The Mermaid

I hadn't the heart to give this a sad ending. But I drank alone, and the bell that I dreamed would introduce her, never rang. But what beautiful things she made me dream, often in something as small as an olive. It's an odd sort of hell, a brokenheart is. But hearts do mend and sometimes even fiction comes true.

I was born in 1977. The year Charlie Chaplin died in Switzerland or wherever it was. Elvis died that year, too, but that is neither here nor there because this has nothing to do with Elvis. I didn't know about Charlie Chaplin's death, just as he probably didn't know about my birth. We were two ships passing in the night. But as I grew up, I began to notice that I bore a striking resemblance to him, though I was named after another movie actor, Errol Flynn. My mother loved Errol Flynn and my dad didn't care what she named me because I was the fifth or sixth kid. 

I look nothing like Errol Flynn,  who I grew up admiring in movies where he was a pirate, or Robin Hood, or Custer, or a fighter pilot in World War I. It could be understood that I would much rather look like Errol Flynn than Charlie Chaplin, but those weren't the cards I was dealt. At some age, I began to embrace who I was, though there was no particular glory in it. Then, as a fan of cinema, I began to admire Charlie more than Errol, and so Errol was just a name to please my mother and a name which got my shit kicked in at school.

My mother said Charlie Chaplin was a pervert and I should not go around saying I look like some pervert or someone is going to think that I am one. But as though by fate, I was a pervert. I never had the heart to tell my mother, but it was a truth I could not deny. Not to some great extreme of perversion, some intrusive and criminal wickedness where I would force myself on others, or even invade their privacy. But I drooled over and gawked at my sister's friends when they came over on sleepovers, and I had a good collection of Playboy's by the time I was eleven or twelve, and I had orgies of GI Joe's and made Baroness a promiscuous hussy, to say the least, and Scarlett and Duke were like rabbits in the carpet soap operas of my youth. In the TV glow of "Dallas" and "Falcon's Crest." Also, I could never look at Daphne from Scooby Doo in other way than pruriently. And Ellie May Clampett, well, her neither. There was a list. A very long list.  

Girls my age or less didn't ever do anything for me, but older girls had some kind of hex on me. I'd seen enough Porky's movies to know what they were capable of. When you're just a prepubescent scrawny kid, an older girl in a bra and tight jeans is something to behold. When they spoke, it was like unearthing an Egyptian burial tomb, or staring at Medusa, only in a good way. I was a listless little pimple practically popping myself in my lust for them. They were royalty of some kind and what they concealed was nothing less than Oz to me. 

I thought of women then as sailors thought of maelstroms, or the Bermuda Triangle, or Sirens, which are, as I understand it, wicked mermaids. It was the way they looked at me. The things they said as though I didn't exist or understand. Or it was the way they sometimes pawed me around like a ball of yarn until I unraveled there at their feet. The way they smelled of cherries and chomped fat wads of juicy bubblegum. The way their lips were glossed. Their hair was sprayed. I listened to them from my room, carefully filtering out my sister's wretched voice, as they giggled about boys, as though they were going to say something of monumental importance. Reveal some secret password to all the treasure in the whole wide world. 

I read every word in those ill-gotten Playboy's between the naughty pictures of Alabama sorority girls and Nebraskan farm girls bent over hay bales. The pause button on my VCR was worn out because I made good use of it when everyone was in bed not thinking of the nefarious things a boy of twelve was capable of in dark shadows. You hit it just so and forever you're staring down the pink love canal of some beautiful cheerleader or a slasher film chick who is tragically about to get it by some maniac who was all the more insane and scary to me in his indifference to sex. With boobs like plump water balloons. That was in the age of VHS. When the fantasy of sex was everywhere on HBO and Showtime and for rent in plastic capsules at Blockbuster Video.

I was around fourteen when I noticed I resembled Charlie. I stopped calling him Chaplin because it felt as though we were on a first name basis. Had I been born around 1889 when he was born, I could have made a go of it. Been in those silent films of his I've seen, or something like them. I could have been a stunt double or played opposite him in a separated-from-birth-type script such as it was in "The Great Dictator." Or at least, I could have won one of those lookalike contests and got a trophy or prize money, which was probably like two bucks a bowl of soup. 

But in my time, no one really cared about Charlie. They cared about Rambo and Jaws and artless flashy films full of violence and sex and drama. So I was a doppelganger of an actor mostly forgotten by anyone who didn't appreciate silent film, or old cinema, and I was only reminded of such when I looked in the mirror, when a dab of shaving cream stuck under my nose or when I moved my eyebrows in a particular way he did.  

But when I turned 35 my wife left me for some insurance salesman named Chip and the house burned down and my dog died of some rare exotic disease that came from Africa via mosquitoes, they said. I cracked. I fissured. I started drinking heavily. I stopped getting short haircuts. Slowly, I pieced together a ratty-black suit and a black ribbon tie and big black beat-up shoes with blown-out soles and fingerless gloves and I grew out his famous toothbrush mustache which ended up getting me fired because my boss, who said he always had suspicions about me anyway, accused me of joining some Nazi group and, well, "company policy..." he eagerly explained.

