Segment 2: When a Third World Came West

I parked the car and listened to Robbie say out loud the words to a song which he shoulda kept to himself. And I walked ahead toward the club by myself and I didn’t pay attention when they asked me to wait up. Robbie his roommate, and his roommate’s girlfriend made a turn at Thorton Avenue towards the 7-11 to get cigarettes and some water to mix with the GHB. Did I want anything?  “No,” I said.  I’d stopped eating so much after I’d taken up smoking; just something to do with my hands, which liked to touch porcelain things on display stands, bat at wavy mobiles. I walked up and past the courthouse where my dad worked and to where I’d put out all he’d say if he knew about me here with these people. I walked past the club Cairo, then passed a mailbox slot and a cigar store.  I recognized it as the one where the owner got shot and killed because my father had tried the case.  In the club there was a wooden bar with chunky wooden eaves at its corners and a red curtain blocking a doorway towards the wait station.  Bar stools surrounded the bartender in a square shape where champagne flutes, pint glasses, and beer mugs hung and missed him when he’d fly by.  I saw a few people at the back end and I walked down towards it seeing two couches.  There was a guy in the corner holding a glass and he was talking to a girl who was sitting on the edge by a Japanese looking table.  I sought the guy out because he seemed like the type I wanted. So I got a twenty out of my purse and I ordered a drink and I looked back at him again and again.

I drank down all I could in three minutes before I had to go up to him because my friends were gonna walk through probably any minute.  I walked past some stools and I walked up to the start of a rug which I caught myself before tripping over. The man was drinking and the girl who was there was gone, maybe she was in the bathroom.

I approached him.“Hi,” I said.

The man nodded and said “hi”back.

What about an introduction or a question about how he liked the bar? Instead I just said, “How’s the drink?” and, “I’m waiting for my friend, but I can’t find him.  I promised him forty for just two.  Can you believe he stood me up?”

The man looked down at the ice in a tumbler.  I looked at the curtains.  I had to think up an excuse in case his girlfriend came back and sized me up as a hussy trying to get at him.  I said “You know anyone with some?” And then I took a drink and he said,“You shouldn’t be going up to people asking them for these.”

“I know but I want one.  You have any?”

“Yeah.” He put down his drink and he turned around looking towards the red curtain but his girlfriend never appeared.  He put his drink on a napkin and he got up.  He went down this small hallway on the opposite side of the bar and he asked me to follow him.  Other than a couple of boxes and red paint tested on the wall, inside the hallway it was empty.  I looked around from side to side and I watched what was going on. I watched people come into the bar but I didn’t recognize any as my friends. The guy pulled out some pills from tinfoil and I got excited.  Most of them had been split open so there were more halves than wholes.  I thought twice because I didn’t wanna go crazy and buy four.  But I didn’t have to take them if I didn’t want to.  I was here; I might as well give into it, my first instinct was usually my favorite one.

Segment 34: When a Third World Came West

Segment 34: When a Third World Came West

We were on our way back from the Congress Avenue Exit and Sam was as grumpy as ever, messing with the radio and not really being satisfied with any of the songs that he was hearing on the radio.  I was keeping covered underneath the last chenille blanket we had in the car, lifting my legs up so that they could be covered up by it to stay warm.  Sam liked to keep the air conditioning on real high even though it was almost October and not as hot as it used to be back when we’d met in July, but he didn’t notice the difference. I didn’t know how fast he was going but he slowed down at some point and pulled to a stop at the shoulder.  He looked out the rearview window and stared at the cop parked behind us, walking back up to Sam’s side of the window.  I hurried to get out my insurance card and began rummaging through the glove box pretending to look for his license, a visa, a valid registration; I don’t know what else what.  But the cop asked for a whole list of things and the only thing I could provide was my insurance card, which was all I was responsible for.  Sam on the other hand looked at him empty-handed and Sam knocked his head against the back of his head rest.  The cop asked Sam to get out of the car and Sam explained some things to him and I was hoping that this would all be enough because it’d worked before.  We’d manage thus far to work our way out of trouble with a lot of talking up to.  But it didn’t work.  They handcuffed Sam and I got out listening to him yell from the cop car to me to call Dante’s to say that he wasn’t going to be into work today or tomorrow.  I caught up with the cop just in time before she’d closed the door to her car and managed to find out where they were going to be taking Sam to so that I could get him out.

