These Things Almost Make Me Smile

Please hit play as backround music to the brief essay below.

When I get home from work at the wire shop Bev* is sitting in the living room tapping a Black & Tan out on the the coffee table.  This is normal: it’s Friday.

I had never seen someone do this before I saw Bev do it.  What she does is take a Black & Tan cigar, unwrap the outer layer so as to loosen it, tap the tobacco out into a bowl so that the cigar is empty, and then put the tobacco back into the wrapper and re-wrap the outer layer.  She does all of this with a careful precision that is more than a little mesmerizing to watch.  Then she smokes the cigar and drinks the Dos Equis beer that had been sitting on the coffee table.

We had met Bev one night at one of the bars and she’d befriended us and now she spends weekends at our apartment, sleeping on the couch.  She is a twenty year old lesbian and her family, whom she still lives with, doesn’t like her much.  So she gets away when she can.

“Hi Bev.”  I put my car keys on the kitchen counter and get a Bud Light from the fridge.  This is back when I drank, too.

We watch TV.  Bev is constantly getting calls from girls she is dating.  After one of those calls she tells me she thinks she should not be a lesbian.

“You should do what makes you happy,” I tell her.

That’s all I know to tell to anyone.

******

The back deck of the apartment overlooks a gravel parking lot and beyond that a White Castle Restaurant and High Street: the main drag up the Short North.  The Short North is the art district of Columbus, Ohio, and at the time I am talking about it was in moderate enough repair that you could call it a shit-hole or a nice neighborhood with an equally straight face.  There were a lot of art gallerys and a few music venues nearby.  A ways north is the gigantic OSU campus but we don’t see much of the refuse of that down here.

What we do see is a lot poverty and lot of people who are sad for other reasons.  Nearby is Mazer’s Pub, which is where I and my wife-at-the-time go most often because they have a pool table and a decent juke box.  It’s also where we are befriending gay women.  The Short North is the gay district and this part of it, where we happened to find a decent apartment for good rent, is, I guess, “the lesbian part.”  I must have gotten to know at least seven people at Mazer’s during that time, which will not strike you as much but I was a very closed-off person, or could be, and meeting seven people in one place, even over the course of a year, was quite something to me.

Mazer’s was a dive.  One of those over-lit dives that always has chalk for the pool table but never enough well-balanced chairs for the tables.  What I mostly remember about that place, when I close my eyes and think back, is the way the summer air smelled at one in the morning when I left the place to walk the two blocks home down High Street.  The street lamps buzzing in the dark and the humidity thick and warm.  What I also remember is how few people ever smiled.  Mazer, the owner, smiled.

*****

On another night a lot of us are sitting around on the living room floor playing the poetry game.  We pass The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry around the circle, open it randomly, and read whatever poem is hit upon.  Halle and Juniper are sitting beside Jack, the local rapper we met a few days ago.  He can rap about anything.  If one of the cats strolls across the carpet he can rap about that.

Halle and Juniper are our two best friends in town, probably.  A married lesbian couple from down in the southern part of the state — not legally married but what can you do about the law, they’re married — they are both taller than I am and strikingly beautiful, so that the first time I met them the thought that crossed my mind was Are you superheroes?  One of them is an excellent singer and the other is a writer, or wants to be, like I do, and so they I and my ex get on famously.  We are all young.

One Cinque de Mayo I met Halle, the singer, at an outdoor bar in the afternoon and she was complaining about having spilled her hair dye in the bathroom back at their place.  “It’s red on my head but blood on the walls,” she says.  

Halle ran away from home when she was 18 after coming out to her hyper-religious parents.  They tied her up on the kitchen floor and chanted over her to save her soul.  

I guess that would tend to make you run away from home.

Juniper, now, here, back at the poetry reading, is reading something she wrote about seeing Halle in a church during a storm.  I laugh, Juniper reads.  I am the rain.

******

That period in my life did not end well, for reasons that don’t matter anymore, even if I will never forgive certain people not mentioned here for what they did.  But there were moments during that part of my life that can still make me smile and feel sad.  There is a sadness and a deep happiness that I do not want to forget.  I thought I would write some of it down.

(*All names changed.)