Had this been fated to me from birth? To become "the tramp" himself. In real life, not film. To have no Hollywood mansion and starlets to romance when the tape stopped rolling. No in-ground pool to soak in. No fancy chauffered Pierce-Arrow convertible at the end of the day. There was no end of the day. It went on and on. I was eating beans and sardines out of cans and pocketing ketchup packets and crackers from restaurants and skipping away before the manager, usually some kid half my age, got the balls to throw me out. 

And I found myself being chased and browbeaten by angry policemen in blue wool uniforms as I hurriedly pushed a rickety shopping cart with all my things and a scrawny stray dog in it along the bike path where all the homeless camps are. I didn't know they weren't after the shopping cart, or me for vagrancy. They were after that ratty-looking dog who was a famous canine actor. Rin-tin-tin, perhaps, worth millions, who I thought was just a mutt. I was kicked out of those homeless camps for a folly of reasons. Once, they thought I was Hitler. Another time I was mistaken as a pervert. Or I forgot to pay my HOA fee or to abide by their community rules. There are rules for living in homeless camps, I've come to know. Maybe I wore too much face powder and made them think I was feminine, or as they said it in more genteel days, "that way."

If it was caught on film, one of those Bell and Howell Model 2709 cameras with the famous Mickey Mouse ear reels, it would all be some grand comedy. Me at the market being shooed out by the fat crotchety manager with the pepper-colored crewcut and apron. Flirting with the ugly girl in the bakery, hoping to get food, all the while, madly in love with the girl who sold flowers. Stuffing my pockets with rolls and muffins, shoving a baguette in my pants. Living in that market, perhaps. 

But it wasn't film. It was my life. But even when my dog died, had I been in this get-up then, it would have been a gas if they filmed it. My house burning down. Me running around frantically with a bucket, throwing water on the flames. Maybe my pants would catch fire. Maybe I'd climb up and down the trellis just to rescue six cats and a goldfish. Then an obsese wife who broke the ladder. Hilarious. 

Charlie was great at self-depricating comedy because that wasn't his life. His life was lived while the camera wasn't rolling. With money and girls, girls, girls.

But it wasn't captured on grainy film that goes faster than real life, and I wasn't in black-and-white. I was stuck in color. A misfit in the wrong day and age. A damn fool wearing a worn bowler hat and carrying a cheap cane. With beat-up shoes with blown-out soles. Socks with giant holes in them. It would be funny if it wasn't really my life. If it was on film in an air-conditioned movie theatre, and if I could sit and watch it and eat popcorn and sip soda and hold hands with a beautiful woman. Laughing at my misfortune rather than living it. The cops chasing me. The dog biting my ass. The store manager shooing me away. The ugly bakery girl blowing me fat kisses while I serenade the girl in the flowers. The other homeless people casting me out of camp. I laugh thinking of it. I laugh because I am half mad and I am writing it all down. 

But it was trash day and trash day always makes me feel better because I am both curious and a scavenger. Someone threw out a canoe today. They pushed it to the street and it sat there next to their garbage can on the curb and I suppose come morning the invisible garbage people will take it away and it will be thrown into their truck and compacted to nothing but splinters and busted wood. It made me sad thinking of it because I get sad thinking of inanimate objects being destroyed, losing their purpose. So I took it. I dragged it along with me down the sidewalk and figured I could patch the hole in the bottom if I found the right parts. Some of that flex-seal as seen on TV stuff. I pulled it by the rope and it went along just fine. 

I found an abandoned house. It was falling in and condemned. There was a sign on the door that said no trespassing. It looked like it was a nice house at some point, but time had moved on without it. In 1920 when it was new, it would have been one of the nicest houses in town and there were little things that testified to such like the gilded wall sconces, the pendulous light fixtures, and the ornate woodwork that was choked under 100 years of lead paint and poor taste. There were holes in the floor, windows missing, and parts of the roof were gone making unintended skylights. In a closet I found a fishing pole and some wire and hooks which made me smile at the thought of eating catfish tomorrow. 

The next morning, I went to the creek which runs through town. It wasn't much of a creek and no one gives it much thought. They call it a river, but it is hardly a river at all. It is more of an embarrassment. I took my canoe with me, though it had a hole in the bow. I thought maybe it would still serve some purpose and so I dragged it along like a puppy. I dug up some worms but didn't have the heart to put them on the hook so I sat there and cast my line in the shallow creek hoping a shiny bare hook would entice some desperate dumb fish. Then no more than ten minutes after casting my line as I began to fall asleep, a sudden jerk on my pole woke me up. As I looked down the bank at the line, another tug yanked me down and I tumbled headlong into the water. I must have caught a whopper, I thought. A ten or twelve pound catfish by the jerk of it.

