by Marty Rafter
start to focus on my breathing as I walk. The action clears my head like it always has, and with the sensory stimuli, I feel safe that I won’t lapse into some kind of interspatial travel. After a while, I buy a cup of coffee, and walk over to the library to wait for it to open.
When I get to the library, Coats is already there sitting on one of the picnic benches. He is a tall, older black man, and from what I heard, he is also an ex-convict. He is at the library nearly every day, normally in one of the wing chairs in the basement reading room holding with a thick hardback book. He almost never talks to anyone. He just sits there and reads with his long legs crossed in his neatly creased jeans. Ben told me that Coats is homeless, but he has a brother that lets him keep his clothes at his place and use his shower, which would probably explain why he is always at the library. Coats knows who I am, but he never talks to me, but since I have time to kill, I walk over and sit down with him. I say hello, but he doesn’t respond, so I just sit there for a while and drink my coffee. After that, I decide to take the out the little box with the head in it and check to see if it stayed secure while I was walking. Coats watches me, and then he says “What’cho got there?”
“It’s a present for my friend, Ben” I say
“The crazy fat guy?”
“He’s not that crazy”
“He crazy enough. He your boyfriend?” Coats says, not looking at me, and resting his elbows on his knees
“No. He’s my friend”
“Nothing wrong with it if he is…. That’s your business”
“Well he’s not” I say
“You got a present for ‘eem”
I untie the box and open it up. I take out the clay head, and show it to Coats. He looks calmly at the head, and then at me.
“That’s you?”
“No, it's not supposed to be anybody. It's just a little head, I made it”
“Man, I know it's not supposed to be you. I meant is that you, leaving them heads?” He asks, still looking at me, but scooting further over on the bench.
“Oh you found one? Behind the Neruda?” I ask
“Yeah, Neruda. What is that? Some Voodoo shit?”
“No, No, It's not Voodoo. It is supposed to put a little magic into the world”
“Magic? That sound like some Voodoo shit to me” He starts to get more animated, so I put the head back into its case and put the case into my backpack
“No, I mean, like a sense of wonder. Of possibility” I say, explaining myself rapidly, trying to calm Coats down.
“Don’t be hiding little heads in there, man. “ He says even louder as he stands up.
“I’m sorry. Honestly, I didn’t mean anything by it. I really didn’t. I’ll take the one back that I put that in there”
“I threw that shit away”
“You threw it away. It took me a long time to make that!” I say
“I’ll throw that one away, too, if I find it.” He says
“I’m not going to hide this one. It is for my friend”
“You just be fuckin him up worse, givin him some weird shit like that” Coats says
Coats turns around and started to walk away, but I follow him. He is a few paces in front of me when I say, “Hey Coats, I didn’t know you liked Pablo Neruda?”
He spins on his heel and walks toward me. When he is six inches from me, he puts his index finger in the center of my chest and says. “Man, fuck you. And keep my name out your mouth. You don’t know me.” Then he walks up the library steps and stands waiting by the front door.
I go back to the bench and try not to look at him. I wonder if he really does like Neruda. I don’t. I retain the right to discount someone entirely if they are an apologist for authoritarian governments. On the other hand, I would also like to think that Stalin couldn’t survive the age of the internet, but what I really understand about history could fit in a thimble. Nobody really gets anything they didn’t live through. Either way, one thing that hanging around the library has taught me, is that if you want to find somebody who has put real independent effort the literary heavyweights, you should seek out some felons. Or least the ex-cons that spend their unemployable hours at the library. They certainly aren’t in the majority. The majority are people checking out Dan Brown audio books for their road trip to Cape May, then the students, then the deranged with nowhere else to go, and then the felons, and then everyone else.
When the doors finally open, I wait a few minutes for Coats to go in and find his book, and settle into the wing chair, and then I go inside. I find the copy of the Captive Mind that I have been reading and sit down at one of the wide wood tables in the Mezzanine where Ben can find me. I read for a while, but I find that I am getting distracted, so I close my eyes for a few minutes. A little while later, I am awoken by a guard.
