The World's Greatest Cup of Coffee
It was a pretty stupid way to die. There I was eating an egg salad sandwich on a croissant, drinking a cup of black coffee, crossing the busy street. The very next thing I know, I was splattered on the road. When you die you have absolutely no control over how and when it happens. That is, of course, unless you do it yourself and get it over with. A pigeon ate the remains of my sandwich, which was tossed some forty feet upon impact. My coffee cup rolled to the curb, spilling it's black guts all over the asphalt.
Imagine the pigeon's story. He was watching the whole damn thing unfold. And like a real asshole, he ate my sandwich.
Spoiler alert: I am dead.
I lied there flat as a fritter in the middle of the street pissing New Yorkers off because my death had stopped the flow of traffic, which is like the flow of blood to them. Imagine the audacity of me, stopping traffic just to die. They blew their frantic horns. All because I was reading a story on my phone I had just finished and had to have to my editor by three in order to get a ten grand advance. I needed the advance to pay for Riley Reid's engagement ring because I was $4,200 short.
Yes, that Riley Reid. She had a thing for writers, apparently. She came to one of my book signings and the rest was pornographic ever after. She told me she read one of my stories and it made her feel good inside so she figured I was someone of substance. It was about an invalid who loved a ballerina. I suppose I was the invalid.
I was in my editor's office negotiating a deal for myself that morning, and Ed said if I got it to him by 3:00pm, before he left for Lake Champlain with his wife for the weekend, all would be well. I'd have my advance and I could propose to Riley on that Saudi prince's yacht Saturday night, a party she was invited to and, thus, me as her plus one. Though surely, as our previous dinner and theater engagements had gone, everyone would give me a surly look for they wanted her to themselves. There is plenty of me to go around, she would say.
"Ain't Love Grand," was the name of a story I wrote for her. She turned it into a porno. It grossed 11 million dollars.
The ring was a beautiful ring and a deal for $25,000. The seller said it was made in 1922 and belonged to Ava Gardner, Riley's favorite actress. It was flawless. It came with a letter and a picture of Ava Gardner wearing it. Riley wanted to do a film remake of "The Killers." She was an excellent actress, truth be told. I had written several stories for her and movie scripts. But those move scripts were a little less legitimate than what they do in Hollywood, and my stories were never ones that would be featured in Harper's Weekly or The Atlantic. I wrote scripts for nearly every studio in Silicone Valley.
Not to be confused with Silicon Valley, Silicone Valley is a nickname for the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County which was the pioneering region for producing pornographic films in the 1970s. "Silicone” refers to the silicone gel that is used for breast implants. I had written several of her latest films, which were critically acclaimed by scheisty men with mustaches and old women with big lips and egos who talk in fake accents and call everyone "darling."
Soon, Riley would retire and we would move to Italy. That was our plan, anyway. By coincedence, "The Best Laid Plans" was a movie I wrote for her last year. It was about a young woman who, well, never mind. It is not important.
But editors don't care about writer's block. They don't give a damn about writer's. They squeeze the juice out of them like lemons so they can sell the lemonade. Ed didn't care that I gave him 50 great stories in the last 18 months. That's over two per month I cranked out because he was an insatiable man and I had a lifestyle to afford. He said he needed one by three or else he'd have to look elsewhere for a magazine I always wanted to be published in. A legitimate magazine. Not smut. Not porno. A respectable rag.
It was a box truck that hit me and suddenly I had all the sympathy in the world for raccoons and dogs and possums and deer and all those other animals I had seen laying alongside the road at one time or another. After a while, you don't think twice about them. You don't until you're laying there with your bones crushed and your skin rolled out like a pizza pie crust on an asphalt pan. It hurt.
Sonofabitch, it hurt.
I didn't know what was going to happen. And if you're the erudite sort of person, you must realize now that my death did not end it. For here I am. Writing of my experience. Offering this for further consideration. I suppose I am offering the climax much too early, that sort of thing, going about it all wrong. Some editor is probably reading this and going nuts.
I don't know where I am. It is a truck stop, it seems like. It is dark outside, black, and rather dim inside. I can hear the lights of the neon buzzing and dishes clanging, though I can't see anyone through the kitchen window. I am at a table by myself having coffee. The coffee was already here and in front of me when I realized I was here. Maybe I ordered it and didn't realize I had. A waitress came around and said she'd be right with me.
A sign in the window said that black coffee was free. Enjoy! It was the world's greatest cup of coffee, the sign boasted. "Enjoy" was in emphatic cursive red neon letters, bleeding
into the night. It was inversed, of course, because it was facing out. Out into that black night, black as the coffee in my cup, where I could see nothing. Not even headlights. We don't have cream and sugar, another sign said. So don't ask.
Sissy stuff, cream and sugar.
When she told me she would be right with me I tried to ask her where I was, but my mouth suddenly didn't work and no words came out. None at all. Instead, I made the sound of a baby seal being clubbed by some drunk Canadian. You can't offend a transexual in Canada, or refuse a vaccine without serious repercussions, but you can club a baby seal. That's all I really know about Canada.
And so there I was in that truckstop, drinking a black cup of coffee from a pearly-white cup. The world's greatest cup of coffee. My hands cupped around the porcelain because I was cold. There was a lot in that cup as I looked down into it. It was an ominous black eye of sorts. An abyss. But there was depth to it. There was life in it. And I fell into a trance-like state staring down into it. It felt almost as though I had crawled out of that cup and here I was looking back into it. Waiting to order. Waiting to go somewhere else.
