Girl Peeled Off A Cigar Box

I was waiting in an empty bar to meet a Cuban for the first time over here yesterday. There might be two in the whole city. I had to meet one. I figured he'd be easy enough to spot: fourteen layers of clothing and shivering in pretty mild weather.

Some sunlight splashed through the windows into the bar, hanging in the air like suspended lemon-aid. The waitress kept calling me "sugar" out of spite because I'd ordered a bottle of wine and been drinking it out of the bottle like a schmuck. When I'm meeting someone for the first time---and it doesn't matter who it is---I get nervous and have to improvise with something goofy. Snatch a wheel chair at the arrivals section of the airport or steal the girls driver's license and keep it in my pocket over the course of dinner and slip it back into her bag before the night's over. You don't even have to tell her. Maybe it goes well and from whatever she's told you about herself somehow you know a little less. To get even you ask to read her palm as an excuse to touch her hand and tell her something's been missing and she plays along and asks what and you cough over the plastic to see how she responds.

For a long time I'd had some plans to meet a different Cuban over here, the one who really did look like a girl peeled off a cigar box. She was just my exact, perfect type: WAY out of my league.

For someone whose gone back and forth to Cuba for the last 10 years, I've only kissed one girl from there and it wasn't even on her home soil. Any filthy tourist will tell you, it's not shooting fish in a barrel over there, it's LOOKING at fish in a barrel. Which is not to say it's ALL economics either. Girls over there aren't doing their best emotional interpretation of a casino over there the way they do over here. They're deviously innocent in the same way all the best, most liked kids books by kids are the same ones most banned by adults and teachers. It never happened for me. I didn't have the guts to accept an offer without anything being said.

I was trying to come up with a way to account for this. Not for myself. I like the idea of being a few cards short of a full deck whenever I feel like playing solitaire. I wanted to have some explanation for the guy meeting me in that bar. Most Cuban men would fuck a lamppost. It's about the only thing in existence they're not philosophical about.

So what the hell are you gonna say then?

You could try something a little clumsy like: Reality is for people who can't handle their dreams and dreams are for people who can't handle reality.

Yeah, but chances are he's sat through about forty-thousand hours of Castro speeches over the course of his childhood and not all that interested in yours.

You could tell him about that first day you had in Havana stumbling onto a fruit stand on Calle Neptuno surrounded by pretty girls and getting this strange craving for papaya and asking if they had any and all eyes at once burning you to a crisp since "papaya" in Cuban is slang for pussy. And the fruit stand guy laughing his ass off because he was the only one who knew you didn't know.

Nah. He's going to want to know about that other girl you met over there. The one who lives in Playa in Havana. The one he probably fucked and just for amusement wants to see if you did too. If you talk about her you're going to have to explain about the other one peeled off the cigar box. This isn't someone to discuss her with. Because all he's going to do is tell you how many men she's slept with just to make all her men jealous since this is the Cubana's unofficial national sport and, what's worse, you're knowledge of her is going to confirm the stereotype. And be honest, partly that sorta stuff made you fall for her---they only keep a secret if everyone already knows.

So distract him.

Get him talking about the city. Boxing or baseball. Tony Montana. Or those chilling pet cemetery animals wandering down the alleys and scavenging for left-overs at restaurants. Get him talking about the tourist blonds famous for being warm at night and amnesiacs in the daylight. Get him going about the pickpockets. All those crews of Artful Dodgers working on the street with others up on the rooftops following the action next to all those wonky TV antennas piled on there like prehistoric discarded toothpicks. Or his family. The generational stuff. Something cute like the Guarapo stands all over the place with the stout women who grab a stock of sugar cane and take a run at lancing it into the cogs of a giant clunky machine that resembles the inside of a clock and produces this juice that the slaves used to drink and that everybody, of all ages, no matter who the surrounding company, sweetly encourages *you* to drink should you ever find yourself climbing over a girl.

