The Fine Line

There’s the fine line in front of Vill’s head, staring into him. He’s sitting at an all night diner, laughing about it, at the fine line that follows him around, out of reach like a shadow.

Vill lives in an apartment complex, under two goth girls who blast heavy metal music and hold all-night vampire parties. When they pass each other on the front steps, the goth girls give him a knowing smile; their cigarette-yellow teeth snarling beneath black lipstick. Vill doesn’t smile back, just tucks his newspaper deeper under his arm and walks to the bus stop. He whistles a little song to walk to. The whistle gains him friendly nods by other pedestrian walkers. Vill feels a thousand miles closer to the fine line during these morning walks to the bus stop.

Far, far away from his apartment complex, at the end of the East edge of the city, he finds the gargantuan Lake Michigan separating his native Illinois from that of the wooded Michigan towns nestled across the waters. It is there at the lakefront where he trudges out into the icy cold water on sweltering summer days, trying to get closer to that fine line that is drawn somewhere in the vast blue waves. He walks out into the water with slow unexacting steps, looking down at the dust cloud explosions of sand his heavy feet create, muddling up the wet-brown sand-crests with size ten footprints. The numbing cold water creeping up his legs makes him want to squeal and spasm like hitting the funny bone, except that feeling throughout his whole body. Little by little the numb becomes normal and accepted and okay. He thinks he’s closer to the fine line this way. He thinks.

As an overworked manager of a grocery store, Vill frequently forgets to feed his goldfish in his living room. The innocent orange creatures just prance about their glass cage, not even remembering who Vill is, not knowing the hand that feeds them. Yet they exist and swim around within the fine line. Sometimes he feels the fine line crawling into his mind in the high afternoon, when every single person surrounding him seems to be busy with their dog walking or office work or vacuuming. When Vill lounges in his hammock in the backyard, looking up at the clouds swoon over the wind, he sometimes looks down at his feet so far away from him and feels that they are not his own. He feels like he’s living in a ghost of himself, an universal spirit borrowing this odd human body to experience the wonderful suffering of this world. And he looks at the tiny brown birds that fling themselves off of power-lines, their suicide attempts foiled by a natural instinct to live, to fly, to be one with the air so high and even higher. But that only happens in the noontide afternoon, when the fiery sun has reached it’s zenith in the sky and makes all the shadows of buildings, trees, people, and ants cower into hiding, into themselves.

And the fine line happens when Vill gets kicked in the face with a soccer ball. One night he was playing soccer as a goal-tender at the net. Under the bright stadium lights of a park in the evening, Vill is not paying attention to the soccer game and instead stares at the softball game going on at the other end of the park. He is focused so much on the baseball field that the roar of the soccer game is just a dim hum to his inattentive ears. Imagining a baseball hitting someone on the head and possibly killing them freaks him out. He is daydreaming about all the blood and the ambulance and the sullen air of sadness it would all cause. The wind blows a cool, refreshing breeze on his sweaty neck. Then, he gets pounded in the face by a soccer ball. The soccer ball is an unexpected hard pounding on his cheek. And as he falls to the ground, in that split second, the baseball game, the soccer field, the clouds, the Lake, the universe all disappears from his knowledge and he is toeing the fine line. But then it all rushes back; he doesn’t know whether the throbbing of his face or the embarrassing blood in his cheeks burns more. Then the game comes rushing back like a typhoon and the people crowd around looking down at him. He needs to talk to the people and assure them he’s okay and that there’s nothing to worry about. He needs to feel the anxious feeling of everyone’s attention being directed at him but wishing only that everyone would get back to the game. And when everyone did get back into the game, he forgot about the softball game and went back to goal tending. He was quite far from the fine line after getting back into the game.

