Flâneur Fiction: "Detouring Vol. 1"

“Detouring: Vol. 1”

By Patrick Patterson-Carroll

The mattress and box spring I sleep on are never covered. They rest on the floor, the former covering the latter slightly diagonally. If one were to remove the ceiling to look down on it, there would no doubt be discovered symmetry. Symmetry that is not aesthetically pleasing, but symmetry nonetheless. The bed frame is leaned against the wall under the window. I'm missing a crucial support piece, so the chances of me having a real bed are slim to nil.

Books and clothing are littered randomly about the room. Boxes remain packed in corners. I've lived here for four and a half months. I usually sleep with my feet pointing southward and my head pointing to the window, which looks north into an alleyway. The alleyway separates the mansions on Swiss from our little favela on Gaston. That’s America for you. The moneyed aren’t content with protecting their riches, no. They want to see us poor bastards suffer our paycheck to paycheck existences, so they smile and wave to us as we move hither and thither-- from work to home and home to work, day in and day out-- with our apartment complexes only a monument to poverty.

On cold nights I wrap myself in a comforter and assume the fetal position. Most nights I drink myself to a slinky, rubbery consistency, try to read The Gift of Death or Crime and Punishment, fail, and go to sleep. Comatose. So it goes. The cycle.

Usually I wake up at noon, wrench my eyes shut to defend them against the rays of sun that filter through the slats of the horizontal blinds, get up on the left side of the bed, limp to the bathroom, take a shit, wash my face, brush my teeth, and if necessary, shower and shave. But on this particular morning I was rousted from dreamland by the urge to piss. Only hours before I’d taken two lithium, four ibuprofen, and drank a handle of Chilean plonk.

I stand under the cold, sobering spray of the shower and wonder to myself how the hell my bladder could penetrate two lithium tablets and all that fermented grape juice. Then I remember the girl who gave me the pills warning that polyuria is a side effect, so I shouldn‘t “worry my pretty little head about being pregnant.” Har-d-fucking-har. Combined with the wine guzzling, my actions were tantamount to taunting my bladder and liver thusly: “Hey, I don’t like you, and you don’t like me. So I issue to you a challenge. Wake me from a sound sleep for a piss! I don’t care! Do your fucking worst!”

Forthrightly speaking, perhaps pissing off my liver and bladder aren’t the smartest of actions given their biological necessity.

On the toilet I sit, my teeth clattering against themselves, drying off my frostbitten toes. Cold water + A/C = probable shock. I lean over to the hamper and pull out a pair of underwear. I’m not getting laid anytime soon. If Tracey Emin can proudly display her dirty knickers in an installation, certainly I can wear once worn unwashed boxer briefs. They’re at the top and aren’t entombed in dirty shirts and socks, they pass the smell test, and I have talcum. All bases covered.

I’m still feeling drunk. The shower was not sobering enough, apparently! I quickly cover my genitalia with powder, slip on the boxers, and put on the shirt and jeans that are leaning on the back of a seldom sat in chair. They‘re clean. I think. I check the clock. Fifteen ‘til one. Lovely. Breakfast consists of a Belgian waffle-- cold in the center-- and a glass of water. I’m positioned in front of the tube, pretending to watch television en español. They’re trying to sell “trocas” again. The eye candy in the orange top and skirt is cute.

“I know she’s a human being,” I say aloud to no one in particular, justifying to myself those hedonistic little thoughts that cause one so much inner turmoil. Ha, right.

Saturdays are the kind of days where one such as myself does little more than sit around and wait for an exciting proposition to come his way. Per usual, my friend Adam the Strange delivers. By phone. I have one new text from “the Strange,” the icon reads after a couple secs of vibration.

“En route. Get your shit together,” the message reads. Brusque.

