A Stray Idea
Sep. 10th, 2012 02:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonBlack Metal Cafe. Thursday night.
Becky works behind the bar. She's got the raw charm of a militant librarian and the skinny good looks to match. Though she's fluent in five or six languages, English chief amongst them, she chooses to speak to me only in German. Now since I can't sprachen fuck and or all, at least not beyond a few words I might've picked up watching old World War Two films, this makes the process of ordering a drink take a lot longer than it should.
"Sehr gut, ein Jack auf den Felsen ist es." Becky grinds the words with a Southern drawl that only serves to heighten the innate menace of the Germanic tongue . She turns around and starts pouring my first of many through the night. Joining her behind the bar is Anton. Anton is the BMC mascot, a mangy black goat wearing a black leather mask with a white upside down pentagram stitched across the forehead. Though I'm pretty sure Anton is strictly a creature of my imagination I treat him with no less respect than I do any of the other staff or patrons. I nod a deferential greeting to him. Anton neahs a salutory 'Hail Satan' back.
Becky sets down my drink: "Hier, bitte. Wollen Sie sollte ich ein Registerkarte zu öffnen?"
Having no idea what she just said, I hand her my debit card and step out to the back patio for a smoke. The patio's packed but I score an empty table in the corner by a supply closet that's been painted up to resemble a TARDIS. I pull up a seat, a wrought iron hand me down from some old inquisition or another. I rest my glass on the table and light up a Camel. I check my phone for the time. I'm 15 minutes early for my meet-up with Magpie.
Though I know a lot of the faces here none of them register the slightest flicker of recognition. The table I'm sitting at is round and gives off a dull steel reflection. I lift my drink up and it leaves a perfect condensation ring of water. I dab my finger into the twelve o'clock of the ring's perimeter and draw a symbol within it. Nothing special, a minor glyph I know off the top of my head. I take a long drag off my cigarette and exhale a breath of smoke into the surface. The water in the glyph begins to sizzle and their thoughts open up to me.
None of them about me. I snort a sad little laugh and pull out a magazine from my messenger bag. An old issue of Vice that I thumb through half-heartedly to kill the time. Around me the young, and the hip and the painfully relevant jostle about loudly.
They remind me of an earlier conversation I had had.
A few hours ago I was down in West End picking up an eighth from my dealer. After a obligatory bowl between us we got straight down to business. I handed him three 20's and he measured out a few pinches worth of green from a pillow case he had stenciled with a dollar sign on it. When he finished, he then proceeded to offer to double seal my bag. Since the weed was a fresh batch of Blueberry Skunk-Ape, I was warned its aromatic pungency might be noticeable at even several yards distance. My dealer intoned with a solemn shake of his head: "Now you don't wanna be fuckin' around on no MARTA with this shit. No Sir, if police don't sniff it first you can bet some crack-head will."
"Can't have that." I nodded in agreement. After all you couldn't be too careful. Not with the sweet funk of Blueberry Skunk-Ape wafting all the way from his apartment to down Campbellton Road and only being dispersed by the tracks with the occasional passing train.
My guy got to work hermitically sealing the sack in a sheen of plastic off a lamination machine he kept in a closet along with several AK-47s, a stack of old issues of the Economist and a blow-up doll dressed as a fast food employee.
"No sir, you don't wanna be fuckin' around with this - it's what the Kids call 'Loud'." He repeated putting the finishing seal on the bag.
"Yeah, well you know what?" I answered without missing a beat or raising my voice, "Fuck the 'Kids'. I'm sick of being told what they're saying as if it were the world almighty from on high. They don't vote, they're all broke, with most of them undereducated and overweight. So I don't want to hear shit from the kids 'til they find their way to a voting booth, a job, a book or a gym."
No one said a word in response for some very tense few seconds. The two now clearly irate young men with their thick chests puffed out and tattooed biceps bulging with obvious intimidation stared at me in disbelief. That's when my dealer starts laughing - "You're tripping, Jack. Here take your shit and get on out of here. He said 'fuck the kids'!"
I took my shit indeed and made my way out. A muggy dusk had lit up the sky with a milky silver-orange glow. From the portals of windows and doorways hood -rats watched me pass. They all knew why I was there and who I had seen. Fucking with me meant fucking with my dealer's money and so long as that was the arrangement I had free passage. At least until I was a block away.
However today was, as Ice Cube might say, a good day. I made it to the West End Station without incident. When I got back to my room here on the edge of Downtown Terminus I sampled my wares thoroughly before taking off for my midnight rendezvous with Magpie. Which might or might not explain the glyph, the goat and the lady who was now sitting down across from me.