That fine line cannot be painted. When he paints, he tries so hard sometimes to paint that fine line. He starts with the deep logic of it, of mixing the right colors for the right mood, a green-blue calm balanced by a fiery red-orange. He knows there are fine lines between the boundaries of the colors, but these are not THE fine line itself. He eventually blends out the boundaries out of an exasperated surrender, and during these sloppy strokes, he is experiencing the fine line within his very own bloodstream.

The fine line between past and present, between right and wrong, between happy and sad. It pervades around us like invisible, fleeting fog so fine we can’t see the shapes from the lines.

The Giants

A high-pitched grinding is screeching loudly outside my window. It’s like a giant is outside, dragging a tree-sized fork against the side of a metal warehouse.

I wake up earlier than usual and brush my teeth, the screeching reaching my ears through the bathroom door, accompanying the swish-swish of my toothbrush on my teeth. Lanky, greasy hair all wet from this awful summer heat is slathered on my forehead like sleeping baby worms. And it really is awful, how you wake up drenched in sticky, sweaty fluids. When I’m wearing sweat like a wetsuit, it’s almost religious how good it feels after a cold, cold shower. And just getting up the nerve to jump in that cold shower is terrifying because of how jarringly cold it’s going to be. I can’t even bear to test that cold water with my feet or else I’ll get nervous. It’s all or nothing: I psyche myself up to jump in and let the stinging cold water drench my warm, sweaty skin. And most of the time I’m so tired and confused that I just laugh aloud to myself, feeling the cold water hammering little headaches into my temples as it sprays my head.

When I get out of the shower, the screeching has faded into the distance. After I wipe myself dry and wiggle into my clothes like a hula-hooping performer, the screeching has stopped. Hm, I think. Hm, hm. There must be something awfully interesting going on outside, but I make a bowl of cereal first. I fill the bowl so full of generic Fruity Loops that I need to hold down the red, blue, and green rings with my palm as I pour milk in so they won’t tumble over. I find a plastic spork lying next to the empty silverware drawer.

Outside, sitting on my front stoop, I find no sign of the screeching culprit. A couple semi-trucks crawl down the street like centipedes on their eighteen rubber wheels. Maybe Fred would know what was making the noise. Fred is my neighbor, an old man who takes his morning and afternoon and evening walks after breakfast and lunch and dinner. He often comes by and we chat about the neighborhood. He’s not one of those old timers who tries to ask you about your studies or work or family or drags on the conversation to try to fill up their own boring lives, he really just says what’s on his mind. So I saunter down the sidewalk, taking an apple with me. My first bite of that apple is so crispy and seems to snap into the air around me. Oh, how good fruit can be on a summer-morning walk!

When I get to Fred’s place we talk about something lively that I don’t remember. For him the ways of the world can’t be much better than a supply of toothpicks and a bucket of beers. He’s so perfectly simple. He’s like a country-mannered fellow wedged into an urban neighborhood. When I ask him about the screeching, he doesn’t really know what to say. He just nibbles on a toothpick wedged in-between his teeth. Well, I guess he just doesn’t really care or maybe didn’t even notice it; that’s just the way he carries on with his day. It would take a nuclear holocaust to put him in distress. Even then, he’d probably be twenty notches calmer than the screaming people around him. And so I leave his place to find something to do. I’m at a point of being jobless, single, and absolutely certain of only the good feeling of wind on my face, something I’ve picked up and grown to trust from my years as a skateboarder back in high school. All I’ve ever enjoyed is skateboarding. I’d skateboard on the bikepath in the woods near my house to get to the post office and mail a letter. The smell of maple trees swishing their sappy juices past my skin and the smooth, bumpy imperfections of asphalt pushing against my feet made me fall in love each morning. It was the rush of it all: of your lungs hurting so bad and so exhausted and your thighs so furiously hot and overworked. And I skateboarded in my head, too, constantly picturing myself doing the act on desktops, ledges, bedframes, and stairwells. I skateboarded away from this world of greasy gray materials with its greasy brown food and greasy pale faces. I skateboarded away from the garage where my brother worked on cars and I skateboarded away from my family that loved me with more love than I deserved. I skateboarded to the city, where the prospect of prospects invited me. But as I walk down the sidewalk now, I can’t think of anything to do that could make me fall in love like that again.

