by Herocious
know what the thing about canons is, right?”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“They’re surefire.”
“Whatever,” I say dismissively. “I need help on my spiral. When I was younger, I had a sweet spiral. But not anymore. How do you hold the football?”
Shaggy demonstrates his finger positioning. I decide I’m going to copy it. Maybe it’ll do the trick. The truth is, I’ve had many dreams puzzling over a football in my hand. No matter how many times I try throwing it, the damn pigskin wobbles like a child’s top about to lose its centripetal force.
But I can throw it a long way. I have a good arm. I just can’t find the spiral.
The entry to our part of the beach is elegant. First, there is the matte steel 41st St marker with a tessellated aquamarine base. Then, winding through short palms and spunky bushes, there is a staircase with eleven wooden steps. You cannot see what’s on the other side of the staircase from the bottom. To see, you must walk up the steps. I breathe in the salty air and ascend with a skip.
Bridget’s ahead of me, also skipping. The bounce of her body is arousing. At the top, the three of us stand shoulder to shoulder and admire the horizon and the lap of the sea. Exercising gentiles and orthodox Jews pushing strollers pass us on the wide boardwalk that spans north and south. The 41st St lifeguard tower is pastel blue and purple. The sand is expansive and white and fine. Towels and umbrellas dot the shoreline. People tan. The ocean waves gather and break infinitely, throwing spume. No traffic is audible. Nothing is audible except for the sound of waves and the call of gulls and the brackish wind.
“We’re on an island,” I say, reminding everyone we’re actually on a strip of land with water on all sides, completely disconnected from Florida. This is why the water in Miami Beach is so crystalline, and the sunlight so tropical.
Shaggy can’t contain himself any longer. With a sudden step, he jazzes his way to the beach. Bridget and I hug each other, turn toward each other, and kiss.
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
8
With our newly purchased camera slung over my shoulder and 24 ounces of Steel in my clutch, we amble along Congress Ave toward downtown.
At what seems to be the north end of the street, couched in between parallel lines of streetlights and a nest of skyscrapers, is the Texas Capitol. Its sunset-red granite dome that brags of reaching greater heights than the nation’s capitol is illuminated. On the very top stands Lady Liberty. She has plucked the Lone Star from the night sky.
And above her, too far away for Austin to reach, the spring moon waxes.
Bridget is brown-bagging her IPA. Everything is good until we see a bum crumble to the sidewalk, crawling on his hands and knees before curling into the fetal position and ebbing. He’s wearing a 2010 census cotton tee and faded jeans.
What’s disturbing about this bum isn’t only the way he crumbles to the concrete, but also the bloody gash on his forehead, sitting red and oozy above his temple, it’s in need of medical attention, perhaps.
Bridget and I slow down and take a closer look at this bum to see whether he’s going to be alive tomorrow or if these are his last breaths. His face is pale, his lips are pale, and his hair is pale. This bum is drained of vigor, a cause for concern. What choices did he make that brought him here tonight, crumbling before us? I guess you could also ask the reverse: what choices did we make that brought us here to this sidewalk to watch this bum fall to the ground, vanquished?
“Are you all right?” asks Bridget, bending over at the hips to try and fix eyes. I know she’s doing the right thing, but I also know this is a bum. This is someone who’s on the fringes, a loner full of spiteful independence – an Austinite.
“Are you all right?” repeats Bridget. She gets an unintelligible answer issued through a bubbly mouth. Bridget gets closer, “Do you need help?”
“No!”
Venom breath jerks my lover back toward me. She steadies her brown bag of IPA.
“C’mon,” I say, “he just wants to be left alone.”
But not more than a block north of the vanquished bum, Bridget turns around with a calling in her eyes. She really feels this bum is in trouble. “What if he dies?” she asks.
“He’s not going to die, Bridget. He’s drunk and tired and doesn’t need our help.”
“But you saw how much he was bleeding?” Bridget looks back toward the bum. “He should go to the hospital. Head injuries are serious.”
“Are you kidding me?” I ask. “In his state, he doesn’t want to mess with any kind of authority. Think about public intoxication. He just wants to be left alone.”
“I’m going back,” says Bridget. “Are you coming with me or not?”