Now, when Adam calls or texts to say that he’s on his way over, there’s no real way to determine exactly when he’ll show up. See, neither of us have vehicles. We proudly boast this to our friends, most of whom have cars or are smart enough to utilize the public transport that our glorious city affords us. Yes, those big yellow sardine cans manned by careless drivers only made confident by stupidity and the fact that they are in the biggest vehicle on the road.

The mystery of the ETA is sacred to us both as we are capricious individuals and sometimes we don’t think to notify the other person until we’re halfway there, or already there, or close by, but distracted by a woman or a bar or a woman we have followed into a bar. The point is: I don’t know when he’ll be here.

For awhile he lived with a woman whom we’ll refer to as his girlfriend. The day he moved in with her seemed as if perhaps it would be one of those oft bolded watershed events-- you know, it‘s usually a vocabulary word in history textbooks-- that change drastically the landscape of existence as it is known; a change none of us in his immediate circle of friends expected to happen.

But Adam the Strange is not a man to be tied down. “We weren’t built to last,” he confessed over a drink. “I can’t write. She throws off my rhythm. It’s almost like... well, she’s always around and familiarity through sex breeds a lot more things than just contempt.”
“Like what?” I asked, curious.
“Comfort. I‘m not used to such... everything‘s in its place shit.”
“Oh, well then, can I have a go?”
“She’d kill you. Seriously. You seen my back? You’re a pussy.”

He was right. Woman’s a beast. Best I could hope for would be mercy. And I wouldn’t get that. Besides, she’s fond of Mexicans with Mohawks, and it’s a mold I could never possibly hope to fit.

The spiral notebook sat under my glass. I set the drink aside and opened it. I read the first page that was legible. It was shit. Completely uncharacteristic shit. Undeniably awful. Unabashedly base. His self published This isn’t a suicide note... was so far away from the mess thrown onto those whiskey stained pages that I wanted to hug the guy.

Celebrity was local and brief for him. It was a nice little wave that died out way too soon for his liking. The girlfriend thing was a coping mechanism, which I guess is why it caught everyone who knew him by surprise. “'the Strange’ has a girlfriend? No way!”
“I know it sucks,” he said, looking me directly in the eye. He wet the tips of his fingers, as he does when his mind moves faster than his mouth. “The only thing that could make it more than nonsense is covering up the bullshit with a gimmick.”
“So, bury the bullshit in bullshit? I like it.”

He laughed.

We were walking south on Akard in the direction of his place. City Hall stood, lurching over the reflecting pond like a child admiring itself, teetering dangerously close to the edge, but never quite falling in; and just then Adam blurted, “let’s just get some of my shit and keep going.”
And that’s what we did. “Goodbye,” he said to the beautiful hardwood floor, “goodbye,” to the beautiful high ceilings, “goodbye,” to the beautiful gas stove, “goodbye,” to the beautiful view of Downtown Dallas from the communal patio, and least (and most) of all, “goodbye,” to the eccentrically beautiful woman who had taken him in and fucked all the talent out.

Of course, she was asleep. Passed out. I checked to make sure she was still alive. The woman did a lot of coke; even claimed to have had a heart attack when she was twenty four. She was breathing.

“At least she doesn’t snore,” I said, pocketing a small bag of coke and the rolled up dollar bill.

All I see now are scantily clad young women gyrating to Latin rhythms. I am enjoying it too much. Or not enough. I change the channel. Too much stimulation too soon makes me boring and one dimensional. At least that’s what the postmodernist loving lit major I dated said. She would read my blog and regurgitate phrases or words I used; always striking mockingly, never drolly. The tongue sharp but somehow witless. I curse her and her stupid observations.

Now I’m thinking about my blog. To update or not to update? That’s the question. The answer is that I haven’t brought my virus protection to current, and because I can’t afford a Mac (not an endorsement), I'm open to any PC STD out there. So there it is. My laptop sitting closed on the table in front of me. I'm still paying for the piece of shit.

