Coffee

Hours I spent standing at the end of a pier on Lake Michigan. I set my back against a concrete wall so that I was invisible to the humans on the shore, and stared out straight ahead so that all I could see was blue horizon. Waves and clouds were perpetually unfurling toward me but never quite reaching. I felt like I could stand there forever, weathering the frigid winds like a carved face on a totem pole.

At the base of the wall behind me was srawled this message:

"you can put out the fire that started at the but you can't put out leaves when they burn in autumn"

I realized that the numbness in my toes had crept up the length of my legs. I decided to walk.

"Do you have coffee?"

"Yes."

Her simple response meant so much more to me than she could know. To her I was just another New Year's day hangover. To me she was my first reconnection with the community of humans in some 36 hours.

The simple phenomenon of being able to slap my lips, tongue, and teeth together, while exhaling, in a way so as to perfectly communicate my desire for a very specific object. A verbal magic trick, like pulling a dime from behind her ear.

She arrived at my table and she served me the object. I could see the coffee; my eyes vouched for its existence. My nose was useless, the odor of the cup cast adrift on a background sea of scent: an ebb and flow of eggs, beans, sweat, pork, farts, halitosis; pumped through the cramped diner with every breath of its patrons, like a galley full of steadily rowing slaves.

I picked up the cup and I felt its warmth radiate through Styrofoam and skin and hair and tissue and it warmed my bones.

I tried to thank her but I couldn't express it. So I drank my cup and when it was empty I went up to the counter and asked quietly, humbly, for another cup of coffee.

"What?"

Patty Revere Pt. 5

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Patty thinks first of Dr. Sanjay Gupta, but then she thinks of Rebecca, the woman who stops by to visit Patty every once in a while, and to bring her a plastic CVS bag. Inside the CVS bag are orange tubes with words written on the side, but Patty can't read, so she has to remember exactly what Rebecca tells her.

"This is medicine for you Patty. It make you feel better so remember to take them, okay? Is okay? You take your medicine Patty?" Rebecca would say.

Rebecca is very funny. The way she talks is funny, like the people on Channel 4 but slower and using words Patty can understand. The way she is so small but moves so fast around Patty's apartment, nimbly stepping over mounds of dirty laundry and VHS tapes, is funny. Patty can never do anything but nod when Rebecca talks to her because if she opens her mouth she knows she'll laugh and she doesn't want to hurt Rebecca's feelings. In the winter Rebecca wears a lime green coat and this is Patty's favorite, because with it on she looks just like one of those tiny green bugs, the kind you forget about until one day you look at a rock very closely and you see one scurrying across the surface.

"You can have some of my medicine. Rebecca tells me I have to take it to feel better, but she's just a silly little bug."

Laboriously, wheezing, Patty rises from her seat. The CVS bag is stashed under the bathroom sink, along with many others full of orange tubes from other visits.

"Rebecca's just a silly little bug. You can have all my medicine. I don't need any."

Alex claws through the bags, their contents spilling out at Patty's feet like the entrails of a fresh kill. Patty begins to laugh.

Alex looks up momentarily, the expired Prolixin capsules he was studying momentarily forgotten. Patty's laugh is harsh and raspy and doesn't decrescendo the way most people's laughs do, but instead repeats itself in a loop, like a broken laugh track. He pops a handful of multicolored pills into his mouth like they were Skittles. He starts to laugh too.

-----

The Magic Bullet sits in the middle of a long marble counter top. Myriad glass bowls, each filled with a measured amount of ingredient, form constellations around it.

Patty and Alex sit at rapt attention as one by one eggs, sugar and cream cheese are poured into the device and subsequently pulverized. An ecstatic young woman in a salmon-colored cardigan pours the homogenized substance into a pie plate, a wan moon set among the stars.

Patty leans forward to flick an inch of ash off her cigarette onto the carpet and it vanishes immediately, whisked away to an invisible realm of forgotten detritus; kept company by gum wrappers and lint. Alex is cleaning himself in the manner of a cat, pharmacopoeia vibrating through his veins like a subway train on a loose track.

The camera cuts to an old woman. Upon seeing a cheesecake made in just five minutes, she raises her eyebrows disapprovingly.

Patty hears it first. "Ooh, another cat come to visit?"

Alex hears the second knock. "Pittsburgh police! Open up!"

Deer may freeze in headlights but not cheetahs. Alex is halfway to the back door when Patty starts to unlock the front.

Patty Revere Pt. 4

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Patty has a clock. It stopped ticking at 3:27 p.m. years ago and she never took it off the wall. It still hangs over her kitchen sink and now she misses its steady rhythm for the way it seemed to fill the silence.

Silence is an uncomfortable rarity in Patty's life, but she felt she should turn the TV off when entertaining a guest. When there is silence just before Final Jeopardy, music starts playing to pass the time.

Alex looks across the small, sticky aluminum table at his hostess. Before him is a fruity-smelling bowl of creamer. His stomach growls and he thinks that perhaps he is hungry. Patty starts singing.

The cheetah, invited into the den of the antelope, is momentarily paralyzed with confusion.

Alex is tempted but wary. The singing only serves to put him more on edge.

Abruptly the singing stops.

"Are you hurt?" asks Patty.

The bowl of spoiled creamer is a pale pink hue. Another drop of red falls in as Alex looks down. The scab on his forehead is pinched between two fingers in his right hand. He hadn't noticed.

"Do you have medicine?" asks Alex.