Sam had a ton of quarters hidden back in the luggage carrier that he kept in our trunk and I used most of them all to call Dante’s and to find out where he was being held.  Normally I could figure out maps pretty well but I was all jumbled up in my mind and I was nervous, missing turn-off points, where I was supposed to go, and missing the exits for Titusville.  When I’d finally gotten there I drove around a dusty town, picked up some gas, and passed the space shuttle at sunset.  I parked, walked up the many steps to the jail, and sat down amongst a bunch of crying babies and yelling mothers.  In the back I found a quiet seat and counted out the $420 that Sam and I had collected from our jobs in the past few months, and then I thought.  Here it was all going to waste and I was sure, just like the last time, that we wouldn’t get all of our money back.  I bit my lip and realized that I was furious, being put in this situation again again and feeling like I was supposed to come up with an answer for how to get us out of this one.  I must have been there an hour trying to come up with something to do before I stepped up to the cashier’s desk, waited in line, and asked her what I was supposed to do.  She told me that they needed $500 in cash, which was more than I had, and that they were closing in a half an hour.  I didn’t have enough money in my bank account to get out eighty more dollars and I sure as heck couldn’t call anyone who would bail me out for this second or third or fourth time.  I packed up my things, zipped up my purse, and walked out the double glass doors to the parking lot which was growing darker by the minute.

I was eating dinner at the granite coffee table, cereal and apples and listening to Sade on the radio when my parents came into the dark house.  I didn’t really keep any lights on in general I didn’t make any efforts to leave any on especially tonight. I spooned more of my chunky cereal that had gotten mushy from me spooning it back and forth in the milk so many times.  My mother put down her jacket across the back of the dining room chair and began undoing the back of her necklace as she walked into her room.  She didn’t see me so I said “hello” when she turned on the light on her bed stand.  She and Jim came out to ask how my night was and I asked about theirs, they’d gone to the theater to see a play with their two favorite lesbian friends and I asked about the couples’ daughter who was in middle school, who I used to babysit.  They asked me what was up and I told them and I said that I was done with Sam, that they could count on me for that, and that I was done with making any more mistakes.  I told them that I missed college, that I wanted to see Dr. Deetrum again, and that I needed help setting up a bank account because I had $420 to put in it.  My mother sat down cross legged, leaned back with her hands against the carpet and my step-father piped up about all the things he’d been concerned about with Sam for the past few months, how Sam had avoided them, how Sam had been despondent and how Sam had acted untrustworthy.  And I agreed to all of it.

When a Third World Came West: Segment 32

I was kicking my boots against the puddles that were accumulating under the store awnings of Siegel’s clothing on Park Avenue.  My mother and I had barely said many words to each other lately and we’d gotten back from her church.  I’d been helping. I did most things half-way in, half-way thinking about Sam nowadays.  Like the youth group I’d helped out with our church.  Some of her friends were there to help dish out the maccaroni salad onto styrofoam bowls and another friend of her’s to ladel out soup.  I moved around the butler pantry metal tables trying to spread out the bowls in a line or put the plastic forks in a heap by the fridge for the kids.  But the older ladies kept disorganizing my stuff to make it more convenient for eating.  Couldn’t I be of help to anyone?  Today after i’d spoken with the the head filing secertary at Lynx she’d told me that I’d done a great job getting rid of junk information in the bus drivers’ files.  I asked her what could be left out and what needed to be left in and she told me that she’d leave that to my good discretion.  So I started taking out doubles of everything, like copys of their drivers’ lisences or proof that they were American citizens.  I made sure to keep a double copy of an updated drivers’ lisence and looked for material that incriminating or susbtantial.  I wished someone would do this for Sam.  Even though we were married we had so much red tape to get through before we could count on him staying here for good.  Most of it was gonna have to be done with the both of us together, taking time off of work, time away from saving up money.  One time we went out to this far away place, past the John Young Parkway in west, west Orlando.  When we drove up it looked like a building that was built in Disney World because of the way it was old in a modern way.  Like something from Tomorrow Land. We crowded in next to seventy-five people all speaking broken English and being pushed away and pointed to sit down by bored looking security personnel.

I was hiding out behind the Cigarz shop next to the fountain where they’d built a tea shop in a small hideaway that looked like a lodge bunker up north.  It was drizzling more now and I kicked at the water in the rivets of the brick cracks near the iron bench I was curled up on.  My mom had found out through the secretary in the county clerks office that I had gotten married when she filed away the month’s marriage certificates and had come across my last name.  When she immediately came up after work to my father’s office on the 17th floor to say congratulations to the good news he didn’t have the words to say stuff back.

