Hey. It's about
time you got here; glad you finally decided to show up. Want
something to drink? No? Well, if you change your mind, just say so.
Anyway, as long as you're here, let me tell you a story. What? No,
I'm not going to preach some kind of moral message to you. That's
not what I do. It's just a story, nothing more. Of course, if
I am going to be the storyteller then you have to be the listener,
and that job is just as important as mine. Maybe more.
Yeah, I know you didn't come here expecting to do work, but no one
made you come and no one is going to make you stay. That's one of
the powers of the listeners, you know. You can get up and leave any
time you want, and there isn't anything the storyteller can do about
it. We're powerless creatures, the tellers. We hold lives in our
hands that we can mold like so much clay, grant every wish or birth
every nightmare into gruesome reality. But it's a false power, a
glamour, the lives we control are as insubstantial as the stuff of
any fantasy. A dream.
But where was I?
Ah, yes. A story.
I know a lot of stories, most people do. I know about Alice's
venture down the rabbit hole, and I know Hamlet's insanity, although
not whether it was feigned or real. I know the true story of
Cinderella, and of Red Riding Hood, not the children's tales but
ones of blood that taught of the realities of the world through
fear. I know those stories.
But they aren't mine.
This story is my story.
Once upon a time, (because all the greatest stories begin that way),
there was a young man. He wasn't special, not to himself, and not to
the world. Later in his life, he might do a few things that were
special, for someone, someplace, but in the end he was just a human,
like the rest of us.
He lived in a two-bedroom apartment, alone if you didn't count the
cat, worked a steady nine-to-five, Monday through Friday, and one
Saturday a month. Once or twice a week he would call his mother and
carefully fend off her questions about when he was going to settle
down with a nice girl, because he hadn't told her that he was
homosexual. He hadn't told anyone, really, not out of any true sense
of shame, but because he really didn't see that it was anyone else's
business except his own. Perhaps it was his mother's business too,
and he swore once or twice a week that he was going to sit down and
just tell her, although he never did.
Sometimes on the weekends he'd go out to the clubs, simply because
that is what single people do, and he'd sit at the bar and sip a rum
and coke, watching the other people dance.
One night, as he was sitting, lifting his second drink to his lips,
he saw another man sitting at the other end of the bar, as
unremarkable as himself. Dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, the
slightest hint of a pot belly that all men seemed to gain as they
aged, men that sat in bars on the weekends, anyway.
For only the
briefest of moments, their eyes met, and suddenly, looking into
ordinary brown eyes, he saw the entirety of the night laid out
before him. The entirety of his life.
They would talk together, the careful, almost nervous, talk of two
people who don't know each other very well, an elaborate dance that
we are taught from the moment our child's lips begin to form words.
Treading lightly around certain subjects until we discover how the
other feels about it. Waltzing through easy topics like music and
movies, switching to ballet, on Pointe for the subjects of religion
and politics.
But he could see that the dance with this man would be as if they
had been practicing it together their entire lives. He could be
Ginger Rogers to his Fred Astaire and the giddy silliness of the
thought almost makes him laugh.
For the first time in his life, he would go home with someone
without the nervous butterflies in his stomach threatening to choke
him, without that little doubtful voice in the back of his head
wondering if this would be like the last one, or the one before
that, the one before that, and would he go home again feeling, if
not dirty, then slightly used, and he'd sit down to a microwave
dinner that was still frozen in the center, alone, and a bowl of
popcorn from the same-said microwave, to watch old movies until he
fell asleep on his sofa.
This time, he would stay the entire night instead of creeping out
guiltily with the only light coming from the bright green numbers of
a strange alarm clock, numbers that watched him accusingly as he
slipped out the door. He would stay the night, and they would make
love until they were both exhausted, beyond exhausted, the heady,
sweaty, scent and sense of their own bodies driving them until the
thought of orgasm was almost painful.
In the morning the man with brown hair and brown eyes would make
pancakes, not great pancakes but good ones, and too-crisp bacon that
he would eat anyway, before they'd shower together, last night's
eagerness engulfing them again until much later they'd both call in
sick to work, trying to sound ill when inside they were struggling
with laughter.
A whirlwind romance, and only a few weeks later they'd move in
together, because it felt like they were more than lovers. It felt
like they'd known each other since the moment of their births, and
that knowing, that simple easiness together would never fade, even
when brown hair had become more gray than brown, even when his
mother passed away, never realizing that her son was living with
another man, and he had taken over bacon duty years before because
he liked it more chewy than burnt.
He looked into those brown eyes and saw happiness.
Then the man with brown hair and eyes looked away and the moment was
broken, leaving him alone again in a smoky bar, loud music that
tried and failed to be subtly about fucking thrummed painfully in
his ears. In one swallow he finished his drink, setting the glass
carefully on the bar. He tucked a dollar bill beneath it almost
absently before he stood and walked out into the cooler night air,
inhaling deeply to clear his lungs of cigarette smoke as he walked
to his car and went home to his microwave dinner and popcorn.
He never saw the brown haired and eyed man again, although he did
dream about him, sometimes, waking in the morning with the memory,
or perhaps the dream of a memory already fading before he got up
and, for no reason that he knew of, cooked pancakes and bacon, chewy
not burnt.
There, that story was mine. Not a great story perhaps, but greatness
isn't determined by the story or the teller, only the listener,
another power gifted to you. Perhaps you didn't like my story, but
that's all right. A storyteller isn't always looking for approval,
only a listener, and you did that job just fine.
Still, I have to say I'm sorry if you didn't like my story, and I am
sorry, but I did so want to tell you a story and this was the only
one I knew.
What? The man in the story? But why are you worried about him? He
was only a dream, remember? Nothing more than a figment of my
imagination and now, perhaps yours.
Years from now, maybe you'll think about him, wonder why he walked
out of the bar without saying a word to the other man. You'll forget
details, of course, about hair, and bacon, and somebody's mom.
Perhaps you'll have nothing more than a vague recollection of some
man, who did something someplace, and you won't recall when or where
or why.
But maybe you'll think of him, some day or some year. Maybe. And
that, my listener, is my power.
Goodnight.
-finis-
Comments and questions to:
mailto:keelywolfe@gmail.com
Back