But as I picked myself up in the creek, proudly holding on to my line, there was no catfish on the other end. There was a mermaid. A beautiful mermaid flopping around in the shallow water. The hook was in her mouth and she whipped her massive tail violently,  which I had to dance around in order not to be upended. I was beside myself. What to do? Realizing the water was only knee deep, I steadied the girl and pointed to the hook and motioned as though I intended to take it out of her mouth. Her eyes were big and she nodded yes as though she understood that I meant her no harm. And like a scared child at the dentist, she settled and stared up at me as I removed the painful hook from her lip. 

She didn't speak English and neither did I. In fact, we didn't speak at all. I couldn't. I was voiceless standing there in that stream staring at the beautiful girl. I was taken aback at first, but then it was as though that is the way it always had been. And maybe it had. There was silly music in the background and there were quick moments when all went black and words flashed in the emptiness of what was. As though time blinked languidly and on its eyelids simple lines were written. About me. About the girl. Dialogue. What I said to her. What she said to me. Cues for me to follow. Cues I've been following my whole life, I suppose. 

After I took the hook from her mouth, she kissed me on the cheek. Even in black-and-white she was stunning. I couldn't see that color would better her at all. There seemed no possible improvement necessary to her beauty other than the subtraction of that troublesome tail and the addition of two legs. I scooped her up in my arms and in my head I had grand thoughts. A wedding. A honeymoon. Kids. Little sardines. Me pushing a baby carriage into a lake so they could see their grandparents, my in-laws. I don't know what she thought in that moment, but she didn't seem to object, and she smiled at me as well. So after some considerable struggling, I carried her up the bank and put her in the canoe that suddenly served a grand purpose. It was her chariot. I figured it best to call it a day, being that I didn't want to catch a cousin or something of hers. I'd have to ascertain what she ate before dinner plans were made. Fish eat fish, I suppose. But being so enamoured by her, I'd rather avoid such an uneccesary faux pas, if it were to be. It is always a question of etiquette when first you meet. 

She told me via the black dialogue box that she had never been on dry land before and I promised that I would show her the world. I had some encyclopedias I dug out of a dumpster a few days earlier, after all. A through F. I caddied her through town in the canoe without much of a thought of what a sight we must have been crossing Main and Memorial and through town square the way we were. She sat upright and her tail was hidden in the boat, so it wasn't as odd at it would have been otherwise. They all must have thought it was some gag or that we were on drugs. 

For a second or so, I thought I could make all the papers. Sell my story to the world news. Newspapers. A tabloid. To Oprah or Jerry. Whoever. I could be lifted out of poverty at the simple expense of the girl's privacy. Clever news lines would run on the bottom of the screen or at the top of the page: Hooked. Filet of Love. Quite the Catch. Plenty of Fish After All. So on and so forth. But as I looked at her, I knew I couldn't do anything of the sort. Forget the flower girl at the market. The school teacher. The dog walker. The meter maid. The socialite. Anyone I had ever thought I loved before. I was in unequivocal love with the mermaid. 

"I love your mansion!" Her dialogue read. "You must be the richest man on Earth!"

I smiled sheepishly. A wave of pride overtook the sting of embarrassment when we walked in as a happy-go-lucky melody played in the background. Perhaps she saw it as it used to be, or she just didn't know any better. This was, after all, the only house she had ever been in. I sat her down in the dining room beneath the broken chandelier and set out the tablecloth on the floor. Then I excused myself and ran up the street and dove into a dumpster behind a pizza shop. I got a box and pieced together more than one large pizza. I made certian none had anchovies. I stopped at the gas station and filled two cups of soda and ran out before the clerk saw me. But I went back in and nabbed two candy bars and then he chased me out, cursing in silence. I went straight back to the house where she waited, staring up with those big eyes at the chandelier as though it were some alien space ship and she were stuck in it's mesmeric tractor beam. Unable to move. Unable to do anything but to smile. 

We ate the pizza and candy and she loved it. She relaxed on the floor and I felt ashamed I had no furniture. No TV for her to watch. No radio for music. There was only the minstrel music that was being piped in from wherever it came, which always reflected the mood of the moment. There was a guitar in the closet where I found the fishing pole, so I dug it out and tried to tune it, but truthfully, I don't know the first thing about tuning or playing a guitar. It had only four strings, but I played it anyway and the way she looked at me it was as though I was Jimi Hendrix and she was completely captivated. I played a semblance of Wreckless Eric's "Whole Wide World" because it was the only song I knew all the words to. I knew all the words, but of course, she could not hear them because I could not sing them. She could only hear the minstrel music that went on and on like our pulse.

