It was maybe 11:00 when Kris awoke from yet another disturbing and cryptic dream. “Not again,” he lamented. He was exhausted. He hadn’t really had a solid night’s sleep since moving in to Momma’s house. The modest little mattress he slept on was old and uneven; Kris’ had to sleep strategically: his hip nearly hit the floor if he didn’t lay just the right way. Kris had been able to carve a small, orderly niche out of the chaos for himself, but still, it was no way for a grown man to live. And besides, the room smelled of his failure and desperation, which is to say that it smelled like cat-pee. Kris got on the computer and tried to write. But it would have taken a stronger man than Kris to summon a muse in that moment.
“Screw it,” he resolved at last, “I’m up.” He decided to get out of the house, go down to BeBo. Maybe the dissonance of humanity would drown out his uneasy thoughts.
-----
BeBo was that local Arts District. It had evolved slowly over the past many years from a sketchy, drug-ridden slum, to a Mecca for artists and hipsters. And in fact it was currently transforming yet again. Bankers and insurance lawyers, recognizing the rise in property values, were beginning to stream in and push down the little bungalows to make way for lot-consuming McMansions. The name of the neighborhood came from a desire to be a little, local SoHo. But rather than being “South of Houston”, this little bohemian enclave was located just off of Benjamin Franklin Boulevard, which then of course was shortened to BeBo. Kris thought this was the silliest thing he had ever heard.
Kris approached BeBo from a dark side-street where he had stashed the Charger. He had chosen wisely, he thought: it was an Art Slam night and the street was in full party mode. Surely this Katzenjammer would silence the chatter of his demons. Four blocks had been cordoned off and festive people moved freely across the street between bars and galleries. At the far end, a stage capped the street off and four men in Seinfeldian pirate shirts played surprisingly great Cuban music beneath strings of white lights. Cops on horses kept made sure that the inebriation literally stayed within bounds. The avenue was alive with merriment, but Kris drifted reclusively right through the bacchanal. He wanted to be invisible, like the old, blind Indian in Little, Big Man, who skirted through the massacre of his tribe with only an insane smile to protect him. A voodoo lady with a table of Tarot cards tucked into an entry-way beckoned to him as he passed by, “Tell your fortune tonight?” She was an older black woman, with beautiful skin and long grey dreads, the color and thickness of cigar ash. Kris chortled, “Way ahead of you, lady.”
He traversed the length of sanctioned festival-zone and emerged behind the bandstand. Behind the stage was a different world. The massive monitors blasted Rockoson music back at the boulevard, which made the blocks behind the backstage feel far away from the party. It was a quieter a place, a place for people who wanted to be able to talk while they drank. Kris didn’t want to talk, but he did want to drink.
The very last place of business on the boulevard was Favorite Things, a wine bar by night, a smoothie bar by day. It had a large, glass garage door, which was raised open to let in the people and music from the pleasant night outside. Kris parked himself on a stool near the curb and ordered two painfully overpriced glasses of Merlot. “Oh, you’re waiting on someone,” the waitress said. “Something like that,” Kris replied. When the wine arrived, he consumed the one of the glasses straight away.
No job, broken faith in the supernatural, faltering faith in humanity. Dead innocents swaddled in roses and candles, their lives drawn from them. That fetid lumpy bed - how does my family live like that? Do I have any talent? Where am I headed? So tired. Lonely. I wish Maggie wasn’t gay. I hope they pick up my column. If they don’t . . . There is no such thing as free will, we are all just cogs in the craftwork of the cosmos. There is no morality, only cause and effect. If the sheep get eaten, we do not fault the fox. And always, always The Sound. Be still. Be still! Be STILL!