That girl peeled off a cigar box is visiting a dad she didn't know she had, and the rest of his family too. And for a month you talked to her on the phone every night and the subject to be avoided was her more and more likely pregnancy back in that hotel room. After she (and her mother, for that matter) didn't believe that you went a couple months waiting for her in Havana and she never showed up so you flew back to see her and piled the sheets from the bed in the corner so the Russian maid could collect them because you were pretty sure she hadn't waited for you and it only took another four or five months to have her confirm it even though she lied through her teeth denying it in that hotel room. But somehow it didn't make a difference either way and you didn't even bother to pretend that it did. She was pregnant for real soon enough and not by you. But you got to have the four-hour post abortion phone call until you got her smiling again enough to sing something the way she used to. Some old song she used to listen to a million times on a record player when she was a kid. And even though it'd been hanging there for the whole conversation she asked anyway, "Are joo really in loov weeth la Nuevo York Chinita? Weeth a Chai-neez woo-mahn?"

He knocked on the window in fourteen layers of clothing and shades slapping the glass at me, "OYE! Brinicio, here we go... "

Valentine

She bought a one-way plane ticket over here around midnight. She bought it on the same week, same day, same *hour* that a couple, same age as us---who it turns out might've got engaged the same day--- got smoked by an SUV that blew through a crosswalk.

The 18 year old drunken kid behind the wheel had stolen the SUV and brought along two younger girls in the back seat. Maybe he was trying to impress them by driving fast. I dunno. I do know that after killing that couple, he ran off and tried to swim across the icy-cold inlet to the opposite shore but a police dog nabbed him before he could get away.

Yesterday I went over to where that couple died. There was a little shrine against one side of a tunnel underneath a bridge.

There were some people milling around trying to find the spot because the story had been front page in the newspapers. They were giddy and confused but also ready to be upset. There are a few crosswalks to choose from pretty close by. The actual location is a bit tucked away. I was alone for a minute and lit up a cigarette after I found a poem by Rilke taped onto the wall of the tunnel and in no time a throng of other tourists piled in.

On Hearing of A Death

We lack all knowledge of this parting. Death
does not deal with us. We have no reason
to show death admiration, love or hate;
his mask of feigned tragic lament gives us

a false impression. The world's stage is still
filled with roles which we play. While we worry
that our performances may not please,
death also performs, although to no applause.

But as you left us, there broke upon this stage
a glimpse of reality, shown through the slight
opening through which you disappeared: green,
evergreen, bathed in sunlight, actual woods.

We keep on playing, still anxious, our difficult roles
declaiming, accompanied by matching gestures
as required. But your presence so suddenly
removed from our midst and from our play, at times

overcomes us like a sense of that other
reality: yours, that we are so overwhelmed
and play our actual lives instead of the performance,
forgetting altogether the applause.

Other people poking around to find the spot saw us and came over. It was them looking for it with a combination of disorientation and slight panic that reminded me of something I've never written about or really talked about either. I mean, what that crosswalk and my girlfriend's one-way plane ticket have in common I'm not too sure. A lot of it is a big emphasis on a *beginning*, a start, a first page, first sight, taking a chance.

Five years ago I took a girl to Madrid and we arrived the day after the bombing of the Atocha train station. It's not Grand Central or Penn Station, but it's an awfully nice place to see and has its own charm. I had a reservation for us at a little pension about 4 blocks from the blast. I'd picked that pension because it was sandwiched between the train station and the Prado. I boxed in Madrid daily and had to pass through Atocha every day to get there and on the way back I'd meet up with Jackie and we'd see El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Salvador Dalí at the Prado or the Reina Sofia where little boys and girls demonstrate some of the differences between boys and girls with their approach to dealing with pigeons (girls nice, boys evil).

After the horror of the explosion, one of the most bizarre, disturbing things before the ambulances got there was the lack of silence. Hundreds of dinky melodies rang out and clashed for hours that everyone was afraid to deal with. Imagine a decked out Christmas tree except that every ornament is a cellphone: that's how Atocha chimed from all corners as families desperately tried to see if their loved ones were unlucky.

I get spooked when somebody dies meaninglessly. I guess that's why I was a little comforted when more and more details came out about that pair who died at the crosswalk. They felt like supposition to sell papers but still, it was obscenely difficult not to wonder:

She'd found out about the ring but kept it from him to not spoil the surprise. Did he pop the question at dinner that night? Her friends said she'd been looking through bridal magazines. What'd they talk about at dinner? Did they ever talk about how they'd want to die? Did he not leave a very good tip and she suddenly took in, FUCK, I'M GONNA MARRY A CHEAPSKATE! Maybe she even told him as a joke. Did they ever wonder about the possibility of dying at the same time at a happy moment in their lives and sorta hanging up their lives for everyone they cared about on the peg of never spending another moment apart. How violently beautiful is that? Boy, hit-and-run---who'd see that one coming? Probably nobody who knew them. Maybe those two little girls in the back seat for about a split second.

