Wise Potato Chips

 

Above, Bloomingdales was a cube of white gold. Proud as a beacon, guiding the faithful through the chill rain and cobalt sky.

Below, the 5 train was a southbound sardine can. Belted coats and woolen necks and sour, sweaty faces. We were all very intimate and not so much in love. As usual I was racing to a gig in order to affect a breezy lateness. As usual the MTA was cooperating like sugar in a gas tank.

The ‘Express’ crept. I was already giving lie to my once crisp shirt. My back was flat to the doors. Unseeing faces dotted my view. Our halting progress gave me glimpses of chalk and spray paint scrawls in the tunnel. I couldn’t read them. The chipper fake-voice assured us there was traffic ahead, cheerily made it sound as if there were only a few minutes before it was your turn to meet Santa. I leaned my head against the glass behind it.

Pressed up hard to my left was a pair of munching jaws.

Her left hand cradled a bag of potato chips, while the right kept the steady feed of a conveyor belt. No hurry, just a continual, happy crunch and chew and rolling tongue to pry loose some bits.

I watched from the side. Miss Chomps was less inhibited. She leaned on a shoulder and faced my left profile. She stared at me with popping, watery blue eyes. Then, as if to punctuate a thought, she raked the corners of her mouth where some fried yellow flakes had clustered. Her tongue as deft as a Musketeer's blade, the crumbs never stood a chance.

Miss Chomps’ mental gears spun at the same inexorable speed as her chewing. I didn’t mind her stare so much. Some stares feel harsh, hers was evaluative. All I had to do was stand there.

I reached into my coat pocket and turned down the iPod. It was coming. Do I open the door long before I even hear someone ring the doorbell? Could be.

"God know I shouldn't eat these damn things, but I will. Normally I'm so careful, eat so cleanly. But today, I dunno."

Miss Chomps’ voice was nasal, unvaried, steam-rolling. She was already mid-conversation and I was late in joining the party.

"Ah to hell with it, right?" Munch.

"Can't eat just one, remember that commercial?" Smeck.

"They're too good, I mean, who'd want to stop?" Crunch.

"You like potato chips? You must, I mean, really who doesn't like potato chips, not all the time, God knows, but really who doesn't get that urge for a potato chip now and then?," she asked.

I smiled. Her wide, thin mouth was a pink rubber band stretching and snapping back. Without being able to prove it, I had the sudden thought that she was less daffy than she portrayed. She was gauging my responses. What for, I wasn’t sure.

Miss Chomps was short and late-middle age solid, her frame filling out a turquoise overcoat. The chin was strong and jowls pulled the face into a ruddy square. Lemon yellow hair was bundled up in a violet beret, cheekily tilted. Her watery blues were watchful, a flare of silliness in there but a skeptical crease between them. What she thought, she kept to herself. She had managed six questions that didn't require a single answer.

"You want a potato chip?" 

That, I assumed, required an answer.

"I would,” I told her, “But you can't have just one."

She nodded sagely and looked down to the crumbs in her palm. Then she hoisted them into her mouth. "That's true, you really can't."

Miss Chomps relished those crumbs.

The 5 went from sluggish to dead stop. We were jostled into each other and righted ourselves. That pinging bell-tone, the impotent groan of the crowd, then the chipper fake-voice. Another train got precedence, rumbling over ours, like furniture being moved in the apartment above.

"You deserve it,” I suggested to her. “Treat yourself."

"How do you know?"

"That you're treating yourself?"

"That I deserve it." The skeptical crease deepened. The merry, lightly salted mouth carried on.

"You said before that today was an exception...?," I offered.

"Yeah. Heh. I did. It is. It’s a treat. I'm anxious.”

“About?,” I pressed.

“About Friday.”

“I see.” I didn’t press further.

Another jostle and the ‘Express’ resumed limping.

“So I thought what the hell, satisfy your urge, right?,” Miss Chomps insisted. “It’s so rare. Not like my husband. He's such a terrible eater, really awful."

"In what way?"

She shrugged. "Oh God, when I first started dating him, that was in the Sixties, I thought, oh God, I can't stay with this man. Hot dogs, pastrami, you name it. All this shit. And I was eating macrobiotic! Well. We all were. I guess it was fashionable. Anyway I married him. He's still alive. Lousy eater but not as bad as then. I've made a dent I guess. Know what's funny?" Miss Chomps’ drone up-ending was my cue.