A boisterous lady in a red turtle-neck stumbled onto the stool opposite Kris. She was pretty in a manufactured sort of way. “You don’t have a light do you?” She had on what looked to be a business skirt and high heels. Her hair must have taken the lions’ share of an hour’s preparation to achieve its sheer height and volume; the architecture of the do was a thing to behold. Her jewelry for the evening was on a necklace of large, white balls, like oversized pearls, and chunky wedding diamond was the size of a Chiclet. Kris didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to talk to her. “No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“No sweat, handsome.” The Lady in Red helped herself to a swill of Kris’ overpriced wine. “I’m just waiting on some people. Mind if I sit?” He did mind. “Gawd, don’t you just hate all of these tourists? I mean, locals only, am I right?” She found a book of matches and lit up. “We just finished construction in the fall. I’m a local now. Locals only, right? I’ve been coming here for years, though. Don’t you just think that it’s getting too trendy around here? BeBo is cool now, right; now everyone wants a piece of BeBo. But it’s all about the art, the art and the freaks, am I right? Artists and locals, that’s what I say.” She laughed through her nose as she drank from his glass. “I mean, you’re an artist, am I right, sexy boy?” The Lady in Red toyed with the baubles around her and neck leered at Kris. She was broadcasting alluring, but Kris was reading vapid.
Kris marveled at the woman across from him. “And what is it that you do?”
“Oh, I’m a realtor. Here you go.” The Lady materialized a business card from nowhere, like a good Vegas magician, “It’s a good time to buy, you know.” Kris checked behind his ears for a quarter and kep a close watch on her hands. “ Oh wow! Is that Jimmy Buffet?” She yelled at the back of the stage, “Buffe-e-e-et! Wooo!” It was not Jimmy Buffet. The song was not, in fact, in English. “Hells to the yeah!”
Kris slid his wine glass back to his side of the small, round table and looked the lady in the eye. “Leonardo da Vinci said that there are three types of people: Those who see, those who see when they are shown, and those who do not see. Which one are you?” He wanted to talk about something real.
“Excuse me?”
“Four girls have been found dead in this city in the past several months. Another will be found soon.”
“Holy crap! What – what is wrong with you? Do you ever get any second dates?” The Lady in Red was stunned and more than a little frightened. “Actually, now that I think about it, I think my friends are at The Full Moon. Ciao.” The Lady laid a ten-dollar bill on the table with her expensive red nails and hustled away, her buzz now killed.
“Well, that shut her up.” Kris was pleased about that at least, and the ten dollars wasn’t bad either. The troupe was playing a truly lovely song that, by the sound of it, Kris thought must certainly be an adoration of a brown-skinned girl, but which was in fact, in its native tongue, the recounting of a bloody Communist coup d’état.
Kris heard the sound of something dragging down the street. “No, no, no!” He took a gulp of a drink meant to be sipped. He thought that was his mind playing tricks on him again, but turned to see that in fact an actual young lady was dragging an actual overcoat behind her down Benjamin Franklin Boulevard.
Two women walked closely together between the sparse pools of light that dotted the avenue. After a few paces they stopped and faced each other. The pair exchanged a few words, hugged politely and parted company. The departing girl looked familiar to Kris; she wore a long neo-hippy skirt and had a bandana across her forehead.
The other lady was incredibly beautiful, and she was dressed entirely inappropriately. She was wearing a Catholic school-girl uniform, or rather a sexy interpretation of one: the socks were too tall and the skirt was too short. Her white blouse was tied in a knot at her midriff and her hair was pulled into matching ponytails. Kris wondered if she was a few months early for a Halloween party as he watched her move towards the darkness at the perimeter of the street fest. Her loveliness stirred an old ache in him. Why couldn’t he meet someone like that? Someone with a tall frame, and long reddish hair? And then he realized that he had met someone like that, someone exactly like that.
“Maggie?!” he called across the road.
The girl jumped with a start. She strained to see who had called her name. Kris jogged over to her. “Omigod, Kris,” Maggie said, “What are you doing here?” Maggie looked back down the street anxiously as if to make sure that no one had seen them together.
“What am I doing here? What are you doing here? And looking like that!”
“I do have a social life, Kris. I know you find that hard to believe. Oh man,” Maggie looked around again, “Come on.” She hustled him back to Favorite Things, “Can we sit inside? They have a good couch open over there. It looks comfortable, and I’m a little chilly.”
“Well I guess so!” Kris said. Maggie scowled at the immature little boy that he was and slipped into the slightly dusty overcoat that she had been pulling along.