 

Segment 27: When a Third World Came West

                        I took Sam the next day to Our Daily Bread which was the homeless shelter located onCentral Avenueparallel toOrange Avenueand kitty corner to the Bob Carr Theater onWest Livingston streetand across from the Omni Hotel where my uncle had had his wedding.  I held onto the steering wheel of my Volkswagen and promised him that if he slept here everynight that I’d get him or buy him dinner and bring him lunch anyway I could and I gave him all the best blankets we had, the two chenille ones that were blueberry and raspberry colored, and he took them with him.  So I drove almost aimlessly home in my brown pantsuit feeling I’d done the right thing anyway after I’d applied at Lynx, the city busline, waiting to hear back.  And I drove home passed the building where I used to see my old psychiatrist who’d tested me for ADHD,  then Mead Gardens, passed the law office of my father’s best friend whom I’d worked and slipped up at it, for.  And then I drove past more places like the streets that lead down to my high school where I’d slipped up on my grades to write in the back of the room during boring classes like oceanography where we’d watched Jack Cousteau films over and over.  Then I rode past the Firestone where I went one time after I’d had a flat tire driving too fast when I was late to school one day as a senior in the morning.  After I’d kept coming across all these places with these kinds of memories  I turned down Winter Park Road to get a better perspective, hoping that I’d drive past something that I remembered where a good memory came to my mind.  But there were the rich Spanish missionary houses of the families I’d babysat for from whom I’d ate leftovers out of fridges, talked all night from their phones to guys and girlfriends.  At a stoplight I hit my head against the back of my seat and felt down.  I didn’t want to look around at the intersection I was at because I didn’t want to see say, the lawyer dad of one of the girls I’d babysat for driving home at rush hour who’d look back and see me, his babysitter, who’d messed up.  I felt like I was gonna sit here in this city my whole life and just see the same people I saw stare back and think “What has she come to…”  And then right off I regretted leaving Elon even though I’d told myself I wouldn’t, that I wouldn’t look back and feel bad because I’d promised Sam the same thing except now I did.  I was supposed to have moved up out, away and North Carolina was the first step to doing all that but how’d I get back here, the place that reminded me of where I’d slipped over and over again; I couldn’t get away from myself.  The light turned green and I sped up keeping my eyes only on the red sedan in front of me with the lisence plate from Georgia because I didn’t want to see anything out of my peripheral vision but I still couldn’t keep thoughts from swimming around that the person in front probably finished college all from the same place, that their parents were proud of them, that they probably had a watch and made the honor roll in high school for being on time and for perfect attendance. At the last stoplight before my street I concluded that the probability of every car in front of me had or would never bring back and forth breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a relationship to an outcast homeless shelter everyday and I suddenly felt hot, grimy, and tired in my stiff clothes keeping my mind on a shower and a big bar of soap above everything else there was to do and sort out ahead of me.

I pulled my Volkswagen up our hill of a driveway already feeling like the chunky silver on my right hand’s ring finger was for me being married and I let Sam out first as I pulled up my emergency brake and studied the overgrown grass behind the chain link fence belonging to our neighbor Mr. Krutch, that intimidated our short even cut yard mowed down every Thursday by our landscaper Joseph. I got out and ran around the front of my car knocking my knee into the top of the three tiered emblem’s metal grill until I got to the door before Sam did, opening it with my key first, picking up a paper bag of groceries on the antique chest that held our mail, searching around through the house for Amira, our cleaning lady.  After I motioned with my hand to Sam from the front of the foyer I told him he could go back into my dad’s dressing area to borrow a suit and he picked out a black pinstriped one along with a corn blue button down dress shirt that he’d ordered from Rutlands almost five years ago.  Sam motioned towards my parents’ wooden storage closet where a tie rack hung with so many ties but I pulled him along and past the kitchen into my room where I made him get dressed in there while I rifled through my wicker trunk chest that I’d gotten for Christmas seven years ago.  I pulled down a red carry-on luggage bag from the top of my closet and folded twice a white dress with satin crinoline at the bust, an empire waist with a thin satin sheen below this that was no thicker than a white dinner napkin.  I took out from a shoe box a pair of  four inch square cream heels with a back strap and a leather strip running along the top and put them in the luggage bag beside the white dress and a box I’d saved in there, filled with a set of diamond costume jewelry earrings with one of the jewels missing.  I turned around to see Sam’s hands swimming in the cuffs of my father’s coat sleeves and looked down at the black loafers Sam had stolen inNorth Carolina to see the ends of his pants’ legs bunched up at his feet.  I didn’t care much and I slipped on my old black moccasins from Walmart that I’d had forever, peeked out from the sliding wooden drawer of my bedrooms’ hallway and motioned again in silence for him to come on.  I ran to the front of the door before he got to me to peek out through the glass to see if Amira had driven up the driveway with her music loud and the plastic necklaces dancing from her rearview mirror or anyone else and I locked the front door.  I walked up towards him to pull him along out the garage and through the side door where I came out the side of the chain link fence that stood up to my neighbors’ yard and saw Mr. Krutch because Mr. Krutch had not kept the curtains closed to his picture window that stretched along back his living room since his wife passed away five years ago and so I could see the back of him on his couch watching a football game on TV.  Sam got into the car quickly and so I put my bag into the backseats’ door and I got in.  Not five minutes later though and I was back pulling up again because Sam was complaining about the length of his coat swearing that he could find a better fitting one if I were to just pull back up to the house so he could run in and measure.

