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Thursday, Jan. 24, 2002 / 6:37 p.m. ~A Memory Inspired By Soul Coughing~ "It is 5:00 a.m. and you are listening to Los Angeles", and it's really 8:00 a.m. and you are driving on the freeway in Atlanta, and you are lost in your mind, you're lost in the beat poetry/music of Soul Coughing, pulling off the freeway, driving past the drive-thru diner, The Varsity, on your way to work, to sell books containing pictures of testicles grown to 20 times their normal size, diseases you don't want to know about, much less see photos of. Homeless men come in the store to use the bathroom and you're afraid to use it after they leave. Your co-worker tells you of the stench, tells you what he had to do to clean it. Frank Sinatra is singing, or Sade, and sometimes you put in Miles Davis or one of the CDs left sitting. It's hot outside and you can smell every person who walks in the door. Every person has some degree of hot summer sweat smell wafting about him or her. You rush to ring up purchases, bag huge books made of heaviest stocks of paper, heavy books filled with tiny text, or frightening color photos, books illustrating the proper way to sew eyes of dead children shut before embalming, or is it after?, hurry to bag, to say goodbye, to get the smell out of the store, to smell the air conditioning, the books, again. Another co-worker has halitosis, and when you have to use the phone after she's used it you smell it, there, on the mouthpiece, you nearly gag, pull the phone away from your face, wipe it on the chair's upholstery, and when she tries to talk to you, you step backwards, carefully, hoping she won't notice. At lunch you don't want to sit in the little room set aside for eating, for breaking, for relaxing, you sit in your car in the alley, notice the oil running from your engine down the slanting pavement. Every day the oil spill is larger, hotter in the summer sun. Sometimes you go out for lunch, and more than once you have beers with yet another co-worker at the pizza restaurant nearby. It makes returning to work harder, you are desperate for an afternoon nap, your reflexes slow, stunted. The County Medical Examiner comes in for scrubs. Scrubs in bright colors for everyone on his list, an entire staff of scrub wearers, all with different tastes. And he's short, but he's handsome and you think it would be nice to find a handsome doctor, marry and settle down, or isn't that what women should aspire to? After work you go with your crazy gay Cuban co-worker to drink. Preferably a pub that's just for drinking, and sometimes it's the Stein Club, "where drinking is King", and you put money in the jukebox, drink pitchers with him and his best girlfriend, and you wish you were his best girlfriend, but you're no one's best girlfriend. You're just there for the cheap beer and to look at the boys with tattoos and piercings, to think of sex, listen to Patsy Cline, the Rolling Stones, the Smiths, and to forget about the day. The drive home is hot, you feel the sun baking the left side of the car, your left arm, the windows rolled down, the sweat dripping down your back, you fly up to a point, then it's lane after lane of bumper to bumper and you'd rather be anywhere but there. You picture the pool you've never been to, you wish you could drive right up to it and jump in, but when you're finally through commuting all you want is to be inside, in the air conditioning, peeling off sweat soaked clothes, sinking into a tepid bath, instantly becoming who you thought you were all along. Cost of the War in Iraq
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