I was so happy when my girl bought a ticket over here to start a life with me I just stared at the confirmation for 20 minutes without it really sinking in. I never said so, but I felt like we had some stacked odds working against us. This long distance thing for the last year is rotten stuff. Penpals with the odd bi-monthly conjugal visit isn't much of a dream situation. And it's clumsy to admit I wouldn't have remembered the day she bought that ticket without what happened to this couple who never get any tomorrows together in the way I hopefully will. Maybe one day some little brat will ask me about when mommy first came over here and even though I'll lie through my teeth and talk about my seven failed Russian mail-order bride-marriages before I'm slapped by anyone within earshot (and they'll hit hard); it was February 10th, on a *choose*day, we both slipped on some kind of banana peel taking a crack on something and I wouldn't have known or especially cared if it weren't for some piece of shit kid who plowed into them. Not fate, just someone who'll have to do or accomplish god knows what to have anything other than this senseless act define him for the rest of his life. Some punk with a chip on his shoulder trades it in for a fucking millstone.

See why I sent this to you and not her?

Straight, No Chaser

Double-whammy, the curse of bumping into Swimming Pool Girl again and an hour later sailing over the handlebars of my bike like a fucking human crossbow onto a busy street landing on my thumb. Permanently eliminating my prospects for a southpaw career in hitchhiking...

Out of the corner of my eye I saw her antique bike leaning against a parking meter. I'd never seen that bike before but I knew it was hers. The shark infested turquoise color of her bike matched the color of her eyes. I looked inside the window of the cafe:

She was darting around the joint like a video game fairy delivering little 10am potions to cure hangovers. Swimming Pool Girl always reminds me I need to write a story about a cat-burglar who tries to rob someone and ends up falling in love with who lives there. Swimming Pool Girl is a 110-pound feminine powder keg for writer's block. Ten seconds inside the door---five years since I last saw her---she mentions she's been constipated for the last five days. Nearly reason enough, she says, to take back up smoking.

I don't do well recovering from this information.

Swimming Pool Girl introduced me to Edith Piaf. Just as she's putting on the record, still wearing little gloves inexplicably: "You'll like her Brinny; she fell hard for a boxer."

She's very sneaky. Whatever you tell her about yourself she eats with the dirty utensils of her soul and it contaminates you. You start noticing stuff you don't want to notice. Rooms are a little hotter around her. Food tastes better. How can it be justified to spend a couple hours with a strange new girl inspecting and judging the merits of every set of revolving doors you can find downtown? But you do. And besides banging complete strangers and recounting it for your prurient obsessed pleasure, she's amassed an intimidating reading list. Oh yeah, and she can guess yours. And Brando sticking that wad of gum under the railing just before he died in Last Tango In Paris was her favorite thing she's ever seen too. Then she'll quote it:

"Torture the children until they tell their first lie."

Everyone who stares at her qualifies as prey. Her eyes always need more names on their mailing list for postcards. From a distance it looks like a holiday destination but when you get up close, all she is is a poisonous oasis. She has something I can't put my finger on, it's more greasy than slippery, but the closest I can get is that comparing her to other girls you've instantly wanted to fuck but knew you'd have to swallow a drugstore if you did---she's an antique where all the others felt like junk. Her slutty high-beam glares and the licked-damp shape of her mouth while she's glaring at you are run-down-porn-theater- cheap and yet if went for it they'd end up being VERY expensive.

If you're like me and you go for girls with penthouse balconies, she shows you what your missing not going for girls with portable dungeons.

Somehow she makes it enticing after the introductory too-close hug and her Venus Fly Trap kiss on the cheek.

I heard Swimming Pool Girl's been dating a guy she calls Dent Head. I ask her if they're still together.

"No, but we're going on a trip. What are you listening to while you write? I'll put it on the speakers."

"No."

