４月２２日

I'm sitting at 15th Street and Prospect Park, facing the trees in the traffic circle and the movie theater with the sun in my face as it sets, sat on the steps of one of those two gorgeous pillars here washed in sunlight along with the stone, both of us gilded and brilliantly monochromatic from its touch. Teenagers play catch with a football somewhere behind me, as evidenced by the ball bouncing crazily on the asphalt when it slips through this end's guy's hands, jumps and shakes and hops and always improbably changes course just before it would lead him into the traffic heading around the circle. In my periphery the teenagers wander in and out of view with older brothers and never-made-good neighborhood friends, gabbing and jumping with both legs out over the belly-high steel posts set into the blacktop path, like they're leap-frogging them. People go by on bikes, other jog with headphones. Buses stop to unload passengers coming home from their workdays; no one new gets on. The air around me is damp but not too cool, and the corners of pathways and ponds' edges are ringed with fallen cherry blossoms: it is spring.

The football goes PUHNK as it hits the ground and I can see it slipping just over the teenager's outstretched fingertips in my mind's eye, brown hands with tan palms stretching towards it in the sky. A jerky, spinning hop takes it into my field of vision and a cry goes up from the teens behind me--some several more in number than I'd thought, judging by the voices I can hear chiming into the sudden shout. The ball hops one way and then jumps improbably high, hitting the other column across from mine, where a different group of teens is holding court on the shallow steps, stoop-style. The ball thwacks the stone above their heads and all contract their frames, pulling hands over heads and heads, turtle-like, towards collars. A girl standing amongst them doesn't even seem to reach out to catch it, but suddenly she is cradling it in a bough of spread fingers, as easily as if she had been holding it the whole time. There's no tension, no weird issues of honor like many a stranger might suppose about strangers and inopportunely bounced balls. Fists are bumped, first greetings exchanged, and some of the stoop teens leave their perches to join the catch.

More 30-somethings job by. Other 30-somethings walk toddlers by or wheel strollers. A boy in bright blond curls and of not more than two bobbles by, his mother pacific, indulgent and decisively pregnant. I can't hear him, but I see the expression on his face, and I hear her confirm: it's a football. Those boys are playing football. I think I have the same urge to play with them that he does. Something causes a big laugh and a commotion from them, but they're out of sight behind the pillar I'm leaning against. Fancy bikes whizz by with spandex-clad alien-looking riders. My bike is here by my side, root beer brown on the side I can see, and gold like me on the side the sun can see. As for the sun, it has been sinking lower this whole time, and I can see shadows on my notebook and from my hands that a few moments ago weren't there. It's still above the buildings on 15th street, and has grown temperate enough by this time of day, just moments away from setting, temperate enough to let you look right at it for just a split-second. You can stare right at it. Less than a heartbeat, but it's long enough to see the perfect, shockingly perfect, circle it makes in the sky. How can anything have such a perfect shape? And then Robin is here to meet me, and I am looking at her shoes past the edge of my notebook.

Ye Olde Doughnut Shoppe

GUY IN WHITE: “I’m not gonna tell you you’re beautiful.”
LADY AT THE COUNTER: “Come on, don’t I have a cute little button nose and everything”
ME: “You alright.”
LADY AT THE COUNTER: “Ha!”
GUY IN WHITE: “Do you know why?”
LADY AT THE COUNTER: “Oh here we go…”
GUY IN WHITE: “Because,” he drawls, “I’m not attracted to you for you for your beauty.”

A is a disgustingly fat man, one with a skinny chest, neck and face, and a body that pours itself out below the line of the table into a bulbous sack of swollen, strained clothes, a shocking bag of stretched jersey cotton that divides somewhere and leads, somehow, to a pair of worn-in white sneakers. My eyes can’t avoid making a quick survey of him, pinned as he is behind the skinny table (or does it just look skinny?) next to the doorway to the street, facing into the shop with his back to the window and his ample body propped like a supersize sack of grain against the wall. His friend sits caddy corner to him in a nearby booth, nodding and silent; except for some obvious markers – his green jacket and obvious latino-ness, not to mention the setting – he could have been davening. The fat man’s girth is such that it’s a wonder he remains ambulatory, although I suppose that this is a presumption on my part: since I come into the donut shop with him sitting there, and since when I leave the donut shop I leave him sitting there still, it is possible that he just can’t move. Did he walk his final steps and heave himself, thanks God, into a 24 hour dinette? Or did he arrive there a thinner, healthier man long ago and gorge and distend himself on all the donuts? No reason to stop eating them I guess.: 24 hours, 7 days a week. a place He could still be there today. It is a very good endorsement for not getting a donut, but this is what I came here for.