So I weigh my options in front of me. The weather is too beautifully bright to stay inside. My natural inclination is to go grab a drink or some weed and wander up and down the neighborhoods. So I phone up Solomon to try to score some of the cheap hash that he lets loose for dirt cheap. He tells me to come over. I hop on the Ashland bus heading north to Grand, giving the driver a timid “thanks” as I step off. The houses grow older, fainter, and more worn as I walk further west. The afternoon sun beats down yellow all around, and the off-white sidewalks don’t do anything but shimmer the light back up at my eyes. When I arrive, Solomon is sitting on his front-porch rocking chair smoking a cigar and reading the funnies in the paper. He looks up and nods at me before getting up and shaking my hand with all the relaxed energy of a man whose work involves helping others escape their own reality.

“My main man,” he says. That’s what he started calling me the second time I met him. “Oh my main man, you’re looking good,” he says, eyeing me up and down with an child-like smile. “Come in, come in,” he says.

Solomon’s house is a travesty of an impoverished drug-shack. On the outside there are panels of siding gone missing and graffiti sprayed all over. On the inside, plush sofas sit on bright red shag carpeting. There’s some sort of Arabian folk music playing with some droning voice singing over a sitar. The walls are decorated with hundreds of framed-art the size of fingernails. As I look at one of a thumb-size doodle of a hilly-billy type guy screaming because he’s getting bit in the arm by his mule, Solomon puts out his cigar. “You like those?” he asks. “I got a midget friend who does those. She says drawing so small helps with her penis envy or some shit.” He laughs loud, but I’m not sure if he’s joking. He hands me a beer, something called Fernando’s Balls. The paper label on the bottle has two soccer balls on fire, falling from the clouds.

“That’s my brother’s brewing company,” he says.

“Where’s he located?” I ask.

“Tempe, Arizona. You like it?”

“It’s good.”

“Let me tell you a secret about why,” he says, leaning over, “Fernando likes to put a tad bit of his balls in the beer. Yep, every once in a while he’ll just walk into the brewery and teabag the shit out of those fuckin’ vats of fermenting alcohol.”

“Um,” I say, not sure if I should smile or not.

He slaps me on the shoulder and laughs. “Loosen up, dude, I’m just kidding,” he says. I’m not sure if he is.

There are strings of Chinese characters written on paper squares hanging from the ceiling. Every once in a while they sway from a breeze blowing in through the open living room window.

“Listen, Solomon, I’d love to stay and chat but I’ve kind of gotta get going,” I say.

“Oh, come on, you gotta stay!” he insists. “I haven’t even shown you my new turtle yet!”

He brings me over to a clear aqua-tank the size of an office desk. There are two small garden snakes coiled near each other, slumbering. “That’s Greg,” Solomon says, pointing to a turtle standing in a corner, facing the wall away from us. He grins at me with the happy teeth of a madman. I grin without making eye contact, only wanting to leave this place which makes me so uncertain of things.

“Feel like having a dinner with my friends in a bit?” he asks. “Just stay a little longer, I promise you it’ll be worth it. Have you had my couscous? You haven’t had real Mediterranean food ’till you’ve had my couscous, I promise you that my main man!”

I sigh, reluctant as ever but still wanting to be polite. “Sure, I’ll stay,” I say. Solomon is delighted. He goes to warm up the couscous, which he has stored in large tubs in his refrigerator. That’s all he has in his refrigerator actually: just giant metal tubs of couscous and six packs of Fernando’s Balls. I’m looking out the window at the red-orange late afternoon sun and the long, skinny shadows creeping up the buildings across the street when the guests arrive: a tall, sullen looking man with frizzy hair like dark brown sagebrush and a girl with charcoal black eyeshadow and shiny black hair slicked around her thin, bony face. Solomon yells from the kitchen, “Make yourself at home, I’ll be out with the cuisine in a bit.” He laughs after he says this, digging the folk music still playing, jiggling his feet on the linoleum floor a little while he stirs the grains on the stove.

