Monthly Archive for September, 2007

1.3 Exper­i­ments:
There have been a num­ber. of .things that keep bring­ing me back to think­ing about Kevin lately.
Near the top of the long (end­less?) list of less-than-awesome things about bar­tend­ing for a cor­po­rate bar-and-grill, is small-talking with the saucy, gen­er­ally inap­pro­pri­ate men who sit at my bar-top every night e x p e c t i n g. And so, I per­form: I talk about foot­ball; I don’t punch their faces for their con­tin­ual igno­rance.
But Kevin, Kevin is my tiny jewel.

Kevin is a kind man. He is hands-down the most devoted bar reg­u­lar my restau­rant has ever seen, and def­i­nitely the most laid-back cus­tomer we have ever served. But he is also my friend.
Every time Kevin shows up, I get but­ter­flies in my stomach…we all do, I think. He has one of those faces that you could search over every day and still feel as if you could not fully know all of it…like it might shift or swell at any time and you do not want to miss it. He is always kind, always new. He expects noth­ing and so we offer him every­thing. Even his drink is pro­grammed into our com­puter sys­tems under the clever title “The Kevin” (Pres­i­dente mar­garita, extra brandy, shaken, in a frosted mug, no salt, lime squeezed on top) and is made more care­fully (lov­ingly) than any drink in the house. Instead of bull­shit­ting about foot­ball and the weather, we lit­er­ally talk for hours about art (he is end­lessly try­ing to get me to love Dali the way he does), and folk music (Indian, Cuban), and the world in gen­eral (we both lis­ten to too much NPR). We exchange nov­els and dis­cuss the details with each other the whole way through read­ing. On Sun­days, Kevin comes in dressed in his Sun­day suit and brings with him a new rid­dle that he hears on the radio. Some days I solve them, some days I beg and beg until he tells me the answer (after swear­ing up and down that he never would tell). He is wiser than any of us are ready for. Some­times I watch him work­ing out responses to ques­tions inside his head for lit­er­ally hours before pre­sent­ing them, some­times days even. He is often the best part of my day and is undoubt­edly the best part of my job.
I’ve con­cluded that I am in love with Kevin, in every way that I want to know how to be in love with a per­son. He is more than three times my age. That is so awesome.

So then there’s her. A few months ago a girl so sim­i­lar to my own self that I have more than once con­fused her face (her words, her irra­tional­ity) for my own, told me that she hated me so fer­vently that it made her phys­i­cally ill. I still don’t know what to do with those words. As I read them printed out per­ma­nently in front of me, all I could think about was dri­ving to her filthy, smoky apart­ment and press­ing my face really close up against hers until we saw some­thing, ANYTHING in the pores of the other to con­vince us that there were lovely things there. I never said a word to her in response, and I know I will not now.

1.4 Con­clu­sions:
In the (prob­a­bly butchered) words of my sweet friend
“Maybe it is not that there are no old men and only girls, but that I am supremely envi­ous of old men and girls. I want their kind of cat­e­gory and placement…a place to fold my legs up into my chest, like age.”

There are peri­ods in life when it seems that the cos­mos are laugh­ing hys­ter­i­cally in your face. Maybe that is what this is all about, not about a lit­tle boy on a train, or lov­ing an old man, or a woman remind­ing me of me. I have clas­si­fied the young and the old and the somewhere-in-between because I do not know what else to do with them, and because I myself feel some­where lost in that mid­dle. To over­come age, and con­ve­nience. To be time­less and trans­par­ent. What would that even look like? There is this the­ory about human con­nec­tion that has been made pop­u­lar recently by Dr. Fred Alan Wolfe (who I find bril­liant and won­der­ful a lot of the time, and a kook the rest of the time) and a whole swarm of “collective-joy” schol­ars, which basi­cally states that human beings can be thought of as sep­a­rate wave-producing bod­ies that, when res­onat­ing in har­mony with another body of waves, pro­duce expo­nen­tial amounts of energy between the two. This is to say that our bod­ies, the chem­i­cals and move­ments and reac­tions inside of us, are already defy­ing (all ready to defy) the con­straints of time and age and “love.” Now that is awesome.

So let’s just say, it would be really nice to meet up…in the train, my bar, your smoky apartment.