She takes my ipod, the one I'll be fiddling with when I go over the handle bars in a couple hours from now trying to numb my commute.

I ask if I can put up a boxing poster in her cafe window and there's more of a pendulum -effect in her ass as she walks over to the cash register.

I met Swimming Pool Girl the day after the worst time I ever showed up late in my life. Just read an extra chapter in my book and that did the trick. Dusted my relationship of 4.5 years for keeps. Poof.

Twenty minutes late and a girlfriend of 4 years came home and found a letter on my computer screen sent from a Puerto Rican pen-pal girl I'd never even met. Small potatoes. Cause there were about 200 more sent over the course of 5 years. So she read all those too. She opened pictures of the Puerto Rican girl. Nothing vulgar. No nudity. But the poses were poses I'd clearly asked for. Requested. And they'd been delivered with precision and pleasure.

How do you compete with a fantasy?

Why bother.

"I don't love you anymore."

This for a girl with profoundly embedded abandonment issues.

No denial-ability available. She knows the score in its entirety. See clearly, be seen clearly. There's your measure. Every word of a relationship conducted entirely on the page. The whole progression of a fantasy that takes over and dominates the alleys of your mind laid bare. She'd cheated on me fucking a stranger once before. "Now I know I *really* love you." Well, shucks. So on the scales of justice, that asshole's dick cheese in her mouth or my saying in a letter to this Puerto Rican: "I probably thought about you 1000 times today"---which is worse?

I was paying it some thought when her jury tendered its verdict:
"Fuck you, Brin! Yours is *far* worse! You cared about her!"
"You fucked a random! You were gonna throw away our relationship on a random! THAT'S WORSE!" And like a stinking fucking Hungarian I'm grinning.
"It's not funny."

Swimming Pool Girl heard all about it when I saw her at the pool and went over to talk to her. And I just treated the whole problem the way I drank the first time I touched alcohol at 16, swallow as much you can and chase it with something else. Magic how the one cancels out the other. Magic. Pretty soon they both spoil the other and you can't go near either. I haven't touched Coke or Tequila since... or that ex-girlfriend.

Polite Bondage

It was nice out---nearly ice cream truck weather---and I finally got around to doing something I'd been putting off for a while. I went over to his house to pick up my bike in the middle of the afternoon. I walked across town to get there, down different streets, some alleys, through a couple of parks. I walked by the church where I had my first kiss and past where I'd walked that girl home after. A new family came out her old front door. I'd only ever gone inside twice. Once because I was badgered into meeting her psychotic, phone-sex-voiced Belgian mother in order that I receive a preemptive lecture on the parameters of dating her daughter and the second time, far more frightening, at the request of the daughter with her mother away, ordering more than requesting: "I want you to come over right now and fuck me on my mother's bed." "Actually, I'm not too crazy about this one, Suzy." "Just get over here." "This one reallllllly doesn't appeal to me." "Get over here. I left the door open." "Suzy..." Click.

I kept going along the sidewalks that girl used to take to meet me halfway, or at least until our specks could be identified. I remember how her walk would change a little after she saw me and that was always my cue to know the little speck was her. Mine must've changed too, I couldn't wait to set a collision course.

It only lasted a Spring on that street because she got a car. But we had cherry blossoms lining both sides of the street, first above our heads, then paving the sidewalk and streets like cherry frosting.



I kept going till I was past all that. Climbed a hill until I could see his place next to the hospital. Stopped a couple times to meet some neighborhood cats and tried to convince myself I was taking my time but I knew I wasn't. Found a curb and read a few pages of Mr. Richard Yates. Saw a sexy girl who looked a bit like Penelope Cruz smoking and I bummed a cigarette off her. She lit my cigarette while I tried to make her smile talking Spanish and struck out. "Unlucky" was teetering on the brink of "bad luck".

And then when I saw him I didn't have luck, of any variety, anymore.

"People who count on luck don't last long in the business of defusing bombs and disarming land mines, and that is what my business seems to be. It helps to know these things. Muhammad Ali was not lucky. He was fast, very fast."---Hunter S. Thompson

What's the smallest group of people you need to have it statistically probable that two people share the same birthday?

How many people would you need in there to make it feel spooky if you found out you blew out your birthday candles on the same day?

The answer's 23. 51% chance somebody there has dibs on your birthday.

