Tag: short-story

A wink at the intersection

by Connor M, posted in City, People, Philosophical woo

Bringgg, bringgg, on the cot beside me. Like a little bird trapped in the sheets. A banner across the top of my phone “Malaria Meds”.

She looked up briefly, disinterested, professional, and carried on.

I giggled, only I knew the absurdity.

A little intersection of two parts of my brain, high-fiving in the red-light district alley. The horny, fresh haircut traveler finally giving in and the recreational germaphobe fresh from exploring un-sanitized regions of the world.

I’d gotten all my shots before Africa. Typhoid, Diphtheria-Tetanus, give me a lollipop. Careful with malaria, take Malarone daily, and seven days after you leave. I was by then several days past that window.

She keeps going, I look around the room at the low lights, feel the heavily scented air. Fiddle with the phone volume briefly.

Health abroad is one of my forever vigilances. The first mis-timed sneeze and I’m at the corner pharmacy. Paying a grinning doctor way too much to give me a Z-pac and send me back to the dusty streets.

Bringg, Bringgg. I grab the phone, finally silence it. Exhale.

She looks up at me, “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you finish.” Maybe she thought it was my wife? Or the cosmos was randomly chiming in to wrap up this unsavory encounter?

I had strolled the Red-Light district a few times, a couple 50 euro notes burning holes in my pocket. Got back to the train car hostel, pop my pill, wondering when I was going to slip behind a curtain.

The two currents weaving through each other, health freak, horny guy, shadow selves in the forest. Never noticing each other until they were face to face.

Oh hey. They shake hands. My Id family reunion at the brothel.

We’re always at the intersection of some neuroses, fantasies, laundry.

Adrift in a Pacific garbage patch of junk food and overstimulation, or riding a swift current trying to keep a newborn alive, ignoring every other force for the moment.

The more you push one down the weirder places they pop up.

I’d googled all the rigorous health protocols that prostitutes undergo there, felt reassured. I made some loops, found different alleys.

The red glints on the cobblestones, foggy air, laughs of the high British tourists stumbling around with Heinekens. Churches from 1640, austere, having to look down at the oldest human desires they couldn’t wash away.

Eventually, I caught the eye of the most animated lady: big fake tits, easy smile and laugh, warm eyes. I felt like she cared. Rapport matters, in any business.

I walked in and she closed the curtain, triaged me like a field medic. Faint conversations of passersby in the alley.

“It’s more to touch,” she said, watching my eyes drift.

Now the phone reminder’s off, but the alarm echoed in my head.

I didn’t have a reminder that told me to go to a bar and try to chat up a cute traveler, or one in the busy hostel.

No alarm that said chill the fuck out you’re not going to get malaria 2 weeks after from a mosquito that got stuck in your carry-on.

Just these stale pathways rooted in me, twisted by loneliness, travel fatigue, adrift with my own paranoias, crossing paths.

What current pulls you? How many secrets up your sleeve don’t make it past the grocery line conversation.

Get a note that grandma is in the hospital while you’re chuffing up a mountain feeling alive.

Think you’re writing a novel in a coffee shop but you’re really just aura flirting with the girl in yoga pants. Wallowing in self-pity at a drive thru when the cashier with the Chia Pet hairline asks how your day is, and you stop to actually take a look.

Riding one wave until another knocks you back to center.

Horny/hypochondria. Odd bedfellows. They briefly winked at each other as I sat in that brothel. You realize how absurd you are right, Guy? See you soon.

Choose your American Dream

by Connor M, posted in People, Philosophical woo

It’s 9:58 pm Saturday night at a restaurant in downtown Nashville. The restaurant closes at 10:00 pm. A couple walks in wearing Savannah Bananas gear (the comedy baseball team). The lady is a tiny pixie haired shrew, and the man looks somewhere in the middle of Jabba the Hut and the Mucinex man. His poor knees buckle as he shuffles his belly to sit like a pregnant mother. I, the waiter, run over and tell them the kitchen closes in 2 minutes, so we’ll need to get their order as soon as possible.

