the writer, or if it is a proclamation that scumbags already fear him or her. The exclamation point precludes the possibility that it is a request to know whether scumbags to fear the writer. Regardless, it has been there for years, and the writer probably has no recollection of its meaning. It will probably be the last thing remaining in this dying city, the last will and testament and final words breathed from its dusty lips, “Scumbags fear me!”
Immediately passing that underpass, I walk up a hill and are past the shame of the city, not that what is there now is anything left to be proud of. There are a few stores on this part of State Street, mostly antique shops. There is one diner that is open until mid-afternoon, and across the street is the latest gay bar. They tend to cause a lot of commotion in this small, narrow-minded city, and rarely stay open more than a few years. Then another will pop up in some out-of-the-way location, and the homosexuals will get to dance again. I think the real problem that ‘decent’ folk around here have is that the homosexuals are managing to have fun while the rest of the community hasn’t figured out how. The last gay bar, amazingly enough, was the one that stayed open the longest, and they were right on Main Street in one of the suburbs. They stayed open a whopping five years before the rest of the community brought them down. Now there is this one with its thumping dance music, undulating bodies, and, so far, there has been little uproar.
Once you get past that area, you are in downtown proper, where all the stores and hootchie bars are. At this time, of course, any hootchie bar that is open pretends respectability. They serve lunch with their beer, and on weekdays, they try to attract businessmen and government officials by jacking up the prices of their cheeseburgers. At night, though, they put on the coolers and open the meat market, many of them with ‘ladies-drink-and-guys-fuck-free’ specials to bring out the sleaziest and most libido-driven kids. At this time of year it gets crazy with school winding down. With the frustration of finals approaching, self-medication among the student body grows ever stronger. I sympathize with that emotion. Sometimes, I like to take drugs and people watch down here, just letting the decadence of it all wash over me in a wave.
The coffee shop is right in the middle of these bars, out of sight, forgotten. It’s owned by good, honest, God-fearin’ folk just want to look past the problems. People that don’t want to worry about how fucked up the world really is, and who are just going to ignore the problem until it goes away or until someone comes in and saves us so the history books can say we were victims, just like we did for the Germans back in 1945. If they need to immerse themselves in the petty problems, like how much money is in their Roth IRA, or if that one kid with the notebook is going to come in and drink coffee all day and not buy any food, well God damn it, they are willing to immerse themselves in those problems. And God damn it, if they need those problems so they can think happy thoughts about their grandchildren and nut-bar children who don’t really know what they are doing when you get them in the sack, then I am willing to help them out.
I caused the owner’s gaunt-faced, perpetually blind-with-rage wife so much grief with that little affair that Terry the Manager offered to give me free coffee for life. Terry is behind the counter fisting a plastic water glass that is so scratched it looks cloudy. She smiles wryly at me and hands me a cup as I walk by. I whisk the cup out of her hand, drop a dollar in the tip jar and move on to the coffee station while searching the bar for Alicia.
The place is packed to the gills with half-lidded young movers, shakers, and sneezers enjoying the traditional breakfast in the coffee house, which they’ve always done, since before it was cool. I should know, because I was doing it before it was cool too, and these guys were all there.
I take my table in the back corner where I can look out into the Parlor City Commons, watching crackheads hassling skateboarders in the red-bricked courtyard. With a napkin and a gel pen I had in my pocket, I scratch down a poem in the sunlight that streams down through the turn-of-the-century glass that has ice form in the gaping cracks with the frame during the winter.
Alicia saunters in ten minutes after me and whisks through the café without stopping and perches on the chair across from me. “Mr. Valentine,” she purrs, “I hope you didn’t wait too long.”
“At least half an hour,” I say, checking my nonexistent wrist watch.
“I hadn’t even called you yet a half hour ago,” she says dryly.
“I have the ability to teleport,” I quip.
“Really,” she says with a smile. “Show me.”
“Top secret project,” I concede. “I’m testing it for the government. If I showed you, I’d have to kill you.”
“Sounds like a big deal.”
“The biggest.”
“I hope that works out for you.” Alicia looks over her shoulder at the tattooed hipster kids busily chopping lettuce, broiling chicken, slicing bread all around Terry the Manager. “I think I’m going to get myself some desert,” she says. “Have you ever tried their lemon meringue pie?”
I appraise myself. “I’m not really a lemon meringue type of person,” I admit. “I’m not really a... a desert kind of person at all.” I look from the beer belly under my baggy shirt to her and back a few times in shock. “Are you trying to say I’m fat?” I follow her up to the counter to refill my own coffee, this time going for ‘Snickerdoodle,’ after looking over my shoulder to make sure no one sees me getting the gayest coffee in the world and then putting sugar in it.
“You’re going to have to try it,” she says. “It’s amazing.” She leans on her elbows and her green eyes pierce me. “So what are we going to do today?”
“Well...,” I say, stalling. “I have a couple of ideas...”
“Let’s hear them.”
“Well...,” I say, again, stalling. “We could... We could go bowling.”
“Not that there is anything particularly wrong with bowling, but there is always something wrong with girls willing to go bowling on a date. It’s so... so... so adult. So safe.”
“I know this awesome state park we could go hiking in. It’s kind of a drive, but it’s beautiful.”
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