“Darling, darling, don’t be mean!”

With the tapping of the bottom of the glass on the bar, Caroline stopped in her tracks sporting a smirk, reached for the jar and tossed a cherry into my glass, “there.” Refusing to serve more whiskey, she had come back with two cocktails for which, pointing at my friend’s, I inquired about the missing cherry in mine. She scrolled down the bar carrying on with her flirting with strangers who would leave a big tip in return of the courtesy. I watched her bend over on the bar, in blue jeans and a white shirt, reaching for a card in the deck this up and coming magician was holding.

“Hey, listen,” my friend poked my arm, his gaze quickly shifting from me over the liquor shelf and the deer head and the raccoon hat on the wall. “Hold on,” said he, apparently needing a moment to get his story straight, loosening another button on his shirt as if it would help him remember. He was talking about some half-animal boy found in the wilderness of India whose family claimed had been kidnapped by monkeys. My friend had seen the savage, flesh and blood and behind the bars, where he was now being displayed for the wondering eyes at a local freak show. “Civilization is the mother of all evil,” my fiend declared.

I saw her tossing peanuts into some guy’s mouth across the bar. Objecting to the score, she held his chin close with his tongue sticking out. I nodded to my friend’s story and reached for a napkin on the pile next to the ice bucket, straws, and shaved lime, and scribbled with the ink pen my friend handed over as soon as he saw me maneuver. After so many years getting drunk together, we had developed an inside sign language, and it was this exact bar where he had contemplated some of his recent papers, and I had written many of my poems. My friend, a professor of zoology where I taught poetry who in a recent paper had denounced Darwinism, took a swift turn in his story and went on to talk about what he theorized as reverse evolution. He had read a paper about a bird who forgot how to fly because its pack would no longer migrate to warmer places in winter due to the change in the temperature.

I was wondering if I should take off to pee and never come back. In my attempt to get off my stool, I tripped as I was full of whiskey and could hardly stand straight.

“We will all drown in water, like the embryo returning to the womb,” my friend mumbled behind my back.

“Yes, we are doomed,” I wavered stumbling towards the bathroom and making a sudden turn by the jukebox, and left my friend behind to step out for a smoke. She tapped on my arm. These little moments we had sharing Marlboro Reds, watching people struggle to get home or pick a fight in front of the bar were everything. A car pulled over and one of the three men standing by tucked his friend in with the third one sticking his head in to give the driver the directions. Before a full minute passed, we watched the cabbie storm out, cursing out in a foreign language, grabbing the back door open, and dragging out the drunken who had just thrown up all over the back seat back onto the sidewalk. And they say romance is dead.

“Walk with me.”

“Can’t.”

Women had a way of rushing out of my life once they were in. She smashed the cigarette butt with the tip of her Converses and walked back in. Left out alone under the dim street light, I waltzed down the street. A sudden rush of hope invaded my entire being as I looked up to see it was an exceptionally starry New York sky. The night was mine.

I met my first wife while still in college. Irretrievably in love, or so we thought, soon after we had our daughter. Since we were young and stupid, but by then I was already trained to tell women what they liked to hear, I’d nod drowning more in my void when she inquired whether we would be in love forever.  But then there was bills to pay, dishes to do, chores to run, and there was very little poetry in the one bedroom we shared. One gets soft with old age, but my daughter, a student of art history now, would also get old and wise enough to turn down my attempts to communicate later on. However, she’d let me compensate for all the birthdays I missed, all the finger paints I did not do with her, and the parks I never took her by letting me help with her tuition. My second wife was Catholic. Determined to save my soul, she offered to live in the suburbs since she had inherited a large sum of money which required neither of us to work. She said being away from the city would help calm my nerves. She made me go to church Sunday mornings, and I spent most of my remaining time drinking harder, trying to walk off my perpetual boredom, waiting for the God my wife kept referring to speak to me as if I was a prophet, but words would not pour out, and I could no longer write. I started to take the train back to the city in the morning and come back at night most days. On one of  those days back home after the mass, my wife inquired about the trips I took, to my surprise, as I was sure of my mastery of disguise. I was unredeemable, she cried out. I suggested we kept Jesus out of this, as he already had a lot on his plate. She did not pick up on my humor; rather, she picked up the butter knife on the kitchen counter. Amidst the roses, finally, there was the thorn shining in steel under the fluorescent kitchen light. I told her I was bored, and clearly my work was suffering. She smirked “woork!” with such an obscure emphasis on “o”. Always having considered myself a man of consonants, who knew I was so keen on vowels? I took the train to the city to never come back.

Quite and calculating, I moved through town like an animal preying on it. I walked couple of blocks passing by townhouses, a pizza place with a queue in front of it at 3 am, a bar playing Cuban jam, stoners, late shifters, the creatures of night, the living and the dead.

I should perhaps also mention my third wife.  She was one of my graduate students, a poet,  who nearly left me jobless, tiptoeing my apartment in the crisp morning light whom I thought would be good for the underdog. Our conversations about life and finding meaning and art and the dissonance in between lingered from night till day light. But one could talk about poetry, the sad state of the neo-avant-garde, Foucault and philosophize only so much as there was, to my surprise, yet again dishes to do, the rent due, family dinners to attend, and even more chores to run as the city was an ever consuming  blackhole. “You are not the marrying kind,” she would say in response. If anything, I was the serial marrying kind. She was smart enough to leave me for the girl who had tattooed us scorpios, my wife’s spirit animal, as an amend of our union right after our visit to the city hall. The tattoo artist moved in couple of months into our marriage, and before the year was up, it was clear that I was the one to leave.

