There's No Manly Way to Eat a Banana

In the window of an hour, I sneak out of the office building and sit with my back to a square concrete planter to read, or to people watch. I don’t have to sneak. It is my lunch break. Time they don’t pay me for, but it feels like I sneak, so I guess if it feels like I do, I do. It’s fun to watch people get blown away in a stiff wind, or to cross the street and almost get hit by speeding cars. Once in a while, fire engine sirens blare and cop cars chase the bad guys.

Since I’ve been single the past three months, and not tied to a phone, I do little more on my lunch breaks than read, or people watch. Sometimes the books bore me, but people never do. I leech them with my eyes and they don’t even know it. I am writing lines with the ink of their souls. I will write a book someday when the dust settles and I am okay again. A good book. Not the good book. But a very good book. At first, I thought I was watching for a new girlfriend, but then I realized I am not interested in a new girlfriend. Everyone bores me so in my boredom I have become a neuter.

She has become a phantom. She used to call me on my lunch break and so now there is a void during this fatal hour when my phone doesn’t buzz or ring. A void that I feel the need to fill, like some sad and desperate people try to fill their hearts with the emptiness of a relationship too soon. I try to distract myself from the heartache until I adapt to this “new normal” of a life. I must occupy my time so not to lose my mind giving thoughts as to what she does on her lunch break now that she doesn’t call me. I imagine she calls someone else. She works across town, a half dozen blocks, or so. Maybe she goes to a hotel with a guy from the office. Maybe to a broom closet. Oh, shit. I’ve gone ape again.

Sometimes, when I don’t feel like sitting and people watching, I walk somewhere up the street in the busy city to see a building I’ve never seen before, or to have lunch in a diner I’ve never ate in. Or I take off my shoes and walk the lawn of the statehouse because it has perfect grass. I think about writing a children’s book about a groundhog that lives there, but I don’t. He was going to run for governor, or something. Maybe he gets shot, or has an affair.


Sometimes there is a statue I have never noticed. The details of architecture, like the face of an angel carved in the archway of a door entry of a defunct bank that is for lease. How many people have passed under it and not noticed, I wonder. I was one of them, until now. Or there are claw-foot legs that run down the lines of old historic sandstone buildings, which make the buildings look like square animals from the right view.

I watch people walk like they have somewhere to be, as though their life depends upon them getting to where they need to get. Others walk aimlessly, talking to themselves, screaming at the air. A fat girl holds down her skirt as though she has some sacred animal under there that might fly away, a free-range peacock or something. Shaved bald as a baby. A cute one does the same thing with a landing strip of track marks up her arms as she hobbles out of the courthouse.


The wind whips with mercy for no one. It blows a vagrant man’s derby into the street and he recklessly chases after it like it is a puppy. They look pathetic trying to light a cigarette. One hand cupped to a potted cheek. With the fick, flick, flick of a calloused thumb. They get angry and cross-eyed as they glare at the sparking lighter at the end of a cigarette. They don't see the respirator, or the chemo and radiation.

There are hysterical messy women yelling, and men ranting to other men about some hustle, or a basketball game. People with canes and dogs, pushing strollers with ugly babies or cute ones that got no hope, lugging big boobs and bellies, babies to feed, dicks to suck, skin to scratch, heroin to shoot. Bedbug treatments, 99.99 guaranteed, the billboard promises. Spotted like leopards with red itchy spots.


A van passes that says "follow me to Sirens" and there are white naked airbrushed women plastered to the side. Monte Carlos bumping. Windows down. Straight pipes. Police and the wide-eye. People on phones, walking around like they are closing a colossal deal to give them controlling interest in something like Standard Oil. They look to see who is looking. Narcissists checking themselves out in the long window glass. Civil servants with badges on laniers like dog-tags jingling. Pretty pooch. Mind if I pet your doggy. No, go ahead. He’s just got a skin condition, is all.

Heels like horse hooves. Italian shoes. A caramel boxing john named Caramello, and seven dead hookers on the front of a paper that blows down off the overpass. Snow White is good blow. He got the hard. I ain’t touched that shit in a minute, for real, for real. Jaywalkers hold their pants as they run across the street. Cars get pissed and blare their horns. I’ll hit you next time, asshole. There is no civility in a war-zone. And somewhere in the chaos, I get lost for a little while and I don’t think about her as much.   



I knew the Chinese restaurant to exist, but I had never walked down that far before. In some way, it was like an end to something. Like the edge of the universe and it sounded pretty good to say "on the edge of the universe is a Chinese restaurant,” so I repeat that a few times until it bores me. There is a giant gold dragon perched on front of the building and his neck is bent in such a way that he ominously glares at anyone who dares to enter, as though he is on guard. I think I read somewhere that dragons and gargoyles and those sorts of things were to ward off evil spirits, so maybe I figured he would blow fire on my head if I dared to enter.

I stood outside and the wind whipped newspapers around and I thought of all the words and pictures flying in the air like magic carpets until I saw a girl I know from the office who is a woman, but I call all women “girls” for some reason just as I call all men “guys.” And she is standing there looking at her cellphone outside of the Chinese restaurant that has a name that I can’t pronounce so I don't try. She was pregnant a month ago, but she is not pregnant now. She was never nine months. I remember I said congratulations when I saw her standing by a vending machine in the cafeteria and she looked at me and smiled and there were tears in her eyes. I didn’t ask when she was due. She might have been three or four months because her belly was the size of a small watermelon, but no more.

