A March of Marys, day four
After two drinks at a bar with a cartoon of a black cat on the door, I start texting you.
It is Day 4 of A March of Marys. I know I don’t usually post this often so I hope your inbox is not feeling overwhelmed. I am taking a chance and doing a thing and I thank you for doing it with me. Check out the previous posts in this serialization here.
Going through this book that I wrote in 2015 and got published in 2016 is really something. I am annoyed by the fact that I didn’t use page breaks when I originally typed out the manuscript (it took me too long to realize there was an easier and better way to move to the next page besides hitting enter a bunch of times), and I am also amazed that having never written a novel or long fiction before that I was able to just throw this together in the amount of time that I did.
American Mary started when I decided to compile something like three short stories I had written (and had gotten published on Electric Cereal) into one document and then build on them to make a semi-cohesive narrative, in the style of Jesus Son by Denis Johnson. I guess I had just read Jesus’ Son for the first time when I decided to try writing fiction, and after reading it a few times I realized I could weave my own vignettes together and make a novel. It took me less than a year, from first drafts to the point I was ready to submit it to a contest. In comparison, the novel I just completed recently took seven years to write, from first notes to working with an editor. I guess I’m just impressed that a younger me was able to have an idea and see it through without really knowing what I was doing. I just did it.
Anyway, let’s get on with it.
▲
I am texting you. I am walking through Golden Gate Park with Luke and the sun is just going down.
'I’m sorry I told you, but I had to tell someone in person,' I say. 'It makes it more real. Like now I have to do something.'
We get to a corner and wait for the light to turn. I look down at the leather peeling back on the toes of my boots and touch the smooth plastic of my flip phone inside my jacket pocket.
'Do you want to hug.' Luke asks.
I nod and feel myself crumbling into the weathered fabric of his denim jacket, crying, crumpling like a dry leaf underfoot. Luke holds me for what seems like the amount of time I try to brush my teeth and I’m holding his shoulders and looking up over them at the fading light streaming through the big branches.
I step away to wipe my cheek and under my nose with my index finger and take a deep breath, letting the misty saltiness of the air hang in my throat.
'Is it really that bad,' Luke says as we descend into the train station.
*
I take a sip of my leftover coffee from the morning. It’s cold but I don’t care. I think about how hot things always taste cold when they’re left out but cold things that get left out like iced coffee or a glass of ice water always taste room temperature or even lukewarm and how it’s all probably psychological or something.
Luke looks at my chin then looks at his hand, 'I know he’s, weird. But can it be that bad.'
‘I don’t’ and trail off. I get my pack of cigarettes out and pull out a smoke for the guy who sells the Street Sheets in the plaza in front of the station who always says hello to me.
‘It’s been pretty bad for a while,’ I say, stepping off the escalator. I look around the plaza but I don’t see the Street Sheets guy. He’s usually standing by one of the pillars, but he’s not here today. I put the cigarette back in the box, back in my bag.
Luke and I are going to a reading by a well known internet scene writer whom many consider a hero of sorts. I don’t personally understand the hype but I want to see if watching him read in person will change my feelings.
Earlier, on the phone, Seba had called and told me he saw the writer out near Haight street when he was doing his laundry. ‘He was just wandering around, and I recognized him so I followed him. We’re getting dinner before the reading, and I’m going to take him out afterward.’ I wasn’t surprised to hear this. I understood it, and I didn’t.
‘I guess there are a lot of things I want to ask right now, but I’ll just ask you later,’ Luke says.
*
We stop at my apartment so I can get some weed to smoke before the reading.
‘I feel weird in here. I’m going to wait outside,’ Luke says after I unlock the front door.
‘Yeah, it’s weird being here right now,’ I say. ‘I’ll just be a minute.’ Luke goes outside to smoke a cigarette.
I finish rolling a spliff at my desk and catch my reflection in the powered off computer screen.
‘You look terrible,’ I say, wiping a finger across to make a slash in the dust.
*
After two drinks at a bar with a cartoon of a black cat on the door, I start texting you.
‘I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a pier looking down.’ Send.
‘Like a wave could swallow me and I wouldn’t cry out.’ Send.
A few minutes later, an orange envelope appears on my phone’s screen. New message.
‘The French call that the call of the void,’ your text says. A minute later, ‘I was standing on scaffolding today and thought about jumping.’
What am I even doing. I look at Luke concentrating on his IPA and stealing peeks at our brunette bartender.
What if it were me.
‘I think everyone hates me,’ I say. I unclip my hair and run my finger through my scalp from root to tip. ‘And now they’re just going to hate me more.’
‘Yeah. They’re probably going to hate me, too.’
We move to the patio to smoke. I keep shifting where I stand, leaning on fence, standing like a flamingo with one leg crossed behind the other. It’s impossible to feel comfortable.
‘If this were the duo that dominated Bad Boy,’ Luke says, ‘I think you would be Diddy and I would be Big.’
My hand keeps shaking.
‘Why do I have to be Puffy.’
‘Because you’re more professional than I am.’
I laugh.
Luke points at a couple making out on a bench on the other side of the patio.
‘Do you think they knew each other, or do you think they just met.’ I ask.
‘Oh, they definitely just met,’ Luke says. ‘You don’t make out like that in a bar unless you’re about to have a one night stand.’
I feel my pocket for my phone but it’s not in there.
‘I feel good about today,’ Luke says.
You probably aren’t texting me.
‘Let’s get out here. The reading’s going to start soon,’ Luke says.
As we leave I dig through my bag to find my phone. I open it and I close it and put it in my jacket pocket.
We walk to what I think is the bookstore where the reading of the semi-famous writer is taking place, across the street from the bar with the cartoon cat on the door.