I tap a fresh pack of smokes against my palm and walk to the door. The peephole is grimy and therefore an unreliable representation of the world immediately in front of my door. I glance down at the nicotine twenty in my hand, separated from the flesh of my palm by plastic and cardboard.

For a moment I struggle. Man against manufacturing. After some ticks of the second hand, the wrapping is off and the top is flipped. I sit back down, remove the shiny paper, extract a cigarette, place it between my lips and light it.

The metal knocker clacks against the door. Adam. He's the only one who uses it. I again shake myself free of the couch's metaphorical shackles and answer the door. He's smiling. "What the fuck's up?" I ask.
"I'm homeless!"

He steps in. I gesture for him to sit down. He demurs the invitation and asks for a cigarette. "If nothing else, you've got tobacco and booze."
"Regretting running away?"
"She's got an 'Amber Alert' out on me. Her friends, mostly assholes I don't even know, are texting me,” he says with a laugh. “But one of them mentioned a party tonight somewhere between here and Lakewood.”
“Well, we can’t miss that,” I say, suddenly perky.

We are both hungry, so we decide to pool our resources and get tacos from Jack in the Box. He has $2.76 cash and I have $2.16 plus something like three or four bucks in the bank. In wadded up tender and change, we have a total of $4.92, which is enough for six tacos (as per the 2 for 99¢ deal, which has been in affect for as long as I can remember), or four tacos and two small drinks. We laugh.

“That, I think, is as good as your math will ever get,” he says.

We do a couple of lines of coke and hit the door. A little boy with nothing but a diaper covering his ass runs past us squealing while his mother yells in Spanish. I say “aww,” lock the door and we head through the parking lot into the alley. The sun is slowly heading west and so are we. Not a creature stirs, nary a crackhead nor bum, just the Tejano music throbbing softly behind us.

Silence, compatible though it is with sedentary solitude, is incompatible when walking in company, so I say to Adam, "What were you thinking when you wrote that shit?" A couple of steps pass, and he stops. I stop as well. He looks at me and smiles.

"Man, I don't know. I wrote This is not a suicide note... when I was rooming with Danger. Our schedules differed to the point where we were rarely in the apartment together. With the girlfriend... all we did was go out and drink and come home and fuck.”
“Yeah,” I said. We walked on, turning northbound on N. Collett. “But in this economy, one shouldn’t give up pussy.”
Adam asks, “Swiss or Live Oak?”
“Swiss, I think.”

Selecting Swiss Ave. is a way for us to simultaneously address grievances while treating our aesthetic senses, and starting each sentence with “If I had the cash...” as each block westward disappears beyond our peripherals.

“How is Danger these days, anyway? Thought about crashing with him?” I ask.
“Still on Greenville. He told me I lost a step, too.”
“That writer’s block shit in the novel was self-fulfilling.”
He scoffs.
I persist, “No really, the narrator is you and you are him. Slim with the tilted brim...”
“It’s not a block. It’s just..." He realizes the reference. In the key of gangsta rap. "What’s my muthafuckin’ name?? Adam the Strange!”
“And you are not even drunk yet. I always liked ‘Adam the overly animated Mexican.’”
“Too long. Not believable.”
“You think Mexicans aren’t prone to excitement?”
“In Spanish, yes. I don’t speak Spanish.”

For the next couple of blocks, I am forced to admit I am more Mexican than him and Danger combined. “Remember that time we were at Fiesta and you bought all that Mexican candy?”
“It’s cheap and delicious, man. That’s my defense. If it makes me Mexican, so be it. I‘m more Mexican than you and Danger combined.”

A woman with a near perfect ass jogs past us going east.

“Irish, Mexican... it’s all the same,” he says. “That is the most distracting ass ever.”
“Yeah. You think Danger will lend us some cash? If we’re going to a party, we might as well make an effort to not show up empty handed.”

