Off the Road - 38

a jazz novel on a typewriter

3

I was writing a novel in my mind but it was all ruff drafts in a Pilsner kind of way. We were walking Jefferson Street and Fillmore looking out across the bay over the green which separated San Francisco from the grungy brown water. I did not realize until this moment how much shorter she was, but it did not matter: I had told her that I was leaving San Francisco before the end of the week to go back to Boston. And she said she did not mind. I’ve looked at life from both sides, I really don’t know love and it seems a downright waste.

 She looked at me: “So, are you going back by car or by airplane?”

“You know I’m going back to my car, I just need the car to do it with. The one I have just isn’t going to make do.”

“Because it’s due do?”

“I wouldn’t put it quite that way.”

“You’d be more explicit?”

“Something like that. What are you going to do?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I am a trifle dumpy and frumpy. But what you may not have known is I’ve lost 20 pounds so far and by September of next year I should be able to look for a boyfriend who isn’t at the bottom of the barrel.”

“And what do you mean by the bottom of the barrel?”

 She turned me around and got very serious: “In the contemporary day and age, every woman wants to date the top 10% of the men. And they want to be exclusive. But the 80/10 rule just doesn’t work in this particular circumstance, at least for me because I am not in the 10% of women.” She was being harsh. But she was also being accurate.

“I heard that from Dean as a matter of fact.”

“Be that as it may I don’t want the top 10% because I actually found a reasonably exclusive relationship and eventually to get married and have a kid or two maybe some children.” She did not laugh.

“So, you need to ditch the 10% or the exclusive. And you have written down your answer, am I right?”

“Precisely so, it is buried in the reaches of my brain. Which is why I’m hanging out with people who I am not even close to marrying while I get the poundage down to a minimal number, and then chase a man until he catches me.” I had not encountered someone as objective as this.

“We have just to the other that we have picked right now rather than right.”

“That is why I seeing the logical song over and over again tell I reach the Nirvana of understanding. All apologies if I’m being too blunt.”

“No, I wish that I had a demon on my shoulder just like you.”

“No, you don’t, because he would sneer at everything you do wrong. Then you would stop listening to him anyway.”

Her “No” had a known force on my noggin. And that hurts without the egg.

Then I wished that either she was more gorgeous, or I was more intelligent because that way we worked as a couple of Jacks. One of the things about dreaming could have been the crashing reality that you are not good enough even for the thing you are imagining. Imagine that: I should have picked my parents better so they could lead me with a sense of how much I am lacking. I was never any good at sports. I was never any good with academics. I simply slipshod buy, by the cheerfulness of my personality. Sadly, the personality was broken and now I have nothing, which is apparent from my living arrangements and lack of pecuniary means. At that point, I grew actually happy because at least I wasn’t at the complete bottom. Then I got worse because I was in the second decile: I knew exactly how much I needed improvement and that sank my heart to a slow beat.

Then my phone rang-a-ding-ding and I answered it without thinking, even without questioning, without even hoping. Of course, it was Dean because Dean was the only person who cared about my existence at the moment. We exchanged a few words, and he wanted to meet me tonight at City Lights Booksellers. I said yes though I didn’t know where the action happened, but I could ask. I closed the phone and stared at Faith with wide eyes.

“Where is City Lights?”

“If you mean the on the street, then all around you. But I assume that you mean the booksellers. We can get you there what time is Dean wanting you to be there?”

I started to ask how she knew it was Dean but then realized that I had talked about no one else.

We wandered waylessly hither and yon, but then on Washington Square far from the Ben Franklin Memorial near the trees, I stopped and asked her: “You are among the most judicious and lucid of anyone I have ever met. So why did you get undertall?”

Somehow this was the moment where another level was broached between us. She sighed and then began: “My parents did things to me which should not be done, nothing physical but over and over again hitting me with the fact that no one would marry someone who is as plain as I am. It was more than just grating but underneath a scream. In the end, I did not want to talk to them.”

“What happened to you?” The wind blew in a stiff breeze, and she waited for it to calm down.

“Most people when they say ‘depressed’ mean a week or so. I was depressed for three years of cool running. I just barely graduated high school, and the next day ran away knowing that I was going to San Francisco even though I was going to have trouble keeping money in my pocket. That’s what happened and that’s where I am.”

“Digging your way out of adolescence?”

“You know the saying: ‘We should let should let our adolescents adolesce.’ And I am adolescing.”