Notes. From the Upper West Side. A novel by Dan Wrench. Chapter 52.
The Alibi. The next morning I was consumed with the post-mortem. I didn't set the alarm the night before, so at about quarter to ten I heard my phone give me one of those notification beeps and it roused me out of my stupor. I found the phone and swiped the screen.
The beep was from my calendar. Reminder! Go to Barb's house and take the bus home from there. This is vitally important.
Do not ignore. Oh right. I thought. The Alibi.
I really wanted to go straight home. I mean, what were the odds junior or one of her neighborhood chums would see me getting off the bus and notice it was the wrong bus? But I knew beforehand that I would be tempted to play at Sloppy with the Alibi. That's why I put the reminder on my calendar with all the capital letters and exclamation points.
So I made up my mind to do the right thing and work the helping part with post-story as planned and not think about the inconvenience of taking the bus to parts neighborhood. So I could get off and wait for another bus and take that bus to my neighborhood. I looked around me on the bed. About a half dozen empty bottles of various kinds of liquor were scattered around me on the sheets.
The TV remote was on the nightstand so I grabbed it and flipped on the TV. And out popped people talking to the grown-up actor who used to be the kid who played Harry Potter. That's when I noticed I was pretty sick to my stomach and ran off to the bathroom and heaved like I was rushing a frat. When I got back to the bedroom I flipped around the TV channels but all I could find were political talk shows.
Older women wearing suits that hid their cleavage away like it was a disgusting secret. Like they didn't want you to know Satan had given them hooves where their tits should be. And old men drooling and stuttering and a couple of young chuckle-tards and all of them saying the same shit they said last week and the week before that. I snapped it off before I could picture them cashing their paychecks.
Then I just let their room be silent for a while. A little femme laughter and footsteps leaked in from the hallway. I thought I could feel the nausea again so I laid back on the bed and closed my eyes. I dozed off for a few minutes and when I woke up I decided it was time to get the adventure over with and no more excuses.
I went back into the bathroom and saw a parp around about in Gold Card tilted against the tiles behind the sink where Cammy left it. I washed the smell of Cammy completely off my face and hands but I didn't shower because the alibi demanded I looked a shovel since I allegedly spent the night at parp helping him out of all the jams he got himself into with the post-production of Little Round a Jewish Hat. A half hour later I was checked out and on my way to parps. I had it on my mind as I wandered out into the soon to be Spring New York Air and got on the bus that I didn't know whether to feel good about the night's events or bad about them.
I guess I just felt a little guilty and niffed at myself. See, I knew it was good to get a blowjob, put a check in that box. But then there was the grown woman pretending to be a ten year old boy and then pretending to be his bitch of a mother who called my dick, Lo Maine, and Mr. Limpet before and after strapping my face into her ass.
And I didn't fuck her. Not technically. Did my cock in sconce in the juice mound? It did not.
When the bus pulled up to the stop closest to the park's apartment in Hell's Kitchen I got off and walked over to the Starbucks at Worldwide Plaza. It was jammed with tourists from a big red bus parked right outside. I stood on the sidewalk and looked in the window and thought it over. I really didn't want to surf that tsunami.
But I needed the caffeine so I had a smoke on the sidewalk while repeating my keep-com mantra. Then I strolled in and tried to stay cool. Any New Yorker will tell you that the worst thing about the tourist is his ability to find exactly the right spot between you and the place you're trying to get to and then stand stuck still in that place like an Ohio sized bag of crap. It's uncanny.
It's like their superpower. Need to get into a restaurant? There will be tourists having a conversation in the doorway. Need to get off and ask later?
There will be tourists standing like Stonehenge right at the top, scanning the horizon for Jesus and the Angels. Need to get out of a subway? There will be tourists walking slowly up the center of the narrow stairs. Need to get a quick coffee while you're rushing to work?