I don't know how mermaids sleep and I didn't have the "M" encyclopedia to look it up and find out. I don't know if they find a sandy bank, or some cool rocks and lay themselves out, or if they float in the water. I'd imagine she had some amazing natural buoyancy. I don't think I've ever considered that of any other woman. How they slept. I've always simply assumed. It got late and we sat there by the lantern light and talked. Scripted dialogue on periodic appearing screens. Then I decided to run her a bath, being the house had a nice clawfoot tub. I thought she would be happy in the tub for the night. I carried her to it and the moonlight streamed in through a gaping hole in the wall and it was as though we danced all the way to the tub. 

She was happy in the bath, it seemed. Her tail wagged like a dog's. I kissed her goodnight and I fell asleep in the next room dreaming of having money to buy us a nice home with a luxurious pool in the back where she could swim freely. Tomorrow I'd figure it out. How this affair of ours could go on. She was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen waist up. I didn't see her as a fish. I saw her as a beautiful woman who happened to have a tail. I saw her as a dream come true and she was mine to do with whatever I saw fit by all rights and the international laws of fishing, which I'm sure was a thing. 

I served her breakfast in the bath. When I had to use the toilet I wrapped myself in an old dusty canvas drop cloth that some painters had left behind. But I wrapped it too tight and fell and rolled down the stairs where I came undone. Then I had the idea of putting a curtain between the toilet and the bathtub which made things considerably easier. She smiled at me, amused at my silent but frenzied efforts of respecting her privacy and keeping her happy. She seemed always to smile and without words to affirm my hopes and desires, it appeared that she felt the same of me as I felt of her. But as the days went on, I began to feel like a thief. As though I had taken her from something and somewhere she belonged. How could she be happy living her life in a bathtub? And maybe, there was a merman in her life. 

I thought of what we could do for money, but it all seemed to subjugate her in some demeaning way. I thought we could travel with a circus or endorse some tuna and be in all the commercials. Maybe she could work nights in the fish restaurant and bar down the street. They could put her in a specially-made aquarium above the bar. Or I could rent her out for little girls birthday parties. Or maybe we could get her on one of those TV talk shows. Like Steve Harvey or Jerry Springer. Maybe she could be a feature attraction at Sea World. Finally a fish that could sign a disclosure consenting to be exploited. 

But I knew, inevitably, anything I did would only harm her. Any attention she got would attract needling scientists who would want to research and discect her to learn more about her and her species. To clone her. To see if she had any medicinal properties that could cure diseases that would make them billions in profits. They would say something like I "owe it to humanity" to let them study her. I knew I could sell her to some university or lab for millions, tens of millions, I bet. Then I could get the girl from the market in the floral department. The one I've been goo-goo over for years. 

No. It just wouldn't do. No one could know about her because I was madly in love with her. She wasn't a fish. She was a woman. She was more than a woman. She was my soul. Then just as I was about to tell her, a tempestuoust wind blew wickedly through the cracks of the siding and the holes. An ominous storm blew shingles off the roof and the shutters open and shut and the fence gate open and closed, banging the iron latch. The girl was frightened and I got into the bath with her and held her, but soon after I did, the tub fell through the floor and crashed into the living room below. The floor was sloped so we shot straight for the front door and crashed though it and down the steps and onto the sidewalk where the tub cracked to a million pieces. We turned just in time to watch the house collapse behind us. It was a sad sight for the abandoned beauty had been my home for a while and I had dreamed of fixing it up to it's former glory. But, alas, it was gone. 

The wind died down but the rain poured hard and I was soaked and miserable. But I looked down at the girl who was happy and smiling, enjoying the rain. Life just hadn't ever really worked out for me and this appeared to be the final and gravest insult. God gave me half a woman to love. Perfect from her navel north, but fish all the way south. What a cruel joke on me. So I picked her up and put her in the canoe and ferried her back across town heading to the same creek that I fished her out of so that she could go home and live her life in her own habitat where she belonged. I was soaked to the gills, but the canoe scooted a bit easier across the wet pavement of the sidewalks and streets across town. 

It was not in the script for me to take her back, I suppose. I was to get some inheritance or insurance money and we were to live happily ever after. Or maybe I was to sell her to some zoo and visit her on Sundays, or she was to be some rich princess. I don't know. But along the way a cop tried to stop me. A messy-faced little boy tugged at my coattails. Even a dog doggedly nipped at my pantleg until I shook him lose. 

The girl appeared flummoxed seeing me so dismayed. She didn't understand what was happening. This life had poked me once too often and I was about to snap, once and for all. I was intent on drowning myself. Maybe there was some irony in me dragging her past Madison's Fish and Bar in that rickety canoe. But I wasn't in the mood for irony and I wasn't in the mood for living anymore. Charlie never got this way, and so I suppose that made me a bad tramp. 

"What are you doing?" she inquired. Her own words that cut through the suddenly dramatic minstrel music that gave my motives away. Not some words on a black screen. Her own words in her own voice. We were off script now. We were well off script. 

