The Place of Our Birth

I sit where we met hoping you come back, but you don’t. You never do. It’s not the first time. I’ve come back several times over the years. Make an excuse to be here, other than this. A grandkid’s birthday. The fair. A festival. It’s all bunkum. I come for you. To visit this shitty bar I am surprised is still here every time I see it. I scrolled through your old Facebook and read your post. You were back to your Marilyn quotes after you broke it off with me, despite our talk on your porch that one night so long ago. About her mental illness. The Norman Mailer book. The E-True Hollywood story. Joe DiMaggio. All a girl really wants is for one guy to prove to her that they are not all the same. You made new friends. Moved on. And all those friends wanted to be your one, but they don’t know what Joe and I know. Who of them became something to you? I don’t know. It’s twenty years dead now.  

I was not the same as anyone you ever knew, but I blew it. And here I sit in the bar in the stool I met you in twenty years later pushing money forward to beg the ugly stepsister barmaid with the unfortunate tattoos for another drink. But drinks don’t drown you. They never have. Not in any city or bar. So I bury my money back in my pocket for the offering plate at church tomorrow as she passes me by for the fourth or fifth time. I go outside and its hot, but there is a breeze that dries the sweat as soon as it breaks. Someone passes me who stinks badly of body odor and two blocks down there is a sudden squeal and a thud as a Honda runs a red light and clips the front of a pickup truck that had a yellow. The woman who ran the red light gets out and yells at the man who is looking at the fender of his truck. After a while he yells back and explains the traffic pattern to her, but she argues anyway that she had the right of way.

I was amused but lose interest and a kitten runs along the bar and I think of chasing after it, but it gets away too fast and I want another beer because I am still trying to drown you, though I know damn well it is not going to work. Then two younger girls walk up from another bar and I hold the door for them and they smile and say thank you and I say don’t mention it and we are all three swallowed up by the bar. And in the belly of it are the regulars and the desperate, and a band that isn’t very good.

I have never seen a fatality accident, I think to myself sitting in the bar in the same stool. I wonder what it is like to see one. If there is some way you know besides for judging by the extent of the mangled metal and the debris. Some gloom cast over the wreckage. A fat guy crowds me to sit next to a fatter girl who regretfully sat in the stool where your ghost sits, so I get up and go sit at a table near the dance floor where people hover and don’t really dance, though the band plays some eighties’ song that is favorable for dancing. Wham! Maybe? And then they play the Human League song we sung at karaoke here so many years ago. Don’t you want me, baby? I guess you answered that for me. How many times have I heard that song on the radio and thought of you. In a hotel lobby. In a mall. A girl has an upright seizure and some tall skinny guy in a white t-shirt and baggy shorts does something I once saw on MTV. There’s a name for it. He looks like a robot with wet notebook paper for skin.

I write something about “burying the bones and skulls” on a cocktail napkin, but I don’t know what the hell it means. It might mean something later, so I stuff it in my pocket after I fill the napkin with scribbles. I feel like a tarot card reader sitting by myself with various empty napkins laid out before me as drunk people walk past. I draw you naked on one then hide it because it is not a very good likeness and because I know you were modest in that way, at least with me.

The people who pass me carry on them all kinds of odors. That of perfume parlors, gyms, whorehouses, and fish markets, mostly. They are like pinballs in a machine that are trying desperately not to go in the gutter for a night. And I guess I am the fortune teller painted on the backbox whose eyes never blink. Eventually, we all get dropped out the outhole, but everyone is doing their best to bang around some and tally points that don’t get anyone anything, really. It’s all just a game.

The man at the soundboard sits in the shadows with his back to the bricks under a halo of dim lights, just light enough for him to see the black knobs and dials that amplify the sound and change the lights on the stage from green, to red, to blue, or all three at the same time. Only the dance floor separates him from the stage, but his eyes shoot across it like laser beams. He has fried blonde hair and looks like that bounty hunter to me, or like someone from ABBA, or who stumbled out of 1979 and got lost in the eighties in a Cinderella album. He slides the plastic off a pack of EL Fudge cookies like panties off some kind of female as he talks music with some old guy in a blue golf shirt who says he plays bass. Everyone plays bass.

This fried Thor of sound, this EL Fudge White Rain commercial, sits back and grins and scratches his chest while the band takes a break and he breathes a sigh of relief because the night has gone well without a glitch. The lights stay blue and some terrible dance song plays and the girls dance like amateur strippers and the guys circle around and pick them out with their eyes like hungry tourists choosing octopuses from a dirty tank in Singapore. Thor eventually hobbles to the restroom and leaves the pack of EL Fudge naked on the table in front of the soundboard. And some chunky lady with the hair of a dead poodle who was also lost in the eighties, takes his place scrolling through an iPhone as a skinny drunk man in a dirty tank-top stumbles by and yells, “Fucking A!” more than once.
 

