FALLING, FAILING TO FIND (2009-11-02)

Trying to take a leak and thinking about the folks. Noah noticed he was doing a lot more of that sort of thing. Maybe he was getting older? Maybe all his friends were taking a lot more trips to the men's room? He could go with that easily enough but what was bringing him pause was the flood of memories. Piss. Flood. Almost poetic in that choice of words and he'd noticed more of that, too. He was devoting more time than he'd remembered in the past giving attention to nuances. Like the surface, the spot he'd lived most comfortably for years, was no longer enough and he was trapped between his dissatisfaction"E and all the things he hadn't found to replace it with.

"Excuse me."

Wait a minute. That wasn't his voice. He didn't have his hand on any one's neck and wasn't looking for openings or guarding his feet as he waltzed through this throng of ...

"Thongs!"

He said it and laughed. There had been a lot of that going on. His commentary on the given situation which would've been stored in his mind, or stopped in his mouth. These random observations might have occurred to him before but there hadn't been this need to open up with them.

"Excuse me?"

And this time he realized he wasn't the speaker, his was the object, the obstacle standing between someone else and something they were aiming for. It took his drunken gaze a little longer to adjust from the distant focal point he'd been concentrating on, pulling in more locally but finally he did it. There she was.

Karla Sparks wasn't exactly a beautiful girl. She had something, sure. There was a sensuality about her that couldn't be missed, although she'd been working here at Crow's for nearly two months now and Noah had. He'd missed both Karla and her aura of fleshy delight.

"Fleshy delight," he said, still not really present in anything except the physical. He was saying things that others might hear but that he couldn't possibly explain if they did. He couldn't have explained it to Karla in particular for a couple of outstanding reasons. The biggest was that she was no more aware of him that he of her. He was an obstacle but one with a little more mobility than a pole or a drainpipe that she might find a way to slide by. He was occupying his section of the hallway with absolute possess. With a confidence so pervasive he might have owned the joint. Which he did. In part. Right? Owned the place?

Noah was standing on familiar ground but so was she. She worked the afternoon and early evening shift on weekends, the lousy part of the day when nobody tipped. Or the part of the shift where the big spenders rolled in, flashing cash and leaving their debit cards in their pockets was right at the end, just as she was cashing in and heading out the door. There was nothing much to do iin the afternoons, which made the whole job more of a burden than the adventure she'd expected it to be.

Noah didn't know this, yet. Something might have told him, if he'd just been paying attention. Maybe if he'd just been listening to the voices that were popping so unexpectedly out of his own head? His charm and "way with the ladies" was usually efficacious. It was the way he got them to...

"spread their legs and let me dive from the cliffs. Ha Ha"

"Are you laughing at me," Karla asked.

No. No he was not laughing at her.

"At my father."

"And I'm sure I wasn't supposed to understand that."

Karla was absolutely right, in this case and finely tuned to the things she wasn't supposed to understand. Any remark about his folks. This was a good place to draw the line and push everything 'not understood' behind it. The neighborhood was going to get dense very quickly as Noah's aging process started picking up speed. He was on a run, by god and the lines forming on his hands and face were winding paths. The road was leading to a mystery as large as the point it had started from. Trouble was it was getting there so much damned faster than it'd left. There was nothing he'd found so far with any power to effect the relentless progress. Nothing. No mix of drink and psycho-active drugs. No amount of exercise. No yoga, mixed with meditation and sprinkled with ritual dance. He'd been seeking the magic bullet, the secret pill strong enough to help him make sense of the world he'd been so comfortable in once, though that was a long time ago.

He found it in her eyes.