This brings the dirtiest look I’ve ever seen from the man who complains to my manager he’s being rushed. She offers a free dessert and an eye roll when she walks away.

Instead of getting ready to close, the servers groan as the man settles in, drinking his sprite with diabetic fingers and a knowing grin.

Meanwhile, in the open-air kitchen 30 feet away from sloth and gluttony another drama is unfolding. There have been recent Immigration raids in the area, ICE is stopping foreign looking people at random and asking for papers. There had been 100 arrests, many already on the road to deportation. Panic is setting in amongst the undocumented kitchen staff.

This had been escalating for a few days. They’d been carpooling with white people, sneaking in through back doors. South Nashville (majority Latino) was a ghost town. All the recreational spaces were shut down, no more football, dance clubs, pop up celebrations. Just eerie silence and waiting. Word reached us that ICE was two streets away doing stops.

In the back of the kitchen was a mother and her son, a middle-aged woman from Guatemala, and 3 cooks in their 20’s, all with families. The sous chef paces back and forth to the front window looking out at any passing police cars. His eyes are welling with tears but he’s holding them back. A stoic leader is vital right now.

You can feel the silent terror just sitting on them like a blanket. They’ll be ready to run out the back door any minute. These people are working 14-hour days, living with 6 others in a house. The chef hasn’t seen his family from home in ten years. They risked their lives to get here to just scrape by and sacrifice so their kids might have a chance.

Out front, Jabba is eating his pizza thoughtfully. He considers the crust, shuffles his gut forward, asks for more ice and another sprite please. His casual tone broadcasting his inalienable right to comfort and relaxation. He side-eyes the chef when he comes up to look out the window. They’re the last table in an empty restaurant, still ordering food.

The front of house is standing there with eye daggers pointed at him.

The man had come from a comedy baseball game, the purest American form of leisure and absurdity. He came in entitled and ready to sit for as long as his bloated legs would hold him, savoring the opportunity to punish us for rushing him.

The 14-year-old dishwasher in the back, weighing all of 90 pounds is eating scraps, checking his mom’s phone. It took weeks for him to make eye contact, just the occasional wry smile. His worst fears were confirmed when his cousin was arrested last week. He and his mom took a few days to hide in their house. Now they can’t leave with customers here, can’t go outside while police lights blaze across the windows.

The Irony of the American dream playing out with vivid contrast. An entitled beast coming from a baseball game, not a care in the world. Eating himself to death because he’s allowed. A kitchen full of people working 60-hour weeks for minimum wage, clinging to each other in fear they’ll have their life swept away any moment.

Labored breath from both parties, 30 feet away from each other. Ask them what they think they deserve?

Gravity Shifts and Grocery Stores

by Connor M, posted in People, Philosophical woo, Uncategorized

Kroger grocery store midday on a Tuesday. Winter still around in Nashville, you feel it most in the parking lot. The people who normally stroll through the parking lot like kings on parade are actually putting up a brisk pace. Trash tumbleweed and cold cigarette smoke hit you right before the sliding doors open. I started hearing a child shrieking behind me.

It’s the nervous high-pitched yelps a child might make on Christmas, mixed with some anxiety. It immediately sours my mood as I walk in the warm lobby. Why didn’t I hear a soothing mother’s voice hushing him? I head to the carrots, perturbed.

“Ah… Ahh Ah!” Little rapid fire blurts, then silence. They follow in behind me. Now it can be heard in the whole store. I turn around to see a little kid sitting in a cart. He can’t be more than 3 or 4, swinging legs dangling through the holes. His mother is overweight, looks like they’re struggling a bit, but she has a huge smile on her face. You can tell undefeatable energy when you see it. “AH, ahh”.. he bleats on.

She stands next to a man near the entrance. They’re beaming at each other for a moment, and she rapidly moves her hands to start talking in sign language. He nods and signs back.

