[Update: I still haven't figured out how to get a sidebar link to the ongoing story, but I did figure out the post-excerpts feature, so that's what I'm going with for now.]
[Updating the update: scrapping the post-excerpts feature. Filing under: bad idea]
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, 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.
I get myself to Ellery’s shop seven days a week. It’s a five block trek from the cool cat place, and the short distance makes it digestible and, therefore, understandable. Mine is not a memory issue or deficiency, it’s probably just that with so many other’s memories, I have limited room for my own. I don’t really think about it. I don’t analyze it. It is, as we say, what it is. I keep my people and activities constant and once I’m in a groove, I stay there.
Days are now 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, but for those who wander in to look around curiously, the place is a nightmare. On the shelves, in a bin, under useless crap is the exact thing that a person has been missing, causing his life to stall or falter or fall, and it’s my job to help him find it. It’s a common object, clandestine in its real purpose: a screwdriver, a pen, ceramic mug or wire whisk. It’s the object that moves with a person from house to house, childhood to adulthood, that rattles in the kitchen cabinet, toolbox, or junk drawer, always present before or after a purge. We all have one, this linchpin that holds it all together, and once it’s lost, our lives trip end over end until it’s found.
In Ellery’s shop, the girl who was caught in a whopper of a lie by her mother and, seemingly unrelated to the lie, is known soon after as the redhead who hands out on demand orgasmic jobs to the high school football team when it was really just that one stupid boy that one stupid time comes in looking for her peso that is no longer rolling around in her desk drawer at home. She and I find it under a stack of early Hustler relatively quickly.
The father who has yet to learn the difference between being a bad parent and accusations by his three fucked up children of being a bad parent wanders into the shop having no idea why he’s there. His linchpin, which I know to be a silver button off a long ago jacket that belonged to his mother, is safely at home in a box on his top closet shelf. He is kind of shuffling down each aisle, confused about why the motor oil is next to the pain relievers, rebuffing my offers of help with a very sad just looking, thanks. He pauses briefly at the stack of Hustler magazines, I hold in a giggle, he walks out empty-handed. He didn’t need to be in here anyway.
Nose first, a massive dog peeks into the shop, either unaware or uncaring that he’s leashed and bound to the hand of his owner, a small dark-haired woman who weighs thirty pounds less, it seems, than her mastiff. She calls him, very sweetly, and he obeys, immediately withdrawing from the doorway. No longer pulling her along the sidewalk, he allows her to tie him to a street lamp four feet from the shop entrance. All at once, he prepares to drink his water, rest on the pavement, and guard the half-block radius surrounding Parker Gale.
I can’t help her, but she walks in, light and breezy and pretty and determined to misunderstand nearly every word that comes out of my mouth. She thinks flirting with me will help as she moves with a purposeful fluidity among bins that are overflowing with cheap shit never designed to advance her cause. I follow her because she attracts people that way. They—we—can’t stop ourselves. With a half smile, I sort with her a bin filled with screws, pencils and cassette tapes. My fingers come across a dog’s leash, prompting me to say: Awesome dog outside.
Her cursory thanks slam right up against her more pressing issue. “I used to have this woven vinyl key chain that I made at summer camp right before fifth grade. I had that key chain forever. I’m thinking that I accidentally threw it away and you, Stillwater, can’t tell me it’s not around here somewhere.”
“It’s not here and it’s irrelevant,” I said for the 400th time since she’d walked in. Evidently, girly had a lot of missing minutiae and what she needed most, apparently, was to stand next to me and catalogue its entirety. “What’s the dog’s name?”
“Neo, but I spell it N-e-e-y-o. He’s a Neapolitan mastiff.”
“That’s terrible,” I say out loud. Hell, she’d been in the store for almost two hours telling me the most intimate details of her life. By then, we were surely friends. Friends don’t let friends give their dogs intentionally misspelled fucked up names.
I untie the dog from his post and bring him inside the shop while Parker pulls his dinner from her backpack. I decided to call him, only between him and me, Ferocious Beast That Lazes in the Sun When Sated.
The shop closes after sunset only in the moment its customers find what they're looking for or when they give up the search for the day. That moment finally arrives for Parker at six minutes past midnight and I grab my keys before she finds another tangent to explore. Her energy is infectious, so although I’m ready to walk away from the shop, I’m not yet ready to let her walk away from me.
Ferocious B waits near the door and looks at me like I’m stupid, which, I guess, I am. I have no idea what to say or do next and it’s obvious to every being in the room. An inherently impatient Parker finally quasi-apologizes for making me work so late and wants to make it up to me by buying me a drink or a cup of coffee. The stupid boy in me refuses to decamp, and I ask after the welfare of Ferocious B. Something along the lines of shouldn’t she be getting him home, he’s been out all night kind of bullshit.
Parker raises an eyebrow in half-amusement, half-are you kidding me, and asks if I want to have a beer with her or not.
In duress, my memory always bails and, standing in front of this girl, I have no idea if I have any money. I know I’ve been at Ellery’s for almost a year, but my work could be a payoff for a bet between him and cool cat gramps or some shit like that. I'm an indentured slave, I'm suddenly convinced. But, then, since I know Ellery and cool cat gramps to be nothing but honest men, I quash the slave scare. I’m assuming in my pocket is enough money for drinks and dinner, and I accept Parker’s invitation.
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