"No way in hell you're getting in there before me," Karla said. Her object wasn't to do anything more than secure her spot in line but speaking when she did had the unexpected benefit of quieting his thoughts. Her words. If he'd listened more carefully he would have heard the song of the siren or the soft dull buzzing of Tibetan bronze bowls. Somewhere way back in the background was the gurgling distillate being piped into the crucible of one Augustus Oswley Stanley, better known to the psychedelic counterculture as Owsley and responsible for a large percentage of every LSD experience in America and every acid trip on the Grateful Dead tour route. This was a mystic experience waiting to happen and could have happened right then and there, except for the voices in his own head Noah hadn't learned to silence or ignore, yet and the magic talisman Karla possessed and kept close to her at all times; her tights. In the cramped hallway without enough slight to read the display of a wristwatch, one beam of light from a bare bulb vetted its way through the "throng Ha Ha", lighting ever so gently on the soft surfaced and delicate flesh on Karla's inner left thigh. In the moment or tow Noah was able to stare fixedly at these delicious gams, he was transported to a perfectly round, gently curved prairie hill, dappled ever so lightly with the soft blond buffalo grass that had grown on the Great Plains for about a million years and would, were it not for Karla's great great great grandfather, in concert with Noah's distant relative, he might've been a cousin, who knows?

"Life has a sweet circular motion, don't you think?"

Noah was frightening her a little and putting her off just a little more, still but the simple fact of the matter was that he was becoming more lucid with each moment he spent imagining himself in a ritual, dancing across the soft tan surface of her leg with both feet solidly planted in a loamy brown earth that left no footprint but neither was it dry enough to be letting him kick up dust. There was nothing here that would cloud his vision and no single spot he would rather train it on than her 24 year old leg and the soft juncture that he would call a knee some day, after he was more familiar and could do it while just moving his mouth enough to breath while he sucked on her thigh. He saw this and he knew that it was real. He knew that the other loves of his life had been starters; learner's permits getting him ready for the long run that was going to be the single greatest love of his life. She was standing before him and he couldn't find a word or even a gesture that would communicate any of it to her.

"All I really, " he was starting to say, his sense of urgency returning and grabbing him by the throat. "all I really really want to do..."

None of it mattered, though. The door before them opened and closed, just like that. Just that quickly she had been there providing the stage for his wildest fantastic projects and now he was there alone in a hallway. Well, not alone. That wasn't exactly the way to describe standing shoulder to shoulder with a tour bus full of urninal and bidet seeking traveling buddies, all on their queue and checking the tickets in their hands every twenty seconds to be sure they were standing in the right line and didn't have to worry about missing out.

They didn't have to. What were they waiting for? Shaking the dew off a dangling lily? Couldn't they have done that ever bit as easily in the parking lot standing next to their cars? Maybe they could have found a spot back in the back, near the dumpster. It was locked but he had a key. He was, after all, co-owner and if they'd just asked he would've gladly given it to them and directed them out in to the darkness to find it. Given the sudden soberness, his four hour accumulation of Johnny Walker and the resultant buzz all but gone now, he would've taken time to usher them out in single file and taken care to lock the door behind them after the last was safely removed. It was the sort of thing he would do as a public service. He would do it because this was love, by god. And love,l he reasoned, was the very basis of all that was right and good about customer satisfaction and the American business ethics. What else was there but him and the fifty-five years burned behind him, sanding in a line that was ostensibly a privileged tour of the lavatory but was in fact, and he knew this plenty well,

Noah hadn't been here. Not here, before. He recognized a lot of the external details well enough. Hell, he was the person who'd made the arrangements to have the pay phone put in the hallway, never guessing how it would steal a leaning space on their wall and reduce the number of people who could wait by that vital one. It was an embarrassing moment to be trapped on the other side of the swinging door, once a customer had tried to walk through and realized there was no room. No place. You could tell a lot about a person by how they reacted if they were the ones who happened to draw that particular position. Some people, the timid girls and some of the older women who were really just looking for a reason to leave, thinking that a trip to the Jane would be the simplest, and most immediate way to put some distance between themselves and the people who were sitting back there where they'd left their drinks and their sweaters. Dangerous , these days and when Noah happened to be pulling a shift at the bar, acting as relief for someone who didn't show up or trying to play the part of the hard working proprietor that the woman he was chasing that night needed to see to believe he was really who he said he was, an owner. "Co-owner." and doing the things he said he did.