Her name tag read Angel. I knew her from somewhere, but I wasn't sure from where. I was flummoxed. I remembered getting hit by the box truck. I remembered the advertisment on the side. It was some sort of dairy truck. There was an anthromorphic cow on the side. Dressed in a pink dress of sorts and drinking a cup of milk. Smiling. There were pink fancy words that said "The Metropolitan Milk Co." and "Brown cows do make brown milk," beneath it.
"Brown cows do make brown milk," I repeated softly like it was a riddle. "Brown cows do make brown milk."
Angel stood in front of me with a pen and pad in her hand. She wanted to know what I wanted. I was afraid my mouth wasn't going to work again.
"How could I know what was on the side of that truck if it had ran over me? If I was laying dead underneath it?" I asked her.
She looked at me and smiled. Then she pointed a finger to another sign on another wall that said, "Don't ask any questions and I will tell you no lies."
I read it out loud.
I looked at her and she smiled again. There was a tinge of sympathy in this smile that there wasn't in the last.
"What do you want to order, Adam?" she asked.
"How did you know my name?"
She puffed out her cheeks and exhaled looking at her pad, cocking her mouth crooked. She looked irritated. Like she had worked a double and I was giving her a hard time over bread pudding.
"Oh," I said. "No questions. I forgot." I realized then that I hadn't looked at the menu so I opened it and had a look. It was one of those laminated card stock jobs with the metal corners. The table was classic gold flake Formica. But there were no food options inside the menu. There were pictures, but not of steaks or meatloaf or different ways to cook your eggs. Not a pictograph of a variety of sandwiches so that you might more easily decide between the tuna melt and the reuben because everyone decides upon everything by looks, superficial as it may sound.
Instead, it had pictures of random things. A drawing of a father and son playing catch. A movie theater marquee. A yacht. A wedding ring. A cabin in the woods. Dracula's Castle with bats flying over it. Marilyn Monroe in "The Seven Year Itch" coming down for air conditioning. All simple black-and-white drawings. And beside each of those many things there was a number and the words, "Where do you want to go now?"
1. Where do you want to go now?
2. Where do you want to go now?
3. Where do you want to go now?
On and on it went.
There were 16 things. Fireworks. JFK in the convertible waving to Dallas. The Pyramids. Machu Pichu. The Santa Maria with Columbus. Conway Twitty on stage. Jesus carrying His cross.
I realized then, slow as my brain was, that these were all the things I dreamed of doing at some point in my life. Spending a night in Dracula's Castle. Being Marilyn Monroe's downstairs neighbor in the movie "The Seven Year Itch." Playing catch with dad again. Carrying Jesus' cross. Being a Conway Twitty impersonator. Going here. Going there. And most recently, proposing to Riley Reid on that Saudi Prince's yacht with that giant diamond ring that is sitting in Christie's at this very moment waiting for me to pick it up. She could not say no to that ring.
"You can go back," Angel said. "Everyone gets one day more. One day to do whatever you want to do. Real or fictitious, as it is. Past, present, or future. You can walk on the moon if you want. Spend the day with Cleopatra floating up the Nile. See your girlfriend one more night. There is no limit. You can see whoever you want to see. Do whatever you want to do. Everything you ever considered is on that menu somewhere."
"This is amazing. But I don't see the one thing that I am thinking of now. That I've always thought of. In the in-between times of my life, when I've been caught in an elevator. Or walking down a flight of stairs. Or stuck in traffic. Or sick in bed with the flu and time to think."
"Flip over to the other side," she said. "There is more on the back."
And there it was. A simple drawing of Dodger Stadium. It was number 27. That is what I chose.
Then I noticed the TV in the corner of the diner. An old boob tube TV on a shelf on the wall.
Riley was on. She was doing a film. She was wearing a black dress and a vail. She had on knee-high stockings. She was at my funeral. Good Lord, it was my funeral. I'd recognize my mother anywhere. But Riley got up to speak and said a few words and began to sob. Then someone consoled her. It was a pastor I didn't recognize. He really consoled her. He consoled her some more. Then he consoled her on top of my casket.
Bloody hell.
She made a movie out of my funeral. "Mourning Wood," it was called. I was only thankful they cleared the room before all that consolation went on and my mother wasn't watching. I always told her Riley was such a nice girl. It was her job, I told her. It's not who she really is. But there she was, spread eagle on my casket.
Angel shook her head and gave me a look. I tried to defend myself, feeling attacked by her eyeballs. "What am I suppose to do about it? Oh, don't worry. It's a rhetorical question. Not an actual one."
"Sometimes you don't know what you want or what you have until it's too late to do anything about it. Are you ready to go?" she asked me. "Number 27?"
"Yes," I said. "I'm ready."
I wasn't told how it would go. Why it was a diner that I sat in. Why I had to watch my girlfriend make a porno out of my funeral. Death made us exes, I suppose. I should call her my ex-girlfriend. I wasn't told why I got to choose one day. But I was on a plane to LA the next thing I knew. And in that plane there were ordinary people flying. Thinking nothing of it. I was the only one aboard with nothing to lose if it crashed. I wondered if any of them were dead, too. They looked too boring to be dead. I never realized when I was living how boring living people look.
The flight attendant asked if I wanted a refreshment.
"Refreshment," I repeated. So I decided to have a chocolate milk. "Brown cows do make chocolate milk," I muttered. She grinned thinking I was trying to be funny, rather than simply recalling the language of my killer.
I wasn't sure who was footing the bill, but I decided if ever there was an occasion, this was it, being dead and all. So I ordered a vodka martini as well. And after another drink, I tried to tell the guy next to me that I was dead, but my mouth wouldn't work. And just as I tried and failed, I looked up and saw a prohibited sign in bright red flashing. The burning cigarette above it was not lit up. I understood what it meant. I couldn't tell anyone that I was dead. That isn't how this goes.
