3 posts tagged “train”
(This is the next installment of the essay, "What I did on my lost weekend")
Chapter 2: Illegal fruit
I did not panic. I smiled at the customs agent and prayed he would not
swipe the passport. I thought about big dogs and interrogation and hours under buzzing
fluorescent lights.
I smiled at the guy again. I remembered Macavity The Mystery Cat and then it made sense. Of course, Macavity got the wrong passport for his birthday potlatch.
I put on lipstick and smiled at the Customs guy again. I passed go and I collected my get out of jail free card.
I met my friend near the photo booth in the train station and walked to to eat garlic-pepper squid and rare beef salad among large Cambodian families. She admired my cowboy boots.
I walked around and looked at lots of meat and even a dried lizard on a stick and charm bracelets and I bought a mango steen—a fruit that is illegal in the US—It’s kind of ugly on the outside, but when you break it open you find something that looks like a bulb of garlic inside but the cloves taste like custard. According to a definition of the fruit I found on the web, “New York Times' food critic R.W. "Johnny" Apple describes its flavor the way D.H. Lawrence described sex: as "moist, fragrant, snow-white segments of ambrosial flesh" tasting "so delicate that it melts in the mouth like ice cream."
I dropped a clove on the street and cursed.
I walked through the seedy part of town and looked for old records and learned that old heavy metal albums are going for $30 these days. I admired an abandoned optometry shop.
I walked to my hotel. It was quiet and reminded me of a nice
memory of Paris. Then I thought it would be
nice for two people to have a love affair here in this room because it was simple and the light
shining through the curtains was pretty and it was quiet at 4pm and I liked the
wash basin near the bed and it was near the park on a pretty street with
benches and flowers and old people holding hands.I don't know who those two people are yet, though.
Then I thought that it would be something special for these two as-yet-unknown people to have a love affair on the train too. Or in the photo booth after the curtains close. Or in the among the creepy collection drawers in the dark back room of the Museum of Anthropology. Then I thought that maybe I should write a magical realism story about a love affair that starts in a photo booth and ends in the museum back room. Or that starts on the train and ends at the Buchan Hotel. Who are these two people? Hmmm …
At 6AM, I rode the bus and listened to "Crush in the Ghetto " by Jolie Holland for the first time and sighed because it is beautiful and what I was feeling at that exact time. I listened while I sat between old ladies going to clean rich folks’ houses and take care of rich folks’ children. I almost missed the train because my bus was late. I ran as fast as I could and told the train to "stay put" and then I rode the train and listened to and looked at the ocean through the morning fog. I realized it is autumn now. I remembered that I’m all alone and it’s Saturday and I felt secret like I did when I was a kid and my parents would go out and leave me alone or when I would stay up all night alone in junior high school watching Night Flight. I read Borges.
At customs, I realized I brought my old passport that was stolen a long time ago on the bus in and then returned to me in the mail randomly from Toronto. I left my valid passport at home. Then I realized that I was wearing my Bottomless Pit shirt (the really soft one I got at that rock show) and that Bottomless Pit is written in pink Arabic script across the front. And I also realized two other things: 1. I had a tomato in my suitcase and 2. a previously-opened, airport-size bottle of Absolute vodka in my satchel.