The two sat on the boxy but comfortable Modern sofa and a waitress clad in black from head-to-toe appeared with a wine list. “Nothing for me, thanks,” Maggie nodded towards Kris, “Designated driver, you know.” The interior of Favorite Things was reclaimed textile mill cum comfy metropolitan daydream. The walls were original turn-of-the-century brick, and large dark timbers supported the high ceilings. The floors were wood, distressed in the literal meaning of the word, and had been stained a near-black mahogany. But the furniture was all super-mod, chosen specifically for its ability to make patrons feel that they themselves were cooler human beings by mere proximity. A large chalkboard hung over the bar with two long handwritten lists: the one on the left began with Australian Syrah; the one on the right began with Apricot Attack.
“So –,” Kris eyed her skimpy attire, “What is this?”
“This what, Mr. Whitlowe?”
“Oh come on! You look so, you know . . . girlie. You’re usually more. . . ” he wanted to say macho, but instead, wisely went with, “incognito.”
“You’re embarrassing yourself, sweetie. So what exactly am I supposed to look like – what exactly is a lesbian supposed to look like, Christopher? We can’t all be girls’ basketball coaches, now can we?” Even so, Maggie pulled out the pony tails and combed he hair straight with her fingers.
“Oh, but stereotypes save so much time,” he countered. This got a begrudging laugh out of Maggie. Maggie was naturally put off by his line of questioning, but she sensed something was off with Kris, so she decided to take the high road, put on her big sister hat.
“Gay girls are just girls, Kris. There are as many different types of lesbians as there are people: Only some are butch. Some are, to use your parlance: girlie. Some are homey - some are wild - some are even – gasp! – Republicans!”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Kris didn’t know how to ask what was on his mind, but he figured that he had already crossed a line, so he probably had nothing to lose at this point – he might as well just go ahead and lay it out there, “It just seems that – I don’t know – some people are born gay, and others are made that way.” Kris’ eyes drifted upwards at nothing particular at all as his brain rifled through some dusty files warehoused in his hippocampus. “I knew this girl in school, Becca: really cool chick, and if you ask me, pretty, not a super-model, but pretty, you know. But she had this messed-up wine-stain birthmark thing on her face – you know what I’m talking about? Just this big ol’ purple-y discoloration, all down one side of her face. Sort of like Gorbachev, but not in a distinguished way.” The mention of wine reminded Kris to take a drink. “She had lots of friends, people loved her – she was super-smart, gregarious – she had lots of guy friends, even. But she never got taken out. I guess the fellas just couldn’t get past the mark.” Kris reminisced, “She used to call it her Capricorn, because it looked like the Capricorn water-goat thing to her. She used to say that she was born under a bad sign. . . I don’t think Becca was born gay. I’ve always thought that she became gay. . . I think she just wanted love.”
“Sounds like an indictment upon your gender there, Mr. Happy. Why didn’t you ever take her out?”
“Ah-so!” Kris grinned and pointed to an imaginary ring on his finger, “Promise Keeper, baby! Vow of abstinence. Touché’.”
“You know what I like about you, Kris? You have nearly completely eradicated small talk from your vocabulary. So what about me, then, what kind of lesbian am I? Hmm?”
“Ooh, wow. Good one. You know – Yeah, I thought I knew until tonight.” He thought about it. He looked to a large pendant light from Ikea for inspiration. He rested his chin upon a fist as he diagnosed the indomitable redhead, “I think that you are a man-hater; I think maybe it’s not so much that you love women so much, as really more so you just don’t like guys.”
“Well, I don’t know if alcohol will lead you to Truth, pilgrim, but it surely has led you to Honesty. Just loosened that little tongue of yours right up there, didn’t it?” Maggie considered Kris’ theory. “Interesting. But your hypothesis is not exactly right. I mean, after all, I don’t dislike men, per se, so much as I dislike people. I am an equal opportunity disliker. I’m not a man-hater – I mean, hey,” she shrugged, “some of my best friends are men. I think I’m really more of a penis-hater; see the penis is what makes you guys do all of those bad, stupid things. Well, no, that’s not entirely right, either; technically it’s really your testicles that turn you all into bad people. Get rid of the testicles and you become lovely human beings. I mean, look at you, you don’t have any balls and I think you’re great!”