We landed and I took an Uber to the ballpark. Dodger Stadium. I watched people like I had never watched them before. With keen interest. Knowing for certain that I would never see them again, unless, of course, it was in the afterlife. The great unknown. Sure. I might see them there. I especially enjoyed seeing children who are so excited about everything and full of life. Yet to be disillusioned by assholes and to become assholes themselves. Yet to burn their candle to its natural, or unnatural, end.
I have hope when I see children that something more will become of us. That they will grow up and be better people. Smarter people. People that are more intelligent than emotionally reactive. With real compassion and not that which is contrived. People that don't hate and bicker over meaningless things. That don't hurt animals or other people. That mind their own and aren't prideful, void of all the thinking errors. I hope they fall in love and never have their hearts broke. Or never get into a relationship that feels like work and accept the diabolical lie that all relationships are work. That there is labor in love.
I've never been to Dodger Stadium. This was the first time. I didn't ask for good seats. Quite the opposite. I asked Angel to put me in the upperdeck so that I could view the whole stadium and sit with real fans. This was number 27. The man and woman kissing would make sense later, but for now I was at Dodger's Stadium. I didn't want to sit with those yuppies in club seating. I didn't ask for a playoff game. A game 7 or anything. I asked for a middle of the year game against anyone. She, or whoever it was that arranged it, gave me the Cincinnati Reds, my hometown team. I smiled when I realized it.
"Thank you," I said.
I bought a program when I entered. Got the little pencil and the scorecard to keep score. To know forever what everyone did. What they batted. How many strikeouts there were. Errors. Runs. It is a beautiful game. George Will said it best, though I can't remember what he said.
The evening set in and the warm yet cool air enveloped the stadium. The sky turned from Dodger blue to a purplish color that seemed unique to an LA sky. No smog. The heat was gone. Brush strokes of orange faded to hues of chili pepper red and were lost in that unfurled purple banner, which became of the blue.
The first pitch was tossed out by some actor I never heard of and the seat beside me sat empty. I looked to the aisle as people were coming in, getting situated. And then she appeared. As beautiful as I remembered her. She smiled down at me from the aisle and made her way in, scootching in and by a family of five hispanics to the open seat that waited for her.
"Hello, stranger, " I said, standing to give her a hug. She smelled of olives and lavender. Of martinis and chamomile tea. Her name was Eliyanah. But everyone called her Ellie. I hadn't seen her in ten years.
"Hey! What are you doing out here? What?! Of — I mean — of all the people in the world! Wow! I mean what are the odds?! I go to a game! You go to a game! And we're sitting right beside each other?! Did you move out here?"
She was wearing a Dodger jersey and hat. I had never seen her in a hat before. In fact, I had never seen her outside of an office. Never in anything other than fluorescent lights. Nothing outside of khakis and dress shirts. We had worked some soulless job together once upon a time years ago until she left for something else. Then I left for something else. While we worked together, we were both dating other people. I saw her one other time in passing, in a stairwell, I recall. I spoke to her on Facebook a few times. But our something else's never intersected.
"No. I didn't move out here." I thought carefully of what to say so not to disable my mouth again. "I've been to all the ballparks, but this one. So here I am. Just visiting."
"You've been to LA, right?"
"No," I said. "Never ever."
"What about Riley? You haven't been here with her? For one of those awards things?" she said awkwardly.
"No. Those were all in Vegas."
"Oh," she said. "Makes sense. Sin City."
"Yeah." I smiled meekly. "Sin City."
We sat and watched the game, but caught up as we did. She asked me about Riley and I said, very carefully, that we had broken up. She didn't ask what happened. I was grateful she didn't. How would I explain it. At this very moment I was sure Riley was on the cruise we had booked, still in mourning, being consoled by the cabin boy, the bartender, and the captain of the ship. Maybe all at the same time. I was sure she was on the deck striking the Titanic pose with someone. My vagina must go on.
That it must.
The Reds took an early lead and I cheered. I was wearing a Reds hat that Angel or someone had given me. It was in my bag. Ellie smiled the whole time. The stadium lights glistered in her eyes wondrously. I suppose I never realized how beautiful her eyes were having never looked into them like I did now. Free to do so. I had never been given this opportunity before.
"What a strange coincedence," she went on as the game progressed.
"Perhaps, it's fate," I replied.
She smiled. "I'd like to think so."
The scoreboard is an amazing thing at a ballpark. At any major ballpark it is something to behold. But even stranger to me were the things that played on the screen. Moments of my life that I had nearly forgotten about and cherished. My mother when I was young. She was the most selfless person I've ever known. Little short segments of life that were just everyday moments of love. My little league baseball coach and how patient he was with me when I feared being hit by a pitch. I realized that no one else was seeing those memories besides me. Not even Ellie could see them.
I watched between batters, between innings. I could not cry, though I felt like it at times. I could not show any obvious emotion, but I wanted to. How precious life is when it is over. How much we take for granted and forget. How memorable the book is when the last page is turned and there is nothing left but the feeling of it still tingling in your fingers, in your mind, and in your heart. A book that leaves your soul haunted.
I had asked Angel to allow me to meet Ellie one time. Number 27 was Dodger Stadium, but it was with a caveat. To have one date with her. I knew she had moved to LA from Facebook, and I figured Dodger Stadium was as good a place as any to meet her. I hadn't been to all the other ballparks as I told her, but it was a good story to tell rather than to say that I just wanted to see her — that which I couldn't say.