I looked at her and wondered what happened to her baby, if she killed it, or if it came early and nature did it and all that, but then I stopped thinking about her and thought about an ex-girlfriend I once had in high school who never met a coat hanger she didn’t like. I hadn’t thought of her in years and she left almost as quick as she came. Then the girl who was pregnant disappeared into the Chinese restaurant and I wondered if she was having an affair with someone and maybe she had an abortion because her husband found out the baby wasn’t his and it almost made me cry because it was so damn sad. Like a soap opera I watched in high school instead of going to football practice.

There was an old Chinese man standing by the door eating a banana. I watched him for a while until the banana was all gone and he balled the peel in his hand. It was like watching a surgery on TV. Or staring at a dog’s erection that looks like a tube of pink lipstick. He didn’t seem to care about the dragon over his head, or that I was staring at him.

I decided to go in and eat. I was hungry. I had told myself after my girlfriend broke up with me that I would do new and positive things. Try new places. Things I had never done before. I would write a book with the blood of my heart and give it to her so she knows how I feel and so that anything anyone else ever says to her will pale miserably in comparison. They will be the fuselage where as I was the rocket. But that is a terrible metaphor because the rocket explodes and the fuselage drives deep into space so it made me think of what she was doing on her lunch break again and I practically cried walking in past that old Chinaman whose breath reeked of banana and ginger and who licked his lips and followed me back inside. I suppose he works here and goes outside and eats bananas instead of smoking cigarettes. 

She might come back, I used to tell myself, but I know now she isn’t. My heart has sent my brain that message, finally. A sign says to “Seat Yourself, Please,” so I walk around and look at the Chinese artwork and the red tables and the paper partitions and the colorful paper lanterns strung across the aisles that hang down like a string of colorful old lady tits and I sit next to a dirty aquarium with a koi fish that looks as though he had eaten all the other fish in the tank because he is fat and lethargic. His eyes bulge out of his head a little and he looks retarded, but he seems friendly and neither of us are desperate for anything and both being neuters, we get along swell. Bachelors, some might call us.

And the young Chinese waitress comes and takes my drink order and the man who ate the banana pushes a yellow mop bucket by and the girl who was pregnant laughs at a table with an older woman who looks like she could be her mother and I think of staying here and eating a thousand fortune cookies and writing that book and not going back to work when my lunch hour is over until I realize I left a bagel and my car keys on my desk and I took the bus, and the earliest bus doesn’t leave downtown until 4:30, so I got to go back. I want to call in and quit my job from a payphone and get in the aquarium and swim around with that fish and maybe he would eat me, too, or not. And all day, I could people watch and do nothing until someone gives me something to eat, which is why people go out to eat in the first place. To be socially lazy and fat and do nothing while someone sprinkles food and flattery on their heads.

But then the door opens and the bell rings and she walks in all by herself wearing clothes I never saw her wear. New clothes. New beginnings, she once said when she last spoke to me on the phone when I was going to kill myself, or commit suicide, which sounds better. I see her, but she doesn’t see me and she looks beautiful and glows. She looks like she lost weight, though she needn’t because she was too skinny already. And I smile at her and then decide to act like I didn’t see her so I look at that fat fish in the aquarium and he smiles back at me, or is it only that my face was superimposed on his like an app.


But God, I miss her, and it isn’t right to miss or to love someone this way, this much, when they don’t miss or love you in return anymore because it went away from them the way chickenpox goes away. And maybe you are still a small silver scar on their temple, but they hardly notice you and they cover you with makeup so the person they love next doesn’t see you at all. And I have become some Killers’ song. Some sad soap opera rerun.

And I feel sick and think about leaving and stepping out in front of a bus or going back to work, but when I look back over my shoulder, she is standing at my table and she asks to sit. I say sure and my voice cracks like Peter Brady’s and she sits and she looks gorgeous like she hadn’t lost any sleep at all, but I don’t tell her because love is a game of poker and when someone knows what is in your hand you might as well forget it. No one loves anyone that loves them too much.

But then I blurt out that I love her and miss her every goddamn day, particularly on my lunch hour and at night, and all I want to do is to watch Sleepless in Seattle with her and eat her out for hours and the waitress who is Laotian, actually, drops a dish and it shatters and my fish friend thinks I am pathetic and swims away, but he has never eaten her out before, so he doesn’t know anything.

And she says, “Oh, shit,” and smiles and begins to cry and says the feeling is mutual. Then we don’t say much more about it and we eat lo mein without beef or cat and joke like we used to and it feels so good to laugh again that we both know we are going to be late going back from lunch break by about an hour or so. But it hardly matters when you are in love if you are late back from a lunch break, especially on a Tuesday. You can do anything when you are in love.

Then she says she eats here often and she named the fish “Adam” because it reminds her of me and it looks at me and I look at it and all three of us laugh like hell and we eat our fortune cookies. And sometime before we both leave, before I go this way and she goes that way, I tell her I love her and she smiles and says she knows and that she will call me tonight about that thing, but I don’t know what that thing is. And she bites her lip and it turns me on. Her subtlety is my porn.

She asks what my fortune cookie said, and I tell her it said that there is no manly way to eat a banana. And she shakes her head and laughs as she turns to walk back towards her office which is on the other side of the universe and I reluctantly walk to mine looking back at her as she fades down a long busy sidewalk of shadowy figures and shapes. I figure I will get hit by a bus now, or get stabbed, because that is the way it goes.

Since she said she will call me tonight, my phone is of some importance to me again and I rub it like it's an old friend, or a genie lamp, though it knows better and so it acts as though it will refuse to ring, but I know better. And as I walk into my office building grinning like a dope, past Ben Franklin and the grim-faced security guards who try their best to look like bricks, I figure I will not need to write a book. But if I did, I know what I would call it and I’d write it with the blood of my heart, which now sounds really dramatic.