“Ha ha. Nicely played, Detective Kennedy.” Music drifted in from the street and mingled with the chatter within. “So have you found our killer yet?”
“Oh, it could be anybody.”
“Any-body? Even me?”
“Well, no, not you, of course.”
“Ah yes, because I am the trusted partner in your quest for truth, and justice!”
“No. It couldn’t be you because you’re black, or at least partly black anyway.”
“Oh and a black man can’t be a serial killer?! Well, that’s just straight up racist, Ms. Kennedy. I demand that every black man be given the same suspicion as their white counterparts. We have just as much ability as any white man to completely nuts and start shooting up campus from the bell-tower! I have a dream . . . that all lunatics not be judged not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their twisted little minds!”
“Oh Kris, stereotypes save so much time.”
They both laughed.
Maggie noticed that he looked a bit ragged, unrested. Kris had always been one to take pride in his appearance. He had mastered the art of looking incredibly good while making it look as if it had all just happened organically. But his overall appearance this night was disheveled; his eyes had dark contours beneath, and his hair looked almost nappy. It could be that it was past midnight and he had partaken of a few, but still, Maggie’s best tool had always been her gut.
“How are you doing, Kris?”
“Oh, I’m good. You know how it is. Hey! This is big: Huffington Post ran a couple of my columns, so that’s big news. And a particular publication, that I will leave nameless at this juncture, is looking at picking me up as a regular contributor. So that could be very exciting. It’s got to be, actually.”
“But, hmm, how are things at your Mom’s?”
“Oh, man. It’s tough. I love her and all, but . . .” Kris trailed off. “It’s not great, Maggie.” Kris corrected himself, “No – you know what? – It’s horrible, Maggie. It’s just – I don’t know how people live like that. It’s squalid – I am using the word squalid here. And Momma’s basically a hoarder. And I know you think you know what a hoarder is, from like the cable networks and all that, but let me tell you – the reality cannot really be conveyed. And there’s all the cats, and the cigarettes, and the house is just – it’s falling down around her. And I want to help, but she doesn’t want help, she doesn’t want anyone touching any of her things.
“I was writing the other day, looking out the window. And the window basically has a tree branch growing out of the frame. I guess the roots got between the walls or something, I don’t know. I checked it out and the tree – the branches – had basically pushed the drywall out, off of the studs, or whatever they are. So I was checking it out, and one of Momma’s cats jump out of the wall. Scared the crap out of me. I noticed that the cat’s teets were full, so I looked in the wall and, sure enough, kittens. In the wall, Maggie. Kittens. Thing is, though, two of the kittens were dead.
“It’s just too much, man.”
Maggie let Kris be quiet for a moment. A clock on the old brick wall, melted as if from a Dali painting, kept time. Interestingly enough, the same song that Mary had played for her in the office was playing now at Favorite Things. She wondered if there could possibly be poetry somewhere here as well.
“Maggie, do you know why I go to Frou-Frou’s?”
“For the coffee?”
“Well, yes. But do you know why else? To take a dump! To take a dump, Maggie! The bathroom at Momma’s house – it’s . . . The bathroom at Frou-Frou’s, it’s got this gorgeous tile, and it’s air conditioned, and it is im-mac-u-late. It’s just heaven, Maggie. It smells like you might fall in to money at any moment. Sanctuary.”
“Yeah, well, we might want to up the ante on your expectations for ‘sanctuary’. But, point taken. What about your faith, have you re-discovered your faith yet?”
Kris began to speak as if quoting from a memorized manifesto, “Faith-is-the-triumph-of-belief-over-reason-and-this-is-why-it-is-the-opiate-of-the-masses: if your reality sucks, then you need a fiction to assure you that things do not in fact suck, that there is meaning and reason to the universe. Pick your Fiction. But I am not searching for Fiction; I am searching for Truth. A reason, without Reason, is no reason at all.”
