Story Time: ‘Motel 6′

We were somewhere outside Charleston, on route 95, when the hurricane caught up with us. The rain came on so suddenly and with such intensity I almost sideswiped a truck trying to get to the exit that advertised ‘Food, Gas, Lodging.’ The girl didn’t notice any of this – she had slept almost the entire way since I picked her up in Florida. It was only three in the afternoon, but there was no way I was going to drive any farther.

Even if I wasn’t half-blind from the rain, I probably still would’ve been unimpressed by the area surrounding the Motel 6. Besides the motel complex, I could make out the faded red neon sign of a Safeway, and what could’ve been railroad tracks. Everything else was gray and rain and beyond interest. I pulled up to the entrance, ran inside to book a room, got partially soaked in the process, ran back out to the idling car and got fully soaked. There were a few other cars in the parking lot, but everyone else in the state seemed to have had the good sense to get out of the way of the hurricane early.

The girl – she said her name was Alice – woke up the second I turned the car off. She blinked wide and green, and stretched her skinny arms over her head. I stared at the steering wheel, noticed that I only had to drive another 340 miles before I hit the 100,000 mile mark. The rain beat a Memorial Day march on the roof.

‘Where are we, anyway?’

‘No idea. Still in South Carolina though.’

‘Why are we stopped?’

I pointed out the window – ‘See that there? That’s a hurricane. Hundred mile an hour winds is generally when the fun stops.’

Alice shrugged and cracked her knuckles. ‘Let’s get inside then.’

After letting her into the room I grabbed my suitcase and cooler out of the trunk. It rattled with bottles of lager and Coca Cola.

The room was surprisingly clean – but the remote control was bolted to the nightstand, sure sign of a dive. Alice was spread out on the bed, her sandals kicked off. She was thumbing through the Gideon bible.

‘Bet you think I’m religious.’

I was in the bathroom and stripping off for a hot shower. ‘Because you’re a southerner?’

‘Yeah, you yankee jerk,’ she hollered from the other room. ‘Bet you think I’m gonna be thinking about Christ and John the Baptist while I let you violate me.’

The water was almost scalding, but it felt good after the clamminess of the rain. ‘What makes you think I wanna fuck you?’

I unwrapped the soap from the wax packaging. Suddenly she was at the door. ‘Why else would you pick up a strange girl at a bar?’

The soap didn’t lather well. Motel soap never does. ‘So you’re assuming I picked you up for that reason.’

She thumbed the material of her tank top. ‘It’s part of the deal, isn’t it? You get to screw a sexy little eighteen year old, I don’t have to go Greyhound.’

I turned off the water. ‘Get out of here so I can dry up, please. And get me some clothes from my bag.’

Alice stuck her tongue out, but obeyed anyway, and a couple minutes later wordlessly dropped the clothes on top of the toilet

By the time I put on dry jeans and a t-shirt, the wind had really started to howl. Lightning flashed outside the windows, and though it was still mid-afternoon, the sky was black.

Alice had taken the liberty of opening up my laptop. I could tell by the way she drew her hand across the touchpad she was no stranger to computer solitaire. The cooler glistened invitingly with condensation. I grabbed a beer and popped the cap off on the windowsill.

She posed another question without looking up from her game. ‘Dark and stormy night, nubile young girl, you’re telling me you aren’t trying for anything?’

The tang of the beer was a welcome distraction from her yapping. ‘How much of a big fucking cliché do you think I am?’

A little ping came up from the laptop – I guess she won. I sat down next to her on the bed and drank more of the beer.

She got up and leaned against the wall and fiddled with the bolted-on remote. I looked out the window at the storm. ‘Can I have something to drink?’

I indicated she could help herself. Alice sauntered over to the cooler and bent over at the waist, her hand fishing around in the bottles and half-melted ice.

‘And you think I’m a cliché?’

She pulled a beer out and attempted to pop the cap off on the windowsill like I had. From the sound of the cap scraping against the sill and her exasperated sigh I could tell she was having some difficulty. After another minute she turned and held the beer out.

‘Could you?’

I just looked at her. ‘Could I, what?’

For a moment her eyes flashed red, but she said in a courteous enough voice, ‘Could you please open this?’

Without a word I got off the bed, popped the cap off, and lay back down again.

Alice took a sip, and grimaced. She tried another sip, this time pinching her nostrils shut while swallowing, but I could tell the taste was making her gag.

‘There are Cokes, too,’ I said, half to myself.

Alice treated me a spiteful stare and tried one more sip – then put the bottle down.

She handed over a bottle of Coke and I twisted the top off for her. ‘Fine, I’m sorry. Maybe you are just a nice guy, giving a ride to a girl with a Broadway dream.’

From her tone, I figured she was being sincere but I wanted to be a little mean. ‘There’s no way you’re eighteen.’

I was staring at my beer, so I didn’t see her almost choke on the soda. I peeled the label off my bottle. ‘Shit.’

Alice got up and paced in front of the bed. In her tanktop and shorts, the truth was painfully obvious. ‘Shit,’ I said again.

She stopped and crossed her arms. ‘Fine, you got me. But you’re south of the Mason-Dixon. Anything we do is nice and legal.’

I leaned back on the bed and let out a long, slow sigh. She was right about a lot of things: she was very good looking, I did pick her up with the intent of fucking, and technically the age of consent smiled on whatever happened in that isolated motel room.

‘Maybe so. But listen up hayseed, there’s something called the Mann Act. I’ve transported a federal minor across two state lines.’

Something twitched in her face. ‘I’m not a hayseed.’ Alice sat down on the edge of the bed, and I could see the little bones of her spine jut against the cheap tanktop.

It was my turn to be contrite.

We passed the next few hours in silence, except for the winds outside which for all the world sounded like a million rioting soccer fans. In the few instances we had to pass one another, we would turn our eyes down and mumble over-polite protestations. I closed the drapes and hoped nothing amusing would smash its way through the window, took Alice’s open beer and drank it slow. She kept to herself and would occasionally read aloud lines from Exodus out of the bible.

