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SPRING RAINS
by Mike DeCapiteThe warm rainy-dusk smell of the London underground blows up the San Francisco subway stairs in a warm rainy dusk. A woman with a burst of daffodils in a blue bag. Raincoats, jackets, the jostle of people going home. The crowd parts for a blind man’s cane and streams into the car and stirs the daffodils’ pollen. The crocuses were here. In a garden near Victoria Station they appeared, as simply as always.
I walked home in the rain. I could’ve been anywhere. Brooklyn, Bruges, Ghent. Any century. Puddles in a stage-lit alley, a book with pages flapping. It wasn’t raining but water blew down from tarps and awnings, pennants flapped, warm wind filled the trees and brushed against me like an animal. I felt welcome. Cleveland, Mexico City, married, twice divorced. Daytime the world was green and grey. Night was a war of scents. My collar kissed my cheek. Two kids were walking ahead of me, one with a topknot and a cigarette behind his ear. I kicked a leaf, he whirled, and they kept going.
My black wet gym bag on the trunk. Tack of rain in the alley.
Saturday night from the wooden stairs a white moon hangs in a cornflower sky over branches of new green leaves. The leaves are like love: at first just buds, delicate, barely visible...you can’t believe it’s happening again...and then it’s for real. Miraculous!
At the Last Supper Club, I sip one shot of George Dickle at the bar like some strange loner/murderer. The waitresses are pretty, they’re working hard. It’s early and the place is crowded with people I don’t identify with but who’re easily understood.
Valencia Street is indigo at early dark. Catherine, a miniature street junkie, chases me across an intersection. She moves as though she’s hung from a hook, and when she catches up I can smell her. She fakes some tears and says she got ripped off for five dollars. On 22nd Street a young tree is bent with the white of its blossoms. I give Catherine a buck, she disappears.
Ten people are scattered down the bar at the Lone Palm. Tad’s there, I sit with him. He introduces me to a couple of friends and leaves. I buy a couple of rounds. I’m drinking Maker’s Mark with a little ice which I don’t especially like, and they’re drinking margueritas and beer, but the music’s so loud that conversation becomes labored, and then the girl leaves and she’s replaced by a woman in a black ten-gallon hat, and the talk gets too personal for the noise and crowdedness of the place and our level of drunkenness, and it turns out they both superficially know my ex-wife, and bartalk is bartalk, so I pay up and we say our goodbyes and I’m outside under the Milky Way, or maybe just high clouds, walking down 22nd Street.
At a bar uptown—I catch a cab—I find no one I used to know and sit while a lighter flashes beside me, a bar where “Tumbling Dice” is always playing and a hooker—I see her in my neighborhood in sweatpants, no makeup, doing laundry—she’s here, dressed up, waiting on her man, a slicked-back reptilian white pimp fur-collar maxi-coat throwback coke dealer, the genuine article, who used to work out of a livelier bar up the street—that was him, where the bar met the wall, at 10:00 he’d pull the chain to light a green glass library lamp, doing the crossword, scanning the racetrack entries through bifocals, reading the comics, with her beside him, a towering Latina in a fur coat, bored, starved for conversation, talking to whomever sat nearby. New ownership up the street, they got kicked down to this dive where he’s forced to compete with three other dealers and do business from a table in the middle of the room.
He steps out as I walk in. Lights a cigarette in the doorway.
“So you’re down here now.”
“Yeah. They don’t serve Glenlivet up there. Can’t get a decent drink.”
She’s in the corner, lit by a video game. Same fur coat, Saturday night. The woman tending bar is smoking. Red Budweiser neon reflects back and forth in Guinness mirrors. Poolballs crack down back. I order a whiskey. The guy beside me has a long grey beard, long white hair under a floppy hat, and small purple eyeglasses. I decide he’s Roger McGuinn. He slides off his stool, nods, and reels toward the men’s room. I stare at an aquarium containing three large unhappy fish. A shine lies deep in the varnish of the bar, and a green cardboard coaster is folded into four points like a little crown.