LADY AT THE COUNTER: Waddayoo want, honey?
ME: Could I have one of those glazed ones, please?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Sure honey. Seventy five.
GUY IN WHITE: Because I don’t think that you and I would work.
ME: Could be he's smarter than he lets on.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Ha!
GUY IN WHITE: Because you’d never appreciate that I love you for more than your beauty.
ME: (to her) That’s not very sporting.
GUY IN WHITE: How many kids you want again?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: This, this I have to deal with every day.
ME: Beats working at a donut shop.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Ha!
GUY IN WHITE: I love you. We could have a beautiful family.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: You staying? Siddown.
ME: You know, why not. It’s not getting any dryer out.
GUY IN WHITE: You want a lot of kids.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Four. Four kids.
ME: That’s a lot of kids.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: I want four, but you know. Every year a year goes by, and I get a year older and I’m still not working on making no four kids. And, with that, you know…
ME: Your bar kind of sinks a bit?
GUY IN WHITE: So you think I'm too old to have four kids with you.
ME: Well hey, look, there’s lots of kids running around in this neighborhood. Just go take a few.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Ha! What, just go take some of 'em?
ME: Sure, who’ll know? There’s lots of the things running around around here.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Right, I’ll just give ‘em back at the end of the day, huh?
ME: You can, if you’re tired of ‘em. Who’ll know the difference. It’ll be like at the dog shelters.
CUSTOMER 1: (enters) Jelly.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Dollar.
GUY IN WHITE: I guess you don’t think it’ll work out.
ME: You know, you go rent a dog for a day just to walk it. They should do that with kids.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Ha!

I’ve thought this for a while, actually. At orphanages: their adoption rates would spike.

GUY IN WHITE: Well how old do you think I am? You think I’m older than your father.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: What are you talking about?
GUY IN WHITE: Am I younger or older than your father?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: He’s 54. My father

This is amazing. She must be in her late 30s. I guess it’s like Laurence Fishburn says in Boys in the Hood.

GUY IN WHITE: So! So, I’m younger than your father. How much younger do you think?
ME: He can't be no spring chicken himself.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Jeez, I dunno. Two or three years?
GUY IN WHITE: Ten years!
ME: Oh, well then.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: This I have to deal with, all the time.

At times like this I remember a story I read in Hampton Bays, where my mom’s mother had a vacation house whose disarray and decay were a surprisingly accurate reflection of the state of her side of the family. The town had a little library that had all of its charm and mystery renovated away when I was probably 8 or 9, but I remember getting a book out of it called Seven Scary Stories, or Nine Horror Stories, or Ten Stories About the Devil or something like that. There are two stories I remember from it; in the one that comes to me most often – in moments like these, that is – a man bothered by the fleetingness of life’s happy moments sells his soul to the devil to receive a magical pocket-watch that can stop time. Its button, a button like a stop-watch’s, can only be pressed once. The devil explains to the man that he should wait to press it until he’s in the happiest moment he’ll ever experience, and then with that one click, the pocket-watch will freeze, preserving him, and those sharing the experience with him, in that happy moment forever. He must wait until he finds that perfect moment of happiness, and then he can stay in it for all time. The catch is (there’s always a catch) that if he doesn’t use the watch by the time he dies, then the devil gets to take him down to hell in his train full of sinners to roast for all time. Moments good and bad fly by in the man’s life: young loves and heartbreaks, marriage, births, milestones of graduations and weddings, deaths timely and untimely, oldening and graying. And the man never uses the watch. He keeps holding out to see what life has in store for him around the next corner. So, going to sleep as an old man at the end of his life, he wakes in a train car. It’s raucous and full of energy, and he’s surrounded by scamps and scoundrels of all kinds, from the led-astray to the truly nefarious. Dice are being thrown, bottles passed around, songs sung, and stories told. When the devil sits down next to him the guy isn’t surprised, and the devil tells him with satisfaction that he knew the guy would never use the watch. It’s an old scam. No one, the devil says, ever uses the watch – how can anyone trade in their curiosity and hope for an eternity of sameness? He laughs, and holds out his hand to take the watch back. But the guy looks out the window at the I-don’t-know-what going by, and he says to the devil, “well, you’re right about a lot of it. Life was grand, and even though its joys were fleeting and its sorrows too numerous to count, it was good, and I’m glad I lived the whole thing through. But just now, Devil, I'm looking around me, and I think I’m as happy as I’ll ever be. I’ve had all of the living I’m going to do, and here on this train car things couldn’t be more jolly. Folks are gambling and singing and drinking, not a care in the world but to have a last hurrah and die as fully as we lived. So why not stay here a spell.” And with the Devil’s eyes round and wide with horror, the guy pushes the button on the watch.

