The Arrival of Godot

 August 23, Somewhen 

& Somewhere Down the Road

 

The next day (from the last) but years later. Sitting, back against the dappled brick side of 7-Eleven — camped between the store and a vacant lot, stuffing an air-filled doughnut into my doughnut-hole, washing it down with a paper cup of bad coffee. 

          Squatting on the side-walk, the judder of traffic on the highway, a few hoarse, scraggly birds, and the shout and shush of the air-conditioning unit. Thirty-six cents on the blacktop I didn’t see till I sat down, just out of reach; but I’ll have to reach it when I get up, because, if I am the bum I’m pretending to myself I am, I don’t know where the thirty-six cents after that is coming from.

          Maybe a little too well-dressed, I’m thinking: jeans cleaner than dirty, Hawaiian shirt, jacket (blazer!), because I always wear one now. It’s at least a decade old and worn at the cuffs and elbows. Shoes also old and beaten down, but they look like they were new at some point — bought to fit these feet.

On the other hand (I look down at myself), I’m writing in this notebook with a stub of pencil, dirt under my finger nails; leaning against the side of a 7-Eleven.

          Who but a lunatic bum (glancing again sideways at the thirty-six cents to make sure it’s still there), whatever the state of his jacket and shoes, would be doing that, bending over under a dusty Tigers baseball cap writing in a spiral notebook there on a Sunday morning before seven o’clock. A young woman dressed for mass walks by toward her car, averting her gaze the way people do now, pulling her phone from her purse and gazing into it.

          The make-believe bum takes a last swig of the bad coffee, rocks onto his feet, picks up the thirty-six cents, thanks God he’s not going to mass, and

Only that’s not what happens: While the pretend-bum writes of the future in the present tense as if he were already headed back in to get rid of some of his coffee thirty-six cents richer, a large brown woman with a limp walks by eyes down. She must have seen other coins lying around, because she says to, or at, him, how can people be throwing money around like trash?

          I’m about to say I had my eye on that thirty-six cents, but she has her hand on it. Then it’s in her pocket. Then she’s limping away across the vacant lot. Write about that.