river rat: I stole one, once. From across the room her eyes burned a pair of lines, parallel and hot, beams locked on the back of my head. There would be marks, two dark pinpoints where my own eyes would have been had I turned to watch her watching me. This lasted a half hour longer than one would have imagined. And then, movement.
The sound of feet shuffling and elbows flying made me think of Charlton Heston as Moses parting Red Sea waters in Technicolor, only it was my ex- and not Chuck. I imagined colors rippling in muted tones of the fall GAP catalog, not cerulean blues and turquoises of Cecil B. DeMille, waves of bodies and three hundred dollar sweaters sets bristling, wondering why she pushed so hard, so fast.
She wore slick, pleated leather pants that made me think about the tallest Joan Jett hold out, only hotter somehow than J.J. herself ever was even loving rock and roll, sweaty in a bodice and streaked from her black eyes to the corners of her mouth. The boots made her somewhere between six-seven and six-eight, the tallest woman in the bar by nearly a head.
“She’s coming right at us.”
It pays to have a sidekick who can describe clothing well enough to recreate the stale air of Trenton's City Gardens, ca. 1982, when she and I saw Joan and the Blackhearts on a night when we did it in a disused shipping container on someone's motorcycle. It also pays to have someone – anyone – with good eyesight watching one’s proverbial and literal back.
“She looks pissed.”
“I’m sure of that.” I pretended not to care, draining another beer.
“She wouldn’t, um… you know.” Jimmy kept ducking behind my head, peeking over my shoulder as he spoke. He leaned in across the table, close enough for me to smell his breath.
Carrots. He smelled like carrots.
“She wouldn’t carry a gun, would she? I mean…she’s not, like, that pissed, do you think?”
I shrugged.
“Oh, shit!” Jimmy shrank into the booth. “Showtime!”
He was a small dude when he puffed himself up with five layers of clothes and a ski suit. So, when I say he shrunk, I mean to say he almost disappeared.
My eyes drilled holes into the bottom of my glass.
“Fuck you.” She hissed and I could smell how she'd been smoking pot for many hours.
“FUCK YOU!”
The scream version felt genuine, more so than the hiss. I believe there was spit, something familiar, salty and slick expelled from her mouth, landing on my lip.
My eyes kept busy re-configuring the silica that originally slumped in an oven somewhere in China a year ago, sliding into a hot form before cooling into the shape held in my hand. I bore down, still nothing. I felt certain that if one looked long enough at glass, it would soften.
Silence.
“Dude.” Jimmy reappeared, half a glass higher than my mug. “She’s gone! She disappeared? How does anything that big just disappear?”
My eyes gave up and looked over the rim to Jimmy, smiling, climbing out of a hole. A server stopped, took another drink order, and moved along.
“You’re cold.” He puffed back up to the size of a ten year-old girl. “You didn’t even return her look.”
“It’s in the glass.”
The night was young enough to tell Jimmy what she wanted from me could never be returned. Both of us left it all sweaty and drunk in an abandoned sea freight container in New Jersey.