Night officially began. Tried watching TV but the only things on were live weather updates on the hurricane. Apparently a town in Florida, some backwater, had been hit pretty badly.

‘Oh shit,’ I said as the camera swooped over the devastation. ‘Isn’t that the place I picked you up?’

She put the bible down and squinted at the TV. ‘Sure looks like it. But they all look the same blown down, don’t they?’

‘You don’t seem all that concerned.’

She turned back to the Good Book and said, ‘Why should I be?’

Despite the devastation, the news guys in their ponchos were confident the hurricane would be downgraded to a tropical storm. My stomach began to growl.

Finally, I turned to Alice, who lay on the floor with her legs propped up on the bed and asked, ‘I’m getting hungry. You wanna try that Safeway?’

She put the bible down on her breasts and smirked. ‘Famished. That store’ll never be open.’

I grabbed the keys to the car and opened the door. The room immediately filled with the howl of the wind. The cheap paintings rattled on the walls. ‘Bad storm like this,’ I yelled, barely able to hear myself, ‘who knows what kinda damage there’d be to a store with glass doors?’

The sky was a trembling black and what few trees there were blew sideways. We ducked down to keep from getting blown over, and I managed to make it to the trunk of the car and grabbed the tire iron.

The road was empty, and the roar of wind was so encompassing it was like my ears were stuffed with cotton. Alice tapped me on the shoulder, and though I could barely make her out in the dark and the rain, I could tell she was pleased by my idea.

We ran commando-style across the road to the dark Safeway. Twice Alice fell over and almost blew away, so finally I grabbed her wrist and pulled her along with me. Bits of grit and sand from the road flew up and stung my eyes and cheeks, and the rain hit like BBs. What we were going through was probably what an ant felt like before it got sucked up the hose of a vacuum cleaner. It seemed to take ages but finally we got to the entrance.

It was a little bit sheltered from the wind and I could hear Alice panting beside me. ‘Is this a bad idea?’ I asked, but then I reared back and smashed the glass on the door. It cracked into an elaborate spider web design, and then fell inward as a single pane. I reached inside and flipped the lock.

Inside, dripping and cold, Alice moseyed over to the snack isle and picked up chips, dip, jerky, and other non-perishables to see us through the night. The first thing I picked up was a bottle of Jack Daniels, something to warm me up on the inside and go with the beer. On a whim, I grabbed a multi-pack of candles and a lighter, in case the power went out. Alice grabbed some cereal and milk, ‘For my breakfast,’ she said. Her eyes were wide with excitement, but otherwise we said nothing to each other inside the store.

As I triple-bagged our groceries, Alice picked up the pack of candles and fixed me with a look that I didn’t understand – sort of knowing, I guess, maybe a little intimidated. After stuffing the candles in that bag and twisting the handles into a knot, I left a dollar on the till, to assuage whatever minor guilt I felt. And maybe just in case there happened to be a security camera I missed. On the way out, Alice grabbed a copy of the Weekly World News that foretold the inevitable coming of the apocalypse.

It felt like the storm had waned while we were in store, so getting back wasn’t as much of a production as getting over. But there was close call when out of nowhere, a single tire came hurtling down the street, directly at Alice. I did the chivalrous thing and rugby-tackled her out of the way, right before the tire would’ve collided with her head. Something inside me wanted to laugh as I laid on top of Alice and watched the tire continue down the empty street, undeterred by the wind and rain.

We managed to make it back to the room in one piece. It took a little bit of work to close the door against the rain – I had to slam my whole weight against the door before it shut all the way, like I was in a bad zombie movie, trying to keep the ravenous wind out before it ate our brains. Once it was shut I had to lean against the wood for a few minutes, panting like a pack-a-day smoker.

I felt warm hands at the back of my neck, and a current went from there down to my crotch. Turning around, Alice had that same wide-eyed look she had in the store, and her breasts pointed directly at me through her now-filthy tanktop.

‘This is all kinds of wrong,’ I said, but kissed her anyway.

Her body felt like a barrel of snakes, all frustrated writhing energy. The storm, the larceny, something flicked the on-switch in that girl and it was all I could do not to get caught up in her enthusiasm. Later, I couldn’t remember if I kissed her for five seconds or five hours, but I know that eventually I pushed her away.

‘Look,’ I said, my hands on her shoulders, ‘stop fucking around. You are sixteen, aren’t you?’

She nodded.

‘Well, I’m twenty-four. Ok, I just lied. I’m twenty-six. Ten years ago I could’ve been babysitting you… if your parents had as poor judgment as I think they did. Anyway, where I’m from that just doesn’t fly.’

Alice shook her head. ‘You don’t think I know what I’m doing?’

I walked past her, tore the grocery bags open, and started stacking the food on the bureau. ‘You got in the car of a total stranger who stopped at a bar to buy a case of beer for the curiously large cooler in the trunk of his car. No, I don’t think you have a goddamn clue.’

‘You had a nice face, anyway.’ She ran her fingers through her sopping hair. ‘Fine, fine. Point taken. But in all honesty, I think you are a little nice. And you got a Jewy face. I always liked Jews. I thought if I had to fuck you, then it wouldn’t be so bad.’

I snorted, but part of me was actually kind of flattered.

She continued, ‘and I thought, maybe I’d see a cut dick. Never saw one before.’

Something occurred to me then, and I said softly, ‘You’ve never seen a dick before, have you?’

Alice didn’t have a chance to respond, ‘cause just then the power went out. In the dark she said, ‘Well, get out the candles. I’m gonna take a bath.’

I set up candles in the bathroom and closed the door on Alice. She came out wrapped in a towel a minute later, and grabbed the Weekly World News from the table.

‘Prescient of you to loot candles,’ she said and disappeared back into the bathroom.

