Consequence

I am surrounded by liars. Every day liars. Big liars. Small liars. In between sized liars. Afflicted liars who have the know not they are lying. Brazen liars who do.

I am sitting on a rattling C train serenaded by a bad trumpet player who stumbles down the car feebly renditioning “What A Wonderful World”. Indeed. Louis Armstrong is clawing up at the cold ground. I close my eyes and imagine the choral vocalists on the recording also botching behind Max Trumpet and a shiver goes wild through me. I give him/them a dollar. I’m a liar. I should have given him a day job to paraphrase an old one.

The C rickets into the Spring Street station. It is crashing rain above. I wait just inside the concrete entrance and watch the people fight it off. It amuses me to no end. Some bundled proper, most unprepared. The lovely young deb meeting her betrothed somewhere for a seafood feast dashes for cover and assesses the damage, unfolds a phone and calls in a lie before frantically putting it all somehow back together.

Rain suddenly slows to a stream as if a massive ball bearing rolled into heaven’s piping. I walk east and survey the theater. A mixture of garbage, dashed umbrellas and a couple of mismatched shoes. Intrepid servants of small business begin reinstalling modicum. I enter a restaurant and sit at the window table set for four places. No reaction. I am welcome. I see why immediately as a group of blustery suits gargle and bark toward nubile coworkers who will very soon never accept another invitation. I gaze among them and fancy thoughts of collapsing in the middle of the table Peter Sellers style with a knowing “RUN!” wink at the girls a la Errol Flynn. The waiter, a Mexican with a heavy accent asks me something I do not hear and I reply “Yes”. He moves off before I realize I do not know what I asked for. He returns thankfully with only a basket of thick, oil soaked tortilla chips and a small bowl of runny salsa. New York City. Two blocks down I could have wandered into the freshest vine ripe salsa I have ever encountered, but not today.

I begin to suffer along with the girls. The large children are now all three telling the same story in the “Who’s On First?” method. It is not seductive and riotous as the original. One of the girls gets up to powder mid story and I fight hard the urge to clap. I am eating a burrito of undefinable mediocrity. Has a fancy name like Sierra Madre or Bolo Tie or something. Mexican waiter returns in mid chew. “Eez everything ok meester?” Yes, I lie. I am now significantly gathered in my thoughts and no longer entertained by the show. Signal check, arrives, pay, go. Good luck ladies. The banter amongst them will be intense and amusing for a meteoric time. Have fun it with it. You’ve earned it.

I walk east. Cross Broadway and the surroundings become more palatable to me. I feel as a Wampanoag with the air mass from home swarming his senses on the lengthening trek toward the white man. Neon grasps my retinae and I pull the door. Bar doors almost always open out. Aging tobacco resin, dried champagne and living beer yeast guide me to my place. Peace pipe in my breast pocket. With the Bolo Tie restlessly sunk in, I order a drink and sit. Dirty old place. I love every inch of it. The crooked pictures, the gathering dust. Sunlight the mortal enemy. Bartender is a pretty middle aged woman with a sharp wit badge. Her gait spells do not fuck around. I love her temporarily and get on with the next drink. A newspaper faced man at the corner regales her with a chapter from his life’s work and she strokes him. Slowly, over moons. The door bursts and two tragic Midwesterners arrive with a pocket full of mom’s money. Twenty feet of cherry oak and they park behind me like L.A. cops. My future ex wife requires their proof and they put on the incredulity missing her subtlety entirely. They each reach around one of my shoulders and I trample the urge to slam my open palm on the ships plank looking for B-flat. I engorge my throat and lay waste to my drink. Liar. She of maidenstrength hands them back their entitlements a foot away from me and they reshuffle down the bar a step to retrieve them. I will ask her to marry me before I leave.

More door pulling and less pushing and I am surrounded. With my hands down. I speak to my drink in extra sensory terms. I am always melancholy after five or six. I start thinking about time and it does my head in. Einstein, the Phoenicians, Hawking and that crazy rabbit hole. I have to go. I signal my imagined lover and she picks up for my last drink then puts down. Extra sensorily buying it, she smiles a fascinating smile and says “So long”. Her salutation is like a worn well tweed coat in a London gale. I say goodbye and exit through a maze of young bodies set up as a lunatic bowling alley.

The air is fresh now. I walk north. Crosswalks vanquished at regular intervals. I am slowed by a gathering of hatred. An anachronistic minister with a milk crate for feet proudly disseminates the history of nothing. I am fascinated at the breadth of both lie and conviction. Somehow that is truth but my head is too vodka addled to get deeper. I merely smirk at him menacingly. Cut and paste facts swarm over the eggs gathered. It is theater and theater is a lie.

The trees in the square rustle a much needed “Shhhh!!” and I leave to walk amongst them. Squirrels perform Top Gun maneuvers. The trees are so beautiful in this light, I begin to get upset at absolutely everything. For a moment I am Van Gogh. A hearth with no one to sit. The squirrels love the trees but do not know it. Better I think. I am a lobotomized deck hand on her ship now. Her gait warns all comers, yet I am somehow caught in the gentle wake. I fall. The pavement violating the treeline is against my face and I am bleeding surely but unharmed. A couple strolling arm in arm are floating inside a cloud of their own making and the vision of me rips her away. Her parachute opens and she tugs her beau along before he falls through.

“Are you alright?” a small athletic girl asks. I gaze at her virginal beauty and compassion and can only nod. I haven’t the heart to tell her. None of us are. There is no alright. Nothing but truth, blinding and we are all liars dangling in it. I need only a drink and a wet rag. She wants to ask again, or so it seems but jogs lightly off to her life breathing air she believes pure. Belief is truth besieged by truth. I could fall again at this rate. Neon beckons. What a wonderful world.