because in the end, by the time they pass out the after-dinner mints, or, if you’re in a restaurant, they’re usually in a bowl by the confusing arrangement of doors, the mints are, which make it hard to run out without paying, the confusing doors do, which is why you should always run out the fire door, even if they say it’s alarmed, and surprisingly, it was alarmed, but the waitress, if you could call her that, she was quite old, don’t you think of waitresses as always being kindv young, not necessarily pretty, especially at lums, can you believe that name, lums, it is a chain here in connecticut, or it used tb, haven’t seen a lums in a dog’s age, it was sortv a throwback to another era, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, with the cream-custard pies in a cylindrical demi-phonebooth going round and round, here it comes again, the banana cream pie, you know it’s going to make you sick, what with all this bush beer, just what pitcher are we on, but still you crave it insatiably, you’re outv your mind, you must have that banana cream pie with one slice gone already, you need it, you’re having trouble breathing, miss, oh, ma’am, umm, hey baby, baby please-- no, she wasn’t pretty. she had that hard stern washer-woman look to her, like lindsay davenport yesterday, live, on tape, from wimbledon all-lawn tennis club which looks disconcertingly like the meadowlands to me, now i’m not dissing davenport, but babe she is not, nor capriati neither, sheez, since she’s switched to anabolic steroids i like her a whole better when she was hooked on dope and shoplifting her little (no longer) butt off all over balitmore, and then there are those nameless-types from the netherlands, they cb babes if you overlooked that they’re not remotely babelike, don’t even get me going on the williams sisters, i’m not a racist, i bought the arthur ashe autograph series i, ii and iii, damn things had sharp edges, they really shouldv done background checks on the people they sold them to, but venuserena, it’s like, do you say africanamerican for black consistently, that’s the mark of a true non-racist, someone who goes the extra syllable, do you implicitly buy into stereotypes of italianamerican mobsters irishamerican drunks or fruity frenchmen who would just as soon kick you in the shins as fight fair like real men, well, i tend to go with black, but still, the williams sisters, i just find myself going the full fifteen syllables, africanamerican, not outv any non-racist or reverse contra-actually-racist rationale, but just because they’re like super women, like amazons, the mighty amazon, flowing northward through the dark continent, africa, home of mysteries and snakes like you wouldn’t want from whom to buy fruit, africa, drums, the mighty andes, towering over the rice patties, iraqi, its baby blue flag rippling in the wind, my goodness that looks like the flag of israel minus the star of david, and me, am i an antisemite, my own sister is a jew, can you believe it, she’s doing a retroactive bas mitzvah, i’ve written to dear abby: am i really required to send a check?
so we went out the fire door at lums and it was alarmed as promised, and this was the first time i ever ran out without paying, and it was just the same with the second, both times i was supposedly being treated by someone else, you know, go hog wild, and then they’re the ones who run out, and, both times, i didn’t even have a wallet on me, what i am i supposed to do, just sit there, i ran, both times, the second time was even more insane, it was a friend from college’s parents, treating us, supposedly, to a big steak dinner in this restaurant which was a converted barn, big one, we were on the third story, way up in the rafters, we had to run down like i can’t even remember how many flights of stairs, and his mom, and i’m using that word loosely, mom, she turns around halfway down and runs back to get the doggie bag. to get the doggie bag, i kid you not. this was the first time, though, and we were all underage and lums was feeding us pitcher after pitcher, and john, my rich friend, who later made it right into bill gates’ inner circle at microsoft corporate, isn’t that kindv incredible, to know somebody, there he is, you randomly pick up a copy of businessweek, you don’t even read businessweek, that’s how random it is for you to be picking it up, and there your boyhood buddy is on the cover with his arm around billy, and the thing is, john never ever did beat me a single time in a single race at any distance, and he did mature into a kickass runner right around the end of high school, mostly a speed guy, i suppose he could have taken me in a half mile, perhaps a mile, but the whole competitive thing, it really wasn’t friendly at all, we did have a loving friendship at some level, i think, a level which neither of us ever saw or even suspected, but the stuff near the surface was just plain mean and hostile shit, all centered on competition, he wanted so bad to beat me, and once he told everyone in town as far as i was concerned that he was going to take my ass in this upcoming 5k and there was a kindv buildup to the race, a lot of people showed up to watch, and that’s pretty much how i remember our friendship, those kind of things, envy and pride and wrath, that’s how so many of my running friendships were, and i saw him once, many years later, he was career ascendant, i was whatever i was, he flicked out a card, said to drop by his office, he’d set me up with something. i was so hurt. he never ever beat me at any distance, even after the whole transformation in high school, he was hit with cancer, was out of school for several months, came back with the most enormous scar i’d ever seen, a worse scar than i’ll ever see again, i realize now you just cannot cut a man open more thoroughly than they did him, and the ironic thing is he hit his post-puberty manhood surge after the surgery, after the rehab, so he went away this tall gangly red-headed kid who was a so-so half-miler and so-so high jumper, he comes back like superman, like a trim two hundred pounds, and cocky, like a man, transformed: still i couldn’t lose to him. because it was important to me.