Here's another one that I was considering standing there in his foyer:

"What's a safest hour to drop in on somebody who you haven't seen in a helluva long time without them being on their way to a drink, coming back from a drink, recovering from a drink, or in the act of drinking?

Answer: 2pm seemed a safe bet at the time.

Question: Are we taking bets?

Answer: On what?

Question: You know what.

Answer: That?

Question: Uh huh.

Answer: Whether he'll die before he gets around to doing anything about this?

Question: That's your crossword puzzle. But what I'm a little curious about here, with your brow like a broken windshield and all, is whether you're deepdown chalking this up to bad luck, or coincidence, or just an ugly set of stacked odds against you?

Answer: Or whether I'm getting off on it as material.

Question: I take that angle for granted, fucko.

Answer: Listen, if you've got all the answers why is he pretending *not* to be drunk?

Question: To fuck with you. Why are you pretending to humor him about it?

Answer: I don't know what else to do. This is Mexican TV movie material.

Question: You could be honest with him. You could leave.

Answer: That would hurt his feelings.

Question: Well then, Mr. Considerate Chickenshit 2004-2009, best of luck when he interrogates you about the book in your back pocket? You're well aware of the warm friendly tradition of happy hour literary discussions. He'll ask you if it's true Revolutionary Road is really Gatsby for the 50's.

Answer: Do you think he remembers when he told me about Gatsby for the first time?

Question: Now or in general?

Answer: I'm the one expected to keep a straight face here. Confronted with this Nixon-like egregious evasion of the demonstratively obvious subject matter only to point 10,000 fingers at the truth.

Question: Wasn't Yates going on about something along those lines in the book?

Answer: Yeah, but I can't remember the exact quote.

Question: Try remembering it from the movie.

Dad: Are you liking what's his name, you know, Reactionary Road? That guy. My writer friend Michael Leone's guy. Norman Bates. Richard Bates. Bill Gates. What's his name?

Brin: Richard Yates.

Sara: Leave. You don't need to see this. And you're gonna be bummed out for a week over this.

Question & Answer: She's right.

Dad: You were saying it, what's it called again, Reprobate Road, is a bit like Gatsby. High praise. Is it?

Sara: Take your bike and go.

Question & Answer: Enlighten him on the similarities. Go on. Enlighten *us*. Make us your groupies. We long for that throbbing thrust of the noble autodidact's uncontaminated insights into things. So pure...

Dad: "Oh yes---before I forget---and what's this your mother tells me about your harsh judgments concerning my alcoholism?"

Sara: 32 DD

Brin: ?

Sara: I'm trying to distract you.

Question & Answer: We'll try and help her too. We were wondering what it meant about you and her when she told you she wouldn't like to play on a cheap piano and you admitted to us, in strict confidence of course, that you wouldn't like to play on an expensive one.

Sara: Is that true?

Brin: Uhhh...

Dad: "Strong judgment, your mother said. Stronnnng judgement."

Question & Answer: He's in a playful mood.

Brin: ...

Question & Answer: Just wanted to posit that we're amused you've 3rd personed yourself. Taking this shit on first person getting a little much, is it?



Sara: Here's something for you to think about instead. It's my pie chart for moving there.



(Continued) Sara: 80% of it love. Only a sliver for Alanis Morsette, cute Olympic stuffed animal mascotts, wine at the Sylvia with you...

Question & Answer: Alanis?

Brin: I know.

Dad: Come to the living room and we can chat.

Brin: I'm gonna go. I just came to get my bike.

Dad: I knew there had to be another reason besides a visit. My ulterior motive driven son.

Sara: 32 DD. You weren't a breast guy before me.

Question & Answer: This is crass manipulation of a girl you're in love with.

Sara: And you love it, baby.

Dad: Come on, let's go to the living and sit for a moment than you flee.

Dan Starling: Don't worry, all my paintings are in that living room we'll have him out numbered.

Sara: When I move there can we find some way to have Dan Starling live next door to us?

Brin: Okay, just for a minute.

Now what was that quote. Fuck. Fuck. I can't remember. Something like, "That's the great thing about the truth, you always know what it is. No matter how long you've been without it. You never forget. You just get better at lying."

Or something close to that.

I think...