Crossing Swiss onto Fitzhugh, we are heading north to the next east-west street, Live Oak. Passing us, going south on Fitzhugh is a metro-sexual looking guy walking two small dogs. One is a poodle, the other is a Yorkie. Fuck it. The terrier is tiny. The guy, with his head up and nose pointing slightly to the heavens, is wearing shades-- those big, annoying bug-eyed ones that ugly chicks always wear for the fact that they cover up 60% of their face-- that give him what he might perceive as an air of cool, but the general consensus concerning these type of guys is that they‘re all pricks. Adam laughs.

“Gay or punk?” I ask. No laughter this time.
“Probably more punk than that guy Steve.”

Good one. Steve was a huge, really scary punk asshole who bounced bars on Lower Greenville. He beat the shit out of me once. I was drunk, hopped up on coke, and apparently I hit on his girlfriend. The worst part was that he was already pissed at me for starting rumors about his “anything antithetical to homosexual” façade being a means to cover up his raging desire to suck every cock in the vicinity.

The back-story to that is the whole fiasco where he got macho with me because I became slightly indignant over him manhandling my driver’s license. Examining it, bending it to the point of alteration. Words were exchanged. From that point forward I was personae non-gratis at the particular bar where he bounced.

“What’s big, dumb, and less punk than Little Richard?” I would chirp drunkenly, tactlessly at whomever I thought was listening. Honestly, I thought everyone was. This went on for a few weeks. I would lob cute little barbs at Steve’s reputation, and there would be no response.
But that particular night my good friends: coke, alcohol, and my big mouth-- not to mention my undersexed penis-- got me beat up.

The story is that I was homesteading in front of the bar his girlfriend was tending at the joint next door (where he bounced many a disagreeable and belligerent motherfucker down the road for a living), and lacking the cash necessary to settle my tab, I offered to take her out back and “eat her out.” Naturally, she was revolted by my proposition and the cheekiness that accompanied it, grabbed me from over the counter, and slapped me several times about the face while yelling. Steve’s attention had been successfully aroused. His rebuttal was neither swift nor graceful.

Drunk and loose as I was, I couldn’t get away from the fucker. Understand: I’m 6’1. That guy had at least five inches on me. That didn’t include the nine inches of spiked Mohawk lined perfectly from his widow’s peak to the nape of neck. And man did his maulers pummel into whatever part of my body faced him! Good show for the patrons. Weeks of pain and numbing euphoria for me (oh the glory of non-prescribed Meperidine A.K.A Demerol!). But that’s how it always is. Inebriation keeps the pain at bay until sobriety rules the day.

Even now, I take shit from my friends for it. At Fitzhugh and Live Oak we stop at the light. “Think that guy could take Steve?” I question with a chuckle.
“Yeah. I do. You were a drunk asshole about it, but it was just a bullshit fad to him. You listen to more punk than that guy,” he trails off and then mutters, “Sex Pistols... gimme a fuckin’ break.”
"He still kicked my ass. But I'll take the street cred."
"You got your ass kicked. Street cred means shit. Just think about it like this: who was more drunk?"
“I was pretty wasted,” I admit.

The light changes. We cross Live Oak and continue west. The skyscrapers of Downtown Dallas can be seen in the distance. The blocks we tread going west pass with little verbal exchange, which means no grandstanding. Every time we open our mouths it’s to impress ourselves or intimidate those around us, so this is out of character. But frankly, I’m tired of talking about the night I got my ass beat, with good reason, by a moronic goliath. Right now, I just want to count my steps. I want to enjoy being sober.

N. Carroll Ave.. Because we’re hungry, the only thing that grabs our attention is the olfactory stimulation from the Burger King that sits on the northeast corner of N. Carroll and Live Oak. We know it’s too rich for our blood. We’re coming up on Peak. It’s the next light. I say to Adam, “Maybe we should see if Danger’s got money, and then find somewhere better to eat. I’m not so sure I want tacos now.”
“Let’s save extravagance for liquor,” he says.
"Do you know exactly where the place is?”
“What fun would that be? Follow the noise, I always say.”

