01 - Cigarettes and coffee
The coffee drips down Dave’s long fingers like brown blood,
his mother’s fingernails pressed into the palms of his hands along with the
coins like the Stigmata, this tall boy with limbs so long he looks stretched
out, a rubber band pulled until he cannot regain his original shape, his face
narrow, sharp, nearly fish-like with each eye set on each side of his head, his
lips as thin as ribbon candy, vanishing when pressed
Yet, when he stops to look at me he looks like a warped
reflection of me in a carnival mirror, the color of his eyes just like mine,
the look in his eyes just like mine, curious and sad, his drunken father lost
in their depths just the way my mad mother is lost in mine.
His trip takes him diagonally across Crooks and Vernon
Cigarettes and coffee, and candy if the store keeper hands
us any change.
Dave doesn’t look like a gypsy; he wanders like one, mother
settling into this place or that, a bee feeding off flowers until the nectar
runs out, desperate to find a flower in Clifton Paterson Crooks Avenue
Tall, not tough, he quivers in each gust of wind, a reed
hoping to weather this storm we live by bending, quivering a little even
talking to me, reading in me my ability to hurt him or lead him into trouble,
when all I want, and all we need, is to survive.
Cigarettes and coffee.
Dave wants to know who I am and why I come to the corner
store so often, bearing cigarettes and coffees for my uncles in their boat
store up the street the way Dave does for his mother to help paint her fingers
and teeth brown.
From St. Brendan’s to
Paul’s Tavern, people wave to me on the street, the old men, the store keepers,
the women waiting for the bus, a familiar icon of Crooks Avenue carrying out my
mission with the diligence of a soldier.
Cigarettes and coffee.
If anyone waves at Dave, he doesn’t see it, too short a trip
for anyone to witness except for anyone who’s seen him before, the liquor store
clerk who sells his father rotgut to keep him calm those few days when Dave’s
mother brings him home each month, the man in the jewelry store over which Dave
lives.
Dave breathes funny, not a huff and puff like I do after my
block long jog down the street, instead a wheeze, a release of steam an old
fashioned locomotive might expel, his long legs taking a dozen strides to start
and just as many to slow him down, and each time I see him, he never assumes
the man behind the counter in the corner store will know what he wants,
repeating the same words very precisely, needing to make the man understand:
cigarettes and coffee.
Yet the clerk knows the routine so well he already has the
order ready, knows how many sugars to put in and how much cream and what brand
of cigarettes to hand Dave when Dave hands him the money.
I’m always a mystery, coming to the corner store with the
requests of four uncles and the collection of customers that came into their
store to gab, issuing me variations that I have to repeat the whole way down
the street to keep them all in my head, reciting them before the clerk so he
can get it straight, too: coffee and cigarettes, yes, just different kinds,
milk or cream, or sugar on the side, leaving my fingers to bleed brown, too, as
I struggle back up the block, the paper bag I carry growing soggy as the coffee
leaks, my shorter legs aching from the endless routine, both of us running
there and back, both of us dreaming about some future life we might lead that
does not keep up climbing up this hill only to fall back: cigarettes and
coffee, haunting me in my silent mantra, long after my night time dreams cease,
morning waking me to this routine, just as it wakes Dave, somehow connecting us
in a special way, almost nobody else can see.