“I would have let you sleep, but it is starting to get busy and people might complain” he says
“What time is it?”
The guard rubs his fat index finger across his eye and then pushes back his shirt sleeve to look at his watch.
“Almost one” He says.
“One?”
“Yeah, the college kids are starting to come in. You can stay, but you have to stay awake”
“Did you see Ben?” I ask
“Your Buddy?”
“Yeah, the big guy? Have you seen him?”
“Yeah, earlier I did. He was drinking a Coke back in the stacks. He got all pissy when I talked to him about it, too”
“When was that?” I ask
“Oh, I’d bet at least a couple of hours ago. Haven’t seen him since I talked to him”
I look down at the book. I had drooled a bit on one of the pages, so I quickly closed it, to conceal it from the guard, but he had already noticed
“Tell ‘em that you ain’t going to charge extra for drooling on the book” He says, and then he laughs loudly and walks away.
I looked down where the book had been and noticed the call ship where Ben had written me a note with one of those dull little half pencils. It says, “Didn’t want to wake you. You seemed so peaceful. Be here tomorrow?”
I read the note over a couple of times, and then decided to check my bag. The head was still there in its little foam case. After that, I return my book, and leave the library.
I have never been to Ben’s apartment before, but I know where it is. He has invited me a bunch of times, but I never accepted because he always asked at a weird moment, and he never really expressed any kind of plan about what we might do when I got there. But, since I was left with pretty much nothing to do, I decide to visit him. His place is not in the best neighborhood, but seeing as I am wearing the same clothes that I had worn for the past two days, and had just slept for four hours sitting at a table in a public building, I figure that I will emit enough of an unsound vibe that nobody would bother me. Plus, it is the middle of the day. When I reach the tall narrow building of subsidized studios where Ben lives, there is a skinny man with a patchy white beard sitting on the low cinderblock wall next to the front door. He is smoking one of those narrow cigars that looks like a cigarette, and he has two huge green bottles of mouthwash in plastic bags on the ground in front of him. I push the buzzer for Ben’s apartment and wait. There is no answer, so I push the button again. The man on the cinder block wall turns and looks at me,
“Who you lookin for?” He says, clearing his throat
“Ben. Big guy. Dark hair. He’s usually got a brown shopping bag with him” I say
“The crazy guy?”
“Yeah, but he’s not really that crazy”
“Oh. He's crazy all right. I live right below him, He screams the whole night sometimes. What are you? A case worker?”
“No, I’m his friend”
“He isn’t exactly the friend type” The man says. He takes a long draw from his thin cigar “Besides, he's not here. He’s been gone all day. I can tell beca
use his radio and TV are off. He is never in there without both of them on at the same time.”
“Can you give him a message for me?” I ask
“No”
“No?”
“No. Just because you talk to him, don’t mean I have to”
“Looks like you are planning on having some pretty fresh breath, huh?” I say, gesturing to the bag with the two huge bottles of mouthwash.
“Liquor store is a long walk from here” He says
“Not that long” I say
“It is if you are carrying a couple of bags.”
“You could get one of those little carts, or at least a backpack or something”
“I ain’t got no backpack, and I’m sure as fuck not stealing a shopping cart. This is just fine” He says as he reaches his foot out and taps the side of the bag with a filthy sneaker.
So, I take the present for Ben, and my notebook out of my backpack, and give the bag to the man.
“Here” I say
“What the fuck is this?”
“A backpack”
“I don’t need a fuckin backpack”
“I think you do. You are drinking mouthwash.”
“Backpack ain’t gonna keep me from drinking mouthwash” he says
“It's got a better chance to keep you from drinking mouthwash than nothing does. Just take it”
He reaches out a hand and takes the backpack, and immediately sets it on the ground next to his plastic bag.
“What's the difference?” He says
“The difference is that mouthwash is for cleaning your teeth. Plus, you might want to celebrate something. Then maybe you’ll drink something other than mouthwash”
“What am I gonna celebrate?” He