"No, what?"

Lip licks, then a sandy chuckle. "All these macrobiotic eaters back in the Sixties, God were we anal about it. But here’s the joke: we all smoked!"

She laughed, shook her head. "That's what we thought was pure I guess. Go figure, right?"

I smiled in response. Not to pacify, but because she was what I'd hoped.

"You have an accent. You're not from here,” Miss Chomps declared. “Where are you from?”

I get asked that a lot, often a barb of suspicion lurking. Her tone was bright, clean of any barbs, or of any doubt.

My biography was brief. Parents’ nationalities, summers abroad, languages, all those credentials that can be ascribed to you but you haven’t earned. They simply are, and simply are you.

The watery blues glinted. “So you spent a lot of time in France?”

“That’s right,” I nodded.

“Been there recently?”

“About six, seven years ago,” I sighed. “It was a lot easier to do as a kid.”

“Speak French?”

I nodded again.

Miss Chomps’ look warmed and her chewing slowed. “That’s beautiful. You’re so lucky. Some languages are like listening to music, don’t you think that’s true, I think that’s true, French is like listening to music. Even if the voice isn’t that hot and you don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, it’s still like a song!”

She bunched a jolly shoulder and the beginning of a laugh rippled on her mouth. “Of course you know what the hell they’re talking about so maybe it’s not so much a song to you. Your parents taught you French growing up?”

“Right.”

“Yeah,” her laugh bubbled over, “So when they were yelling at you, it wasn’t so much music!”

I laughed with her. “Not a song I’d listen to twice, anyway.”

Miss Chomps’ giggle belied the rest of her.

“I’m Estonian,” she told me. “Born there after the war, not such a cheerful place.”

“No, I shouldn’t think so,” I said.

“I loved it though, was there as a young girl until my parents finally brought us here. We spoke it at home. I still speak it.” A half-shrug, a flash of resignation there then gone. “Not as much as I used to.”

Miss Chomps pushed on.

“My son, he’s really bright, really very bright, about your age, well maybe a little older, how old are you, I bet you’re older than you look, my son looks his age, whaddya gonna do, right? He’ll be fine. Anyway, my son is so annoyed with me that I never taught him Estonian growing up.”

“If there’s ever a time to learn a language without effort, that’s it. But you must know that,” I told her.

“Sure, I know it,” she answered. “Who knows, maybe I should’ve taught him. For you, it’s such a gift, French. Lots of people speak it all over the world, it’s romantic, right? God. Beautiful. But Estonian? I mean I love it, sure, but really who the hell uses Estonian? For what? I mean, let’s be real. I guess my son wishes he could speak it, just to be able to say he speaks something other than English. I told him, '...and what, when you were a kid, if I’d made you go to Estonian classes in the afternoon after school!? Yeah, that’d have gone over great, who are you kidding?'”

Miss Chomps’ giggle resurfaced. “Maybe he’s right, I dunno. But really, can you go on a date and woo some girl with Estonian?”

Now it was my turn to shrug. “Lonely Estonian girl, far from home? Could be the magic ticket.”

“Heh.” The bag of potato chips crinkled as she foraged. “Trust me, it’s still not music.”

“Skype comes from Estonia,” she added. “Did you know that?”

I admitted I didn’t.

“Estonians gave Skype to the world, it’s true. Pretty remarkable. You’ve never been there, I’m sure you haven’t?”

I admitted I hadn’t.

“I still have family there, friends. I miss it now and then, don’t go back very often.” Her skeptical crease deepened again. “It’s not a creative culture.”

That struck me. I asked what she meant. Miss Chomps’ watery blues popped a bit further.

“It’s a culture of engineers! Ever tried to connect with an engineer? It’s not the most exciting moment of your life, believe me.”

I laughed and she went on.

“They’re literal. They’re rigid. Right now, they’re also so damn nationalistic, really conservative, ‘get tough to make up for lost time’, you know, that whole thing? You talk to Estonians and get all this nationalism.”  Miss Chomps made a weary face. “Not my bag. At all.”