“Hi, I’m Fernando,” he says, shaking my hand vigorously. “This is Adilah, my girlfriend.” Adilah doesn’t take notice of me nor Fernando’s introduction. She looks impatient and taps her foot a bunch. Fernando sees the beer I’m drinking and his face lights up with his teeth and eyes all enlarged and shining. “Hey! That’s my beer,” he says. “You like my beer, man?” He excitedly titters a little tee-hee.

“We have to stay here for a week?” Adilah says in a whiny pout. Her face looks at the place with contempt, like it’s not giving her something she wants. Fernando takes no notice.

Dinner is amazing: huge helpings of couscous with seasoned potato stew and with plenty of grainy bread all filled with little seeds and soft and warm. I forget to drink water because I’m enjoying it so much.

When it’s all done Solomon takes me to the door. “Hey man, listen, you’ve been my friend for how long now?” he asks.

“A few months,” I say.

“Well here man, here, take this.” He hands me a plastic baggie of hash, all smelly and crispy. “For my loyal friend. Call me up sometime, we’ll have some more fuckin’ couscous, yeah?”

I say goodbye to him and Fernando and Adilah. Fernando is drinking his own beer trying to tell Adilah a story about the history of his brewing company, but she is focused on painting her nails pink in front of the television.

Out in the street, the heat is starting to go down a bit with the sun, but I still feel a little moist with sweat. Maybe it’s my body trying to burn off all that food. I stop to smoke a little in the alley to relax my nerves. I walk around town for what seems like hours and hours until darkening twilight, taking in the smells of people’s smiles, oily chicken, raw sewage, bursting fire hydrants, fireworks that boom down the neighborhood intersections. There’s something sad about it all, the lonely feeling of passing others with nothing but a half-hostile glance, the lonely families with their delicate situations, the lonely lovers erasing themselves into each other one by one, the nervous cats scurrying down the lonely alleys under lonely balconies. I can’t help but smile at it, the whole experience of life together like this under sky pollutioned by orange-yellow light, the progression of it all, of this breathing furnace of a city all busy with a million lonelinesses. Oh what uncertainty it is to be young and existent!

So I walk with excited energy up to a friends house near Elston and Ashland while thinking about all of this, where a party is supposedly happening. I hear the din of commotion from two blocks away. It must be a huge shin-dig. There are people packed to the brim in the huge front lawn, tightly packed all the way up to the black metal gates where I barely squeeze in. It’s all yelling and crazed and hopelessly and hopefully youthful in there. Bottles clank on the sidewalk and against the walls of the brick buildings beside the house and on the bones of people’s arms and legs. I spot an old buddy I haven’t seen for years, Scary Sammy, a nickname we gave him one Halloween when he showed up as a Thunder Cat. Last time I saw him, we were skateboarding in California, packed in some one-bedroom apartment with nine other skateboarders. “Sammy!” I say in surprise, joy, and excitement.

He smiles all big with his lips and teeth spread way apart. “Haven’t seen you in years, dude!” he screams, hugging me. “I’m so glad you’re here!”

“I’ve been here all along,” I say, smiling and nodding to the beat of some funky hip-hop beats blaring from inside. At this his smile fades.

“Let me tell you, dude, the last time I saw you I was in a horrible condition,” he says. “I was lost and completely depressed at the time.”

A tattoo on his arm reads, “My Hell comes from inside” in cursive. I ask him more and why he doesn’t skateboard anymore.