There are curiosities here I never noticed when I met you. Maybe they weren’t here then, or I was oblivious because you ate me up. I romanticized this place for twenty years because of you. Because it is where we were conceived and I waited years after we broke up to revisit this sacred place of our birth, thinking that you might come, too, on the very night I came. And what a story that would be, if I sat in the same stool and you came in just the way you did so long ago wearing the same denim jacket and introduced yourself to me all over again. And we started over that way and maybe we could move to Florida because I can afford it now that I am a writer. I prefer to live in fiction because real life got away from me. And while you can fuck up a story and rewrite it, you can’t fuck up life and relive it.



Thor limps back from the pisser with a Budweiser he got from somewhere and goes straight back to tonguing EL Fudge cookies and studying the stage intensely as the band gets back on it. Twenty years only changes the light fixtures, the barmaids, and faces of the people who act like those who came before them without knowing it. Only I know it because I was here twenty years ago and so I feel old and I have another beer and ignore a girl who tries to tell me I look a lot like that guy from some TV show I never saw. I suppose I aged well to garner such flattery that I don’t solicit. I sit and scribble notes on napkins for something in the future and the band plays some ridiculous song I had forgotten all about.


 
I melt into the brick wall and look. The band is ready and Thor is really on his game tonight spinning a perpetual acid trip of both light and sound. I wonder if there are secret messages in his light tricks. If they flash certain subliminal communications that people don’t consciously understand, and if he is some secret kind of psychedelic mind bender. He is the peroxide-blonde ball shooter in this pinball game. He takes over the soundboard from Debbie Perm and a girl walks in from 1970 looking light and airy like a Ted Bundy kind-of-girl. And I notice the band doesn’t have much confidence, except the smiling keyboard player who has perfect piano-like teeth. You can hear it in how they play. Twenty years don’t mean much to anyone except to me, Thor, and Debbie, or the barmaids who might have been a little prettier and nicer back then.



I am just jealous of their union. Debbie and Thor. Or Thor and Debbie. Their empire of light and sound. The two girls I held the door for me come to my table and one asks what I am writing and I say nothing really and they smile and wait for me to buy them a drink, but I don’t so they go away awkwardly and someone else buys them a drink and after a few drinks one of the girls yawns and looks at her watch and they say goodbye, but they don’t leave. They walk to the other side of the bar and stop and listen to a terrible song that reminds them of when they were infants. And the guy that bought them drinks doesn’t notice they haven’t gone home to go to bed, but I do because that is what I do. I notice. I notice the crumbs of EL Fudge cookies. And by then I am drunk so I put my napkins away like I always do.

Thor rubs Debbie’s lumpy socked feet as he stares at the lighted stage and turns knobs and dials with his other hand, right on cue. And the band plays Killing in the Name Of and people jump wildly and wave their hands like they want to kill someone or something and Thor smiles and turns a dial and clouds of smoke engulf the stage and dance floor and the light of the pinball game plays throughout the bar as the balls bounce and Thor says, “Jackpot.” And I write on a cocktail napkin, where are you? I’m pretty sure I saw Debbie and Thor delivering The Advertiser when they weren’t doing sound at the bar. Together. I think we could have been an empire of sound. We could have delivered The Advertiser.
 

I walk outside and it is hot and those two girls are standing there holding that kitten and fawning over her and they say they are going to take her home and keep her. And I smile at the kitten, though it makes no difference to the kitten whether I smile or frown. And I remember reading somewhere that Joe DiMaggio delivered red roses to Marilyn’s grave every year on her birthday, or the day she died, and how he loved her no matter what she did or who she was with, before or after him. They said he never got over her and I know the feeling. And so I suppose, Marilyn never knew what she was talking about. Joe was not like any other guy.



I saw him on television at a Thanksgiving Day parade one year when I was a kid and my mom told me he was married to Marilyn Monroe, rather than he was a great baseball player for the New York Yankees with the longest hit streak in baseball history. He gave up being a ballplayer, I guess, when he married her. Like someone throwing himself off a cliff. Mom also said he did commercials. He looked like a sad guy to me, even when I was a kid. It was in his eyes. He looked like me looking at myself in this hotel mirror, thinking of you.

Joe wasn’t the same as the others, but all men were the same to Marilyn no matter what anyone ever did. No matter what anyone thought, Joe delivered those roses to her grave, even though she couldn't smell them anymore. I wasn’t the same, either, but I made you believe that I was. I deserve it. To have lost you to time and to be alone in this way. But I know that I am going to be giving you words like red roses all my life to say I love you, even though you can't read them anymore.