I had asked Angel to allow me to meet Ellie one time. Number 27 was Dodger Stadium, but it was with a caveat. To have one date with her. I knew she had moved to LA from Facebook, and I figured Dodger Stadium was as good a place as any to meet her. I hadn't been to all the other ballparks as I told her, but it was a good story to tell rather than to say that I just wanted to see her — that which I couldn't say.
They say of a player who played briefly for a team, or who was only briefly in the major leagues, that he had a cup of coffee with so and so. I suppose the euphemism was accurate in my case. This was my cup of coffee in the major leagues. With Ellie.
I could imagine Sandy Koufax on the mound hurling. I could see all the greats who've played here. Willie Mayes in a cloud of dust. All of their ghosts were out there somewhere in iridescent glints in the grass. In the dirt. But it didn't much matter to me anymore. It was suddenly only a game and those were just names and numbers. Even Mickey Mantle didn't matter to me anymore above only a favorite thing from a collection of favorite things. The only thing that mattered to me was the beautiful woman I was sitting with. Who thought it was simply fortuitous. And who I never could tell that I chose to be with on my one day over everything else in the world, of all the other possibilities, she was greater than.
We drank a few beers. Ate a few dogs. The Reds scored five, but the Dodgers narrowed the gap to two runs with a three run sixth. Then during the seventh inning stretch the scoreboard finally stopped playing the highlights of my life, things I'd forgotten on the surface, but was grateful to be reminded of, and they played "A Kiss to Build a Dream On," which was their way of introducing the Kiss Cam, which I thought had gone the way of the dodo.
I had thought this because Riley told me she was responsible for the end of the Kiss Cam in LA when she threw out the first pitch a few years before and stayed for the game. Of course the camera found her and when it did she "entertained" because she was an entertainer, after all. She gave the literal tongue-in-cheek phantom felatio to the delight of every male twelve and older in the crowd.
"Oh, boy," Ellie sighed, laughing. "Surely it will not come this far up. Will it?"
I was lost in Louis Armstrong's voice and trumpet. Of all the things of life I'll miss if I can't take to wherever I am going, surely, he will be one.
"Undoubtedly, it will," I smiled. I knew it wouldn't miss us. How could it miss us? So as it panned over dad's and daughters and old couples and young couples and made the rounds, I prepared myself for the inevitable moment. I slid my arm behind her and watched the screen like a hawk. But then it passed in favor of the organ which introduced us the bottom of the seventh. The stadium voice said in his dry monotone, "Now leading off, Kiki Hernández."
How disappointed I was secretly though I laughed with Ellie as though I wasn't and it was some reprieve. As though it was a stay of execution from embarrassment. But then she turned to me and smiled, "We don't need the Kiss Cam, you know?"
Her eyes were full of that intoxicating light. That perfect and brilliant light. Light I hope to see when this is all over and I'm left with my inevitable fate. Light that I can stare at and feel the peace I do now. I couldn't look away. It was an open invitation, I thought, though maybe I misunderstood. But I kissed her, oblivious to the others around us and unlike I had ever kissed anyone before. I had nothing to lose, after all. There would be no time for regret in the morning, no time for embarrassment.
She fell limp in my arms. It was the feeling of a surrender to an emotional high. A long lost exhaustive desire that sparked long ago and sparked once again. Rekindled in this most magnificent cathedral of settings. The perfection of time, however unnatural it was, was perfect. It certainly didn't feel unnatural like it had been selected from a menu. And I wasn't sure what would happen come tomorrow when my one day ended. What would she know?
But I considered it then. Whatever else might have occured with a few more drinks and a romantic view would not be in the best interest of either of us, considering I was about to check out and she was to remain. She would be rather upset, I was sure, when she found out that I died. But what would she know of it?
Then in my program as we watched the game come to a close, the Dodgers rallying in the bottom of the ninth, I read a passage that explained that very thing, written, surely, because I wondered of it. "This would be a date and time that happened sometime before your death. She will simply remember it as a time you came on a visit to LA and you luckily ran into each other. It will be a fond memory for her — however fond you make it."
And then it was gone. The writing was displaced by a bio of Mookie Betts with a picture of him smiling alongside it. Smiling as though he were looking right at me and knew what I was up to. He had a good smile.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
I shook my head and smiled.
"Your Reds are going to lose," she teased.
"I'm quite used to it," I grinned.
Sure enough, Ohtani smashed a single into right field and the winning run came around from second base. Not even God could help the Reds win, it was apparent. The crowd went wild. Fireworks exploded and she leaned over and kissed me. Passionately. Not in consolation of the game, but while we were in the shadow of everyone else's excitement. In our own world. With all the fervor of the stadium that was full of electric and energy. But it was as though the game didn't matter at all. It truly didn't. It is one of 162 a year. One of 12,312 in the natural course of a lifetime, supposing one lives 76 years. There is always next year until there isn't. That is how life goes.
We walked out together not in a hurry to beat traffic. She didn't drive either and asked if I wanted to split an Uber. She asked me to go somewhere with her before I went back to the hotel she assumed I got. Of course, I agreed. I didn't know how long I had until I looked down at my watch. It was counting down, I realized. I had until exactly 12:00am. I suppose that wasn't quite one day, but I would not complain. Having this opportunity at all was a tremendous blessing. Midnight, it was.
So we got a ride to Chinatown and stopped for some fried rice and lo mein noodles. We ate fortune cookies and she cracked hers open first and read it aloud, "That wasn't chicken."
We chuckled.
Then I read mine, "Chinese no good in Heaven." I smiled, but she frowned.
"Yours wasn't funny, though," she sulked. "The fortunes are always funny here. I don't understand."