“You know who you sound like right now, don’t you?”
A waitress came up and asked if there was anything else that she could get them. The implication was that the bar was winding down. “No, we’ll close out,” Maggie said, and handed her a bank card of with a golden hologram on one face.
“You don’t have to do that, Maggie.”
“Kris, you, um, you’re not looking too good, my man.”
Kris was beginning to show some fractures. His eyes grew wet as he looked up at a large mural a scantily clad siren with the head of a wolf. “What am I going to do, Maggie? If I could just get a foothold you know, just something small even. Everything used to make sense. Everything used to be black-and-white. But now it’s all fallen apart. And I can’t find a silence to figure it out – there’s just too many moving parts right now. And I keep hearing this . . . I just need a break, you know?” Kris at last began to cry the bitter, frustrated tears that had needed to be set free for a long time now. Happy people throughout the bar discussed art and movies and tried to one-up each other as to who had heard the more obscure band first.
“Listen,” Maggie said, “I want you to come stay at my place for a while.”
This got Kris’ attention. He looked at Maggie quizzically: Was she asking him to move in?
Maggie read his expression: “No doll, I am not looking to settle down and play house just yet. My dad left me his old place that he owned right around the corner from here actually, not even a mile. That’s where I was headed earlier. I can stay there while you are at my place.”
“But . . . what about . . .”
“Don’t worry about it. Look, Dad’s place is actually closer to the station for me, and it’s been sitting empty, so you would actually be doing me a favor. I’ll just grab some clothes and it’ll be no big deal.” Maggie uncoiled a key from her ring. “I am going to give you a key, ok? You can stay there for as long as you need – a few weeks, a few months, whatever – let’s just get you somewhere where you can get your head together. The only thing that I ask is that you feed my cat.”
Normally, Kris would have fought her. It was not in his constitution to be an imposition on anyone; he was supposed to be the servant, not the served. But their friendship was a secure one, and frankly, he was so desperate and grateful for the offer that all pride was out the window. He simply looked at Maggie and thanked her with his eyes. He nodded.
Kris reached to hold her hand. When he touched her wide leather watch Maggie snatched her arm back as if she had touched a flame.
This confused Kris. Had he misread the moment again? This was absolutely possible, he determined. But he hadn’t been trying to make a move; the gesture had been entirely brotherly. Maggie rubbed the watch as if it was bruised. The longer hand of the Dali clock ticked off a few very awkward seconds.
Maggie smacked Kris on the shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me ‘til now what was going on with you?!” she scolded, “Punk.” The young waitress returned with a leather receipt-folder. “Thanks, guys,” she piped, “Have a great evening.”
“Where’s your car?” Maggie asked.
“35th and John Adams.”
“Ok, here’s what’s going to happen now: you’re going to stay here while I go retrieve your car. I’ll be back in ten minutes and I‘ll take you to my place, alright?” She paused for a moment, and then wondered, “Kris, what if you don’t like the Truth when you find it?” Kris just nodded again silently and handed her his keys. As she exited beneath the large glass garage door, Kris called to her, “Hey Maggie - Thank you. I’m glad I ran in to you tonight.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, and muttered something sarcastic about this not completely unraveling her plans at all.
The last patrons besides Kris vacated Favorite Things and chairs began to be placed upside down on tables; a thin fellow dressed all in black began to sweep up. Kris moseyed outside and sat himself down on the curb to wait for the return of his Charger. He did feel better, he had to admit. Maybe just talking about things does help. He felt that he could exhale just a bit, that in this moment – right here, right now – things were ok. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to relish in the cool breeze that washed the sounds of happy people down the boulevard and across his face. Zen is so fleeting, he thought.
And then it was interrupted by Kris’ phone buzzing in his pocket – probably Maggie asking for better directions. He pulled the device out and touched the large screen. He had mail. Kris opened the message and found that it contained only a single photo and a single line of text: When Kris tapped the tiny envelope icon, the screen filled with an image himself and Maggie reclining on the boxy but comfortable Modern sofa at Favorite Things. Beneath this was the simple directive, “Make her stop.”
