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Crash Landing  Click image for full screen version I was headed for a
crash landing. I knew it
but couldn’t prevent it. I’d been involved with a dancer on and off for
about a
year,
not the artistic kind, not ballet or modern dance, a girl who hoofed it in a chorus line in an old tumbledown vaudeville house that still did good enough with audience to keep the pay checks coming. We shared a two-room, third floor walkup nearby. Nothing to crow about but at least it was ours. And however cold it was in the winter and hot in the summer, the one winter and summer we lived there, it didn’t matter all that much. We laughed and fucked and ate and drank and now and then took the subway out to Coney Island and went swimming with the crowd. What did we know? We’d grown up that way and that’s what we did. And for that while, it was just fine. I was a junior reporter for a local rag, having lost a better post with a weekly column just before we met. I was young enough to understand that this was par for the course and that if I stuck with it I’d make back what I’d lost. But then, with her, I just accepted the fact that I’d been done the dirty and did what I needed for that check. I couldn’t see a finale. I wasn’t prescient. I had none of that foresight. But I also was a realist. And for us in that situation there wasn’t much else that could happen. She would meet someone, a guy on the make with a bright future who gave her enough and loved her enough to rub me out, not as in murder, mind you, but out of her picture. They’d meet one day by chance, just as we met. He’d follow up, showing her the bright side of the city, a different neighborhood, a higher terrace, cleaner air, and perhaps the promise of marriage, which wasn’t a deal I could match. I didn’t want to then. Why should I marry her when we had enough to keep us going, and a good deal of pleasure while doing what we did? Because I needed her more than I knew at the time, and I loved her more than I could ever admit; that all came to me after she left. Nothing tempestuous because by then it was clear that our future was moot. If the other fellow hadn’t come along when he did. But he did. They happened. I came back one evening after writing a story about a petty robbery that made the second page next morning. She was packing. I didn’t make a scene. There’s very little I could have done to make things better. I knew she had had it and that she’d move on. And I wasn’t capable of mending it with a few stitches, a bottle of dye, and a new button or two to make it look like new. The next few days I don’t want to remember. I drank too much, lost my salary in a card game, smashed my fist through the mirror hanging above the mantle piece across from our bed, now my bed, called her up several times – she didn’t answer – and gave myself to the streets to get a little bit lost. I was a wreck. The flight had crashed without a runway in sight. And that’s the sorry story I’ve got to tell you tonight. Bowen Island, BC; New York, NY, July 2018 Table of Contents Next Episode |