“Skateboarding is like Laguna Beach these days,” he says, “You have your crew of friends who have beef with other crews who talk their shit behind each other’s backs and on and on. The reason why I skateboarded was so that I could hurt myself. I felt like throwing my body down huge gaps, stairs, and rails all in a self-destructive chaos. It was totally unhealthy for me. I study philosophy now…and I paint.”

“Who do you read?” I ask.

He takes a sip of his beer. “You have to study Nietzsche first, then you have to study the Existentialists,” he says. “Oh and Bukowski. I studied his book Women and it made me completely change my outlook on my sexuality.” His voice is excited and eager. His eyes reflect the sullen world of the party that we’re at, making me feel like I’m witnessing a precious moment in the heart of the thrashing foolishness of rebellious youth. “I felt like I was addicted to the orgiastic experience. I wanted sex and I felt it and it was beautiful. But every time, every single time afterwards, I felt this emptiness and complete darkness in my heart. It’s not a good thing to experience sex like that.”

“So what next then?” I ask.

“Well, I’m going to New York to pursue painting. I just didn’t want you guys to think I just disappeared and stopped calling because I’m an asshole. I wanted to vindicate myself and explain myself.” He pulls out his phone. “Here let me show you something,” he says, handing me his phone. It’s a photo of a painting of his: a little blue figure with a blue dunce cap on his head, sitting in a rickety old wooden chair facing the corner of some melancholy green room; you can make out a feeling of total despair in the figure’s expression. “I paint the problems of this world and all the problems all around us,” he says as I hand him back his phone. Suddenly he sees another old buddy of ours and cuts his way across the crowd to go greet him and maybe give him the same sad spiel.

I go inside and see the people clustered into their clusters, drinking beer to oil the silent moments and releasing the laughs repressed during the sober hours. There are a couple girls in white blouses and faded black jeans selling cold PBR out of a mini-fridge. I notice a tall, lanky, tired man handing money to one of the girls in slow, gracious movements. His long hair is tied up in a bun and his bushy beard looks like a furry bird’s nest. It’s good ol’ Puck. He walks up to me with a beer in hand, nodding his head with a calm smirk showing on the corner of his mouth. “How’ve you been living, man?” he says.

“Good,” I say. Puck taught me to be my own person back in the day. On our long drives to the skatepark on rainy days, he’d curse the strip-mall skate fashions and the greasy fast food diet that I had. I respected him for that, he gave me ideals to believe in. I hadn’t seen him for years, only hearing that he stopped talking to everyone and became a recluse. I imagined him as my father when times got rough at my own house.

At this moment, I don’t want to talk to him, I guess I don’t even want to find out his wretched, smiling state of life. I feel like I can read into him already. We can impose our own interpretations of others for them if we don’t give them a chance. Puck did nothing but remind me of something sad from a book or movie or something. Because of that, that’s how I register him in my head: the self-loathing, once honorable but now given-up, bitter Willy Loman reluctantly dragging his feet around the stage. I’ve lost faith in him the way one loses one’s health: slowly, inexplicably, in hopeless denial at first but with stoic acceptance later. The most horrible loss of faith isn’t of religion but of your role models; a marker of your own change more than theirs.

I say goodbye to Puck. He goes on smirking, walking off to spread his smirk like a gem to the world that pays no attention to it.

My kicks are over for the night and I walk home. Parties aren’t what they used to be. I stuff the rest of Solomon’s dank under the blanket of a man sleeping in the shadow of the recessed doorway of a bakery. I got high just looking at the peaceful, empty night streets while walking home. Across the street from my house, there is a tiny, brittle black woman with her back bent over in a big floppy sunhat, slowly pushing a shopping cart filled with cans and cans of non-perishable foods down the street. The bottom wires of the cart have caved under the years of use and drags along the sidewalk, screeching like a tree-sized fork against a metal warehouse. I walk along side her, both of us silently listening to the music of her work. I help her unload the cans into a food donation box and walk her home.

Mmm, the flow of alone and together knitted like patches of beautiful squares on the fabric of time.