"I'm taking you back. I have nothing to offer you. And you don't belong here."

I glanced back to catch the forlorn look that washed over her perfect wet face, which was a far cry from that she had in the previous days since I reeled her in. She looked as sad as a sardine that fell off a pizza onto a floor where it crusted over and was trampled underfoot.

When we got to the creek, she asked me directly. "Why are you throwing me back? You don't have to. I like dry land! And I like you." 

"I like you, too," I confessed. "But there is nothing I can do to change anything. You don't have legs and I don't have a tail. I am the tramp, penniless, and as gleeful and optimistic as I am supposed to be, day in and day out, I never get the girl. Or I do for the pretend happy ending, but then the credits roll, the music plays, and everyone takes off their makeup and goes home. But this is real life. This is my life! I was born with no particular talent other than I look like Charlie Chaplin. I've nothing to offer you. No money. No home. So I can't ask for you to stay."

"You don't have to ask. I want to," she countered quickly. We sat on the bank and watched the river flow. It had rained a lot recently, so the water was high and rushed with the appearance of urgency. The creek, for once, resembled the river it was said to be and was less of an embarrassment. It was the kind of current she could get lost in. It was loud and careless. It was a universe of it's own and the girl was a testament to that in all her black-and-white splendor. I couldn't imagine her in color, I thought then. I didn't want to see her in color, or with legs. She was beautiful the way she was and she ought to be preserved. 

I was about to change my mind, reaching for some silver lining as we sat there. Her, in the canoe, and me, beside her. But the canoe fatefully slid down the muddy bank and I failed to catch it in time. It shot like a bobsled to the river, crashing on a rock below where it violently capsized in the water. All that I saw was her tail, a splash, and then she was gone. 

After a few minutes, the rain stopped and I left the canoe in the water and schlepped to the mall nearby and dried myself in the restroom hand-drier vents. Security guards came in a few times giving me the hairy eyeball, but I pretended to simply be washing my hands, smiling and nodding at the "Please wash your hands" sign on the mirror. I saw a pretty girl at the jewelry store, but she wouldn't do because all I could think of was the mermaid I had just lost. It was sad that I never even got her name, but maybe it was just as well. I bummed around town for a while. Fed some geese at the park who had it better than me. Found a disposed of ten-speed bicycle in a dumpster with a wobbly wheel and took it for a spin. Crashed it a few times, but found no humor in it at all. 

Then I found an inexplicable twenty dollar bill in my pocket and peddled to Pat's, my favorite bar, and ordered a beer and then quickly had another. That Andy Jackson, however he had found the sad hole of my linty pocket, was my best friend that afternoon. I laid him out on the bar and looked at him and smiled. He was damn good company. 

It was the slow time of day when the lunch crowd was just gone and the regulars began to trickle in. When there was sunlight filtering in through the grundgy windows, which was always odd to me, to drink in a bar when it is still daylight outside. I suppose, I wasn't a good enough alcoholic to be a day drinker, yet. I'd never see her again, I kept thinking. She was gone forever and I didn't even know her name. The girl, she was to me. The Mermaid. The minstrel music stopped and everything was again in color. I could hear people talking and I could hear my own voice when I thanked the bartender for the next beer, which she put on a tab. Then I discovered that I had a wallet in my pocket and a driver's license that said a name and an address that were foreign to me. But it was me in the picture. There were credit cards with the same name on them and more money. There was a blood donor card and a folded up note in feminie handwriting that said, "We'll always have Paris." 

I don't remember Paris or who I had it with or why I carried that note around. And I didn't remember the name on the cards or the driver's license, either. Errol Flynn Pollard. The bartender asked if I was okay like a corner man in a heavyweight fight, and concussed I woozily replied yes. She called me Errol. Same name on the license and cards. "How are the kids? How's the Chaplin business thing going?" she asked to make courteous conversation. I don't think she was that interested. Hospitality is part of her job. 

"Good. Good," I responded curtly. I don't know my kids. I don't know what she meant about "the Chaplin business thing." I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind the bar and I was the tramp. I can't explain the money, or the wallet, or the credit cards, or my O Positive blood-type. I don't know what paradoxical universe I stumbled into, but I was in the thick of it. A Twilight Zone. And my mind was a torrent of nonsensical thoughts that only whisky could remedy. 

The bar was dead and I asked the bartender what she knew of me. She was yet to be annoyed by the nightly parade of drunks and complaining customers, so she obliged, perhaps for pitty's sake. She leaned in as though she had nuclear secrets to tell me. But very boringly, and as though it was a test of her wits or her job performance, she whispered that I work for some architectural firm, that I am divorced with three kids who live with their mom in Columbus, that I like pizza with onions and banana peppers cooked long, that I normally drink beer, but sometimes whisky, and that some years ago I began with the Chaplin thing and it became my thing because everyone has a thing. Don't they? she grinned. 

