| By James Bezerra,
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Favoured : 112 |
Published in : , Fiction |
"Don't ever start a story by talking about the weather," Oscar told me one particularly cold and drizzly day. We were all sitting around in Washington Square Park's mostly empty fountain. We were lizards laying there, the three of us, our bellies turned to the sun, enjoying a sudden break in the storm. There was a patch of slate blue straight above us, but the Village was still ringed by roiling black clouds. At that moment though they were just hanging out, quiet and huge; all rumbly like foreshadowing. "It's just lazy. So cliché."
Oscar was reading the New Yorker I had swiped him from the University library. He pointed his finger at me, its tip sticking out of a hole in his glove. "You better not be writing like that."
At the beginning I had explained to them that I was writing my thesis in clinical social work, but Oscar always insisted on giving me advice like I was a novelist.
"I'll tell you if it's good," Ernest said and reached his wiry black hand across to snatch the magazine. "Let me read it."
"Old man, you can't read," Oscar pulled it to his chest.
Ernest took a pull off his little bottle of bourbon, "I can so read."
"Doesn't mean you would know a good description of weather from a bad one," Oscar explained, he was always explaining, "What are you, a meteorologist?"
"Hell, you know I'm a painter." Ernest said.
As he told it, Ernest was actually Jean-Michel Basquiat in hiding. He'd faked his death because the FBI had been following him. "They were gonna kill me like they did Andy, and John Lennon," he used to recount this to me all the time. To prove his identity he would take a broken piece of chalk from his pocket and sketch out an oval with teeth on any surface nearby. "See," he would say.
When Oscar was done with the magazine he handed it off to Ernest and then sat next to me on the rim of the fountain. We watched all of the city rush by. Since the rain had stopped people were out, hurriedly criss-crossing the park, on their way to other places. But we were happy right there. He would point at people and tell me what he knew about them from their looks. "She wants to make love to me," he pointed at a blonde jogger whose ponytail bounced with her strides. "So does that other one," he whistled at a young mother steering a stroller. She shot him a look.
Oscar winced, "Nope, she's a lesbian."
"How do you know?" I asked.
"Well, she doesn't want to sleep with me."
I laughed and then he leaned in close and I could smell him. He pointed at a man in a business suit hoping out of a cab, "He is cheating on his wife."
"How do you know?"
"He is wearing white sneakers which don't go with his suit and overcoat. His dress shoes are back at the office probably. He didn't want to get them all dirty coming out in the rain, doesn't want to have to clean them before he goes home. And he just took off his ring."
"That doesn't mean..."
Then, just like that, our blonde jogger snuck up to him and kissed him hard. Business man wrapped his arms around her, then, thinking better of it, took just her hand and led her back to the cab, which pulled away with them inside.
"Lucky guess," I said.
"Only shallow people don't judge by appearances," Oscar explained to me. "The mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible."
*****
The weather was still bad when Halloween rolled in. I was supposed to go to a party in Alphabet City with Sibyl, but I told her to go on ahead and took the A train down to the park. I had bought them a bag of small, individually wrapped candy bars. It was so stormy I thought maybe they had gone to the shelter, but then I heard hollering. Ernest was down on all fours and Oscar was standing up on him, trying to climb the statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi. He appeared to be wrapped from head to toe in tin foil.
"Oscar!"
"Guess what I am!" he shouted.
"What are you?"
"I'm a lightning rod!"
It took me a good twenty minutes to talk him down and then I walked them both over to the shelter at 32nd and Park. Oscar insisted on keeping his tin foil on. I gave him the bag of candy and wished them both a happy Halloween.
They stood there on the sidewalk eating the little chocolate bars. Cars shot by in the rain and their headlamps made Oscar's costume spark up like a tiny bolt of lightning.
*****
It was a sudden and hard winter and they spent one too many nights out in the cold. Ernest went to sleep and didn't wake up. I sat with Oscar at the hospital while he cried on me. Then I went home. Sibyl put her arms around me while I cried on her.
My thesis was almost done and I scrounged up the money to get Oscar a bus ticket. He had a daughter in Tuscaloosa, he said.
Before he got on the bus he turned to me, "I guess I'm migratory now. You should put that in your story. How I'm like a wild animal."
"I will."
He laughed a heavy, hard laugh and wiped a tear away. "Here," he said, putting a small, dirty notebook in my hand.
I looked at the sad and weathered little thing, "What is it?"
"My diary. One should always have something sensational to read." He got on the bus and waved as it pulled away.
His diary was the icing on my thesis.
He had done two tours in Vietnam before they booted him out. He had been indiscrete about a dalliance with a Saigon shop keeper. He served some time then found his way home to Harlem, but the nightmares had kept him up, and out of work. Earnest had been a pensioner and that's how they had stayed alive for so long.
I knew then that he didn't have a daughter in Tuscaloosa. He just wanted to end his story with better weather. It made me think of wild Asian elephants disappearing to their secret graveyards in the jungle.
When I got home Sibyl asked me, "How was he when you put him on the bus?"
I smiled just a little, "Wild," I said.
James Bezerra is a too-old creative writing major at CSU Northridge. He has been a journalist, a playwright, and a pet cemetery manager, and among other things he is also a produced screenwriter and a terrible, terrible blogger.
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