This was supposed to be about the bars in Springfield. But it’s not. I had an assignment to write a first person narrative about a Friday night at the bars in Springfield for a nightlife section of the paper, and I was sitting in my house alone reading and drinking and waiting, when the photographer called and said her roommate wouldn’t let her borrow his car. The plans were shot. We couldn’t go.
I poured another glass and drank it, grabbed my coat and walked to the door. Another wasted night. I had a thought as I was leaving that went something like this: ‘Well, they wanted an article about nightlife, right? It’s night. I’m alive, I’ll write about my night tonight. Why not?’
I thought it was sort of funny, in a beery, late-night sort of way, but I didn’t think I’d actually do it. I’d just let the idea swim around my head with the rest of the multiplication tables and songs and nightmares.
Though it was busy with trucks in the day, the street outside my house was barren like the unshining moon. I walked a block down and a block over and I slowly passed a small house lit up with Christmas lights, with four strangers sitting in chairs on the lawn. Walking past, I flashed a peace sign, and a tall, bristle-headed stranger stood and beckoned. I approached him. We said our names and he offered me wine. I accepted. ‘Why not,’ I thought.
As he walked into his house, he said he’d had three bottles already, and he muttered something about a woman he missed who died already and would somehow die again a year from now.
I sat outside with the strangers and they spoke of politics until the bristle-headed stranger came back and handed me a mug of cold wine. We spoke more and then he invited me inside so they could smoke. I accepted. “Why not,” I thought.
The wall of the living room was adorned with pictures of American bullfighters and the back of the flag of Oregon, and they sat on the couch across from the television and smoked from a tall, colorful pipe. They passed it to each other, and I refused as I always do. When the bristle-headed stranger yawned I knew it was time to go. I finished my wine, thanked them and left.
In the night where I live, the streetlamps spill yellow onto the pavement, and the yellow alone is the only color. The rest is gray. I looked at the grass and thought it was an exception – that it was green – but I realized after some moments that it wasn’t green. I saw it as green because I remember grass as green, when in actuality it was, like everything, gray.
As I wandered, my mind wandered with me. I thought of a man I’d worked with years before, in a blue and yellow summer unloading trucks at a garden. He was orange-haired, skinny as a cornstalk, and said he was a schoolteacher when it wasn’t planting season. He drank, cursed and would tell me of deals he got bringing in cigarettes from Russia and keeping them in his freezer.
“They’re just as good,” he’d tell me, “They just burn a little quicker.”
I understood then that this man I barely knew years before was not a human anymore. He was a firing of neurons inside my head; like all memories, he remained for me only as a reflection of who he might have once been.
I was thinking of him when I reached the potholed alley. It led to the party; I could hear bass thumping over the croaking of the frogs in the backyards of the houses I was walking between.
Through the back gate, people smoked in the yard and inside a huge crowd packed the small house, pulsing to the music in the dim, red light. People were yelling, drinking, my hat was taken, my foot stepped on, somebody handed me an open beer and I saw her sitting on a couch on the wall of the main room, drunk.
Earlier she’d told me she’d be here, when we were at her house where I woke up, but there at the party we sat and didn’t talk, just looked into each others’ eyes. We moved closer together until the sides of our bodies touched. A strobe light began to flash. With her thumb she stroked my forefinger. I leaned back down on the couch, and she laid on top of my chest, and while the party raged around us, the music blasting and the crowd roaring, we closed our eyes and fell asleep and we slept, and we slept, and we slept.
I woke, startled. The party was still loud but had died down. I got up from under her warm body and walked to the bathroom, turned on the light and saw the toilet overflowing, a layer of water covering the dirt-stained floor. I walked into the main room, toward the backdoor, and there I found a photographer aiming his camera at a woman sitting on a man’s lap. He was holding her chin, trying to pull her mouth toward his for a kiss and she was resisting, confused, drunk.
Outside in the potholed alley it was raining, and I stood behind the garage and began to urinate. ‘Why am I here,’ I asked myself. ‘Why is anyone here?’
I went back to the couch, and for a time she and I lay like spoons, but soon we stood. The party was done. It was time to go home. We walked through the alley in silence, and I turned and looked into her eyes. I expected them to be, like everything, gray. But they were green – green in the suffocating grayness, greener than grass could hope to be, greener than the night could hope to dim, and this is the why of it all: Who knows? But in this one place in the infinity of places and in this one shadowy night of the infinity of nights we walked toward home, alone together, and from a streetlamp three blocks down, a line of yellow light reflected in the potholes, which had pooled with fresh rainwater.
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