She told me that I post the short films online and my camera guy, Pete, and an actress named Aly, sometimes have drinks with me after we shoot. Then she asked if I ever need another actress to put my lips together and blow because she fancies herself some Lauren Bacall type and I smiled at her and thanked her as quietly as she told me the brief history of my adult life. She stopped to add one last detail, "And for the record, you're so afraid of being bored or being with the wrong person that you are never with anyone for too long. I should know," she winked. 

It was as though she ushered in my memory because they flooded in. The beaver damn I build periodically finally broke. My wife never left me for an insurance salesman named Chip. I left her for some whore after a series of hookers and meaningless miscreants and debuchery. Her leaving me is just how I chose to remember it. My house never burned down, I moved because there is only so long a good woman will allow you to do what I did. Wives don't forgive like Catholic priests and there is a point where you stop asking for forgiveness. And somewhere in front of a mirror in a lonely apartment, perhaps exhausted from mental fatigue or burdened with a ton of guilt for all the things I've done, which were selfish and immoral, depraved and indifferent, I lost myself in a character who was even more pitiful than me. 

I was several beers and a few whiskies in when the window got dark and I slipped into the comfort of drinking. After several people came and went who all said pretty much the same thing, "Hey, aren't you that guy who does the Chaplin thing? I've seen your videos. I love the one with the cats. How did you get those cats to chase you like that?"

That sort of thing. I looked at them and smiled, pretending I couldn't talk, shrugged my shoulders. I was in silent films, after all, and those were trade secrets. What would I have said if I were to say it? The more I drank, the more sense it all made. It was all an act with actors and a camera guy who shot it all, and me who sat down afterwards and cut scenes and spliced things and added music and those words. The scripted dialogue I complained about. 

I posted them on a website and was paid by the view because the web host sold ads. We even had one of our skits played on TCM last May and the host carried on about my uncanny resemblance to Chaplin and the professional quality of our film. It was the one in the grocery with the pretty flower girl, Aly, who I loved, and the bakery girl who pretended to love me. There were subliminal messages in the films. I knew. I wrote them, after all. But I just wanted to be like Charlie. The tramp. I just wanted to be how I felt and to have a talent unique to myself, or at least, shared with only him. 

After a few drinks you don't notice the bell so much on the bar door, but it is there and it rings regardless if you do or don't when someone comes or when they go. It is around the same time at night when all the baseball pictures hung up on the walls seem to come to life like those in Hogwarts and make for good conversation, or argue balls and strikes, or win a pennant already won, or make a catch already made. Pat's is a mom-and-pop sport's bar where locals go when they wish to avoid the Applebee's crowd or the highbrows downtown at the posh bar with twice as expensive drinks and designer curtains. This was paneling and venetian blinds and a formica bartop with goldflake and an uneven laminate floor and old stools that wobble and creak with age, a place with patina, some might say, or character and grit, if you'd rather. It's like having drinks in your grandfather's sternum. Booths with vinyl seats that sink when you sit or are split but duct-taped or flex-sealed. Laminated menus and cottage cheese and crackers on the side. Specials every night of the week. The worst bread sticks you ever ate, but the best pizza. It is twenty, hell, forty years behind the times. The kind of place Gordon Ramsey would admonish and absolutely shit on. 

It was odd that the bell seemed to ring particularly loud when she walked in. Loud enough for me to notice. It was as though I sensed her. Aly. Her hair was still in braids and she smiled childishly when she saw me looking back at her through the reflection in the bar mirror, which was guarded by liquor bottles. It was the way Perseus looked at Medusa before he slayed her. Her eyes had me locked and I couldn't look away. Maybe it was the gold eyeshadow she wore. The way they sparkled that time of dusk in the amber bar lights. But maybe it was more than that. She was the mermaid. She was the actress who I fell in love with every single time. Who made me forget it was only a short film and not real life. But the last time it was for good and I knew it.

"Hello, Errol," she grinned. "Thought I'd might find you here. Hoping, actually." 

"You've grown legs, it appears." I joked glancing down at her most prodigious appendages. She wore tight jeans and boots. 

She looked down and smiled. "Instant darwinism, I suppose. Ain't that somethin'?" 

"You want a drink?" I immediately regretted asking because it allowed for her to simply decline if she chose and I didn't want her to decline. I wanted her to say yes. To stay a little while. The bartender came about the time she fortunately sat next to me and asked her what she was having, which cemented the decision she may have had on whether she intended to have one or not. It was a bar, after all. But she had someone to go home to, I presumed. Some mysterious man I knew and asked nothing about. 

