Queenie
“No, I’m dead serious, man,” Barry insists. “Sell me what you’re wearing.”
“You need to seriously go fuck yourself, man,” the man answers, shoving Barry aside with sufficient force to make him stumble backwards and collide with a bike rack.
“I need your damn clothes!” Barry bellows at the man’s rapidly receding, FUBU-clad figure.
Barry hasn’t exactly fallen to the ground, but almost. He’s awkwardly commingling with the bike rack and has to wrench himself upright. In doing so, he snags his pants on a sharp burr protruding from a protuberant galvanized bolt.
“Shit!” he exclaims on discovering the resulting rip in his brand new Gap 1969 Limited Edition Premium Jeans (rigid rinse, with selvage trim on the coin pocket). They and his brand new Gap (PRODUCT) RED™ cotton T—in soft black with the word “HAMME(RED)” raggedly silk-screened to simulate a cracked and faded, dozens-of-washings look—had been purposely selected from an official Gap window manikin to impress Queenie, the object of Barry’s ardor, with (a) Barry’s Zeitgeist-synchronized sense of style and (b) Barry’s deeply ingrained social awareness.
If the jeans by themselves don’t get the job done, Barry had reasoned, then surely the fact that half the profits from his T-shirt had gone or would eventually be going to a global fund to fight AIDS, will.
In other words, mission accomplished.
Or so Barry had believed while brandishing cash at the Gap. He’d even embellished the ad hoc ensemble with a military-inspired wool jacket featuring four extra-generous flap pockets, shoulder epaulettes with button closures, strapped cuffs, and a concealed nylon hood.
It was all over but the waiting, Barry was certain—meaning, the waiting outside the bodega where Queenie had been shopping the day she saved his sorry ass (as Queenie had put it) when his Harley had fallen on top of him, and she had lifted it from his sprawling person with the apparent ease of a mommy freeing a traumatized two-year-old from a toppled trike.
Four days he had waited. Four days! And then, on the fifth day, there she comes, glowing and gliding towards him like an ethereal form, moving as if in slow-motion through a throng of faceless pedestrians paralyzed in their tracks by her grandeur.
The world becomes a blur for Barry as Queenie floats past him and into the store. He stands there shivering in the sweltering heat, waiting for her to emerge, his heart marking the minutes at two beats per second.
Barry hears her before he sees her. Hears her calling, “Yeah, man, the same to you!” And as she slides back into the sunlight, he hears himself speaking to Queenie, saying, “Hey—remember me?”
“No,” Queenie answers with a tone that’s equal parts indifference and impatience.
Barry gulps like some kind of over-the-top buffoon in some cartoonish melodrama. Like Jack Larson as “Jimmy Olsen,” for instance, in any 1950s episode of Adventures of Superman.
“I’m the guy you pulled the motorcycle off of,” he says, pointing. “Up the street? Over there?”
Queenie’s amber eyes give Barry a thorough going over, then light up with recognition. “Jesus Christ, it’s the Marlboro Man! Who you tryin’ to be now, Jack—that ‘Bono’ dude? And why you wearin’ that fuckin’ coat in this fuckin’ heat, man?”
Barry realizes he’s sweating buckets, but carries on as though he weren’t, as though he were indeed channeling Bonovian cool. “Listen,” he says, “I just have to ask you again—”
“Ask me what?”
“If you’ll go to Starbucks with me. When I asked you the last time, your exact words, as I recall them, were ‘No fuckin’ way.’”
Barry smiles at Queenie after saying this. Smiles like they’re sharing a joke or reminiscing about some distant contretemps whose memory they’ll shortly be washing away with raspberry mocha.
Queenie smiles back at Barry and keeps smiling at Barry while delivering her reply. “I’ll put it a little differently this time,” she says, giving his bulky pockets and pointless epaulettes a final, bemused inspection. “How about, ‘No fuckin’ way—José.’”
She leaves Barry standing there, slack-jawed, in a puddle of perspiration. All seems lost as he watches her walking off, swinging her bag of groceries in sublime unison with her strides.
But then Barry sees Queenie checking out a FUBU man who’s passing her on the sidewalk and coming his way, and decides all’s not lost after all.
# # #
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
209
Little Barry
Big Barry, to all intents and purposes, has disappeared and Little Barry wants his daddy back. Gone without a trace are Big Barry’s pirate trappings and sundry cowpoke furnishings, and with them his peerless “Big Barry” persona.
Worse still, like a self-inflicted mortal blow Big Barry has upped and sold his Harley Davidson—the thundering, fire-belching, ass-kicking “hog” against which Jimmy’s father’s lily-livered, chicken-legged Vespa motor scooter had exuded about as much machismo as an antique treadle sewing machine.
“Where’s the hog, Daddy?” Little Barry had demanded with a quivering, panic-singed voice, his horrified eyes all but sucked from their sockets by the black hole where the motorcycle had formerly held sway like a gunmetal god in Big Barry’s garage. “Where’s the hog?—”
“Sold it,” Big Barry had answered, just like that. And just like that Little Barry’s universe had collapsed to pinhead proportions.