This is an ultimatum. I snap a few photos of a neon sign:
SORRY,
WE’RE OPEN
Then I walk back to the corner with her.
At first, we don’t see remnants of the bum. “Look,” I say, “he’s already gone.”
But then we turn the corner and run into a pile of human rock with pale hair strewn on the concrete like wimpy serpents. He’s still bleeding.
“Let’s at least tell someone about him,” says Bridget, “that’ll make me feel better.”
I follow her back to the beer-and-wine mart. The man behind the counter knows us from before. He has pockmarks and earphones draped around his neck that dangle on his designer cotton tee.
“I have a question for you,” says Bridget. She looks cute in her eyeglasses.
“What question?” asks the man behind the counter, coming closer.
Bridget puts her elbows on the glass counter, above the lottery tickets many people buy, reasoning if you don’t play, you can’t win. This is the absolute truth. You must play to win. No one has ever won the lottery without playing. But why isn’t this enough to make me play the lottery, I think, why am I not a gambler when it comes to my own money? No poker, no craps, no blackjack, no Vegas, no bets, but when it comes to my own life, when it comes to securing a job, starting a career, investing in myself, I gamble recklessly and ignorantly.
“You see that guy lying on the corner?” Bridget points through the window. “He’s bleeding a lot from his forehead. Do you think I should call an ambulance?”
“Who, him?” asks the man behind the counter. “He’s passed out. He’s always around here, getting drunk and into fights. It’s sad, but this is the way he chooses to live. He comes in here and buys beer all day. I can’t do anything about it. It’s his choice.”
The man behind the counter looks at me for some sympathy, probably since I carry 24-ounces of Steel Reserve, a high-gravity lager.
“It’s sad,” he says, “but this is how he wants to live.” Shoulder shrug. Earphones surge and settle on his man boobs.
“Can you keep an eye on him?” begs Bridget. “He doesn’t look good.”
“Sure,” says the man behind the counter, “but soon he’ll stand up and walk away. He’s passed out, that’s all.”
While the way this bum chooses to live is sad, it’s also sad commerce makes no effort to curtail his alcoholism. When there’s profit to be made, it’s easy to turn the other way. But, when you take away the embellishment, selling this bum beer when he’s able to buy it is no different than selling cocaine to cokeheads, or crack cocaine to crackheads, or methamphetamine to methheads, or heroin to Sherlock Holmes.
Oh, Watson, the needle!
4
Perhaps, if I willingly let different music into my days, this would be a different memory.
Music is a lot of who I am.
I’d go so far as to say if you don’t like this memory, you don’t like my music.
I like cumbia. I like underground hip-hop. I like vallenato. I like dub reggae.
Out on the streets they call it merther!
I like ethereal music because I’m an ethereal person. I like 1960s Dylan.
I like music with wispy female vocals and male falsettos. I like
airborne sounds that make me think of bagpipes on the beach.
I’m up in the clouds, building castles in the sky.
Is it possible to be down to earth without being grounded?
I wonder.
1
He really does look like a leprechaun. Michael’s right. I wouldn’t know how to draw him any better.
I notice him today when I go to the library. Michael doesn’t approve of me going there alone, but we don’t have internet, so while he registers the car at the County Tax Collector, I’m at the library doing some reading.
Before grad school starts in September, I have to keep up with some of the readings circulating my lab. It’s not that I have to stay abreast. I could easily ignore grad school until September, but I think it’ll be good to learn as much as I can before my schedule gets crazy. This way I can hit the ground running.
“Champagne for everyone!” shouts a voice.
At first, I’m expecting a library employee to have a bottle with him, but then I see the leprechaun walk through the book detectors with his stuffed backpack and a two-liter bottle of Dr. Pepper.
He carries the plastic bottle as if it were more precious than his firstborn. The head librarian tells him not to take the bottle inside. “Excuse me,” she says, “you have to leave that behind the counter with me. No drinks in the library.”
“Okay,” he says, “just don’t drink it!” He slyly cocks his eyes, “I know you want to.”
“I’m not going to drink your soda,” she says condescendingly. But she also seems to be flattered.
“It’s champagne!” he corrects.
The leprechaun sniffs