‘Where did you get that vocabulary?’ I asked, but she didn’t respond. So I set up the rest of the candles around the room, stripped off my soaked clothes and wrapped my towel from before around my waist. It felt good to lay back on the bed with the JD, to take a swig and let the liquor burn my mouth for a second before swallowing. The warmth from the bourbon spread over me like a descending blanket, and before I knew it I was closing my eyes.

Must’ve fallen asleep then, because when I opened my eyes, there was Alice standing over me, wearing one of my t-shirts and underwear.

‘I don’t have much in the way of clean clothes,’ she said, and sat down cross-legged by my ankles. ‘And I figured you wouldn’t mind.’

‘Right,’ I said, and headed towards the bathroom.

‘There’s no hot water left,’ she said and started munching on a piece of jerky. ‘Um, sorry.’

‘It’s ok,’ I said as I stepped under the frigid needle spray. ‘Just wanted to wash the dirt off.’

What I really thought was, how could a cold shower possibly hurt in this situation?

By the time I got out Alice was into the Fritos and bean dip. ‘About earlier…’ she began.

I took a heap of dip on a chip and shook my head. ‘No, not now. We’re actually sort of talking to each other like human beings. Let’s keep up that good stuff.’

Alice nodded. ‘Ok, got it. I ate all the jerky, too.’

‘Well, you’re a growing girl, protein’s important and such.’

‘But can I just say one thing?’

I didn’t look at her, but I did nod my head.

‘You were right. Well, sort of. I mean, I have had sex before, but it was only once, and it

wasn’t really…’

She must’ve seen the look on my face, because she quickly stammered, ‘No, no nothing like that. I mean I wanted it at the time. It just – it wasn’t…’

I stopped her, ‘No, it’s okay. I get it. Sometimes…’

Truth was, I had no idea what to tell her after that, but there must’ve been something for her in that ‘sometimes,’ because that was the first time Alice smiled at me. Not a smirk, not a leer, but a real, eyes crinkled-at-the-corners smile.

Somehow, maybe it was the darkness and flicker of the candles, her half-stammered confession and my absolution took on the weight of a Pope poem. For the first time in months I began to feel comfortable. Even our meal – for all its processed, nutritionally deficient nature, had taken on a kind of significance – that she and I both, for the first time in a long time, had found good company. I’m happy to say that I didn’t spoil that feeling with words.

The candles began to burn out, one by one, as we ate the rest of our meal. I had more beer and chased it with JD. Alice stuck with Cokes. By the time we got to the last candle we were both full and I felt pleasantly drowsy, from the food and booze and atmosphere.

Alice cleared away the remains of our looted dinner and sat on the edge of the bed. I could see that the last candle was just about to flicker out.

‘Sleeping arrangements,’ she said as I took off my shirt and jeans. ‘I can sleep on the floor if it makes you more comfortable.’

I shook my head and lifted the covers up. ‘Here’s the deal. I’m gonna lie on this side, and I won’t move all night. You sleep on that side, be a proper lady, and we’ll still be pals in the morning.’

The candle burned out and I heard Alice move under the covers on the other side of the bed.

For a few minutes, all was silent. The wind seemed to have calmed down a bit, though the rain was still loud. I heard Alice turn over on her side.

‘Why did you want a ride to New York, anyway?’ The words were out of my mouth almost before I realized. She didn’t answer at first, then said:

‘I saw that was the plate on your car. Figured it was as good a place as any.’

‘You don’t want to elaborate further, do you?’

‘Not so much. Can you be satisfied with just that?’

I wanted to say ‘Not really,’ but I paid her a compliment, instead.

‘You’re the most well-spoken teenager I ever met.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I like watching TV shows with lots of talking.’

I felt her hand snake out from the other side of the bed, and would’ve rebuked her, but then her fingers closed around mine.

‘What were you doing in Florida, anyway?’ she asked this in a sleepy sort of way, and for the first time I felt protective towards her.

‘Was supposed to write something for this magazine, but I got fired first.’

‘And you don’t want to elaborate further.’

‘Not so much. Satisfied?’

Alice was silent for a second, and then said, ‘I hope this storm hasn’t put you out, too much.’

‘There’s no hurry.’

She squeezed my hand and asked, ‘Isn’t there anyone waiting on you?’

I felt my stomach clench, but then relax. ‘No.’ I swallowed. ‘There’s no one waiting on me.’

It was still raining the next morning. We got an early start, and had the road to ourselves through the rest of South Carolina.

Story time: ‘A Tabby Wandered’

A work of fiction

The man called Jackson sat on three mattresses stacked one on top of the other next to a blown-out window covered in black muslin. He read Ian Fleming’s ‘The Living Daylights’ by the light of a portable lantern, which cast a soft amber glow on him, the mattresses, the paperback, and the yawning emptiness of the fourth floor apartment.

His location was well chosen for the job he had to do. The apartment building on the outskirts of the city was held upright by little more than gravity and mold. Most people avoided the area entirely. But one person, Jackson knew, had no choice but to pass within fifty meters of the crumbling concrete structure.

‘Ian Fleming’s short works aren’t as well constructed as his novels,’ he said to no one as he glanced at his black plastic watch. ‘Certainly better written than anything Tom Clancy’s ever shit out, but in general the short works aren’t as Bondsian as the full length novels.’ Jackson liked to speak out loud every once in a while, if only so he could remember how his voice sounded.

He closed the book on his finger, and glanced around the empty apartment. He was using his open rucksack as a pillow. A Pelican rifle case sat open and empty at the foot of the mattresses. The rifle itself was secured to a stout aluminum tripod. A long silencer jutted from the tip of the rifle and a telescopic sight was bolted on top of the barrel. ‘My life is like a Bond novel without any women or intrigue.’ The room didn’t even respond with an echo.