Westward on the north side of Live Oak we walk, Downtown Dallas magnifies ahead of us with each step. Some older black gentlemen are sitting under one of the DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit-- not always apropos, but not always oxymoronic either) bus shelters. These shelters were conceived to protect waiting riders from the elements, but in reality do little to accomplish such a thing. Rain never comes down from a single angle and cold and heat are allowed several entry points (through hollowed out dot-matrix type entrances-- or if there’s glass, it varies-- through cracks and empty panels), hell the metallic material the fucking things are made of conduct both elements! Clearly, these men would be fucked were it not for the beautiful spring day.

They solicit us for cash as we pass. Adam pulls the linty pocket lining from his jeans and shrugs as if to say “I’m more broke than you are. Don‘t fucking ask.” One of the guys mumbles “God bless you“ while the other waves us off disappointedly. We keep walking. “Look at that,” he says. “They didn’t want to put a tape measure to poverty.”

The Jack in the Box exists comfortably on a concrete bed at the corner of Live Oak and Washington Ave. At this moment we have run out of grass. I notice the concrete bench with “DART” etched into its sides. In front of it is a metal pole-- sprouting from more concrete-- that has a sign made of something I think is much like fiberglass affixed to it. It also reads “DART.”
“I guess they make up for Exall Park’s inexcusable overabundance of grass!” I exclaim. “The park has more than enough fucking grass! It’s Texas, everyone loves sun, what bigger lover of sun than concrete!”

Adam shakes his head.

Inside we are greeted by an empty restaurant. Most of the employees are fooling around: the manager is texting and grinning to himself, the fry cook is flirting with the prep station girl; all of them are doing absolutely nothing to keep their awful jobs-- and in any other situation would likely be summarily fired-- save for the pale girl at the register who is smiling at us, playing well her part, anxious to serve.

Adam sees the slight outlining of one of her tats drooping underneath the hem of her shirtsleeve. He points to it. She smiles and lifts up the sleeve. It’s a cross. He cringes and says, “Nice. Can I get six tacos and two cups, please?” He turns to me. “Water’s cool, right?”
“Sure,” I answer. “Water is the source of life.”
“Really? I thought it was sex.”
“That too,” I add with boredom.

The girl smiles at us. “That’ll be $3.14,” she says with a voice that’d glow if it could be seen. I scramble through my pockets, pull out the two wadded bills. Adam reaches back into his wallet and retrieves two crisp bills, gently laying them in her hand. I can’t believe it! He’s flirting!
She gives us our change and thanks us. 86¢. Three quarters, a dime, and a penny. We sit down and wait on our order. I spin the penny on the table. I think about saying something I always say-- sounds something like, “plastic salt shakers, too bad they don’t have them here... blah, blah, blah”-- I think better of it.

The dining area around us is split into three sections, each one with a ceiling fan turning at medium speed, quietly above. As most of the restaurant is glass, what little wall space there is, is covered with "humorous" send-ups of classic paintings and photos that feature the chain's "mascot" or "commercial identity."

"I don't think half the people who dine at this place get the intended humor of these posters," I say.
"I don't even get half of them," Adam mumbles. His attentions are focused on the girl behind the counter. She's staring at the front door, waiting for the next customer.
"She's ugly, dude. And a Christian."
"Christians have vaginas, too."
"What about ugly girls?"
"The same. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

I am ignoring his usage of a cliché because our tacos are ready. I get up and walk to the counter. She says, "Want hot sauce?" Of course I want hot sauce. Hot sauce is the best part. I nod. She dumps several packets in and then rests her elbows on the counter, propping her head up with the palms of her hands.

I drop the tray onto the table between us. Adam tears into the bag. One of the napkins has a series of digits poorly scrawled in ink on it. I point this out to him. He picks it up and reads her name and number aloud. Her name is Juliette. Juliette the pale tattooed Christian.

(2009)


©Patrick Patterson-Carroll