"Working sixty hour weeks. Really! It's the only way for a man to make a living in this tough old town., " he might say and probably had said on more than one occasion. He said it, watching the nervous young woman trapped on the wrong side of the swinging door to the passage way to the restrooms, seeing how she was suddenly all atilt, not sure whether to flip or fly. It was going to be one of the other because she didn't know how else to go about it. Something had to happen and here she was, too far away from the front door and still an entire waiting room removed from the restroom. What was she going to do?

Usually they left. there was an awkward moment where they grabbed up their belongings and, without slamming down the last of their drink, headed to the door. They were trying to assert themselves in such a way to make it obvious they were leaving on their own and that the guys sitting at the table behind them hadn't brought anything to the meeting that was going to particularly endear them to her. They knew, and Noah knew too, they were going to be the horse's asses of the next story she told when her friends got together and wanted to go out for a drink and look f9or fun. It was a sad but obvious fact of life that almost any story saved up and used about the Crow's Nest was something of a cautionary tale. The sort of thing that was designed to keep the unaware and uninitiated away from the joint. It worked about six percent of the time.

"Max."

"You talking to me?"

A popular question in this line, he noted as the lights started dimming, his range of vision spinning in on itself like the aperture of a camera closing tightly to end the exposure. He was finished here and he felt it almost, but not actually as quickly, as he'd felt himself in love for the first time. It was a tough crowd and might really have been the wrong place to take such a fall as he was taking right now because these people around him were of many purposes and focused on many separate and some widely disparate goals. One thing was hell and and a handshake sure, Chuck. It was that nobody here was going to be particularly bothered by an old fucker who'd pushed himself to the front of the line suddenly going down and being forced to abdicate the position he's hijacked from the rightful parties. A heartless crew? Perhaps. There were several cases to be made for either side of the question but one might agree to this much, at least. All were better service by him, this fat drunk bastard, being out of the running. They were all starting to flow around him emulating the water that courses through a storm drain from a yard sprinkler. it will hit small snags composed of grass trimmings and an old sock and slowly build behind it, gathering force to blow past the obstruction and continue on its way.

Except for the unfortunate and extremely awkward position in which Noah had collapsed as he slid down the wall, his head still erect but everything else about him perfectly at rest. His head and heart has the empty ring of a vacation rental between two scheduled parties. The surf was still smashing against the seawall of his round shoulders and their was no reason to remove the glass from his darkened lenses. All that said, it was till a great big "no one home" situation and he was stuck against the door in the hallway that opened out and the walls which closed in on the claustrophobic as they pressed in, pushed by the building pressure of the stream waiting behind them.

Now, something was going to have to be done here or the entire system was perilously close to closing down. It was going to take a proactive "let's get 'er done" rally from somebody, and hopefully the most robust and burly of the waiting lemmings to slide him out of the way, re-opening the flow. The scene had gone to def-con levels amazingly fast and with chaos being the next best friend of organized society, we were about to see our own barbarians pouring down from the south and crashing on the gates of Noah in a few seconds when...

the door opened ever so slightly. The girl was pushing on it and doing a pretty damned good job, at that. No body was cheering but the fact wasn't lost on anyone there, especially those nearest the front, that she was actually moving the big hunk of man away from the position he's collapsed into. She was working herself to the point where she could look down and gander at the barricade holding her prisoner in the place one was only desperate to be in when there was something to be done. It wasn't the place to set up housekeeping, or compose epic poetry to the quirkiness of fate that would have her so near the guy who had, just moments before, been trying to compose an epic poem of the Argonauts journey across her thighs and into the dampened flood plain of her delta . he'd been making something of a case for himself, and proving a lot more persuasive than she'd guessed he would. This was one of those delicate surprises that Karla, were she the sort of girl who did such things, would have run home and jotted down in a journal with a date and maybe a few hearts and flowers sketched in the margins to highlight the importance of the moment.

She yelled, "Get help. Quickly. My god, he's the owner.", instead.

"Co-owner" somebody remarked as the one man able to hold his business well enough to risk giving up his spot in this trove to run for help moved backwards and out the swinging door, mindless of the young girl standing awkwardly there, calculating the distance to the front door and her sweater at the table.