Soon the sun would set, and Jackson would have to turn off the lantern, shove the paperback into the rucksack, and throw the muslin cloth to the side. And then he would go. Maybe later in the week he’d buy another Bond novel, perhaps one printed in Farsi or Cantonese. He was rusty in both languages.

Jackson opened the book again and settled himself more comfortably on the mattresses. Every so often his ear twitched at the sound of some distant gunshot, some other distant explosion. In the story, Bond had some pantywaist bureaucrat with him who was constantly second-guessing his decisions, and threatening to report him to M. But all Bond wanted to do was read his bondage/rape fantasy novel, shoot a Russian, and maybe try to bang the blonde with the cello case. Jackson smiled at a particular description of the pulp novel Bond read while he waited to take his shot. ‘There are no more true pulp novels,’ said Jackson.

An unexpected scraping sound caused him to throw the book down and whip a small pistol out of his rucksack. There was no need to go for the rifle: the sound was coming from within the building, the room in fact. Jackson pressed a button on the side of the pistol, and a thin red dot appeared on the apartment door. He waited. And waited.

Then another scraping sound, followed by the sound of nails scratching against metal. This time it came from the corner of the room, where the plaster had crumbled to reveal rusted pipes and moldy concrete supports. A small gray something burst out of the opening and Jackson would have shot, but a second larger gray something burst out immediately afterwards. He let out a long, slow breath, and put the pistol down. The cat chased the mouse across the room, trapped it in a corner, and with a swipe of a white paw captured its prey.

Jackson listened to the crunch-munch sound of the cat eating the mouse as he checked his watch. There were a few minutes of daylight left. He tried returning to the novel, but was intrigued by the spectacle of the cat having its supper. There had been no pets where he grew up: the discipline was strict, and animals weren’t considered fit for companionship. But as he grew older and no less lonesome, the idea of a cat began to hold particular interest. Something self-reliant, that desired company but could live without it just as easily. Just like this cat – who now that he could see clearly had black and gray stripes, white paws and neck – catching mice in a war zone.

After a few minutes, apparently sated, the cat sat on its haunches and licked itself clean. Jackson smiled, said ‘Such a fastidious little killer, you are.’ At the sound of his voice the cat seemed to realize it wasn’t alone, froze mid-lick and stared at the stack of mattresses.

The company of the little furball appealed to him, and he didn’t want to risk scaring it back into the wall. He sat still and waggled his fingers a little to entice the cat closer. It started to paw its way across the room, and leapt on top of the mattress next to him.

‘Hi tabby,’ said Jackson in what he hoped was a soothing voice. The cat purred loudly. He put his hand tentatively on the cat’s matted fur, expecting it to leap off the mattresses and back into the wall. Instead it purred even louder and Jackson rested his hand on the back of the cat’s head. It closed its eyes and lay down next to his sprawled form.

‘What a fine creature,’ he said. He checked his watch again. There was still time. He scratched behind the ears, under the chin and along its back. Jackson forgot where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. All his attention was focused on the warmth of the fur and the sound coming from deep within the cat. ‘I must’ve been a crazy cat lady in a past life. This feels way too good.’

The cat opened its eyes and stared at him. Jackson thought for a second, then slowly picked the pistol up and clicked the laser sight back on. Immediately the cat’s ears pricked up, and looked ready to attack a new piece of prey. The sight of the cat playing filled the assassin with warmth as he swept the laser across the room. A giddy, childish expression spread across his face as the cat scrambled up and across the floor, along the base of the walls, and finally back to the mattresses. The cat stopped dead when Jackson turned the laser off. It licked one of its paws, hopped back on the mattress, and rested against Jackson again.

The cat purred loudly, but it sounded wrong. It took a moment, and then he realized it was the sound of distant engines approaching quickly. A glance at his watch and he forgot all about the cat. He sprang off the mattresses, extinguished the lantern, and tore the muslin off the window. The sun had set, and the sound Jackson had been waiting for all night was suddenly loud in his ears. He adjusted the rifle mount as the roar became deafening. There it was. There. He pulled the trigger.

After a few seconds, Jackson pulled his eye off the scope and gently began disassembling the mount. A mistake had almost been made and his heart beat loudly. He detected movement in the room, and turned. After a few beats his eyes registered in the darkness, and then he saw it. The cat sat in front of the hole in the wall, looking reproachfully at Jackson.

‘Impossible,’ thought Jackson. ‘It’s just a stupid cat. It can’t reproach.’

But there it was. With a silent jump, the cat disappeared back into the wall.

Pittsburgh Coffee Reviews (abridged)

With a day to myself in Pittsburgh, I realized I had a relatively shortlist of things to do/see whilst in town, most of which consists of gawping at how gentrified some of the various neighborhoods have become. And I say – bring it on! After all, only the presence of an American Apparel store in Oakland can prevent further devastating ‘white-flight,’ even though the thought of Pittsburgh without white folks is about as unthinkable as Boston without crippling, mind-numbing pretension.

And so much for all that. As the above paragraph may indicate, I’m rather tired. So tired in fact that I’ve spent a fair amount of my time today, aside from the gawping – seriously? How’d they turn the Cathedral of Learning white? The damn thing was as black as the Tower of Mordor (or something) the last time I saw it – drinking coffee. And as I’m about to attest, the overwhelming powers of the evil gentrificationeers (or gentrificationistas, or gentrificationoes, or something) have done little to mitigate the underwhelming quality of coffee this town has to offer.

Starbucks, 210 6^th Avenue

Description: Seattle based coffee chain that, for a brief period of time right around when comedians were crafting jokes around “You’ve Got Mail,” was shaping up to be the second most successful capitalist enterprise known to man, right after McDonalds. Unfortunately, two decades of automation, middling roasting and freshness standards, not to mention full financial backing of every ‘indie’ music excretion to come along since Wilco (‘Sky Blue Sky’ rulez!) have forced Sbux to suffer the Krispy Kreme-like indignity of shutting down some of their approximately 2 billion stores.

