There were better tables here before. Big round tables, circular anyway, about three and a half feet in diameter but they were probably measured in the meters, four of them, each stop a different kaleidoscopic mandala mosaic of different colored tiles. The tiles were about an eighth of an inch square, and the patterns must have been laid down in installments at different times because the tiles of the same color were often in different shades, like you see some of a bright crimson and then further along in the pattern some would be a deep blood red. It was subtle, but if you had time to sit there and stare at it, as I often did in 1994, it became impossible to not notice. And because the tables were outside on the sidewalk you could smoke, cigarettes, which I did a lot back then.
But this place was a deli then, not a vegan bistro. Not kosher but kosher style, they would serve you pastrami and cheese on bagels, but then most of the students would not have known any difference. There were more Japanese than Jews in those days. In some world-renowned universities it's rather difficult to find students who grew up in the area. And the people who ran the deli were very sweet. They would let a person come in off the street and use the bathroom and not buy anything. Now the restroom door in the vegan bistro is locked and there’s an embossed plastic sign saying Paying Customers Only. There’s a lot of that going around, all over the country. So the alley around back stinks like piss all the time.
30 years ago I had plenty of time to think. Or I thought I was thinking. I would sit there chain smoking unfiltered cigarettes, the generic kind, and drinking large coffees one after the other. I would sit there thinking I was thinking and impatiently wait for something. For her to walk by, or for her not to walk by, or for someone else to walk by to take my mind off her.
It can be hard to think about what you want to think about. At least for me. When I'm actually thinking, which in those days did not happen often.+
The difference is that these days I smoke cigars instead of cigarettes, after 20 years of not smoking any tobacco at all, and I'm drinking an organic apple juice from a big plastic bottle from The Bistro of course, alternating with gulps of cheap bourbon from a little bottle I carry in my pocket. Don't pour cheap bourbon into apple juice, you won't like it.
Too much has changed in the past 30 years. But I'm still the same person, or at least I think so, and the street is basically the same but sometimes with different stores and in some cases with new buildings She'll follow the same traffic pattern that it has for a hundred years. St Paul here runs southbound, Charles Street, a block over, where I used to live, goes north, and Maryland Avenue where I lived before that goes southbound again. This part of the city was laid out back in the horse and buggy days. And in some ways those days never ended.
You can still sit outside at these tables, out on the sidewalk in front of their big plate glass windows with their silly seasonal health related displays , the table is being small folding plastic monstrosities that they take in when they close every night, barely two feet across so much impossible for two people to sit and eat. And smoking tobacco is frowned on these days, and sitting here even outside on a windy blustery day with a lit cigar in your hand you have plenty of personal space all around you. Smoking a cigar says I hate you don't come near me. Which is true.
These days I'm not waiting for anything. Some guy from long ago recognized me today and told me she killed herself before I left town, but nobody told me. There was a restraining order on her anyway. I put a restraining order on her. Those were the days. Several people I knew back down have killed themselves, or died of repeated drug overdoses which is the same thing. But she didn't use a needle, he told me, she used a knife, actually stabbed herself in the throat and sawed at her neck a little to make sure the carotid was severed. That’s what I heard, sawed. I didn’t hear if the knife blade was serrated, which might have explained the sawing part. And he did not tell me she was on heroin at the time, but I imagine the pain would be too much otherwise. Of course if you hate yourself as much as she hated me, which seems to have been the case, things get easier. It’s easier to die when you hate being alive. And it’s somebody’s fault.
Now I'm sitting here waiting for someone else, if I'm really waiting at all. But there's no one in particular I'm waiting for, just someone who might remember me, or someone who might be so offended at my cigar smoke that they'll stop to tell me how insensitive I am, or for some even drunker bum to shamble up and beg for a cigarette which I don't have. Faces change completely every year or so in neighborhoods immediately around the college campus. Sometimes the faces belong to the same people, they just make themselves look different, as if this new look, this new trend, will give them an identity after all. But I don’t recognize any of the faces passing by, and I think some people would manage to get themselves remembered even after thirty years.
The difference in my appearance is that now my hair is so thin and so patchy that instead of growing it long like before I shave it bald. Otherwise I still look the same, sometimes I'm even wearing the same clothes, sometimes literally the same. Things were made to last longer thirty years ago. I had no idea I would last this long. It's not like I wanted to.
30 years and I'm back again. Only for a while, not very long. I'm here because. There is a reason.
But it's not her because she's dead. I hadn’t known that until somebody recognized me earlier this afternoon and told me about it. Thirty years later. It just happened to come to mind when this guy who tried to steal my LSD once recognized me as he was driving by. Somehow it’s important that I know that, after thirty years. I’d almost forgotten her, even though she was very important to me for about six months, and not always in a good way. I wonder if the restraining order was still in place when she died. It was necessary because she would not leave me alone. She said it was all my fault. What happened was we were at a party, the band she roadied for, and friends of the band, and friends of their friends, and she did a little too much of everything and she could not handle it. She was crying and screaming and blaming me, telling me it was all my fault that she was like this, that I was so broken I broke her, that she hated me, that I should just go away. Go home. Go die.
Apparently she woke up sometime the next morning, face down on the floor, with her panties hanging loosely from one ankle and semen dripping from her anus. She had to tell me that, she told everybody. And she told me and everybody that it was all my fault, that I abandoned her there like that. She did not tell them that that happened after she told me to go away, after she told me to go die, because it was all my fault that she was in that condition in the first place. So I went away. I went home. If I had been there I would have protected her. Somebody had to. Or should have, when nobody did.
When I had wanted to see her it wasn't easy to arrange. She had to make time for me. She was a very busy person. She had so many friends and so much to do. And I was so demanding. But she had insisted I come to the party with her that night, there was someone she wanted me to meet. Her new lesbian paramour. She was lesbian then she said, except for me, and the boys in the band. She even learned to play bass guitar to fill in sometimes when the junkie who usually played bass couldn’t stand up. But after I had stopped wanting to see her, after she started screaming at me from the sidewalk in front of my house and banging on the door because it was all my fault, she would not go away. She'd be gone for a few days, doing Lord knows what, and then she'd be back to blame me for everything.
So soon after that I went away. Not because of her, or not just because of her. It was just time to go. Mainly. There were other women out there, far away, who hadn’t met me yet. Whose lives I hadn’t ruined by failing to be sensitive to their needs. There are lots of needy women everywhere. Who will want me to forget about everything else in my life and fix their lives. By being totally devoted to them. So I’ll do that for a while, I’ll devote a lot of my attention to them, until that too turns out to be futile. These women can’t be fixed. That’s not what they really want anyway, it became clear to me after a while. They don’t really want me to fix them, they just want to blame their brokenness on me. Most of them don’t kill themselves though, and the ones that have usually did it by accident, in a car crash or an overdose or getting beaten to death by some macho man who was so much better than me. It’s happened before. She was the fourth one I’ve heard of, but probably the first in the series. I’m a serial killer without doing anything. Against my will, without my consent.