She's got this whole auburn Veronica Lake look going, with a plump smile and wide rubenesque curves that your eyes can't stop driving dangerously around. In her hand is a cigarette, one of mine, and she's holding it to her lips clearly waiting for someone to light it. A taut arch of her brow reminds me that I technically qualified as 'someone'. I snap out of my stupor, fish-fumble my Bic from my jeans and light her up.
I lean back and take her in again. She looks familiar - an old regret I never found the courage to talk to, a tiny photograph scrolled by through late night social network trawls, the dream of a kiss with only the face not forgotten .
"You know," she purrs with an accent from goddess knows where, "it's a shame they don't have websites for hot plus size boys like you."
I smile nervously and look around the patio. This must be a joke the Magpie's pulling on me. Some routine he's got working from behind the scenes. I scan the crowd for any betrayal of recognition.
"Of course there's a few sites - but they're mainly filled with bears and obviously there for gay guys. Which I don't have a problem with, but it kinda ruins the whole j'nais se quoi for me, if you know what I mean?" She snorted a laugh and took another drag.
"Do I know you?" I mumble sipping my drink slowly.
"Oh if we had ever met, you wouldn't be asking me that."
"You look familiar, s'all."
"Is that all I look?"
I blush and look away.
"You're cute when you're nervous. A shame you spend so much time sulking here in the corner."
I look back at her sharply and gesture to the indifferent crowd: "Not exactly friendly waters, these."
"So why you here alone?"
"I'm meeting up with a buddy." I say with another sip of my drink.
"Well, that explain the 'why you here', but not the 'alone' part. No pretty ladies to keep you company this evening?"
"My company seems pretty enough from where I'm sitting."
"Heh, why thank you. But we both know I'm not."
"What 'pretty'?"
"No, 'here'."
I bite my lower lip and nod politely. Great another psychopath or drama queen of the damned.
As if reading my thoughts, she points to the glyph I drew on the table earlier. The condensation ring now a scorch mark across the table's reflection.
"You left a gateway open. I stepped through." She sighs content and rubs her finger around the glyph's circle. "I can't manifest beyond your vision and not for long at that. But still, it does beat another night at home."
"And where would that be?"
"Where dreams and nightmares go when you wake up. Where ideas well from and vanish back into before you can write them down. Where imaginary friends and monsters under beds live when you no longer believe in them. A place between places, if you will."
"Uh-huh. So what do you want with me then?"
"A little company before I have to go back. Nothing more."
"Riiight." I set my drink down over the glyph and eye her suspiciously.
"So you want to tell me how a guy like you doesn't have a lady."
I shrug: "I guess I'm not looking."
"We both know that's not true either."
"Well then I guess I'm not not-looking in the wrong places." I sigh and take a healthy glug off the drink before continuing. "Look, I don't know what people want from me. I've been living with my mom since dad passed, my great American novel didn't exactly set the publishing world on fire when and I' haven't been able to find steady employment for a very long time. I'm doing the best I can with what I got, okay?"
"I know you are. I also know that despite your father's absence you feel there's no where you can stand that isn't under his shadow. You feel guilty for quitting work to work on a novel. You feel ashamed for living with your mother at your age. But none of those excuses are the real reason why you're single? After all there've been offers, there've been chances. Some for an evening, some for much longer..."
"I blew them chasing an illusion. A beautiful ghost no realer than you. Pfft, less so probably."
"And why did you chase a 'ghost' then?"
I look for an answer that'll satisfy her but all I have is the truth: "Don't know, just did."
"Uh-huh, and it couldn't be that you set yourself up to fail? It couldn't be that fundamentally the reason you've never been happy in your relationships is because you're incapable of being happy with yourself?"
"I dunno, lady. You tell me."
"You search for someone to love because you feel yourself incapable of doing so for yourself. You can't figure out what went wrong with your past relationships but fail to see how that nobody can love a man who doesn't love himself... no matter how much he may love them back in return."
I roll my eyes and feel the beginnings of a headache thunder up behind my skull. I lift my drink and down the remains in one shot: "Yeah, well... this has been fun but I'm afraid I'm gonna have to wrap this up."
"You know what I'm saying is true..."
And maybe it was but there was enough dampness in the glyph now that I could smudge it into incoherence. With a zigzag of my finger I negate the opening and when I look back up she's vanished back to the 'place between places' she came from. I catch a few faces in the crowd staring my way, no doubt trying to figure out who I was muttering to if not myself. I shrug and squeeze my attention back into the magazine.
Finally the Magpie shows up.
"Sorry to have kept you waiting, mate." He pulls up a chair with a horrific metallic scrape. "Rehearsals ran late."
"No worries, I didn't want for company" and I wave at the empty chair where she was sitting a few minutes ago.
He scans the empty space and the crowd confused: "Come again?"