Drink: Tall coffee. Actually, I really only wanted a place where I could check my phone without attracting creepy stares.

Staff: Chubby blonde farm-girl, probably a part-time student at Duquesne or one of those. Pleasant demeanor if giving off the slightly glassy-eyed dimness of most modern-era Starbucks employees. In short, as good as it gets.

Verdict: One of the other chubby blonde farm-girls working behind the counter misheard my order for a ‘tall coffee’ as a ‘grande’, so I was upgraded in size for free. Coffee was good enough, as all filter coffee should be, with no distracting tastes or flavors. Actually brewed fresh, a rarity for Starbucks filter coffee.

Grade: B+

Beehive Coffeehouse, 1327 E. Carson Street

Description: Bloated so-quirky-it-hurts coffee shop in E. Carson Street that has yet to be completely absorbed by South Side works strip mall, Beehive is the favorite hangout of the unappreciated Pittsburgh unwashed since before flannel was worn ironically. Beehive may well have started out as a hipster wet-dream – hell, there’s bad art everywhere, mismatched chairs, coffee mugs with snarky slogans, vegan snacks and tofu sandwiches that smell vaguely of mold – and they probably fancy themselves an anti-Starbucks: there’s even one right across the street to enforce the contrasts. But let’s be honest kids – Starbucks would never have gotten to where it is if it didn’t offer the people what they wanted, if only on some vaguely Mephistophelean level. And Beehive has definitely embraced some of the megachain’s ethos (isn’t that a brand of bottled water? Never mind), no matter what the sweaty skinny-jeans wearers would like to believe. Just look at the t-shirts for sale on the wall, the suspiciously clean floors and lamps that aren’t spattered in spilled coffee and dotted with burns from clove cigarettes. The toilets don’t even stink of stale urine, feverish masturbation, and loneliness. Stinky, stinky loneliness.

Drink: Small skim latte

Staff: Pissy, preggers hipster of advancing years. Was distracted folding napkins when I came in and stood at the counter. I was in no rush to order, so I stood patiently waiting for her to notice me. When she did, she fixed me with a look that had the kind sunny demeanor and warmth not seen since the Hell’s Angels worked Altamont. Maybe it was the fact that I was out and walking around before 10 in the morning that made her suspicious, or possibly it was my choice of the day-old turkey panini versus the day-old tofu panini for my breakfast. I didn’t take it personally in any case: god knows I hate to wake up at 7:30 for work, just like anyone.

Verdict: Under-extracted shot and indifferently steamed milk (using the ‘auto-steam’ method, again reminiscent of Starbucks) unceremoniously dumped in a mug with a sarcastic quip printed along the side. Below-average taste, quality and texture. Maybe if I were wearing a studded belt the coffee would’ve been better made, but it’s unlikely.

Grade: C-

Second Shot: Beehive has free, unlimited wifi, and due to my own personal, strict, fair-use policy, that translates to buying at least one coffee for every hour of free internet used. So, I bought a second small skim latte, this time from a bearded, heavily pierced lad of diminutive proportions and an infinitely cheerier demeanor than pissy-preggers. He actually made an attempt to correctly steam the milk and pull a decent shot. The resulting coffee, though still not up to my epicurean (read: prissy douchebaggery) standards, was still a damn sight better than the first, bumping Beehive up a solid grade. I’ll probably go back there again later today.

Grade: B-

Kiva Han, 3553 Forbes Ave

Description: Local, blandly hipsterish Pittsburgh based independent. More along the lines of socially acceptable/ethically aware quirk than Beehive – they’re apparently in love with the dirt-poor brown people who grow their coffee, and would like you to be, too. Doesn’t produce the same the gut reactions as either of the other two cafes reviewed, but that’s probably the idea.

Drink: Small macchiato

Staff: Twenty-something douche in skinny-legged, acid washed jeans. Wouldn’t stop surfing the internet, even after I placed my order. Acid washed. Douche. Douche!

Verdict: Crap. Under-extracted shot, shitty, scalded milk with the texture of styrofoam, and the espresso had all the flavor of an off-brand Chinese chocolate bar left in the near vicinity of a puddle of lukewarm, bacteria infested Yangtze river water, probably a result of using a pitcher that hadn’t been washed out since the last over-sugared drink was inflicted upon an unsuspecting customer.

Grade: Fuck this place.

Second shot: the Kiva Han at S. Craig street fared slightly better. At least the barista was attentive, and made a show of washing out the milk pitcher before beginning to steam. The result was a smoother texture to the milk, but it still was one of the worst coffees of the day. Why does this coffee taste so bad? Oh right, Fair Trade beans. I wonder – is it a rule that any bean that has the Fair Trade certification automatically taste like Beezlebub’s post-burrito squirts? Maybe Kiva Han should skip the ridiculous damn Fair Trade certification (every halfway decent coffee roaster in America already pays well above the Fair Trade price for their beans anyway, including Starbucks, so what’s the point?) and focus on making coffee that doesn’t taste like bowel movements.

Grade: D+

Conclusion: I’m really not that hard to please, no matter what you may infer from the above. As long as you pretend to give a damn about the customer, and pretend to give two damns about the drink you’re making (like I have to do, every damn day, with customers who aren’t 1/50^th as polite or as well tipping as I am) you’re aces in my book. No one in Pittsburgh, so far, has shown more than two of three of the damns required for a good experience. For some reason, the economy has been brutally kind to Pittsburgh, so maybe the influx of cash will one day have an effect on the quality of coffee. In the meantime, Beehive will remain my coffee-shop of choice in the Pittsburgh area. Sure, the staff, drinks and food are all hit-or-miss, but hey, it gives you the quirky-coffee shop experience without worrying too much about lice on the seats or contracting hepatitis from the mugs. And that, in my opinion, is a worthwhile experience. Plus, free wi-fi.

