The Tumbleweed Umbrella
I got a call at 8 o'clock Saturday morning from a ten-year-old boy wanting to buy the N. Carolina house. Mr. Louis, he said, you probably don't remember me but...and then he explained who he was and ever since then I cannot get the image of this boy out of my head, as I remember him from 14 years ago. I am not imagining what he looks like as a 24-year-old.
I am at this sidewalk cafe in NYC called Le Jeep. It is a brisk, sunny morning in May. Le Jeep is on a corner. Me and this homeless guy nearby are watching a two man crew clean out the storm drain across the street. One man with a shovel doing the detail work and the other man operating the boom on the dump truck. The boom has cables and pulleys and at the end of the cables is a bullet shaped caliper device which lowers into the drain hole from which the grate has been removed. The caliper goes in closed and then opens and closes around muck and sludge which is lifted up dripping and then deposited into the back of the dump truck.
People keep tripping over the same mangled umbrella which has blown like a tumbleweed into the middle of the crosswalk. Shadows at the corner precede the people they are attached to but they fail to alert their owners to the mangled tumbleweed umbrella in the crosswalk.
Le Jeep is a cafe on wheels and will circle the block when the street sweeper arrives.
When the crew finishes cleaning out the drain a man comes out from the corner store and hooks up a garden hose and proceeds to wash the stray muck back into the drain. A police van pulls up and honks at the man with the garden hose. He waves happily. Two cops exit the vehicle and the one cop shakes the man's hand and pats him on the back and the other cop shakes his wrist because he may be suspicious of where the man's hand has been.
There are croissant crumbs littering the floor of Le Jeep. Two empty coffee cups with foam in the bottom sit in cup holders. Bernadette has gone off to Pilates so it's just me at the cafe now, and in the back seat the 10-year-old N. Carolina boy who stares quietly out the window without an idea in his head. He doesn't have any friends, except this grandmother. She will die soon and leave her house to the boy's older brother, who is a marine. The boy will wait 14 years and then call me at 8 o'clock in the morning. I will have the night before accepted an invitation to a concert of a band called The Cure. I will be groggy at 8 o'clock in the morning but carry on with a professional attitude. I will say I remember him and I do. He was a distinctly lonely-seeming boy back then, and now 14 years later he spends part of his day haunting me.
I came up to attend the funeral of Bernadette's mom.
Behind the cafe Le Jeep is another cafe run by three loud guys named Steve, Angelo and Tony. Tony jabs the air between him and Steve with his index finger and makes an argument that apparently Steve has heard before. Steve is following with his eyes a woman walking along the sidewalk behind Tony. The woman's dress blows up, Steve whistles, and Tony turns around. Tony shrugs like he's seen better and puffs on his cigarette. I look behind me to see if the boy has followed any of this but he is just staring off in the opposite direction at an empty playground surrounded by an 18 foot tall chain-link fence.
View current page
...more recent posts