They carry on, with the little child smoke alarm still going off. People skirt around them, confused. The two are locked in, their faces and hands show two friends catching up at a coffee shop. The child continues. I stood by the produce and watched for a beat too long.

 I’m a sensitive person, I will fully admit I suffer more from sounds, textures, and spatially and spiritually unaware people than others do. This odd little family juxtaposition entertained and annoyed me. I wonder what everyone else briskly moving by thought.

Does the mother know or simply not care? Is this child responding to never speaking out loud with anyone by just yelling out? Is this the rhino and the little bird on the savanna living in symbiosis to help each other? God smiled on this Deaf mother and her Siren son pairing.

Her warm, unconcerned smile could be a rare time he sees that reaction, this pairing couldn’t be out of randomness. The cosmic balance walking around Kroger looking at bananas.

We all go about our lives tumbling and yelling and butting heads or melding in with others, circling in orbit hoping to find our gravitation counterpoint. The romantic in me hopes I can find this partner by luck or action, the calm deaf person to my wailing boy. The antidote to occasional genius or madness with a warm, calm demeanor.

Meanwhile I’m strolling through Kroger head down, working, going to the gym. No drastic bends to the fabric of normality, trying to present as cool and collected.

Maybe I have to get so hot and uncomfortable that I let the steam out at the grocery store, or Twitter? I plow forward with everything on my sleeve. Everybody is broadcasting something; has some frequency that can complement and balance another. The mother and son some odd reminder that maybe there is a point to it. I try to pick up alterations in the daily life, later that day on the same busy road I saw another kind of shift.

Coffee Shop

That afternoon at the coffee shop. Homeless and drunks and hipsters all working away at something. It’s a place of quiet conversations and politeness, political correctness and funky couches that have their own Instagram account. I saw another glitch. A homeless lady walked into shop slamming the door behind her. She ignored every hello; how can I help you?

I looked up to see her, huge backpack slouching off the shoulder, burnt from head to toe and layered in heavy coats. She went to the counter, grabbed the bathroom key and strolled to the back to lock herself in. Some murmurs from the workers, a subtle smile to each other.

After a couple minutes, as simply as she came in, she walked out of the bathroom with the key, again ignoring the barista calling after her. This time all eyes left their bible studies group and almond lattes to follow her on her march. Like the aforementioned kings of the parking lot, she strolled right past everyone. “Ma’am!” She swung open the front door, stepped off the curb and onto the busy street. The barista charged after. He intercepted her as she was about to Frogger her way through traffic.

She was unaware of every person, custom, traffic law. She said nothing but had everyone’s attention for that brief period. We all sat in brief discomfort of her signal, slapped physically and olfactorily.

There was nobody there to offset her heavy presence, but she could have been on her way to meet her counterpoint on the other side of the road. She could be bulldozing normality and serving looks to wake us up from our mundane discomforts. Eventually she’ll run into traffic or a life changing opportunity.

Or do you just go down the middle and not need the balance? Be palatable. Work, drink, weather, football, complaints and aspirations that won’t turn any heads in the grocery store.

There’s people at grocery stores and coffee shops and street corners who are heavy walking billboards of harsh truths. Autistic infants, patient mothers, homeless women plowing into traffic. We’ll scramble to avoid looking at ugly realities.

The more fortunate polish their billboard every day, online and in real life. Annoyed by the yelling infant, buying craft beer, curating the same sheen in mind, body, and status.

The harsher your truth the more drastic the balance.

I have to figure out where my weight goes. All the dogshit humanity beneath my Republican haircut wants to breathe. It’ll pull and repel rather than just cling to a false self-image. I’m not an algorithm, despite how much optimization seems to build your prestige.

My ideas or sadness or joy will only matter if seen unfiltered.  When I walk into a room with only the weight of my presence and not my baggage, I’ll find a genuine conversation. Be the squealing infant when you need to say it, rather than burying it with dopamine hits. Grab the key and walk into traffic instead of pruning your eyebrows. No more diet coke friendships that feel good on the surface and make you sick. No more hiding the dark, let the light find it.