Story time: ‘#1 Crush’

A work of fiction

Every problem I ever had with women can be traced back to Shirley Manson, lead singer of Garbage.

I saw the music video for “I’m Only Happy When it Rains” when I was about thirteen. It was the first and least complicated sexual experience I ever had.

Shortly after that I began writing letters to her. Nothing creepy. I didn’t want her to think I was weird or desperate – just that, y’know, I was in love and that it didn’t matter if she’d ever love me back. They were the letters of a kid smitten with an older woman who seemed glamorous, soulful. Dangerous. That was probably the most alluring aspect. Someone who could transport me out of my mundane suburban existence and show me the real world.

In class I would fantasize about Shirley: my favorites were when the two of us would meet on a bridge – always a bridge, I wonder about the Freudian implications – in a far-off European city. Then we’d go to a bar or rock club and just before the first kiss we’d get involved in some kind of espionage adventure. Long story short, either she’d rescue me or I’d rescue her – I always preferred the scenarios where I was the rescuer, but just to mix it up sometimes she’d be my hero – and then we would have raucous, thrashing sex in some vaguely public location, like an apartment building courtyard, or in the elevator leading up to her hotel room.

The cities were always just ‘European,’ because at that point the farthest away from home I’d ever been was visiting relatives in the Bronx. But then I saw a picture of Pont Neuf, and suddenly all the time I should have been learning algebraic functions, or rules about past participles, I was in Paris, fucking the life out of the most glamorous woman in the world.

Looking back, I chose my first girlfriend because she had red hair. Not even the kind of electric rock-n-roll red I saw in Garbage’s music videos, or the surrealistic bloodiness in my trite pornographic fantasies. Just naturally red, more a sort of flattish orange than anything else. But she was the only redhead in our school, and at fourteen it was already pretty clear that no other hair color would do.

Predictably things didn’t work out. You can’t date a hair color, and you can’t always imagine you’re with someone else. I kept writing letters, c/o the addresses to record labels that I saw on the backs of Garbage’s CDs. Email had already started to gain popularity, but I thought my love for Shirley Manson was a purer love, and should be expressed by the effort of pens, ink, paper and stamps. So how was I supposed to know that she didn’t actually have mailboxes at any of the record companies?

I was fifteen when “Version 2.0” came out. The change in sound jarred me at first, but then I found myself altering my fantasies to accommodate. We’d still be in Paris, but instead of rock clubs and sleazy underground circles of guitar embezzlers or whatever, we’d be in techno clubs breaking up ecstasy rings and screwing in dark corners lit up by the occasional strobe light.

Girlfriend number two belonged to the club set, naturally. I pretended to ignore the fact that she was a blonde and wore a miniature backpack made out of some transparent, blue gel material. I suggested she dye her hair red, ‘cause it would look awesome. She responded by dying it a candy cane pink. She snuck me into my first club, Matrix. I took some X and remember being profoundly disappointed. I gave away my ‘real’ virginity later that same night. Woke up the next morning stone sober and thirsty. We broke up a week later.

By this point I began to fear my obsession/love was having a dangerous effect on my intelligence. Instead of studying I listened to the same three albums – ‘Garbage,’ ‘Version 2.0’, and ‘Angelfish,’ technically not Garbage but Shirley’s first band as lead singer, which I never really liked all that much – over and over again. Instead of paying attention in class, I was imagining myself in lurid sexual fantasies that would have embarrassed most pornographers – or so I told myself. I would cut class entirely and ride the train to Boston proper, trolling the South End, the Common and Lansdowne Street for Shirley Manson facsimiles. On the days when I didn’t go to school at all, I would include Cambridge in my search, and sit lonesome on a bench in Harvard Square. The closest I ever came was a barista at Starbucks, but she patiently explained that she was, in fact, a lesbian.

So I wrote the last letter I would write for almost a year. It was fairly direct, something along the lines of ‘Shirley, I still love you and believe I always will. But the strain of high school is beginning to wear on me, and if I don’t pull my grades up soon I’ll never be able to go to college and get a good job and have the money to travel wherever you go. So bon chance my darling, for now.’

After that I went full bore into my studies, and escaped the year with a ‘B’ average. To my surprise, and probably that of my art teacher as well, I discovered I had serious drawing talent. She was amazed and suspicious, particularly because for the first three quarters of the year I had drawn fuck all.

So over the summer I drew as much as I could: landscapes, still life, people I saw on the street. I spent a lot of time on Newbury Street in particular, because of the always-interesting cross-section of rich shoppers, fauxhemians, and freaks. At the end of the day I would look over my sketches with a mixture of surprise and pride. Every sketch that bore just a little bit too much of a resemblance to a certain Scot I threw in the trash.

Also during that summer I started dating girlfriend number three. She worked the counter at Newbury Comics. Everything about her was multi: multi-colored hair, multiple face piercing, and multiple personalities. She said she liked me because she had a thing for sensitive straight-laced boys who might take it up the butt. I didn’t know what she meant. Our ‘going out’ mostly consisted of me meeting her after work, lending her money to buy a bottle of Jack, then either going to the park to grope each other or heading to one of her friends’ places in Somerville. Whenever we did the latter I inevitably ended up walking alone to the train station at 5 in the morning to wait for the first train of the day. Sometimes we would go to rock clubs, but I always ended up losing her somewhere. By the time school started again I was glad for the excuse not to go to Newbury Street. I never thought of her as soulful or dangerous. At first I just thought she was kind of weird, then as time went on, desperate and pathetic. We didn’t keep in touch. She hated Garbage.

My art teacher encouraged me to take afternoon classes at Mass Art to ‘nurture my talent.’ I agreed mostly because I figured that if I spent my extra time in classes, I wouldn’t go to record stores trawling for deleted Garbage singles.