The ‘Express’ idled into Grand Central like a royal carriage past an adoring mob. Through the window I didn’t see too many adoring faces crammed on that platform.

Miss Chomps balled the now empty bag of potato chips, the metallic foil gleaming and collapsing between her fingers.

“That was good,” she said.

I looked at the face of an older woman, a face with the cheer and radiance of a girl who has snuck a special treat and no one need know.

It reminded me of something. There wasn’t much time, soon the 5 would stop and its doors would slide apart and I’d step out and others would flood in.

“Why the potato chips if you never eat them? Why are you anxious about Friday?,” I asked her.

“Oh,” Miss Chomps’ pink rubber band mouth pulled in a rueful way. “Friday I’m having surgery.”

I didn’t ask more. More would have been intimate.

Miss Chomps’ pleasure was intact. “The potato chips cheered me up.”

I wished her luck on Friday. She thanked me. I offered her my hand and said I was glad we had spoken. Miss Chomps said likewise. The doors parted. A wall of coats pushed forward and I went sideways and slid through a break in the wall.

I thought about potato chips.

 

© Eric Yves Garcia 2012

Frozen

Tonight I watched a train rumble over a helpless man on the tracks.

I was standing on the elevated platform at 125th, tea in hand, ready for the 6:13 train to my gig. We were all bunching our shoulders a bit against the cold, avoiding each other’s eyes.

Then to my left a shout, stark, then cut off. I turned and leaned over the edge of the platform. Very nearby, a man lay hunched over the nearest rail, unmoving. I saw his red-checkered shirt and white t-shirt and pale jeans. His limp legs curled away from him and his back was a mound over the track. I heard his pleas for help. He begged for help, shrill, over and over, could anyone help him. I looked past him.

The 6:13 was late, and now was a white flare, growing, harsher and brighter by the second. There were shrieks in the crowd, groans, cries to God. I turned right. There were three women in yellow reflective MTA jackets. I hoped they had radios. They didn't. Wild waving of arms, of palms pumping the air to will the train into stopping. We shouted, incoherently. I don't think we used words, only cries.

There was no time. I walked a few feet closer. The white light grew and grew and grew. You could never have leaped into the track, picked up a wounded person, hoisted him to safety first, then yourself, in time. It was impossible. In our helplessness, there was only horror. You could only watch. Those very few seconds when nothing but watching could be done, they dropped away one by one.

The white flare was now brilliant. The front of the Metro-North train was sooty blue, #209. It had begun to slow down, in a fashion almost grotesque. It slowed just as it passed over the helpless man's form. I felt perverse.

An ugly moan rose from the crowd. Around me were a few women who burst into instant tears. One turned her back. One, in the reflective jacket, gripped her own head and wailed and stomped in circles and cried to God that this was 'overwhelming'. That was her word. It struck me, that word, almost from afar. I had my hand to my mouth and my eyes had never left the train.

Minutes passed. Very few of us left the platform. We remained, hardly logical. But we did remain. The firemen and police arrived with near instant speed, cordoning off part of the platform and gathering near where the train conductor leaned out of his window and darted around an anxious head.

I called out of my gig. They were very sympathetic.

Then I called my father, the original YVES. I had to talk to someone, and for all our differences, he was the one I thought to call. I told him the story while I still watched the train. Through a shifting crowd I could spot flashlight beams crossing each other and flicking underneath the train. I finished telling my father the story. He swore softly. To swear is his way. To swear softly has never been his way.

Then he instructed, "Get the FACK out of there, you can do nothing, just go, it was a horrible experience, traumatizing, but get the FACK out of there while you still can!" Not necessarily unwise.

All at once, heads started to snap to each other and murmurs trickled over. The woman in the yellow reflective jacket bobbed from one person to the next, "He's alive! He's alive! He's under there, they hear his voice and he's sitting up! But they can't move the train or they'll kill him!"

This news was no less overwhelming but shouting it to God seemed less urgent. He likely knew already.

I told my father the news, in a voice less taut, less repetitive and nearly piercing.

"THERE you GO, see?,” YVES declared. “He's alive, he's fine, no problem, now get the FACK out of there!" YVES is often of a fixed mind on things.

The firemen used a ladder to climb down into the track and a cluster of them, helmeted and in striped, heavy jackets, bent around the front of this frozen train.