"It was funny to me," I replied. Then we drank a bottle of sake.
"You know. I felt an attraction to you all those years ago. When we were stuck up in that office. I would sometimes dream about it. But I am always afraid of the dream being greater than the reality."
"I always knew the reality would be greater than the dream," I replied. "I dreamed of you as well. But as much as I wrote of love and happiness through such relationships, I never sought it. Rather, I avoided it and sought those who I didn't love and who wouldn't ever really love me, despite what we might say to each other. Those lies we tell in bed or going to work in the morning. I was afraid of giving someone my heart. Afraid to be vulnerable. Afraid to be in love. So relationships for me, all my life, were based upon physical attraction and sex. If it was satisfying, they lasted. If not, I found someone else. I have been emotionally detached to everyone I've ever been with all my life."
She looked at me with large empathetic eyes.
"I don't mean to make you into my priest," I laughed, a bit embarrassed.
"Oh, no!" she countered. "I don't feel that way at all. I feel like — I don't know — like you are giving me something I am grateful to receive."
"Good," I said. "Good!" And then I kissed her again. A second kiss that was no less than the first, though it was quicker. It is a strange thing to kiss someone when you think of it. When you really think of it. I couldn't help myself.
Chinatown is something to be seen. From the ornate entry way to the red paper lanterns strung across the street drooping in the middle. The laundry hanging on similar lines. The artistry of the signage. I expected it to be more impoverished-looking like other Chinatowns I've seen in the past, but I suppose the LA Chinese were doing well for themselves. The smell of rice paper and sautéed meats and vegetables was thick in the air. The sounds of ducks and chickens clucking their last clucks and people shouting in Chinese. Things I could not possibly understand. There is never any hope of me understanding Chinese. Even if I was given a hundred more years.
There were kids on rickety bicycles. Rickshaws being pulled by little thin men in sandles and bamboo hats. And fat tourists who sit like royalty making the same Chinese Uber joke, taking selfies. There were opium dens. People lounging, taking drags from hookah hoses. Prostitutes being scolded by old women, whose feet look like turnips. Not a stray cat in sight.
We decided against the rickshaw for pity of the driver. I gave him five dollars for nothing and that smile you give people who carry a burden greater than your own. We got a taxi and drove the rest of the way to our intended destination. The secret place she kept in her back pocket. We finished that bottle of sake on the way and it rolled around on the floorboard.
She looked at me as we drove in back of that Toyota Prius cab. It was getting closer to midnight and I was close to turning into a pumpkin. I looked at my watch and realized I had 32 minutes and 19 seconds left. I was getting nervous and I think Ellie could tell because she reached over and put her hand on my hand and I smiled back at her. My nerves subsided under the warmth of her hand and I knew everything was going to be okay. Moreover, I knew I had made the right decision. I couldn't have had a better goodbye from this Earth.
"30 minutes left and you are already saying goodbye?" The driver said to me in the rear view. He clicked his tongue in shame. Ellie couldn't hear him, I realized. She was frozen. And he confirmed, "She can't hear me, or you right now."
"Things are coming to a close," I reasoned with him. "Is it not natural to draw something to its conclusion when the time comes?"
His scornful fatherly eyes reappeared in the rearview mirror like boiled ostrich eggs. Giant white effulgent orbs in stark contrast to his dark skin.
"Hasn't life taught you not to waste a single minute? What are you doing, man? You got to kiss the girl again."
"I don't want to lead her on, considering I can't stick around."
"No! A last kiss wouldn't be leading her on. It would be the perfect ending," he insisted. "Something for her to keep. A good memory. That is what she wants, and if you don't she will feel you rejected her in some way. You don't want to make her feel that way, do you now?"
"A kiss to build a dream on," I muttered looking at her still face. Her perfect lips. How awe-inspiring she was to me. She had the face of an angel. A face I would not forget.
"Yes! Exactly," he said.
And with that, Ellie came back to life and said, "Driver, let us off here, please."
"Yes, ma'am." The driver pulled over and gave me a reassuring glance as we got out. He refused to take money and said it was on him. I looked up and there was a railway that ascended upwards. Atop it, a sign read "Angel's Flight." It looked old. Like one of those landmarks they restored. I could tell it was from the early-twentieth century.
"It's the shortest train ride in the country," Ellie marveled as we walked up. "Maybe even the whole wide world. It is a funicular that connects Hill Street to Grand Avenue. When I first moved to LA, I had an apartment on Hill St. and I worked in a hotel on Grand Avenue. So I took it often. I thought it was the neatest thing in the world. It saved a lot of steps, and tickets are only a buck."
But as we got closer, she stopped short and looked up with dismay. "Oh, no. It's closed. Rats."
I closed my eyes and said a prayer. An appeal to Heaven. Whoever has authority over such things. And just as I opened them, the door opened and there was Angel, the waitress from the diner where it all began for me. But instead of wearing an apron and a paper hat, she was wearing a maroon railway uniform and smiling. She gave me a reassuring wink.
"We're not closed!" she exclaimed. "We have time for another ride. Going up, love birds?"
Ellie smiled and looked at me.
"Yes," I said. "Going up."
We held hands as we took our seat in the beautiful railcar. We were the only two passengers, of course. Angel smiled and disappeared through a door and was gone, yet again. There was music, faintly at first as though it were only imagined. It puzzled Ellie, who said she didn't recall there being music before. In all her rides up and down, she didn't remember it.
I smiled because of it. Because I knew God was a romantic.
I remembered what the cabbie said and I stood up, taking her hand and pulling her up with me. And we danced to the song that played in the stadium. "Give me what you alone can give. A kiss to build a dream on."