That’s where I met, well, not girlfriend number four, but rather ambiguous-touchy-feely-affectionate-female friend number one. She had dyed red hair (!) and took life-drawing classes to supplement her degree in performing arts. When we met she didn’t know I was still in high school, and didn’t treat me with any of the art school disdain I would come to know so well.

She was a self-described audiophile, and spent a good amount of free time creating headphone rigs using vacuum tubes and silver wire she braided herself. It didn’t matter to her what she listened to, she said, so long as it sounded absolutely brilliant. She was the only person I ever wanted to admit my Shirley Manson love to, but I never went through with it. Time away from my letter writing made me think of it as something shameful, even pathetic. Fanboyish. Also, all the time I spent with my friend took me out of my old habits. At least that’s what I told myself.

Whatever damage I had done to my grades in the first couple years of my Manson obsession was largely undone by the time senior year rolled around. Don’t ask me how, but I got early admission to Cooper Union. I don’t know what possessed them. Though I still listened to every Garbage album I had everyday – I was up to seven at that point, the original three plus two Japanese imports and a couple bootlegged concerts – I was no longer tempted to write letters to Manson. Sketches of female faces didn’t magically transform into her dark eyes and gash of a mouth. I had developed a crush on my friend and wanted to date her. Her quiet geekiness and technical proficiency – she built me a vacuum tube headphone amp that I use to this day – coupled with her natural good looks and subdued clothing sense seemed like exactly what I should want. She wasn’t mysterious or exotic: she didn’t seem dangerous in the way that I always wanted to encounter and somehow conquer. She was just good. And I liked her an awful lot.

She shot me down when I told her how I felt. Kindly, yes, but after that I didn’t want to see her anymore. She didn’t quibble.

Right around the spring of my senior year I went with my class on a school trip to Paris. A lot of people were in the mood for celebrating, but I wasn’t. My art teacher got special commendation for helping me get into Cooper Union. I spent a lot of the time that led up to the trip just wanting to be alone.

Our flight to Paris was delayed by several hours because someone managed to crash a Sky Chefs truck into the plane we were about to board. Stuck in the Logan international departures lounge with forty of my fellow students, I felt like a cockroach in a glue trap. I milled around for a while, listened to ‘Version 2.0’ on my Discman, and then I went over to look at the newsstand.

Shirley Manson stared back at me from the cover of a lad’s magazine. It promised an exclusive interview. I don’t remember picking it up, or taking it to the register. All I remember was that the funk I had been in for the past few months, ever since my friend and me stopped speaking, suddenly disappeared. I read about her disappointments in life and love, critical responses to the band and her music – and then she said one thing that took my breath away and incited an immediate desire to write her a letter.

‘I want a man who knows that when I say, “leave me alone” what I really mean is “tear my pants off and fuck me up the ass.”’

Things changed for me after that. I stopped feeling so sorry for myself and embraced the new life I was about to enter. Paris was magnificent, everything I could’ve hoped for. Didn’t meet any redheads, but I walked the streets all night, went into clubs and danced with girls who didn’t speak English. I was more aggressive, not in a grab-ass or pushy kind of way, but simply able to make my intentions and desires known without using language. The response from these girls was like nothing I’d experienced.

My fantasies took on a new dimension as well. Rougher. A little more violent. Some of the danger that I always attributed to her, well, suddenly I started to possess a little in my dreams. It felt good to get out of my head, to temper the sensitive artiste with a little cock n’ balls.

Cooper Union had the same kind of pretension as Mass Art, indeed the same kind found at every art school, but it was enhanced by a heady mixture of entitlement and justified vanity. “Beautiful Garbage” was released that fall, and I listened to it everyday while I worked. Almost immediately I decided to focus my efforts on corporate design. In my spare time I started work on a graphic novel starring Shirley in less pornographic versions of my fantasies. Out of deference to her, I left myself out.

Most of my time was spent away from my classmates and mingling with students from other universities. Girlfriend number four was a drama student at NYU. We had sex for the first time in her dorm room while listening to “Beautiful Garbage,” specifically tracks two through nine. She was a brunette. I broke up with her because she drunk-dialed me too many times.

I went to my first BDSM club the week before the end of term. They played a techno version of “Milk” as I used a cat o’nine tails for the first time. It felt good, and I went back almost every week thereafter. It was one of the few clubs I’d been to that regularly played Garbage.

I met girlfriend number five in that club, three years into my time at Cooper. At that time I had already started to receive job offers in several different sectors. Apparently I had a bright career in front of me. My graphic novel – which to date consists only of images, no actual text – spanned almost a thousand pages and over four thousand individual illustrations.

When I met her, she worked in an architecture firm with one of those Teflon reputations, even though she was only a few years older than I was. She was a bottom who loved her men to wear leather cuffs – I had worn one since my second year – almost as much as she loved over-the-knee spanking. Her family came from Paris.

She also bore a near perfect resemblance to Shirley Manson.

It took a while to understand what was wrong. Ever since I read that interview, I wrote one letter a week to Shirley, every week, without fail. They were no longer the insipid, love-lorn letters of a thirteen-year old. Instead, I had simply written to her about my week. What was going on with classes, my illustrations and girlfriends. Family troubles. Bad dates. Funny things that had happened in clubs, BDSM and otherwise. It was like a one-sided pen pal, or speaking to a person in a coma. Call me crazy or obsessive or what you will, but that letter-a-week was just as important to me as any of my other relationships, including girlfriend number five. Maybe my attention was divided, or maybe she just began to realize that I seemed to be writing a lot of letters without ever getting one in return, but she became suspicious.

So that afternoon in early spring, when I came back to my apartment and found her reading the draft of the letter I had left on my desk – I still handwrote all my letters to Shirley – I didn’t back down from her accusations. I told her everything, from the way I felt the first time I saw the “I’m Only Happy When it Rains” music video, to swearing off letters and discovering a talent that would take me wherever I wanted to go, to how a simple, throwaway line in a magazine interview saved me from being trapped in my own brain and gave me the courage to pursue everything I ever wanted.