I ended my call. I couldn't leave. I had to know. They got him out, and I only wish I knew how. But they did. The fallen man survived.

I picked up my tea from where I'd dropped it then threw it away. I didn't have a taste for it anymore. I passed the cordoned off stairwell and down onto Park Avenue where a mass of flashing sirens and speculating citizens stood with their heads craned up above.

Tonight I watched a train rumble over a helpless man on the tracks. Then I watched him live to tell the tale.

© Eric Yves Garcia 2012

Lows and Hi's

 

Zebra Print had arrived with Irish Prep. Both struck me when they walked into the bar, doing the out-of-the cold-isn’t-this-nice? routine.
 

Irish Prep asked if the stools next to me were taken in that rib-nudging tone that men adopt when one assumes he understands the other. I was shouldering the wall, between the hat rack and the coffee urn. He had jolted me from my pages and absent sipping of beer. Chin in palm, I swiveled left.

Irish Prep was the girl’s age, early twenties, medium height and reliable build, a solid sweep of wavy chestnut hair. He had a pale, chummy face, a stockbroker’s grin. Somehow you knew he had uncles and cousins and brothers who all look precisely like him, and that they take turns backslapping each other. Irish Prep wore a white button-down shirt beneath a grey knit sweater, and kept a black and white striped scarf loosely draped around his neck. To be fair, the only thing I disliked about him was the mere sight of him. Otherwise he seemed fine.

I offered up the stools without much charity. I kept staring at my scarred pages, thumbing the end of the pen for the clicks. CHAK-chik, chik-CHAK. That was as much as the pen was used.

Distractions need only present themselves. I’ll do the rest.

Dark-featured girl, slight but coyly rounded. I noticed her and tried not to look like it. She wore a clinging zebra print dress in which the white stripes were grey. A camouflaged zebra? She could have been Latina, or Caribbean. Her face was wide, earnest, heart-shaped. The onyx eyes were thickly lashed and cheerful. She wore very little fuss of make-up, no jewelry save a modest silver link bracelet. Her black hair had the feathery fullness of curls flattened into submission.

The pair situated themselves, ordered a round, and I had new neighbors.

Early Saturday night in a Lower East Side bar. A Happy Hour has never been lower. Not bleak low, just dialed-down low. Checkered floor and Deco light fixtures, horizontal blinds and green/red neon. For holiday cheer a stiff, plastic garland studded with bulbs looped over the back mirror. Low lights, low jukebox, low prices, low talking. Easy. I’ve never mentioned the place to anybody because I don’t want to spoil it. I like it low.

A good place to work, but all I could do was push at the pages. Or cut. Or stare. Or try too hard. I couldn’t find many shards of the original thrill to write it. Only see it through, because…? Because. 

I went back to the distraction.

Their meeting felt polite, exploratory. On him was self-consciousness, and God bless him for that. I watched eyes that darted and gambled, a grin that rose and fell, topics that cast wide nets. I watched him know he was scrambling. I watched him know it, but keep on trying. And the girl? On her was a calmer shade of uncertainty. Some couples look like puzzle pieces impatiently wedged together.

Some absent sips, some chik-CHAK’s. I gave my neighbors an ongoing listen. They sounded like a familiar song heard through a closed door. You nod and keep going.

Then in a sunny chirp she pleaded the ladies’ room. He stopped her with a light palming of her forearm. Irish Prep’s assurance felt as shiny and thin as enamel. I sympathized. I made a silent, futile prayer that I wasn’t as transparent.

Irish Prep upped it though. His lips gathered in a discreet pucker that hung in the air, expectant that she would meet him in a ‘hurry back’ peck. Was this a first kiss? An early volley, to gauge the defenses?

Zebra Print, purse in hand, blinked and gave a small, toothless smile. Her answering pucker was so tightly sealed that a dust mite couldn’t have floated through, let alone a tongue. She brushed past him for the back of the bar and the ladies’ room.

After that I ignored them and don’t know how much of the clock's face fell away. I dove back into my slashes and arrows and question marks. Some fun. Too much of it I disliked and couldn’t think how to fix. What little I liked, I didn’t love.

I took a pull of my beer. A few pulls, in truth.

“You look like you’re working.”

She piped up from nowhere, from the bend in the bar.