Then, there was Caroline, not of drinking age like my daughter, I suppose, as she fled the scene whenever a police officer walked in for a beer. She would occasionally disappear with one of the men at the bar, doing a party favor, I suppose, inspecting my face on her return for a glimpse of reaction. “Loosen up the frown, kid,”  I would joke around. I was hurt, but not for what she did; rather, for not being able to give her what she so desperately wanted from me. I was probably doing her a favor by staying away; furthermore, longing made one either a poet or a mad man which initially was the same thing. In no fairy tale ever written, did the antagonist end up living happily ever after anyways. It worked like magic as I wrote better than ever, occasionally reading at places like the Bowery Poetry Club and this underground bar on McDougal street where Ginsberg used to live. I invited her multiple times to my readings to which, completely invalidating all that I held on to, she was a no show as she could care less for my writing. Only this one time she showed up at the Poetry Project, for which I felt like a kid who saw his parents come to his first play. On one of our rare outings in the day light, I took her to the Museum of Modern Art. She roamed around uninterested, pretending to listen to the stories I tell about the pieces. I wanted to show her the world, paint her face like she was Venus on the Waves, and perhaps make her love me and then leave her. There she was, my Goliath, with her eyes full and fixated forward, standing still in front of a Jackson Pollock. Her stare transcended beyond the canvas in search of the meaning I was too myopic to see. There is something disarming about a woman crying. I stood still in my paralysis, afraid to utter a word. Disappointed I was, for her being impressed by this one among all the art I showed her. I had never paid so much attention to this one as its all-consuming chaos was too much to handle. But if you stared at it just long enough, you had this uh-huh moment where you were stripped off all that you know. Relieved at the end having lost all that could be lost, you walked away a free man. Alarmed by the movement of the brush stokes, the confrontation of the pale tan and the black, I felt dizzy, moving restlessly like a child signaling his mom he would like to go now. Taking a sharp breath, she tilted her head swiftly, and declared she wanted waffles which was like a breeze in summer.

Making a stop at the Union Square park, I threw myself onto a bench and watched the bloody full moon as the paper called it. Soon after, I heard a squeak and saw a pigeon clawed by a hawk standing still on a bench in the dim moon light. The hawk plucked feathers out one by one, with the craftsmanship of Michelangelo carving David into marble. The feathers glided down on me like snowflakes in slow motion. I knelt down to look for stones underneath the dim street light and threw a few towards the top of the tree. But they reached only so far to make the hawk pause for a moment, soon to continue with its task with even more determination. Desperately crawling back on the floor in my attempt to find more stones to throw ,which, at this point, not even bothered, the predator ignored making a complete mockery of me. I collapsed on the bench nauseated, weeping like I never had, with my head spinning, my ears deafened by the silence of the pigeon idle in the claws of its killer in acceptance of its fate. It is a mystery to me how long I stayed there passed out laying on the bench. Neither the hawk nor the pigeon was in sight when I opened my eyes. My feet covered with feather, I got up and made my way through the night which ended up back at the front door of the closed bar, yet another proof the world was round alright.

I saw Caroline waving out of a cab window. I got in among the strangers soon to find out one of whom was an investment banker, with the other two squeezing on the front seat being jazz musicians Caroline seemed to have made friends with. We were heading to a party we were invited to at the trombone players’ flat. He put a record on the turntable as soon as we arrived. More people came in and went out along with the booze. Buried in an sofa, I watched the fan on the ceiling spin doing no good in the summer heat. Why would anybody not crack a window? Did I say that out loud? “Will somebody open a window?” The music was loud. A glass shatter. Footsteps running down the stairs intertwine with curse words. A door slammed. I looked around to see, but Caroline was no where to be found. I got up to check the rooms to finally find her sitting on a bed staring at the floor. Shit! The six feet from the door to the bed was the longest distance I had ever made as the ground slipped off like a rug beneath my feet. I rushed to find some ice, and came back with a beer can since there was nothing else in the fridge. She pressed the beer can on her busted lip for a moment and quickly pushed my hand away when I murmured we should find a doctor or the police. Her empty stare turned into contempt, then she pushed me away to reach for her  jeans on the floor. We got out in the street with her walking fast in front and me following behind making our way towards subway without a word. We hopped on the Q which was almost vacant except for a drunk guy and a homeless woman speaking to herself. We rode the train for what seemed like eternity to make it all go away. The colors disappeared while the train dived down with its metallic breathing of the doors opening and closing at each stop. As we came out  the worm hole, the sun was making its way behind the skyscrapers, and we reached the lower tracks of the bridge. Loosing her battle against her sleep, her head rested on my shoulder. In the broad day light as the flickers hit the East River and before they bounced back on the smudged windows of our car, it was clear to me. This was the start of how it all ends.

The train stopped at Coney Island, and we moved towards the ocean as if we were being pulled by the magnetic soft tides, and we were meant to be nowhere else. She took off her shoes, and so did I. She sat down pushing her feet into the sand away from her hips. Her hair tangled like a golden sandstorm in the wind revealing the bruises on her neck and shoulders changing color from red to a deep blue. And I wished I could sink in the sand forever. Pushing hair strands away, not moving her eyes away from the ocean, as if she did, even for a moment, it would escape her gaze. Maybe my friend was right, we were all bound to drown in it eventually. After a while, we got up and walked on the boardwalk towards the amusement park. I bought her soft ice cream and I chugged down another black coffee. She stopped by a bodega and asked “how do I look?” fixing her hair. “Like the queen of Coney Island” I answered, staring back at our pale reflection fading away on the store window. She smiled for the first time in hours.

We rode the ferris wheel, and as it reached the top, despite my fear of heights, I was ready to tell her life was beautiful no matter what, and that she was young and that alone could beat all odds. She stared down fearlessly like a goddess cursing out the mortals, and I held on to the handle next to my seat tighter instead, fixating my stare in a safe spot somewhere over the roaring field of ocean.