She packed the few belongings she had in my apartment and left that same evening. When she was gone, I sat down at my desk and drew a new page for my graphic novel. It was much simpler and less action-packed than the others. In it, Shirley Manson receives a letter. She reads it, and then sits down and writes a letter in return. She mails it.

After I finished the page, I sat for a long, long time. Then I addressed a new envelope to her agent – I had finally figured out the correct way to send fan mail – folded up my illustration, left my apartment and dropped it in a mailbox.

“Bleed Like Me” was released that same month. I took the day off from class, bought the album from the record store on the corner and, after rolling a couple new tubes into my headphone amp, pressed play. I listened to it once, all the way through. After the last track, “Happy Home,” I pressed eject, powered off the amp, and shelved the CD with the rest of my collection.

I was offered a job upon graduation at a prestigious – God I hate that word – design firm with offices in New York, Paris, London, Madrid and Tokyo. I had already done some work for them, and the pay was so exorbitant I decided to take a vacation to celebrate. In August I bought a first class ticket to Paris.

The flight took off from Newark, but was rerouted through Boston due to equipment trouble. So I sat in the departures lounge and listened to my iPod – I think it was the “Foo Fighters”– when suddenly I caught a glimpse of long red hair.

She stood in line at the Starbucks counter, leafing through her maroon passport. I don’t remember standing up, or pulling the headphones off my head, or making the decision to get in line behind her. All I remember is suddenly getting snapped out of my stupor when she placed her order.

‘Tall caramel macchiato, please.’

There was nothing I could think to say, no possible way to start a conversation. I had imagined her in thousands of scenarios, in all manner of situations and contexts. I had drawn and studied her face to the finest detail, tracking the beginnings of fine lines around her mouth and eyes. I knew every hairstyle she ever had since 1990.

Conversely, she knew – if she ever got or read any of the letters – the most intimate details of my life, from the time I was thirteen to twenty two. There was the possibility that I knew every inch of the woman standing not two feet in front of me, while knowing nothing of her mind or who she was, while she knew everything about me, except what I looked like.

I knew then that I was right to stop the letters. She was my first and truest love, but there were simply no words left.

She paid for her coffee and went to sit in the lounge. I approached the counter automatically, and as I ordered a tall coffee, looked down to see that she had left her passport behind.

Reality had finally caught up with me, and as I walked over to her, coffee in one hand and passport in the other, I knew everything would be okay.

‘Excuse me, miss?’

She looked up from a book she was reading. Her face was at once intimately recognizable and totally unfamiliar.

‘Yes?’

‘I think you left this on the counter,’ I said as I handed her the passport.

‘Oh, thank you. Can’t believe I forgot it there. Daft of me.’

Her voice was like the sound of my heartbeat and yet so new. The Edinburgh accent I thought I knew so well.

‘No problem. Uh…’

She arched her eyebrow. Apparently this had happened before.

‘Well, could I have your autograph?’

She smiled and reached into her purse for a pen.

‘Of course. Who shall I make it out to?’

I handed over the only piece of paper I had at hand: my ticket stub for Paris. I gave her my name.

When I said it, I saw on her face the briefest of pauses. The whole world seemed to have stopped. I felt thirteen all over again. It was all at once the most terrifying and most exhilarating moment of my life.

But then it was over. She finished the autograph and handed it back to me. ‘There you are. Always nice to meet a fan. Are you on your way to London?’

I relaxed and took the stub, and for an instant our hands touched. ‘No, I’m on my way to Paris.’

‘Gorgeous city, isn’t it?’

‘It is, indeed.’

She smiled politely once more, and indicating her passport said ‘Well, thanks again for this. I hope you have a good trip.’

Recognizing the end of our relationship, I took a step back and said, ‘Thanks for the autograph. And, y’know, enjoy your trip as well.’

‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

Get stuffed – Samuel Johnson

‘Blackadder’ seems as good a place as any to begin.

Yes, I’m just another pissy unpublished writer, pushed to the breaking point by the publishing community’s perpetual insistence that, no, in fact, another novel dedicated to the travails of a naive, young Brown graduate discovering life and love in the big city is much more viable than any of my literary excretions. Though in fairness to the overpaid, underworked, and creatively bankrupt that, like cockroaches after a nuclear holocaust somehow manage to maintain a toehold in an economy that has reduced the best of this generation to madness – yours truly excluded, of course – I haven’t taken the idea of being published even halfway seriously, until recently. So as long as I’m entertaining deluded pipe-dreams of getting published and whoring myself out on Oprah, where no doubt a comely young Northwestern intern will lovingly work my balls before the show and a naive young Brown graduate after, I may as well start by pretending I have a voice and personality in the form of a blog. Sounds like a good idea, no?

Of course, I’ve also begun to view lottery tickets as a viable alternative to ever finding a job that pays a slightly better hourly rate than the post of apprentice shoeshine boy – and I was, once, a shoeshine boy, therefore I remain aware of industry trends – so perhaps my judgment, regarding work, publishing, and everything else, is not quite what it used to be. At the moment, blowing two bucks on a scratch ticket feels only slightly more foolish than once again foraging deep into Craigslist for the entry-level clusterfuck of a data-entry position of my dreams.

But enough of this incipient negativity. Best to accentuate the positive. For whatever reason I can still put a sentence together. That’s something, isn’t it? Not bad for five years and thousands of dollars of government money to be repaid over a ten year period.

Yet this frustration is not going anywhere, anytime soon. When I look at how I was just a couple years ago, I wonder when things stopped being easy, and when they became difficult. The tipping point came and went, I’m sure, and I didn’t notice. Now here I am, in Boston. Sweaty, stifling, humid, ugly Boston. My home town. The place where John Adams once practiced law, before being forgotten by history. He had a rough time in his 20′s, as well. John Q. Adams, as well.

They were both consigned to live in Boston for a while, as well.