Missed the Train to Mars

Then Who's on First?

Written in the second person for no good reason.

Eric smiles his puppet grin at you and says you look like -- and he pauses for a moment, balancing insult against compliment and you wonder if he is aware that you refer to him as Eric the Virgin and if the appellation offends him -- the pimp of the Beltane festival. You opt to thank him, aware that your many rings (a silver and a gold dragon, a bat set with a garnet and a claddagh) can be taken in various ways and this description rates as fairly accurate, despite the fact that you are otherwise dressed in a subdued fashion, blue jeans, a green Hennessy shirt, and a black jacket -- nothing descript or obtrusive.

Dan Kessler, who brought you to 60 Main to kill time before the party, comes up and jokes around with Eric. Soon, they get involved in a short debate as to who could school whose ass in chess, an argument that can be best resolved by actually playing. You watch only momentarily, chess not being the best spectator sport and you having other things on you mind. You go outside, past the folk singer taking the stage, to write. To purge.

There is this girl, because there is always this girl. It is uncomfortable in the truest sense to see someone in whom you see a spark and to do nothing because you cannot contrive a thing to say that won't sound like some corny pick-up line and that isn't remotely how you intend it. You have a darling fiancée who goes out of her way to buy you the last Blizzard of the season and who makes organic, white bean chicken chili from scratch; you are not looking for a date. More that you feel you know this somehow and cannot figure it out on your own and want to enlist her help. It helps and hurts that she does happen to be sort of attractive, because it undermines the purity of your intentions. It introduces the doubt of flirting. And your eyes lock, hers a few shades lighter and sweeter, and you feel the magnetism of the spark and feel she might too until she looks away to her laughing friends and you to yours and you wonder if you are making inappropriate eye contact with a stranger in a strawberry sweater. You feel it is too likely a nothing you are trying to built into something to keep yourself amused and involved. It is far from your best quality.

Dan comes out after a few minutes to check up on you. You have not ventured far, only to the smoker's bench feet from the door. Leaving the company of a packed coffeehouse for the solace of cold air and a PalmPilot is not normal, but Dan understands the impulse toward artistry at inopportune moments and needlessly apologizes for interrupting. You ask about the girl and he asks if you mean the young looking one. You uncertainly nod your head -- how young is "young looking"? -- and he identifies her by her relations, though you don't actually know any of her siblings by name.

You both return to 60 Main to watch the beginning of a folk singers set. She, a woman named Carla Rozman, is musically talented and self-deprecating, so you plainly think well of her as she sings songs titled "Guilt" and "I Like Insecure Men." She isn't trying to be something she is not. If anything, she is too much herself, but it gives her a light beyond the Christmas strands behind her.

Midway through her set, Dan brings you back to his place to pick up his new antique sarod, a stringed instrument that twangs curry powder and Bollywood. He calls it the Indian banjo to give you some context. There is some resemblance, but only that they share some long distant ancestor, the sarod a lemur to the banjo's marmoset.

Dan drives you and his sarod all of five hundred feet down hill to the party. As you get out of the car, you see descending the hill Strawberry Shortcake and her companions (who you do not feel obliged to give such twee names, as you do not remember their actual names moments after being introduced). She looks at you, pleased to see your familiar face. You look away for the same reason.

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