Journal
and why
We were sitting on a smelly subway platform somewhere in Brooklyn, and she had just given me a bunch of presents. It might have been Christmas. The presents were in a garish pink shopping bag and inexplicably they were all Hello Kitty-style things- notebooks, paper, pens, etc. The Kitty on the presents wasn’t exactly Hello Kitty. It was one of those weird rip-offs. I could tell she’d been shopping at one of those stores in her neighborhood where none of the items were labeled in English.
I thanked her and we sat together a while in comfortable silence- we’d known each other for eleven years, and loved each other, and we were fine when there was nothing to talk about. We waited for the train and watched other people wait for the train. I wanted to push them all onto the fucking tracks.
After a while she chuckled to herself quietly and I looked over at her. ‘What?’ I asked.
‘Look at that guy over there,’ she said, pointing to a flushed but non-descript businessman checking his watch. ‘His face is all red from drinking all day because he hates his family.’
I marvelled at this insight. ‘You’re completely right,” I said, impressed. She nodded sagely and we sat together some more.
Eventually we felt a gust of wind on our faces, and half a minute later the train arrived. We leaped up, clutching our things, and rushed to be first in line. The car doors opened and a wall of people began to trudge out, listlessly leaning against each other like zombies. Suddenly she grabbed my free hand and yanked me forward, grinning and shoving people out of the way. She was looking for two adjacent seats so that we could be next to each other.
The people she jostled jerked out of their stupors to sneer at us. ‘Wait your turn!’ one thirty-something in a suit snarled.
‘I have a penis!’ she shouted, mocking him. She mocked anything that would stand in her way. We flung ourselves into our seats, clutching each other and howling with laughter as the train sped up, taking us forward and away.
Every year they did this to themselves, these people who used to live beneath the same roof, that over the course of three decades had grown to have nothing in common but blood and history. It wasn’t enough. Stephen drank. White Horse whisky, it stung, but it gave him the strength to endure this…
“Charades, anyone?” Linda, his sister, joyously and loudly queried. The kids looked up and whined no’s all around. They were playing with robots or dolls or mutants or whatever it is that children entertain themselves with.
Disappointed, she walked into the kitchen and helped her mother dry the plates that held the dinner which was ungratefully shoveled down their six mouths.
Dad snored so loud he woke himself up, looked down at the kids and over at Stephen. For a moment their eyes met and Stephen felt a lineage of defeat, the kind that comes from a life lived without any purpose but to fit in to the planned happiness that a good job, home ownership, and children are supposed to afford. Stephen felt more the failure: at his age his father had been on his way to that American Dream. He lived alone, in Queens, in a loud apartment above the Puerto Rican church. There was no one, but there were the bars and the job, and those were enough to make him forget about anything else. But here on Christmas Day, staring into his father’s colorless eyes he felt the crush of destiny, the force of mediocre survival that held them together, the call of kin. He was a disappointment, and so was his father, and likely his father before him.
Mother brought out a cake and the kids excitedly ran to her, leaving the toys in front of the screen, and greedily reaching for their next sugary treat. Mom glowed, she, at least, felt renewed purpose in these needy young mouths. Stephen rose and walked over to his mother.
“Cake,” she said grinning, banishing the disappointment of raising a drunkard son who never called except on this one occasion.
“No thanks, mom. It’s late I should go.”
She grimaced, and Stephen kissed her forehead. “You know I love you, Mom, but I have to get home. you know how the train gets if I go too late.” He hugged his sister tersely and bade goodbye to the kids who paid no mind to him, immersed as they were in the gooey frosting in front of them. He called goodbye to his father, who didn’t rise from his chair, put on his coat, and stepped into the snow covered street.
He trudged three blocks to the train, snow crunching underfoot and the nearby freeway unusually silent.
The platform was crowded with other Christmas zombies. He stood and stared ahead at the ad to join the police department and another urging him to go back to college to achieve his dreams.
Down the platform two girls were exchanging presents excitedly. He looked towards them and then away. Too young, but something to be remembered later, in the last motions of the night as he comforted himself to sleep. The train came on the other side of the platform and passed, leaving a gust of wind and unsettling a nest of rats.
He listened now. To the squeal of trains down the track, to the unintelligible subway announcements, to the flute playing more interminable Christmas music near the stairwell. He caught a voice, it was one of the girls.
“Look at that guy over there,” she said, pointing towards Stephen. He checked his watch, so as to look nonchalant. “His face is all red from drinking all day because he hates his family.”
Stephen flushed even more. He was embarassed, because they were partly right. Drinking because you hate your family is easy. Drinking because you don’t understand what to do with yourself otherwise; drinking because it is the only way to numb the onslaught of disappointment and still the pang of expectation, that is the truly challenging commitment. The wind picked up on his side and the train approached. Stepping in, Stephen thought, They’re young. They’ll see. Soon enough they’ll see what it’s like.
— Charles
— rrrrrrrrain
“I can’t believe you’re going to pour salt on it now!” the black haired girl exclaimed.
“It’s the thing to do really,” the white haired girl replied.
She started pouring salt from the large container into the bag, and they were quickly greeted by the ear piercing screams of a freshly skinned baby.
“Wow, you’re right!” the black haired girl exclaimed.”
The white haired girl nodded sagely and continued to pour.
A while later the screams subsided and the white haired girl began to look sad. “Well, that’s the end of our fun, why don’t we go get some tacos.”
“OK”
Hand in hand, the two girls walked to the subway and down the steps. A man saw them together and took his penis out as they walked by. While waiting for the train they spotted him again.
“Look at that guy over there, his face is all red from drinking all day because he hates his family,” the white haired girl pointed out.
“Wow, you’re right,” the black haired girl replied.
The white haired girl nodded sagely.
The train came and they pushed a million people out of the way to get to the good seats. They really wanted tacos, it had been a long day.
— babys are my dinner