GUY IN WHITE: I don’t think you’re beautiful.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Oh god, I’m stuck here.
ME: That’s true for everyone.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: No, I mean I’m not supposed to be here!
ME: See, exactly.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: She laughs. “I don’t mean I’m stuck here in the world in this life. I mean I’m supposed to be on my way home already! My replacement ain’t here. Paulo!”

There’s a ding from the back, and a line runner brings up a circular tin-foil box with greasy fries and something oily and beige inside it, and a plastic cover steaming up inside. B packages it in a bag with napkins and hollars to the back.

LADY AT THE COUNTER: Manuel! Delivery to go out!
GUY IN WHITE: What’s in the box?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: He’s talking to you.
ME: Huh?
GUY IN WHITE: You got an instrument in there?
GUY IN GREEN: He want to know what is the music you have in the box.

Jeez, I'd forgotten he was here! He's not davening then. Or he's finished, anyway.

ME: Oh.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Manuel!

Now she speaks into a microphone attached to a PA.

LADY AT THE COUNTER: Manuel, delivery to go out.
GUY IN WHITE: You can play a song in here, right now. Play some music.
ME: Nah, it’s just a box. Empty case. Conversation starter.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Ha!
GUY IN WHITE: Oh.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Manuel, delivery to go out. Just this. Come back again sometime.
Manuel: Si, si.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Bring us back something nice.
ME: Whaddaya want he should bring you?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: The money from the order!
GUY IN GREEN: No, it’s a…whaddayacallem…a violin?
GUY IN WHITE: “Play us some of the, um...” the fat man makes a violin motion with his arms and fingers.
ME: “Sorry, actually it’s not one of these,” I make the same motion, “it’s one of these,” I make a teeny strumming motion.
GUY IN GREEN: Oh, it’s a how do you call it, acoustico.
GUY IN WHITE: What is it?
ME: It’s a ukulele.
GUY IN WHITE: “I saw…I saw my cousin, and he plays a little guitar. Couldn’t be more than this big.” He holds his hands about a foot away from each other. “In the park.” Now I know where my competition is I guess.
CUSTOMER 2: (enters) One sugar donut.
ME: Boy, no one says please anymore, huh?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Huh?
ME: So how come you don’t use powdered sugar?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Who. Where.
ME: On the sugar donuts. There's powdered sugar on the jelly donuts but just normal granulated sugar on the sugar donuts.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: You know, I dunno.
ME: They’re way better with powdered sugar. Whadda you say, lady?
CUSTOMER 2: Well, my son loves them this way.

Well, I think he must be some kinda yutz then, but I guess it’s a free country, so I don't say anything.

ME: So where you going back to anyway?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: To the Bronx.
ME: Wow, what for?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: I live up there!
ME: And you work down here?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Commute every day. I gotta be back at six in the morning.
ME: Whatsa matter, they don't have diners in the Bronx?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: That's what...
GUY IN WHITE: That's what I said to her.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: That's what everyone says to me.
ME: Well?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: No. They all closed down.

This, I can kind of believe.

LADY AT THE COUNTER: Paulo! I need some coffee.

Paulo watches suspiciously as she her pour the coffee into her travel mug. Apparently they have to carefully control the stuff...coffee and donuts being the precious contraband they are.

LADY AT THE COUNTER: I gotta stay awake on the train.
ME: Why? You're not gonna miss your stop. You got like two hours till you get home.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: I never feel safe on the train! Who knows what could happen.
ME: Man, I don't know from the Bronx, but you should be safe for the first hour of the trip anyway. You need an alarm clock more than a travel mug.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Ha! You're sweet. Be good.
ME: You too.
GUY IN WHITE: No song?
ME: Sorry man. Empty case.