What I've got so far...maybe more tomorrow.
Walking away, behind me my mother standing in the doorway in her unwashed housedress, hair sticking out in all kinds of crazy directionless ways, screaming something, screams being nothing to her but usual, but I admit something was different about this scream, maybe she was screaming for me to come back. Not, this time, maybe, screaming motherfucker. Not, this time, maybe, screaming lazy motherfucker. Didn’t sound exactly like stupid lazy motherfucker, could have been a plea. For me. Her son. To come back because today was, you know, one of those brand new days you sometimes read about. Different I’m sorry I promise I love you won’t you please come back. For a second, I adjusted my backpack and, carefully, my considerations. Stopped to capture the rhythm in her hysteria…ah, there it was…I was still a motherfucker. But I was a motherfucker who was now walking fast away from this shit and that alone makes me better than most motherfuckers you know.
Found a bit of a pad somewhere, not not close, not not far. Not sure how I pay for it, if I pay for it. Cool cat with lightning white hair we call gramps works the front desk and takes money from a few people. Mostly, he gives ‘em friendly shit of the workin’ hard/hardly workin’ variety. I like my room, nothing in it but me and a bed. Shower and head up the hall and I’ve counted five dudes walking in and out. No phone around the place. And this won-der-ful woman I feel obligated to call Mom and she has yet to call me motherfucker cooks us breakfast every morning, no fail. Eggs, toast, bacon, oatmeal, Frosted Flakes, and pancakes if we ask. We are on our own for lunch and dinner, but that breakfast can and does hold me all day sometimes.
Cool cat we call gramps tells me about a place maybe I can get a quick gig doing a few odd things, pick up a few bucks here and there. Am I out of work? I ask him this, hoping he knows ‘cuz I don’t. He laughs and slides me a small white card with an address written on it in tiny neat print. I bet it’s Mom’s writing. Guess I’ve eaten one too many pancake without some sort of monetary compensation. Not wanting to get on the bad side of anyone associated with this good place, I accept the card and head on out to find whatever it is I’m looking for.
Two blocks up, three blocks over, I get it, I’m there. New cool cat waiting for me and I like him already. I feel where he’s been, I’m at where he’s at, and I know where he’s trying to go. I tell him nothing of this as I introduce myself. I love how he says my name: STILL water. The Still intoned as nothing but, you know, very un-still as the word rises as an uphill stream. STILLwater Crowe, he says, and I am home.
I do my odds for him: sweeping floors, greeting customers, twirling a mop on such needed occasions. After about a minute, I figure out I’m not the most necessary employee hired in world history. Most of what I do, Ellery probably did himself before I got here or it just as well didn’t get done. Grateful, I work hard and fast, taking a break only when Ellery claims I’m about to give him a heart attack, I’m working so much.
I ask Ellery how he knows cool cat gramps. I ask, but I know. I know this the same way I know everything about certain people I meet. Their lives fold out in front of me a page at a time. I knew next to nothing about my mother even though, after sixteen years, we’d been together for over half her life. I knew nothing of my father since, I guess, his life choices weren’t about meeting me twice. As I sweep, I close my eyes and listen to Ellery and his smoker’s rasp tell the story that began fifty years before I was born when Ellery and cool cat gramps were young boys.
By accident, my laughter at one part of the story sounds too much like I’m very familiar with it, and I catch myself. Ellery barely notices, though, and keeps talking, dismissing my yeah, I know exactly what happens next with his own but you’re too young to know anything about that, aintcha, boy? No point explaining, I’ve learned, that our experiences are universal and I may not have been with him on that particular street corner on that particular day, but, shit, we’ve all had best friends fuck us over. My universe speech gets lost, anyway, in the overall possibility that I just might have been there with him that day almost seventy years ago. Because how I know all this shit about these people, I haven’t quite figured out, yet. I was out of school more than I was in school at some point and maybe metaphysics was covered on one of the days I was out getting my ass kicked by my 103-pound mama.
Ellery asks about my mother and for one hot flashing second, I think he’s asking about my pancakes Mom over at the cool cat place, but then I get it he’s asking about that mother. I give some shitty answer that makes him temporarily defensive and I apologize, but she is no longer the focus, so it’s good.
Days are months and I am spending more time alone in the shop, a place for odd pairings. It is organized only for those who know what they need in the moment they need it. For those who wander in to look around curiously, the place is a nightmare and that’s when my day excites me.
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