            We parked on East Robinson street two blocks from the courthouse and to the left of Lake Lily and after Sam got out first to catch up to me on the sidewalk I pulled out my red carry-on luggage bag and wheeled it up to Edgewater Drive where a turquoise honda honked in our way when Sam stepped out too close to moving cars going through the green light at the rush-hour 12:30 lunch time.  I turned around to hide behind my luggage feeling transparent with my white dress already inside it until the light turned red and Sam pulled my arm to cross the street and up the stairs to where we’d parked two days ago so we could purchase our marriage silence.  We knew the drill and we walked up three more flights until we got access to the elevator that brought us into the building, we hurried through the waxed marble floor to the elevator that brought us up to the seventh floor and we turned left into the entrance to the justice of the peace, an office kitty corner to the county clerks’ office where I would be collecting a a receipt stub four months later after issuing a restraining order preventing Sam from ever coming near me again.

Segment 21: When a Third World Came West

Segment 19: When a Third World Came West

Three months later and we sitting before a judge, well in different places because Sam was sitting up in front near the bailiff and I was sitting back behind the wooden session pews next to a lady with braided weaves in her hair, trying to keep a small two year old with a pony tail from running around the room while holding a male infant.  The bailiff was a woman and she wore a tight bun and thick glasses and she was standing firm near the witness stand, her back to the double doors that led out to the jury room, with her arms behind her back staring straight ahead.  For some reason Sam had hiked up his raincoat cargo pants so that they were rolled up above his knee caps.  He had on a black t-shirt and his hair looked unkempt when he passed through the swinging wooden bench door towards the Plaintiff’s table.  The judge first asked him for his name and when Sam pronounced Sammy and then Maserati the judge asked over and over again for Sam to say it louder but Sam’s voice sounded muffled more and more each time because he kept pointing his head down towards his run-down black flip flops.  He should have dressed up.  The bailiff in her short cutting voice asked him to speak up and she shouted it the third and the fourth time.  I looked around to see a short Hispanic woman with dark, sleek hair and engaging black eyes pick up her baby with the pink laced headband around its bald head when it started to cry from the bailiff’s orders.  I got up and gritted my teeth staring down the bailiff.  My father who was a judge used to let me come into his courtroom to watch his injunctions and I’d never in my life seen someone who was a hired court appointee stand here and treat someone this way.  Must be something aboutNorth Carolina.  The bailiff looked around and over my way and told me to sit down but I only glared harder and said into my head how lame and homely she was, I whispered inside of myself how wrinkled and wrapped up she looked like, like a raisin, standing there with her lips pursed and flexing her bare flesh to keep her arms tight behind her back, like a rape victim.  She said once or twice, but I didn’t hear her that if I didn’t sit down and obey orders that she would have to ask me to leave, but I she only spoke louder and more harsh the next time she asked.  I was staring up at the judge now who was a pudgy man with receding grayish hair, thick silver eyeglasses, and this punitive frown that somehow made me think he was a libertarian and that he thought this somehow made him liberal and liberated in his own conservative way.  Sam sometime after that asked me to sit down because he said I was embarrassing him.  When the lady walked closer to me demanding that I leave I turned around and said every curse word in my head I could towards her like I meant it and I felt it hit her hard because I was thin and attractive and had long hair back then, and I could walk away making someone feel less than.  But outside of the courtroom, after I’d cooled off and gotten some plastic cup off the water fountain and drank some of it, I leaned against the plastic black of the courtroom doors asking to myself what I’d just done in there.  And the Hispanic woman whom I’d seen in there with the tiny baby came out too and started laughing saying something that I was trying to make out in Spanish.

“I don’t know what came over me,” I barely said out loud.  “I think I thought they were discriminating against him because he was Muslim.  I’ve never seen anyone do that in a courtroom, talking down to someone like Sam as if they didn’t matter.”  The woman’s baby was down on the ground clambering up her leg, wanting to be held.  But her smile faded immediately and to the best she could she said “Yes, yes.”  I threw my cup in the trash and folded my arms against my chest while I watched the granite on the fountain out the window get splashed every seven seconds with water from the bronze statue in its middle.  I knew that I couldn’t stay here any longer.  If people kept doing this to Sam then he was going to leave and I’d already gotten too attached to him to let that happen.  My summer school class was over in three days and after that we would go.  We’d find someplace that was him and me and start over where people understood.