"Ain't it still prohibition?" she joked. She was a pinball in that way. She always had a line. Something to counter with, which made her a very good ad-lib actress. And I say with confidence that she is the most beautiful woman on the planet, which didn't hurt her abilities to mesmerize, either. Whoever it was she had at home, whether he was a boyfriend or a husband, didn't appreciate her as I did. He couldn't have. I could tell by her demeanor that she was starving for a certain affection, or rather, simply appreciation. I appreciated her and I wanted to scream it. I adored her. Hell, I breathed when she exhaled just to breathe her in. I would have drank her bath water. 

"I'll take a martini, with the olives, please," she ordered. 

At Pat's you had to specify "with the olives" when you ordered a martini, otherwise, you wouldn't get them. Or you could say extra olives so that you got some to begin with. It was a game we all played when we ordered what Pat, the owner himself, called "country club drinks." Maybe that is why I drank beer and whisky to avoid secret codes and being shorted my due in tree fruit and garnishes. To avoid the bartender's quiet disdain, I always imagined, with drinks that require a certain bit of effort. 

Aly clearly wanted to talk or else she wouldn't have ordered a drink. She would have said whatever it was and left, or asked me for her check and split, or told me she was in or out for the next film, and then gone. She liked to be that way. Fleeting. She enjoyed being unpredictable and I knew she was very much the mermaid she had portrayed. Just as rare and just as mythical. And if I didn't feel her arm brush against mine, I wouldn't have believed her to exist. She was a mermaid, with or without the tail. Her sandy blonde hair and the way her mouth shaped when she smiled, creased just above her lip so perfectly, made me weak. It made me swoon, the way a person ought to feel. She was to me the sum of everything. Every licentious or wholesome desire I ever had and the light at the end of a very long and bewildering tunnel. But sometimes we aren't to others what they are to us, and in such case we have folly or we have heartbreak. Or both. 

She sipped her drink and riddled me with pleasant smalltalk. Filming went well, she noted. I think this is the best one of all, don't you? You kind of went off script there at the end, huh? So are we going to need to film any more, or is that it? That sort of thing. When I glibly replied a most reluctant, no, I think we got it all, she grinned and I knew it was a grin to be paid. I had my checkbook in my coat pocket and I took it out to write her a check. Her last check. At the onset of filming "The Mermaid," Aly regretfully said when it was finished she was taking another job and pursuing a career in interior design. 

She enjoyed being an actress, but it wasn't something she ever intended to do permanently. She just needed a temporary outlet. An escape from something or someone whose identity she never disclosed. I never asked about him or her home life. I never talked about her kids or the small town where she lived because I left it to her to tell me. I was always curious, but I refused to intrude. I just enjoyed her being around. Working with her. Seeing her. Her being my muse and inspiring me with the hope of something I wasn't sure would ever happen. I never wanted that to end and if I would have asked her out on a date, or about her personal life and she been forced to tell me some unfortunate news, it would have ended. Better to dream than to be let down. I thought I could dream of her forever. 

I knew every word she uttered in the year I had known her, as though I had some old lady in me that kept perfect diction, only of her. I wondered if I could hang on to her after she had gone, because inevitably she would go, I knew. I tortured myself at the thought. There had to be someone else. The father of her kids, perhaps, or some boyfriend she lived with. Maybe he was a fine man and I read it all wrong. Or maybe he wasn't and I read it just right. But she couldn't be single. She was too beautiful and too personable to be alone in that way. She was the kind of woman men approach because when they see her, whether it is at a gas station or at a restaurant, anywhere in passing, they know they have one chance because they may never be fortunate enough to see her again. She isn't like anyone else. She is unique to herself and entirely uncorrupted by society. She thinks, speaks, and acts like herself. No one else. And you do not know how rare that is until you find such a person. 

Aly never spoke of him, but I knew that he existed and I knew someday, had I asked her, it would have forced her to make a choice between me and him and I believe that she knew that as well. One day she wouldn't inspire me anymore if she went away. If she spoke of him. If she said something like, let's have a professional relationship. Like her, inspiration in that way is fleeting. It is only lasting when it is mutual. When it is real love. 

Filming took a week. It normally took only two or three days. I couldn't have made it go any longer, but I stalled as long as I could. She was the heroine in all my films since the inception of our little theatre company. The rich girl. The bank teller. The florist. And the final one, the mermaid. The beautiful mermaid that I, hungry for fish, accidentally fished out of that river. How very fortunate it was for me. I hadn't feigned anything in the film. I needn't. I love her and this was the inevitable end to the film that was to be our last together. 

The money was not much. What I made was not much, but enough to encourage another if not for artistic ambition and enterprise alone. I wrote the check out to simply "Aly" because I never really knew her real last name. She had a name she used on Facebook, I assumed not to be her own in the simplicity of it. I smiled and told her I'd let her write her own last name, to keep with tradition.

"Aly is fine," she simpered, eating a gin-soaked olive. "Maybe I will forever drop my last name and go by Aly alone," she joked in her delightful voice I was sorry that I never captured on film. I wondered if I would remember it. Or the sound of her laughter. Only time would tell. 

