Summer Rain

It's a soft drizzle right now, I was expecting bigger storms. Heat lighting flashed in the west and it reminded me of home. The wave of humidity that washed me when I opened the window was just how I imagined it, and I'm sitting in the window dripping sweat with a damp cigarette hanging out of my mouth. On the outside it's the ideal romantic summer. On the inside, though...it was supposed to be out of an old movie, the whistle of a tired fan and the creak of a lopsided iron bed frame and the glow of the single lamp lighting a shithole of a room, maybe a torn poster of an actress on the wall, maybe my typewriter on the desk, an old jazz record cooing on the turntable, or Hendrix, depending on the month. That's the sort of room I lived in three years ago when I cooked it all up in my head. It wasn't supposed to be the [straightened] round living room with the clean red carpet and the two-hundred pound television and the air conditioning that I have to turn off if I throw open that window because I share this apartment with two other guys who don't know the second thing about the discomfort of reality.

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Babe I'm Gonna Leave You, 25 or 6 to 4, and Brain Stew all seem to rip off the same musical progression. The original song was written by Anne Bredon and covered by Joan Baez, who credited it as a traditional song. That's where Page heard it first, Baez's album, and only began to pay Bredon royalties in the eighties. What of Chicago and Green Day?

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I was back in the garden today today enjoying myself a little picnic. There's a wooden table next to a gas grill, which is built right into a short stone wall, and a walkway leading around to the front of the house, and a patch of grass that constitutes a yard, I guess. The whole garden is walled in by tall, thick hedges, making for a pleasant, private cove of sorts. Lovely and I used to sit out there at night, under the stars and when the street was quiet, and have the entire world to ourselves--there's nothing like being in love and being outside and being alone, because you're not confined to the privacy of some tight, stale little room, and you can breath and laugh and be happy and feel free.

The yard hasn't been tended to by a gardener since the season turned, which I thought strangely symbolic. It will, of course and probably only in a matter of days, be mowed over, and then it will appear neat and clean and fresh, but for now it's grown tall and wild: forgotten, but not dead.

Saturday night after I got off of work I went down to Riverdeck, a hotspot on the waterfront, and watched Katharine glare and curse her way through her first official shift as a bartender. It's a busy place on the weekend and she was put to work, learning everything in about two hours of mixing and, well, tending, that it's taken me a year to learn at the Chain. She absolutely hated it: the relentless wave of customers, the lure of forbidden liquor at her back, the clouds of mocking cigarette smoke drifting from just outside the bar awning, the noise, the heat, the motion, the attitude, the drunkenness. I sat and watched it all, throwing recipes to her if she needed them, and trying to catch her eye with an encouraging smile, or to share some silent private joke--

She had none of it, she never even really looked up, or around. The second thing you learn as a bartender is how to avoid making visual contact with people until you are ready to help them.

She did a great job and I tried to tell her so. Once in the middle of the shift--she answered with a tart "Fuck you."--once with a text message during the middle of her shift--she didn't get it until later--and then through a line on Facebook after I got home. I like her. I wanted her to know that she did a good job, and managed the work well, especially for a rookie. Nobody else tells you these things: You work at a bar, grind your feet down to the stumps of your legs and strain your voice and your ears and your patience, but you're still only working for drunk people who want to get drunker: end of the line. Their attitudes alone make the job unbearable, and that's just one facet of the job. So many people...and every one of them convinced they've been waiting too long for your attention, too self-involved to consider for a minute the throng of mad scrambling that they've waded through to get to the bar in the first place, too convinced their needs come first now that they've made it, goddamnit, and who cares who else has been waiting longer?

I tried to compliment Katharine, and each time I think I offended her. She deserves to hear good things. She thought I was being sarcastic.

Again, she hated the job, she never smiled once the whole night she was back there. But, the money was good, and it made the night, I guess--strange way about certain things. I want to take Katharine out, even though she's leagues above me, but I'm worried about something else. I actually like this girl, and I'm afraid that, as it's happened a few times already, pursuing her will only make the future miserable for one or both of us.

That grass grows a little taller with each summer rain. But you're not in the room you want to be in, are you? You're where you are, hearing the rain and feeling it all the same.