so we were drinking john’s money, we always were, and he points to the door, and then he just goes for it. we all ran, what could we do. it was my car, the ancient toyota corolla, one of the first to hit these shores, many hundreds of thousand miles on it, rusted, brakeless and long since without the ability to start except with a good rolling pop of its clutch, we made it to the toyota quite quickly but there were already guys, big guys, not underage guys, in kitchen whites piling out the confusing front doors, in memory i see them with butcher knives, gleaming in the moonlight, dripping with boar’s blood, and the car doesn’t start, of course, but i’ve depressed the clutch and we’re rolling backward on the sloped asphalt and through some god in a machine i simultaneously pop the clutch in reverse, skid a backward j-turn and roll this giant meat-cutting man off the hood of the car, we drive long and hard, quite a ways before i realize i don’t have the headlights on, then we hide, slumped down low in the car, parked on a dirt road, because we were all of us very scared, even john. that’s the part of the story that’s been with me more, how we hid like that for a good hour, imagining the flashing lights out there looking for the boys who stiffed lums, those dirty coppers, they’d never take us alive.
the thing i remember about meals is who was there: do you? there was a time i worked in the corporate world (it was only a matter of time that i wouldn’t) and of course, it’s their own fault, they told me i could spend whatever i wanted, i did, entertainment expense. the catch was you were supposed to eat with someone else, like it was business, and just that suggestion, that it had to be like business made it business, i can’t recall a single meal and that’s a lie, i can, but it makes me nauseous to do so. i’ve had other good meals like that, with people whom i have no right to detest, and what, it might as well have all been sand, these meals, so many mouthfuls of dust. i’ve had meals with my family, and even just with my dad, and my dad, i love him now, but he’s without an artistic bone in his body, don’t ever go to an art museum with him, he’ll latch on to one fact and that’s the experience, that’s it, and even if you just had an aesthetic epiphany, forget it, his blanketing white insight will blow it all away: you see, he had a blue period. did you see?
all of the meals in my life i’ve eaten with my mother, i might as well confess it to the world. she’s perceptive, of course, but dogs are perceptive, plants are perceptive, just because so many people cannot feel what they feel doesn’t make it extraordinary, but to speak it, to respect the silences, to resonate and reflect in such effortless precision that even a lonely tone has something going on in it for a while, this is how to share a meal with my mom. twins have private language, so i’ve heard, and a parent can collude with a child, this i’ve seen, and you can think about these things and conclude that it’s not such a good thing, privacy, semaphores, inside riddles within enigmas inside pastry shells, i remember the diamond lady, how her teenage daughter and loutish hubbie did collude against her, it wasn’t too nice, not for her, but i saw the pair walking away from the inn, hand in hand, and you could say, tusk, it’s as if they were husband and young wife, how they walked in waveform harmony, conspiring, diamondless, to me, how they moved, i was reminded of love, these things we can name exclusive, incongruent, skewed, we know just an aspect, it’s how we know color, we’d sooner see blue than its shift.
so my fav meal ever, it’s a movable pick, yesterday i was thinking of this lunch we had, caviar and sour cream omelet, it was the first time i ever liked caviar, it’s never been the same since. a little sunny room in an old victorian house, a little western connecticut town already known to new yorkers in a valley so small you could call it a ravine, i think we spent the afternoon by a fast clean river, it was such a clear day, and we talked, i could fill in the spaces but won’t, it was like so many other times, just talking. today, because i wandered back to that long-since forgotten scar, i’m thinking of that idiot cream pie ontop of all that piss beer, how good it was. of course, the cancer came back, the news of john’s death came to me on like a reuters financial crawl, you never know what to think. i revisit. what i find sometimes i lose before i’ve even returned, like the memory of a meal, pies going round and round, where were we then and what did we say, still, do you remember the taste?