We walk inside and I am confused. There is no crowd. There are a few older people standing in aisles and purchasing books about exercise. Improve your looks. Stay young forever. There is no reading at this bookstore.
We take a streetcar up to the correct bookstore. Luke checked the event page on his phone.
‘You can never remember dates,’ Luke says to me. Or addresses.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say but I am laughing. I hold onto a bar for balance with one hand and the other inside my pocket on my flip phone. I watch green and brown and grey stream past through the windows of the streetcar and feel the warm fading light of late summer on my face.
‘We’re going to miss this reading,’ Luke says.
We get to the bookstore and find two seats in the back. I see Seba, sitting up front and gazing at the writer intensely. He laughs loudly at a joke the writer makes.
A person in the audience raises their hand when the writer stops speaking. The writer nods and the person puts their hand down and begins speaking.
I lean over to Luke and say, ‘I’m sorry we missed the reading.’
‘It’s okay. Look at all these chumps.’
I laugh and someone in the audience in a row closer to the front looks back and gives a disapproving look to the back rows. It’s no one I know. They might have seen me, though.
‘Do you want to leave.’
‘Yeah, let’s get out of here,’ Luke says. We stand up and leave and I see Seba watching us leave and feel a chill.
*
I flip my phone open and let my thumb glide over the smooth keys forming letters and words with T-9 technology. 'Please pick me up. Please. Take me anywhere.' I type to you and press send.
I put the phone back in my pocket and fidget with a dusty tissue.
'What about your job,' Luke says.
'Who fucking cares,' I say, staring at nothing in the distance. 'I can’t keep doing this. I can’t breathe.'
'Let’s sit down,' Luke says, plopping carefully onto a park bench. I root through my carpet bag for nothing in particular and feel the fog moistened wood through my sundress. I flick my phone open again and see the orange envelope.
I read and smile.
'Let’s get married and start a publishing company and we can be the opposite of Tao Lin and Megan Boyle.'
'Maybe let’s make out first' I type back and send. 'We’ll be better than everybody.' Send.
Luke lights a cigarette. I look at his hair. I think about those pomade poems we never wrote. I start rolling a spliff, the one we smoked in the doorway off Haight after the reading already wearing off. I think about the guy who arrived at the foot of the stairs where we sat and smoked, carrying groceries, apparently a tenant of the apartment whose stairs we were blocking, just some guy trying to get home. We started to get up to move but he laughed, 'You guys are cool. This happens all the time.' He was probably relieved we weren’t a couple of those rich kids from Marin who dress like crustpunks and beg for beer.
*
‘You wanna get a drink before we go to this reading,’ I ask. ‘Is it even a reading, what is it.’
‘I think he’s reading from his new book, but he’ll probably talk too.’
I pull out my train pass from my pocket and wave it front of the censor to be let into the paid area of the train station.
‘Wait up,’ Luke says. He is standing in front of the ticket machine. I forgot he doesn’t have a pass.
‘Just buy a single trip for now,’ I say, leaning on the glass partition that separates the ticket area from the paid area.
‘Do you have a dollar.’
‘Here, I think I have some change.’ I find my wallet in my bag which is way too large and pull some coins out from the zippered pouch, reaching my arm across the partition to hand to Luke. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
Luke gives me a look as he crosses into the paid area. I think the look means, ‘whatever,’ like probably that was embarrassing, that whole exchange.
‘I need a drink,’ I say.
‘Me too,’ Luke says, as we take the stairs down to catch the outbound N Judah.
*
'You’re really going to smoke another one,' Luke says. I laugh.
'Well,' Luke says, 'if you’re really going to move out, maybe we could look for a place together.'
I consider this seriously and think about moving out of the city and into the burbs where it’s quieter and warmer and where I’ll probably need to learn how to drive a car. The suburbs have always felt romantic to me. To a citykid the notion of playing in your own yard is pretty romantic. A whole house not connected to another house. A chance to see stars at night. A chance to start something new. A chance to start something. Anything else.
I smile at Luke and nod a few times, 'I would do that.'
'I think a collective consciousness is taking place,’ Luke says. ‘Something is on our side, working in our favor.'
‘I hope so,’ I say, ‘I felt pretty good when I woke up this morning, like I was ready for the day.’
I pick at the wood on the bench, a carved out bit where someone engraved the words 'dat ass' in all caps.
I take out my phone and look at the message you sent. 'Well, duh.' Yeah, of course, duh. I think about what your hands might look like.
I text you, 'I really wish we could run away, however impractical it is.' I think about my student loans, I think about the vet bill from when Sookie went to the emergency clinic, I think about the raise at work I will never receive no matter how much effort I put in, I think about the google buses that rattle my bedroom windows at twenty minute intervals.
Orange envelope. 'I know. It’s a fantasy.'
'I feel like Kevin McAllister,' I find myself saying out loud. 'I feel like I always want my reality to disappear, for everyone to just go away all neat and clean or something. But I’m not a nine year old with neglectful parents, and no snow shoveling savior is going to help when the Wet Bandits come for me next.'
'What are you talking about.' Luke is playing with his phone.
'I don’t know. I just need a change. I think. Something… I... I don’t really know.'
'I hear you.' A long moment passes like the end of a school day. 'I think I’m going to cut.'
'All right, I’ll walk you to MUNI.'
We walk in silence through the park for some time, finally getting blue dark. I light a cigarette.
'What are you going to do,' says Luke.
I look up and watch the streetlights as I pass under them, their orange glow like an invitation, like a place I want to go.
'Nothing yet. I’ll go back, work on my poems, go to bed, go to work tomorrow. I’ll figure it out.'
'Yeah. I’ll call you later.'
'Yeah,' I say, taking in a deep gulp of the fog.
Missed yesterday’s post? You can read it here.