And I kissed her as the lights flickered on and off and the railcar gyrated gently in its ascent, as though it was as excited as I. It was our third kiss that evening. They say writer's like to use the element of three. Three of something. So here it was. A third and final kiss. It was a kiss like no other I've experienced. A passage really to a place I've never been, a feeling I've never felt, and a relief from something that long had burdened me. It was far from a tease, or an empty promise of something that will never be. It was an expression of a gratitude and love that I had never expressed. Sure, I had kissed many women many times over. Done things in the name of love, tenderly or otherwise, voraciously and viciously, even. But this was not that. This was nothing like anyone or anything I ever felt before.
I wondered if it was the last time I would kiss someone. If it were the last time I would hear Louis Armstrong's trumpet or be on a train. Or have lips and stand on two legs in human form, even. I wondered a thousand things all at once and then we were at the top of the hill. Then the railway shifted gears and we went back down again and I stood there and held her, wondering what she would think when I was gone. Hoping she didn't think that it was because I was in someway unsatisfied or unimpressed by her. Would she hear later that I was hit by a milk truck in New York City. Would she come to my funeral?
When we got to the bottom, I looked down at my watch and it was 11:58 and some seconds. She stepped off the railcar and I stayed on. Then she looked back at me as though she knew. As though she had figured it out.
"I'm a bright, girl," she said calmly. "This sort of thing isn't something that just happens. I suppose you have to go?"
"You know?" I asked.
"I think I do," she replied softly. A tear in her eye looked like a diamond. She smiled and wiped her eyes with her fingers and dried her fingers on her pants. "The reality was indeed greater than the dream. However brief it was."
I smiled a smile I've never before.
I told her I had to go. I wanted to tell her that I could have gone anywhere, done anything, but the one thing I wanted to do was to see her. It wasn't about a baseball stadium or a game at all. I wanted to tell her so she would know how incredibly beautiful and loved she was. But she seemed to understand that, as though I had already properly conveyed it. Neither of us cried, well, neither of us sobbed, anyway. There is a way of crying without tears, of laughing without laughter, of making love without making love. We did all that at once.
It was a peaceful goodbye. The doors shut, and the lights went out, and the Angels Flight ascended back up as I watched her in the dark, waving goodbye.
I took a seat and exhaled and Angel came back out and sat with me. She was no longer wearing her railway uniform. She was in a white dress that flowed to her ankles. She had a cup of coffee for me. She handed it to me with a smile.
"The world's greatest cup of coffee?" I asked.
"Yes," she smiled. "Are you okay?"
I nodded. She didn't say anything more to me as I looked out the window and watched Ellie, who was still standing there. Her face growing ever-smaller. I don't know where I was going. What would become of me or my body. If I would turn into a vesselless soul, vapor, or some sort of gas. But I was sure, for whatever reason, that when we reached Hill Street and those doors opened, I would not be what I was now. Nor would it be Hill Street that waited. Though, regardless of anything, I knew I would never forget her. And maybe, someday, I will be at a train station, somewhere, waiting for her.
I could imagine Sandy Koufax on the mound hurling. I could see all the greats who've played here. Willie Mayes in a cloud of dust. All of their ghosts were out there somewhere in iridescent glints in the grass. In the dirt. But it didn't much matter to me anymore. It was suddenly only a game and those were just names and numbers. Even Mickey Mantle didn't matter to me anymore above only a favorite thing from a collection of favorite things. The only thing that mattered to me was the beautiful woman I was sitting with. Who thought it was simply fortuitous. And who I never could tell that I chose to be with on my one day over everything else in the world, of all the other possibilities, she was greater than.
We drank a few beers. Ate a few dogs. The Reds scored five, but the Dodgers narrowed the gap to two runs with a three run sixth. Then during the seventh inning stretch the scoreboard finally stopped playing the highlights of my life, things I'd forgotten on the surface, but was grateful to be reminded of, and they played "A Kiss to Build a Dream On," which was their way of introducing the Kiss Cam, which I thought had gone the way of the dodo.
I had thought this because Riley told me she was responsible for the end of the Kiss Cam in LA when she threw out the first pitch a few years before and stayed for the game. Of course the camera found her and when it did she "entertained" because she was an entertainer, after all. She gave the literal tongue-in-cheek phantom felatio to the delight of every male twelve and older in the crowd.
"Oh, boy," Ellie sighed, laughing. "Surely it will not come this far up. Will it?"
I was lost in Louis Armstrong's voice and trumpet. Of all the things of life I'll miss if I can't take to wherever I am going, surely, he will be one.
"Undoubtedly, it will," I smiled. I knew it wouldn't miss us. How could it miss us? So as it panned over dad's and daughters and old couples and young couples and made the rounds, I prepared myself for the inevitable moment. I slid my arm behind her and watched the screen like a hawk. But then it passed in favor of the organ which introduced us the bottom of the seventh. The stadium voice said in his dry monotone, "Now leading off, Kiki Hernández."
How disappointed I was secretly though I laughed with Ellie as though I wasn't and it was some reprieve. As though it was a stay of execution from embarrassment. But then she turned to me and smiled, "We don't need the Kiss Cam, you know?"
Her eyes were full of that intoxicating light. That perfect and brilliant light. Light I hope to see when this is all over and I'm left with my inevitable fate. Light that I can stare at and feel the peace I do now. I couldn't look away. It was an open invitation, I thought, though maybe I misunderstood. But I kissed her, oblivious to the others around us and unlike I had ever kissed anyone before. I had nothing to lose, after all. There would be no time for regret in the morning, no time for embarrassment.
