A Denigrating Friday

We meet on a rooftop.

Silhouettes of skyscrapers surround us like jagged teeth. The starless summer sky hangs over our heads like a blank canvas. I throw my arms up and shout, “Glory!” A bombshell waitress snaps to attention. She warns us: Buy a bottle or don’t sit down. She damns us to nomadic wandering. We don’t care. She scowls.

We move through the crowd. Rubber-faced men wear suits and laugh without humor. We sift across the rooftop like acid. I feel like a pirate. We are pirates who have jumped aboard a hijacked a ship and are drawing our swords. Fight or die.

We scatter.

It’s THE KIDD and I. THE KIDD is impressive. He grins and I see his eyes glint under his long, shaggy hair. He pirouettes and grabs two girls. He says something I don’t hear, but feel. He radiates. THE KIDD is impressive.

We tap girls. They turn. We talk. My spirit rises out of my body. Faces blur like dotted yellow lines on a highway: They are individuals, but I see them as a straight, singular line.

THE KIDD and I move by the bar. He says there’s a gorgeous girl behind me. In a single motion I turn and tap a bare white shoulder. I smile. She faces me. She’s beautiful. Literally, beautiful in the most obvious sense, how you’d imagine a princess.

I extend my hand and tell her my name. I look so deeply into her eyes I can count the hazel specs. Her hair shimmers in shades of chestnut. She smiles, her skin shines. I want it to click that she’s a girl and I’m a man. But it still feels unreal, impossible.

I speak to her from my spirit. People shoot by us like white-hot comets in a distant galaxy. I hold her hand and our fingers lock. Our conversation has no logic, has no right to exist in a place like this. Beyond us, pretension fills the rubber face of every suit-wearing man who laughs without humor.

But there is no world beyond us.

It’s just me and this girl. This beautiful, beautiful girl.

But the outside world is determined to destroy us, to destroy this moment outside time and logic. Her friends tap her and declare it’s time to go. These girls are monstrous. These girls are not cock blocks. These girls are dream destroyers. It’s two of them. Two miserable chodettes who don’t want to be here, don’t want to be anywhere, who can’t want live in a world where moments like this exist. They are determined to denigrate anything that shimmers with beauty.

They pull her arm. As they pull, the motion feels like the chirp of an alarm clock awaking us from an inky, restful sleep.

“In a minute,” my girl says. She turns back to faces me and smiles. The moment descends on us like dew baptizing the glow of morning. The world becomes a backdrop. We are actors in a two-person play. We are finally performing a scene we’ve rehearsed for our entire lives. I narrate our adventure through Brooklyn that involves underground clubs with secret handshakes and smoking flapper cigarettes and us putting on disguises to fool the world. She laughs and laughs. She loves disguises.

Again, the claws of the dream destroyers paw her elbows. “Let’s GO!” they beg.

Then, it happened. If our conversation were a glittering Christmas tree, this would be the resplendent angel to crown our moment together. She pulled her arm away and said, “You guys go. I’m going to stay here.”

The words floated above us. They floated and revealed everything that’s possible. Floated in defiance of all that’s ugly and dream destroying to reaffirm everything that’s beautiful and Romantic and worth living for.

“Don’t worry,” I say, feeling (me) betray everything alive inside me. My heart beats but the words come from a corpse. “Go with your friends. I should find the rest of my friends, anyway. Give me your number. We’ll talk some other time.”

“Definitely,” she says.

As she programs her number into my phone, I can smell my rotting stench. I’ve joined the dream destroyers, the rubber-faced men wearing suits and laughing without humor, the bitchy waitresses who expect us to pay a month of rent for a bottle of alcohol and a seat. I’ve joined all those who denigrate anything that shimmers with beauty.

She walks away and I stand on the twentieth floor of a skyscraper, feeling like an ant on a concrete molehill. The starless summer sky above my head is a shade of blue that’s blacker than the blackest black.

I feel failure.