City, sunset, one of the first warm nights — I walked past a hospital. The ER admitting desk was right behind a wide bright window, on display to the sidewalk. A pink figure caught my eye immediately. Standing not tall with her back to the window, pajama bottoms, loose sweatshirt, knit beanie. Kind of folded in on herself, not taking up much space, but maybe not fully aware of space either. Standing quietly, almost demure.

Standing by her side, a man, youngish, oldish, neither young nor old, glasses, focused, face open and frank. He was looking down at her, then looking up at the person behind the counter, back and forth like that, getting the information across, getting it right. In the necessary state of external calm one has to be in when standing there, being the one standing there doing that.

I thought, I know them. They were one of my daughters and me. I thought, There goes another one. The pandemic got another one, and I wasn’t thinking about COVID-19. Because the girl was either late pre-teen or early teen. I recognized the look. It was the look of disappearing. Intentional overdose, I thought — though one of the early ones, bless them, not the kind where she comes in via ambulance. Of course I could be wildly wrong, I don’t have any idea whatsoever why those people were standing at the admitting desk of that emergency room at that moment, and I never will know — but something in me just knew. A gale of grief swept over me, followed me down the sidewalk.

As far as I know, this is unrelated to today’s pigeon, except perhaps for one key word.

pigeon

What a lonely lunch!

The gas stove was squat, curvaceous, and it made the apartment always smell a little like gas.

The pork chops were mine. I had walked to Schnucks and bought them myself, with some of the cash I had earned as a stockboy at Kmart. Then I fried them, in that grimy little kitchen, and I sat there, next to my open window overlooking the scrubby trees in the alley, and I ate the pork chops, and that proved that I existed, and it was good.

My girlfriend came over.

The street was called “Independence” and that seemed appropriate for my first apartment on my own. The address was 1018 (#4), and the house is not there anymore. Some years after I moved out, it was completely razed. For years there was nothing there but a sad pad, a ghostless non-memory of a mundane pile of siding and roaches. Pedestrian grief. No history of nobody. Maps now shows a shed of some kind.

She wasn’t “mine” nor was she a “girlfriend.” I wasn’t “Independent.” Words lie. They’re not ambiguous, they’re not equivocal, they’re not a limited representation of the endless possibilities of consciousness, they’re not a crude approximation of the depths of thought or the idiosyncracies of human experience — they lie, and they do it on purpose. They know what they’re doing.

The floors sloped and sagged. Baby roaches festooned the smoke detector and made it beep at night. When Elzo came over, we shot at the roaches with my pellet gun — the one BD gave me. My Colonial puked a fully intact spaghetti supper into my toilet one time when he was drunk. Well, he was drunk almost all of the times, but this one time he puked in my toilet. My downstairs neighbor was a hard, small, wiry, angry man who was also most of the time drunk — but the hard, kerosene kind of drunk, not the floppy teenager kind. He listened to trashy country really loud and got really mad if I asked him to turn it down, and really really mad the time I called the cops with a noise complaint. I can still feel my heart pounding as I lay there behind that flimsy door to the hallway, waiting for him to give up pounding and yelling, and go back downstairs. He apologized to me later, after he got in a twelve step.

My girlfriend wasn’t “mine,” because she was independent, more so than I was. She had gone right on into college like a normal person after high school. I had gotten a job at Kmart and moved into this ratchety apartment on the fringes of Cape Girardeau’s bad side. She was active, making friends, doing cool stuff like caving and camping and learning biology. I was walking to Schnucks, and smoking a pipe because I had read a little bit of “The Drunken Boat,” and the introduction in my paperback said something about Rimbaud being a pipe smoker. I guess he was.

Hey, me back then. Hey. It’s me now. How ya doin. It’s OK. It’s gonna be OK. Relax. Don’t give up. Don’t relax too much.

She wasn’t a “girlfriend” because what does that make you think of? To me it sounds like bubblegum, puppies, cute little pleated skirts, being like 12 years old, being good and proper and demure and submissive and cutesy and going to the movies and having braces and getting married. We didn’t do any of that. I don’t know exactly what she saw in me, although I will admit I was pretty cute. And charming. And I had a good sense of language and magic. But yeah, if me now was her dad then, and me then was my daughter’s boyfriend now (haha “boyfriend”), I’d be like, what the hell is she doing with that slacker. Her dad didn’t say any of that shit because her dad wasn’t in the picture at the time, but her mom more than made up for it by despising me most venomously.

“I don’t understand why you want to go over there and spend all your time in that hot apartment...”

Well, mom, it’s because I’m repeatedly having sex with my cute charming smart dorky twink of a boyfriend.

We also had a cat together who, of course, lived in the apartment with me. We had two. The first one died young, of feline leukemia. We sat with her, her tiny curled up body, her breathing getting slower and slower, until at last she stretched out as long as her slight frame would allow, took one last long, sighing breath, and expired. Her name was Amanda.

Then we got Cecelia. Also a calico, but darker, bigger, healthier. She scampered all over the apartment, climbed the curtains all the way to the ceiling. Slept on my girlfriend’s chest. I don’t know what she died of, because she ran off and disappeared two days before I left Cape Girardeau, the next year when I finally did decide, though not before rationalizing the hell out of it, to get off my ass and go to college.

So now you know there’s more going on than the words will admit when I say “my girlfriend came over” while I was eating my slightly burned, slightly pink in the middle pork chops. She saw me through the window; she was standing in the alley down below. She was tall and slender and vital, like the weeds in the alley.

“What a lonely lunch!” she said, amused, charmed, pitying.

The frailty, the fragility of a cat drinking in her last breath.

The fragility of a young girl standing at the entryway of an emergency room.

“Can I come up?”

My loneliness interrupted by a feast of attention, to which I felt entitled, which I took for granted, and yet constantly feared losing. My infantile independence traded for love.

What the words don’t want you to know. What they’re trying to hide, and why. What the words feel a need to protect. Yourself from yourself. Your small, feline body from the gaping, aching ravages of nothingness.

Here’s a thing I wrote a long time ago:

There’s a road.
It’s packed dirt with a pubic mound of grass
and weeds down the middle. The colors are pea
and manila. There’s nobody around. There’s
horizons everywhere. Too many horizons. There’s
no place to hide. There’s one part of the road
where tire tracks have left lunar markings in the
fine silt. The pattern is exquisite, touched by the
sun. You should go there. You should look at it.
You should touch it. Get your fingers dirty. I’ll
wait here.

There is a secret place behind the river.
You have to go beneath the sawed-off concrete
bridge at night when the crows have been
forgotten. Unlearn your language. Forget why you
came. You have to leave your family. You have to
not be sure about the clouds anymore.
There is a little girl there who has something very,
very, very sad to tell you.
Please. Don’t go there. Don’t.