She fell limp in my arms. It was the feeling of a surrender to an emotional high. A long lost exhaustive desire that sparked long ago and sparked once again. Rekindled in this most magnificent cathedral of settings. The perfection of time, however unnatural it was, was perfect. It certainly didn't feel unnatural like it had been selected from a menu. And I wasn't sure what would happen come tomorrow when my one day ended. What would she know?
But I considered it then. Whatever else might have occured with a few more drinks and a romantic view would not be in the best interest of either of us, considering I was about to check out and she was to remain. She would be rather upset, I was sure, when she found out that I died. But what would she know of it?
Then in my program as we watched the game come to a close, the Dodgers rallying in the bottom of the ninth, I read a passage that explained that very thing, written, surely, because I wondered of it. "This would be a date and time that happened sometime before your death. She will simply remember it as a time you came on a visit to LA and you luckily ran into each other. It will be a fond memory for her — however fond you make it."
And then it was gone. The writing was displaced by a bio of Mookie Betts with a picture of him smiling alongside it. Smiling as though he were looking right at me and knew what I was up to. He had a good smile.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
I shook my head and smiled.
"Your Reds are going to lose," she teased.
"I'm quite used to it," I grinned.
Sure enough, Ohtani smashed a single into right field and the winning run came around from second base. Not even God could help the Reds win, it was apparent. The crowd went wild. Fireworks exploded and she leaned over and kissed me. Passionately. Not in consolation of the game, but while we were in the shadow of everyone else's excitement. In our own world. With all the fervor of the stadium that was full of electric and energy. But it was as though the game didn't matter at all. It truly didn't. It is one of 162 a year. One of 12,312 in the natural course of a lifetime, supposing one lives 76 years. There is always next year until there isn't. That is how life goes.
We walked out together not in a hurry to beat traffic. She didn't drive either and asked if I wanted to split an Uber. She asked me to go somewhere with her before I went back to the hotel she assumed I got. Of course, I agreed. I didn't know how long I had until I looked down at my watch. It was counting down, I realized. I had until exactly 12:00am. I suppose that wasn't quite one day, but I would not complain. Having this opportunity at all was a tremendous blessing. Midnight, it was.
So we got a ride to Chinatown and stopped for some fried rice and lo mein noodles. We ate fortune cookies and she cracked hers open first and read it aloud, "That wasn't chicken."
We chuckled.
Then I read mine, "Chinese no good in Heaven." I smiled, but she frowned.
"Yours wasn't funny, though," she sulked. "The fortunes are always funny here. I don't understand."
"It was funny to me," I replied. Then we drank a bottle of sake.
"You know. I felt an attraction to you all those years ago. When we were stuck up in that office. I would sometimes dream about it. But I am always afraid of the dream being greater than the reality."
"I always knew the reality would be greater than the dream," I replied. "I dreamed of you as well. But as much as I wrote of love and happiness through such relationships, I never sought it. Rather, I avoided it and sought those who I didn't love and who wouldn't ever really love me, despite what we might say to each other. Those lies we tell in bed or going to work in the morning. I was afraid of giving someone my heart. Afraid to be vulnerable. Afraid to be in love. So relationships for me, all my life, were based upon physical attraction and sex. If it was satisfying, they lasted. If not, I found someone else. I have been emotionally detached to everyone I've ever been with all my life."
She looked at me with large empathetic eyes.
"I don't mean to make you into my priest," I laughed, a bit embarrassed.
"Oh, no!" she countered. "I don't feel that way at all. I feel like — I don't know — like you are giving me something I am grateful to receive."
"Good," I said. "Good!" And then I kissed her again. A second kiss that was no less than the first, though it was quicker. It is a strange thing to kiss someone when you think of it. When you really think of it. I couldn't help myself.
Chinatown is something to be seen. From the ornate entry way to the red paper lanterns strung across the street drooping in the middle. The laundry hanging on similar lines. The artistry of the signage. I expected it to be more impoverished-looking like other Chinatowns I've seen in the past, but I suppose the LA Chinese were doing well for themselves. The smell of rice paper and sautéed meats and vegetables was thick in the air. The sounds of ducks and chickens clucking their last clucks and people shouting in Chinese. Things I could not possibly understand. There is never any hope of me understanding Chinese. Even if I was given a hundred more years.
There were kids on rickety bicycles. Rickshaws being pulled by little thin men in sandles and bamboo hats. And fat tourists who sit like royalty making the same Chinese Uber joke, taking selfies. There were opium dens. People lounging, taking drags from hookah hoses. Prostitutes being scolded by old women, whose feet look like turnips. Not a stray cat in sight.
We decided against the rickshaw for pity of the driver. I gave him five dollars for nothing and that smile you give people who carry a burden greater than your own. We got a taxi and drove the rest of the way to our intended destination. The secret place she kept in her back pocket. We finished that bottle of sake on the way and it rolled around on the floorboard.
She looked at me as we drove in back of that Toyota Prius cab. It was getting closer to midnight and I was close to turning into a pumpkin. I looked at my watch and realized I had 32 minutes and 19 seconds left. I was getting nervous and I think Ellie could tell because she reached over and put her hand on my hand and I smiled back at her. My nerves subsided under the warmth of her hand and I knew everything was going to be okay. Moreover, I knew I had made the right decision. I couldn't have had a better goodbye from this Earth.
"30 minutes left and you are already saying goodbye?" The driver said to me in the rear view. He clicked his tongue in shame. Ellie couldn't hear him, I realized. She was frozen. And he confirmed, "She can't hear me, or you right now."