And so, when Big Barry brings Little Barry home a little earlier than usual on Saturday afternoon, Little Barry does not emulate Big Barry’s erstwhile cocksure saunter on making his way from the curb to the porch. He runs as fast as he can, desperate to escape the stranger in his father’s car, determined to reach the haven of his bedroom before the first sob.
# # #
Big Barry, to all intents and purposes, has disappeared and Little Barry wants his daddy back. Gone without a trace are Big Barry’s pirate trappings and sundry cowpoke furnishings, and with them his peerless “Big Barry” persona.
Worse still, like a self-inflicted mortal blow Big Barry has upped and sold his Harley Davidson—the thundering, fire-belching, ass-kicking “hog” against which Jimmy’s father’s lily-livered, chicken-legged Vespa motor scooter had exuded about as much machismo as an antique treadle sewing machine.
“Where’s the hog, Daddy?” Little Barry had demanded with a quivering, panic-singed voice, his horrified eyes all but sucked from their sockets by the black hole where the motorcycle had formerly held sway like a gunmetal god in Big Barry’s garage. “Where’s the hog?—”
“Sold it,” Big Barry had answered, just like that. And just like that Little Barry’s universe had collapsed to pinhead proportions.
And so, when Big Barry brings Little Barry home a little earlier than usual on Saturday afternoon, Little Barry does not emulate Big Barry’s erstwhile cocksure saunter on making his way from the curb to the porch. He runs as fast as he can, desperate to escape the stranger in his father’s car, determined to reach the haven of his bedroom before the first sob.
# # #
Sunday, September 5, 2010
315
Chuck
Chuck flips the switch that puts his Kindle to sleep, then the one that shuts off the blue-white diode of his reading lamp, which he wears on his head. It is a headlight in the literal sense, complete with an adjustable elastic band, and much more convenient and effective than any clip-on reading lamp he’s ever owned. He removes that and sets it and the Kindle on the nightstand and checks that the alarm’s turned on on his digital alarm clock.
The room’s dark now, and the ceiling fan’s gently thrumming. But even under conditions so conducive, Chuck’s mind, as usual, won’t allow nodding off. It starts working, as usual, on something, and the something in this case is how wonderful is the book he’s reading—a novel from 1915 called The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford—and how much lonelier the fact of that makes him feel.
Chuck always feels lonely. But being unable to share with anyone the sumptuous perfection of Ford’s prose or the novel’s masterfully woven story-line or the powerful insights and delightful wit the book contains aggravates his isolation to the throbbing point. Chuck simply does not know anyone who would give a rat’s ass about The Good Soldier or about Ford Madox Ford.
Or about Chuck himself, come to think of it. Which Chuck does, of course, come to think of.
Why am I here? he winds up wondering, inevitably. It is his inevitable meta-theme. He means nothing to everyone, something to no one, increasingly less to himself. He thinks about all the photo albums his image must be in—an anonymous background element in thousands of keepsake snapshots snapped by untold strangers at parks, fairs, zoos, monuments, historic and scenic points of interest, and by marginal acquaintances at social gatherings whose fringes he routinely helps populate.
“Background fodder,” Chuck mumbles, rolling onto his side. “My raison d’être.”
# # #
Chuck flips the switch that puts his Kindle to sleep, then the one that shuts off the blue-white diode of his reading lamp, which he wears on his head. It is a headlight in the literal sense, complete with an adjustable elastic band, and much more convenient and effective than any clip-on reading lamp he’s ever owned. He removes that and sets it and the Kindle on the nightstand and checks that the alarm’s turned on on his digital alarm clock.
The room’s dark now, and the ceiling fan’s gently thrumming. But even under conditions so conducive, Chuck’s mind, as usual, won’t allow nodding off. It starts working, as usual, on something, and the something in this case is how wonderful is the book he’s reading—a novel from 1915 called The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford—and how much lonelier the fact of that makes him feel.
Chuck always feels lonely. But being unable to share with anyone the sumptuous perfection of Ford’s prose or the novel’s masterfully woven story-line or the powerful insights and delightful wit the book contains aggravates his isolation to the throbbing point. Chuck simply does not know anyone who would give a rat’s ass about The Good Soldier or about Ford Madox Ford.
Or about Chuck himself, come to think of it. Which Chuck does, of course, come to think of.
Why am I here? he winds up wondering, inevitably. It is his inevitable meta-theme. He means nothing to everyone, something to no one, increasingly less to himself. He thinks about all the photo albums his image must be in—an anonymous background element in thousands of keepsake snapshots snapped by untold strangers at parks, fairs, zoos, monuments, historic and scenic points of interest, and by marginal acquaintances at social gatherings whose fringes he routinely helps populate.
“Background fodder,” Chuck mumbles, rolling onto his side. “My raison d’être.”
# # #
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