"Nothing. Just a stray idea I had. Anyway, how's the show going?"
Becky works behind the bar. She's got the raw charm of a militant librarian and the skinny good looks to match. Though she's fluent in five or six languages, English chief amongst them, she chooses to speak to me only in German. Now since I can't sprachen fuck and or all, at least not beyond a few words I might've picked up watching old World War Two films, this makes the process of ordering a drink take a lot longer than it should.
"Sehr gut, ein Jack auf den Felsen ist es." Becky grinds the words with a Southern drawl that only serves to heighten the innate menace of the Germanic tongue . She turns around and starts pouring my first of many through the night. Joining her behind the bar is Anton. Anton is the BMC mascot, a mangy black goat wearing a black leather mask with a white upside down pentagram stitched across the forehead. Though I'm pretty sure Anton is strictly a creature of my imagination I treat him with no less respect than I do any of the other staff or patrons. I nod a deferential greeting to him. Anton neahs a salutory 'Hail Satan' back.
Becky sets down my drink: "Hier, bitte. Wollen Sie sollte ich ein Registerkarte zu öffnen?"
Having no idea what she just said, I hand her my debit card and step out to the back patio for a smoke. The patio's packed but I score an empty table in the corner by a supply closet that's been painted up to resemble a TARDIS. I pull up a seat, a wrought iron hand me down from some old inquisition or another. I rest my glass on the table and light up a Camel. I check my phone for the time. I'm 15 minutes early for my meet-up with Magpie.
Though I know a lot of the faces here none of them register the slightest flicker of recognition. The table I'm sitting at is round and gives off a dull steel reflection. I lift my drink up and it leaves a perfect condensation ring of water. I dab my finger into the twelve o'clock of the ring's perimeter and draw a symbol within it. Nothing special, a minor glyph I know off the top of my head. I take a long drag off my cigarette and exhale a breath of smoke into the surface. The water in the glyph begins to sizzle and their thoughts open up to me.
None of them about me. I snort a sad little laugh and pull out a magazine from my messenger bag. An old issue of Vice that I thumb through half-heartedly to kill the time. Around me the young, and the hip and the painfully relevant jostle about loudly.
They remind me of an earlier conversation I had had.
A few hours ago I was down in West End picking up an eighth from my dealer. After a obligatory bowl between us we got straight down to business. I handed him three 20's and he measured out a few pinches worth of green from a pillow case he had stenciled with a dollar sign on it. When he finished, he then proceeded to offer to double seal my bag. Since the weed was a fresh batch of Blueberry Skunk-Ape, I was warned its aromatic pungency might be noticeable at even several yards distance. My dealer intoned with a solemn shake of his head: "Now you don't wanna be fuckin' around on no MARTA with this shit. No Sir, if police don't sniff it first you can bet some crack-head will."
"Can't have that." I nodded in agreement. After all you couldn't be too careful. Not with the sweet funk of Blueberry Skunk-Ape wafting all the way from his apartment to down Campbellton Road and only being dispersed by the tracks with the occasional passing train.
My guy got to work hermitically sealing the sack in a sheen of plastic off a lamination machine he kept in a closet along with several AK-47s, a stack of old issues of the Economist and a blow-up doll dressed as a fast food employee.
"No sir, you don't wanna be fuckin' around with this - it's what the Kids call 'Loud'." He repeated putting the finishing seal on the bag.
"Yeah, well you know what?" I answered without missing a beat or raising my voice, "Fuck the 'Kids'. I'm sick of being told what they're saying as if it were the world almighty from on high. They don't vote, they're all broke, with most of them undereducated and overweight. So I don't want to hear shit from the kids 'til they find their way to a voting booth, a job, a book or a gym."
No one said a word in response for some very tense few seconds. The two now clearly irate young men with their thick chests puffed out and tattooed biceps bulging with obvious intimidation stared at me in disbelief. That's when my dealer starts laughing - "You're tripping, Jack. Here take your shit and get on out of here. He said 'fuck the kids'!"
I took my shit indeed and made my way out. A muggy dusk had lit up the sky with a milky silver-orange glow. From the portals of windows and doorways hood -rats watched me pass. They all knew why I was there and who I had seen. Fucking with me meant fucking with my dealer's money and so long as that was the arrangement I had free passage. At least until I was a block away.
However today was, as Ice Cube might say, a good day. I made it to the West End Station without incident. When I got back to my room here on the edge of Downtown Terminus I sampled my wares thoroughly before taking off for my midnight rendezvous with Magpie. Which might or might not explain the glyph, the goat and the lady who was now sitting down across from me.