There will be tourists at the front of the line negotiating a specialty item with the barista like it's a 30 year mortgage. And when the inevitable happens? When the native New Yorkers push their way into the restaurant and off the escalator and up the stairs into the front of the line? The tourists snap their heads around in semi-panic.
You can almost hear their neurons scratching down the mental notes to tell their pals back in Bull Dump, Wisconsin. Well, that's who stood between me and the coffee and the Starbucks at Worldwide Plaza. Not one tourist. Not five.
At least a dozen. But I didn't care. By the time I got to the back of the line I was pretty focused on making sure my alibi was junior proof. While I was standing in line it occurred to me that I could really sell the alibi if I called Junior up and told her I was on my way home and while I'm telling her this in the background, Parp could be making some identifiably parp-esque noises like, hey Paul, come here.
I really need your help with this or hey Paul, can you make it quick? I can't do this without you. And if I was lucky Junior would be sitting in a pewet church and wouldn't pick up then me and Parp could do an uninterrupted performance for her voicemail. It was a stroke of genius.
You know what it's like to feel your cerebrum catch fire when you get a great idea? Feel my whole brain just exploded into flames right there online at Starbucks. I called up Parp and no joy. Nothing.
Just the brainless echoing abyss of his outgoing message. Hey, it's Tony. I can't tell him to the phone right now but... I hung up as hard as I possibly could on a touch screen.
The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. Today's alibi day for Christ's sake. The guy sees my name on his caller ID and he doesn't think it's important enough to pick up. And what if he was asleep in Junior called?
The whole alibi would be out the window. Next on line. The barista said nobody moved. Next on line.
She insisted. The morbidly obese guy in front of me shambled out of his daydream and sort of fell forward in the direction of the barista. He was wearing a tan suit and amber framed eyeglasses covered with dandruff. He was groped test.
Blonde. Balding. And depressed. You could tell from the way he ordered to stall latte like a little mouse.
And he teetered on his feet while reaching for his wallet. And he never made eye contact with the barista just stared over her shoulder like he could see through the wall behind her for a thousand yards. My uncle Carl used to stare straight ahead like that. A dinner in at the beach and at the market.
Like he was staring down a dark tunnel only he could see. Once I asked him why he did that and he said, because I'm wondering if tonight's the night I'll have the stones to blow out my brains. He just kept eating his dinner after saying that. And we talked about the red socks and I never bought it up again.
Then one winter morning my aunt Kim got up and she was alone and figured Carl it's literally for work. So she made some coffee and took it down to the pier they had in front of their little lake house. She's just standing there sipping coffee and shivering because it's freezing outside and she looks down at the ice to over lake and underneath the ice is this naked guy staring up at her and a second later she figures out. It's Carl.
I'm pretty sure that's when she screamed. With a record Carl's brains were still in his skull but the verdict was that he definitely offed himself. Wait himself down with dumbbells tied with ropes around his ankles and shoved off the end of the pier. Then the surface froze and a few hours later out walks in Kim.
I'm guessing his second to last thoughts were, his last thoughts? I'm assuming they were more along the lines of, oh shit somebody I'm buying my fucking legs. But back to the tail at hand I finally got my coffee and swilled it down and jumped on the uptown bus from my place. When I got upstairs to the fan castle it was deserted.
At the door I shouted Daddy's home and heard an echo bounce back like the ghost of divorced future. Still at church I thought, so I stumbled down to the bathroom and showered off the rest of my grunge. Then I stretched out on the sofa in the living room for a nap. It took me a while to nod off because of the coffee and while I was lying there I got all stern with myself about the future and made some resolutions.
I promised myself I would work out like parp, eat like parp and ask parp about the dick exercises. In fact I thought, I should become a version of parp. You know, a socially acceptable version with a human soul. When I finally fell asleep and didn't wake up until Sammy hit me on the head with an action figure.
Captain America or somebody. Notes from the Upper West Side is a work of fiction. The people depicted in this work do not exist. Notes from the Upper West Side Copyright 2013 to 2017 by Dan Rench.