"Things are coming to a close," I reasoned with him. "Is it not natural to draw something to its conclusion when the time comes?"
His scornful fatherly eyes reappeared in the rearview mirror like boiled ostrich eggs. Giant white effulgent orbs in stark contrast to his dark skin.
"Hasn't life taught you not to waste a single minute? What are you doing, man? You got to kiss the girl again."
"I don't want to lead her on, considering I can't stick around."
"No! A last kiss wouldn't be leading her on. It would be the perfect ending," he insisted. "Something for her to keep. A good memory. That is what she wants, and if you don't she will feel you rejected her in some way. You don't want to make her feel that way, do you now?"
"A kiss to build a dream on," I muttered looking at her still face. Her perfect lips. How awe-inspiring she was to me. She had the face of an angel. A face I would not forget.
"Yes! Exactly," he said.
And with that, Ellie came back to life and said, "Driver, let us off here, please."
"Yes, ma'am." The driver pulled over and gave me a reassuring glance as we got out. He refused to take money and said it was on him. I looked up and there was a railway that ascended upwards. Atop it, a sign read "Angel's Flight." It looked old. Like one of those landmarks they restored. I could tell it was from the early-twentieth century.
"It's the shortest train ride in the country," Ellie marveled as we walked up. "Maybe even the whole wide world. It is a funicular that connects Hill Street to Grand Avenue. When I first moved to LA, I had an apartment on Hill St. and I worked in a hotel on Grand Avenue. So I took it often. I thought it was the neatest thing in the world. It saved a lot of steps, and tickets are only a buck."
But as we got closer, she stopped short and looked up with dismay. "Oh, no. It's closed. Rats."
I closed my eyes and said a prayer. An appeal to Heaven. Whoever has authority over such things. And just as I opened them, the door opened and there was Angel, the waitress from the diner where it all began for me. But instead of wearing an apron and a paper hat, she was wearing a maroon railway uniform and smiling. She gave me a reassuring wink.
"We're not closed!" she exclaimed. "We have time for another ride. Going up, love birds?"
Ellie smiled and looked at me.
"Yes," I said. "Going up."
We held hands as we took our seat in the beautiful railcar. We were the only two passengers, of course. Angel smiled and disappeared through a door and was gone, yet again. There was music, faintly at first as though it were only imagined. It puzzled Ellie, who said she didn't recall there being music before. In all her rides up and down, she didn't remember it.
I smiled because of it. Because I knew God was a romantic.
I remembered what the cabbie said and I stood up, taking her hand and pulling her up with me. And we danced to the song that played in the stadium. "Give me what you alone can give. A kiss to build a dream on."
And I kissed her as the lights flickered on and off and the railcar gyrated gently in its ascent, as though it was as excited as I. It was our third kiss that evening. They say writer's like to use the element of three. Three of something. So here it was. A third and final kiss. It was a kiss like no other I've experienced. A passage really to a place I've never been, a feeling I've never felt, and a relief from something that long had burdened me. It was far from a tease, or an empty promise of something that will never be. It was an expression of a gratitude and love that I had never expressed. Sure, I had kissed many women many times over. Done things in the name of love, tenderly or otherwise, voraciously and viciously, even. But this was not that. This was nothing like anyone or anything I ever felt before.
I wondered if it was the last time I would kiss someone. If it were the last time I would hear Louis Armstrong's trumpet or be on a train. Or have lips and stand on two legs in human form, even. I wondered a thousand things all at once and then we were at the top of the hill. Then the railway shifted gears and we went back down again and I stood there and held her, wondering what she would think when I was gone. Hoping she didn't think that it was because I was in someway unsatisfied or unimpressed by her. Would she hear later that I was hit by a milk truck in New York City. Would she come to my funeral?
When we got to the bottom, I looked down at my watch and it was 11:58 and some seconds. She stepped off the railcar and I stayed on. Then she looked back at me as though she knew. As though she had figured it out.
"I'm a bright, girl," she said calmly. "This sort of thing isn't something that just happens. I suppose you have to go?"
"You know?" I asked.
"I think I do," she replied softly. A tear in her eye looked like a diamond. She smiled and wiped her eyes with her fingers and dried her fingers on her pants. "The reality was indeed greater than the dream. However brief it was."
I smiled a smile I've never before.
I told her I had to go. I wanted to tell her that I could have gone anywhere, done anything, but the one thing I wanted to do was to see her. It wasn't about a baseball stadium or a game at all. I wanted to tell her so she would know how incredibly beautiful and loved she was. But she seemed to understand that, as though I had already properly conveyed it. Neither of us cried, well, neither of us sobbed, anyway. There is a way of crying without tears, of laughing without laughter, of making love without making love. We did all that at once.
It was a peaceful goodbye. The doors shut, and the lights went out, and the Angels Flight ascended back up as I watched her in the dark, waving goodbye.
I took a seat and exhaled and Angel came back out and sat with me. She was no longer wearing her railway uniform. She was in a white dress that flowed to her ankles. She had a cup of coffee for me. She handed it to me with a smile.
"The world's greatest cup of coffee?" I asked.
"Yes," she smiled. "Are you okay?"
I nodded. She didn't say anything more to me as I looked out the window and watched Ellie, who was still standing there. Her face growing ever-smaller. I don't know where I was going. What would become of me or my body. If I would turn into a vesselless soul, vapor, or some sort of gas. But I was sure, for whatever reason, that when we reached Hill Street and those doors opened, I would not be what I was now. Nor would it be Hill Street that waited. Though, regardless of anything, I knew I would never forget her. And maybe, someday, I will be at a train station, somewhere, waiting for her.
Comments
Post a Comment