She's got this whole auburn Veronica Lake look going, with a plump smile and wide rubenesque curves that your eyes can't stop driving dangerously around. In her hand is a cigarette, one of mine, and she's holding it to her lips clearly waiting for someone to light it. A taut arch of her brow reminds me that I technically qualified as 'someone'. I snap out of my stupor, fish-fumble my Bic from my jeans and light her up.
I lean back and take her in again. She looks familiar - an old regret I never found the courage to talk to, a tiny photograph scrolled by through late night social network trawls, the dream of a kiss with only the face not forgotten .
"You know," she purrs with an accent from goddess knows where, "it's a shame they don't have websites for hot plus size boys like you."
I smile nervously and look around the patio. This must be a joke the Magpie's pulling on me. Some routine he's got working from behind the scenes. I scan the crowd for any betrayal of recognition.
"Of course there's a few sites - but they're mainly filled with bears and obviously there for gay guys. Which I don't have a problem with, but it kinda ruins the whole j'nais se quoi for me, if you know what I mean?" She snorted a laugh and took another drag.
"Do I know you?" I mumble sipping my drink slowly.
"Oh if we had ever met, you wouldn't be asking me that."
"You look familiar, s'all."
"Is that all I look?"
I blush and look away.
"You're cute when you're nervous. A shame you spend so much time sulking here in the corner."
I look back at her sharply and gesture to the indifferent crowd: "Not exactly friendly waters, these."
"So why you here alone?"
"I'm meeting up with a buddy." I say with another sip of my drink.
"Well, that explain the 'why you here', but not the 'alone' part. No pretty ladies to keep you company this evening?"
"My company seems pretty enough from where I'm sitting."
"Heh, why thank you. But we both know I'm not."
"What 'pretty'?"
"No, 'here'."
I bite my lower lip and nod politely. Great another psychopath or drama queen of the damned.
As if reading my thoughts, she points to the glyph I drew on the table earlier. The condensation ring now a scorch mark across the table's reflection.
"You left a gateway open. I stepped through." She sighs content and rubs her finger around the glyph's circle. "I can't manifest beyond your vision and not for long at that. But still, it does beat another night at home."
"And where would that be?"
"Where dreams and nightmares go when you wake up. Where ideas well from and vanish back into before you can write them down. Where imaginary friends and monsters under beds live when you no longer believe in them. A place between places, if you will."
"Uh-huh. So what do you want with me then?"
"A little company before I have to go back. Nothing more."
"Riiight." I set my drink down over the glyph and eye her suspiciously.
"So you want to tell me how a guy like you doesn't have a lady."
I shrug: "I guess I'm not looking."
"We both know that's not true either."
"Well then I guess I'm not not-looking in the wrong places." I sigh and take a healthy glug off the drink before continuing. "Look, I don't know what people want from me. I've been living with my mom since dad passed, my great American novel didn't exactly set the publishing world on fire when and I' haven't been able to find steady employment for a very long time. I'm doing the best I can with what I got, okay?"
"I know you are. I also know that despite your father's absence you feel there's no where you can stand that isn't under his shadow. You feel guilty for quitting work to work on a novel. You feel ashamed for living with your mother at your age. But none of those excuses are the real reason why you're single? After all there've been offers, there've been chances. Some for an evening, some for much longer..."
"I blew them chasing an illusion. A beautiful ghost no realer than you. Pfft, less so probably."
"And why did you chase a 'ghost' then?"
I look for an answer that'll satisfy her but all I have is the truth: "Don't know, just did."
"Uh-huh, and it couldn't be that you set yourself up to fail? It couldn't be that fundamentally the reason you've never been happy in your relationships is because you're incapable of being happy with yourself?"
"I dunno, lady. You tell me."
"You search for someone to love because you feel yourself incapable of doing so for yourself. You can't figure out what went wrong with your past relationships but fail to see how that nobody can love a man who doesn't love himself... no matter how much he may love them back in return."
I roll my eyes and feel the beginnings of a headache thunder up behind my skull. I lift my drink and down the remains in one shot: "Yeah, well... this has been fun but I'm afraid I'm gonna have to wrap this up."
"You know what I'm saying is true..."
And maybe it was but there was enough dampness in the glyph now that I could smudge it into incoherence. With a zigzag of my finger I negate the opening and when I look back up she's vanished back to the 'place between places' she came from. I catch a few faces in the crowd staring my way, no doubt trying to figure out who I was muttering to if not myself. I shrug and squeeze my attention back into the magazine.
Finally the Magpie shows up.
"Sorry to have kept you waiting, mate." He pulls up a chair with a horrific metallic scrape. "Rehearsals ran late."
"No worries, I didn't want for company" and I wave at the empty chair where she was sitting a few minutes ago.
He scans the empty space and the crowd confused: "Come again?"
"Nothing. Just a stray idea I had. Anyway, how's the show going?"