Zebra Print sat cross-legged a stool away, wrists stacked over her knee. Within reach was half of a vodka/soda/lime. I saw that Irish Prep had vanished for a moment. I never noticed him leave her side.

“No, not really working,” I mumbled, cheek mashed against my fist.

“Really?," she asked. "It sure seems that way.”

“Alright. How about ‘working but not getting anywhere’?” I gave her a shallow smile that she returned more fully. A swirl of humor and relief spun in her eye.

I put down my pen and looked at my private square of bar space: a pint of beer, typed pages X-ed to death, illegible notes on the backs of old envelopes, a Moleskine oozing scribbles. It was as if Jackson Pollack were planning D-Day.

“I’m enjoying myself,” I told her, told us both actually.

“That’s good to hear. You should. It still looks like work though.” Her grin filled out healthy cheeks and laid out a sliver of white atop her tan skin.

She asked me what kind of beer was I drinking.

“Southampton Whey,” I answered, tilting the cloudy gold in the glass toward me. “Not the Pale. Though I recommend both, if you like wheat beer. They’re on tap. And you?”

“Oh, we’re still figuring out what we are to each other,” Zebra Print said, the words sliding out blithely.

“…We are?”

“Not you and me. This guy, he’s in the bathroom. First date.”

“Got it,” I said with a fake detached nod. “Then yeah, I can see how you’d still be figuring things out. First date, all that. No need to rush.”

“Right??,” she said in exaggerated commiseration. She managed to make it a little too harmless without being dull-witted. Or maybe I was too ready to take her side. It happens.

“So. Yeah. Who knows, right?” She gave me a shrug more playful than she felt.

“Having fun?,” I asked.

Zebra Print leaned onto the bar and held her arms. Not so much protective than pensive. Her mouth bunched all to the right.

“Ehh. I mean, it’s alright,” she leveled.

On principle, I wasn’t leading the Irish Prep parade, but even I winced through a crooked smile. “Ouch,” I said. “I’ll grab some napkins for the bleeding.”

She realized her words. She flapped a quick hand to the side of her head as if to scrub her honesty from the imaginary chalkboard. “No! I’m sorry! I mean it’s fine. So far he’s nice.”

I snuck a quick look to the far end of the bar. A distant Irish Prep was closing the bathroom door, wiping a damp hand on the back of a jean leg.

“I understand. With any luck it’ll improve,” I told her. “He’s on his way back. However it goes I’m sure you can handle it. Enjoy your night.”

“Thanks,” she said gamely.

Irish Prep was midway across the room, even to the taps and jukebox. He had a purposeful walk, likely thought he was on firmer ground with the girl. For the moment I knew something he didn't, and I didn't want to know. I'd walked with purpose into oblivion once or twice too. I hoped then no one else knew it before I did. Then I blinked. Maybe he knew he wasn’t getting the girl, and was now marching back to damn well get her. Irish Prep was a only a few stools off now.

“You’re sure you’re not working on something?,” Zebra Print insisted.

“No, I’m not,” I let my hand drop to the pages. It landed like an accidental slap with some heat in it. “Well. I suppose it’s work. But it’s work I choose.”

“Oh,” she said, with a glossy bubble in her voice. “So it’s your passion!”

It seems so flimsy, but it wasn't.

The way she said it, a battered, overused word, she exclaimed it, discovered it. Her excitement popped out the dents as the word righted itself, new again. She said the word as if it were the most obvious thing to any child or any fool, which I suppose it was.

I looked at her. Not for too long, but too intently. I hoped she wasn’t uncomfortable, I couldn’t tell. Irish Prep was retaking his seat.

Now I gave her a shrug more playful than I felt.

“You could be right,” I said to her and smiled. There’s a distanced warmth, a silent note of thanks you reserve for someone you don’t know and aren’t going to know, but whom has given you something.

“Enjoy your night,” she told me, turning away.

"I am," I told her.

Zebra Print led with her shoulders back to Irish Prep, freely giving him all her attention, and it rang true. She was willing to try.

They left soon afterwards. Several minutes later, the shifts were turning over so I settled and tipped and left too.

With any luck the place would still be low when I came back. Not bleak low, just dialed-down low.

 

© Eric Yves Garcia 2012