Patty Revere Pt. 3

Part 1
Part 2

Patty doesn't understand. There is a cat at her door, scratching to be let in. It must smell the spilled creamer, or the empty cans of meat in the garbage. This has happened before, and Patty likes to let the cat in. She doesn't mind if it makes a mess out of her garbage or pukes the rotten meat on her sofa. But the cat has never rung her doorbell before.

Patty's vocal chords, unused to the exercise, slap together and issue a trembling call through the door.

"Who is it?"

"Alex."

Alex rubs his fingers frantically on his thigh. He looks down but the paint is still there. He hadn't thought this far ahead. What will he do if she doesn't open the door?

There is a long pause. Cars honk in the street behind him. He feels like he's standing on the bank of a river.

He hears Patty inhale through the door.

"I thought you were a cat."

Without thinking

"I am a cat!"

A pause. Patty inhales and clears her throat.

"May I come in?"

Both of them are surprised when Patty opens the door.

Patty Revere Pt. 2

Part 1

Alex looks blankly at the peeling yellow paint on the door in front of him, and he thinks about what it would be like to run his finger down it.

When he was a boy he knocked on his neighbors' doors selling candies to raise funds for his school.

Somewhere in Africa a cheetah crouches unseen in a field of tall grass.

Alex scratches at a scab above his brow. Don't pick the scab.

If you pick the scab before it's healed you'll have a big nasty scar.

The cheetah smells the wind and scans the horizon.

Alex rings the doorbell again. Then he runs his finger in a long horizontal stroke across the width of the door. He looks at his hand and there are flecks of yellow. Rubbing his fingers together doesn't seem to help much. Transfixed, he picks at a hanging strip of paint. It peels off the wood like dead skin from a sun-burnt back.

Patty Revere Pt. 1

(Trying my hand at fiction. First installment below.)

Patty empties her ashtray into the coffee pot to give it some flavor. One part coffee to one part sour Irish Creamer; Patty knows it's good till the last drop. She imagines herself in the Folgers commercial, as the sprightly ballet dancer who awakes looking radiant in a pink bathrobe to prepare her morning joe. Patty sports a moth-eaten baby blue nightshirt, draped across her large frame like a tarp over a swimming pool. After taking the first sip of her coffee, Patty sighs with relief like the dancer. Unlike the dancer she's barely able to get a breath out without four or five wet coughs. Hacking a wad of phlegm into the sink, Patty retires to the sofa in front of the TV to smoke three Newports before the last segment of "The View" has ended.

45-year-old Patty Revere doesn't leave her north side Pittsburgh one-bedroom very often. She never feels the need to. She's more comfortable watching the people on Full House or Family Matters. Nothing much seems to happen outside in those programs; if it does it's usually a special episode and seeing it disturbs Patty. When she was a child her father watched a show with her on the public access channel. Unlike her usual programs, it took place completely outdoors. The ground was made of dust and Jay told her it was the beach,

"Bleach?"

"No, Patty. Beach."

and that you could walk on it for hours and not reach the end. Patty thought about all the debris that fell off her rugs when she shook them off, all the dust she'd swept out her back door. All of it had to go someplace. Maybe that's where beaches come from. All the dust bunnies and rug debris of the world combined to create a vast tan landscape, where people could walk all day.

A strange-looking red bug appeared, crawling on the dusty tundra. An invisible man called it a "hermit crab."

"Decapod crustaceans of the superfamily Paguroidea fashion their own habitats in a novel way.

'One beast's trash is another's treasure for the hermit crab: a discarded sea shell makes for a cozy home."

Patty awakes with a start when the cherry at the end of her cigarette falls on her thigh. She yelps and flicks it into the shag rug at her feet. The pain helps bring her out of the thick snooze brought on by too much spoiled milkfat. The doorbell rings and Patty realizes with a bolt of fear that it is the second time.

Get Everyone In Here Right Now

The neat basement den of a prosperous suburban family. They've got all the home theater equipment, all the fine wood furniture. The XBOX and the PS3: look out. I'm worried I'll put my drink down somewhere I'm not supposed to, so I don't ask for a drink. A vast white carpet like fresh snow and it's strangely quiet, even with the couple dozen people milling around enjoying the Pabst and pixels.

John wears a stocking cap and flannel and reminds me of a few other acne-plagued scenesters I knew in high school. He's drunk and I can tell he's very sad by the way he earnestly pursues trivial conversation. Not sad like the scenesters I knew in high school, but a more acute misery; a fresh wound.

Later on, a storage locker. Six of us: Anna (whom I'd met the night before and was quickly losing interest in), Sim and Bridgette (the attractive couple with careful outfits), John, and Jason, whose mom was blissfully unaware her son was inviting friends to hot-box her storage locker. Before we light the bowl, John mentions someone named Warren---apparently he was always smoking, whether it be weed or cigarettes.

We need to smoke this bowl for Warren, he says.

We need to get everyone in here right now, says Jason.

20 more strangers, all of them friends, makes it abundantly clear that I'm the odd one out. Three pipes are passing around the room, filling the tense air with smoke like a censer carried around the pews. Sniffles, sobs. John is hugging Jason. It's only now that I realize that Warren passed away a few days earlier. I'm stoned and I'm in the suburbs and I want to be sincere but more than anything I'm just uncomfortable.

So I numbly sit and watch the video games and ponder the excruciation of my situation until it's okay to leave. I do some more pondering on the drive back to Chicago and when I go to bed I'm grateful. Happy Thanksgiving.