What moved in me, moved like glaciers. What broke in me crumbled like a stadium being demolished. Like something of my youth. The old Riverfront Stadium memorialized in one of those photographs on Pat's paneled walls. The final tearing of my heart was the sound of that check being ripped from the book and then pushed across the bar to her. 

She looked down and then immediately up at me. "This is much more than promised, Errol. I can't except this much. I would do it for free, if I could."

"We all would. Take it, Aly. I insist. Put it towards your interior design business, or your kids, or that animal sanctuary, or the cabin in the woods, or whatever the hell you choose to do in life. You deserve much more. You were really good."

She beamed at me and gave me an ecstatic hug. We had kissed in all four of the films, but I felt more in that hug than I did in all those kisses added up. She was beautiful in her sweater and jeans and boots and messy braids. I never knew how old she was, I never asked, but I assumed she was 36. The number seemed to suit her. She was a young 36 and I am an old 42, especially at the prospect of not seeing her again. I was collapsing and little different than old Riverfront Stadium. I had turf for a soul and antiquated concessions for thoughts and inefficient bathrooms for bones and not enough club seating to seat a future, all of which determined me to be too archaic for modern times. In frank, I was a dinosaur. 

Older men would chastise me. For if I felt old at 42, they were much older. Much more lost. They'd tell me I had a whole life in front of me and a lot yet to learn. But they wouldn't know how recklessly I loved her and how it was exacerbated by doing so in secret. How I just wiped out my savings to make her parting all the more substantial and to negate any foolish idea I might have had in my head to buy her a ring, or to persist in this ridiculous lopsided affair that began when she answered an ad on Facebook that simply read: Actress Wanted Immediately. "Wanted" is such a vague term and was then far less than it is now. It had evolved to something much greater, beyond the scope of that which she had applied for, but she had fulfilled her duty and surely she deserved every penny because it was not me they clicked to see. At least, I didn't watch and rewatch our films for me. I watched her move so effortlessly through every scene and glow in black-and-white as brightly as she did now in true color. And in truth, it wasn't an actress I wanted at all. I suppose I advertised inaccurately and what I really wanted was real love. I just didn't know it until I met her. 

I could have done a dozen or so more films with her. A lifetime of films. There always seemed to be an idea that appeared when I looked at her. When she messaged me or stopped to see me. That is how it is to be inspired. It takes a feeling from someone or something you borrow with the knowledge that someday you must repay the debt. I was repaying her now, not with money, but in the grief I felt in losing her to this inevitable goodbye. 

"What will you do without me?" She smiled, finishing her drink. 

My answer left me before I could stop it. It rushed out of my mouth quickly without the sort of vetting and careful encryption we speak to others with, especially those who we adore and wish not to embarrass ourselves by letting our true feelings be known. It was delivered without any stealth or fiction or the furtive and dismissive gruffness she came to expect of me. 

"I suppose rather than to pretend being someone I am not for the rest of my life, Aly, it is high time to be myself. This can't go on forever. Besides, I can't imagine playing opposite anyone other than you. It isn't something I want to do."

She nearly choked on an olive. Or maybe it was my sentiment. Or maybe it was because someone, in very good taste, played Frank Sinatra on the jukebox, rather, on the computer on the wall that pretends to be a jukebox just as I pretend to be Charlie Chaplin and she pretends to be an actress. It was all or nothing at all. It was everything all at once. 

She sat the glass down, the last of the three olives triumphantly in her teeth as she smiled at me and said, "Do you like olives?"

Before I could answer whether I did or didn't, whether I was allergic or had some strong aversion to them or whether I loved them, the olive that was in her teeth was in my mouth, delivered by her tongue which decided to stay for a while longer than expected. The actress was no longer acting and I was no longer writing script. 

It is not an uncommon scene for a couple to make out at a bar, but it isn't everyday that Charlie Chaplin makes out with the most beautiful woman on the planet in a little small-town pizza parlor. There was some applause from the tables behind us, but assuredly some objecting hisses we couldn't hear. Never-you-mind, ninnies. 

At first, after that olive failed to choke me and I ate it ravenously as though it were the most delicious morsel of food on Earth, like it were Beluga caviar and I was a connoisseur of such expensive delicacies, I thought maybe it was a goodbye kiss. It could have been the simple relief of pent-up frustration. Sentiment gone astray. But much can be told when someone does or doesn't order a second drink and so when she sat her empty martini glass down, pushed it forward and ordered another, with the olives, I knew our night was just beginning. 

The best scripts are those unwritten. They are the ones made from the purest of gin and the sweetest of vermouth and the impetuous impromptu ad-lib lines of authentic passion. It is what writers seek to replicate in their stories. What guilt kept me from loving anyone rightly after my scandalous philandering past, would keep me no more. I was in love, whether anyone waited for her at home or not. Whether she would stay a night, or a week, or a little more than forever.