Conversations Among the Ruins

Valentines day is always a strange time to me. Likely, I'm working a monster shift, full of extra tables and featured drinks - red colored. It always made me sad in the past that I wasn't a fancy girl in a tight dress eating steak and lobster. This year was no different, as I trudged to work after kissing my love goodbye with a frown.

I went to Starbucks and got my venti four shot iced coffee, 3 pumps raspberry and two inches of cream. It reminds me of a place that's a million years away and besides, it's pink and festive. "Where did you hear of this?" The barista asks.

"I worked in a coffee shop. They had them, they were called coffee coolers. You can do them with any flavored syrup."

Today I am blessed with the ability to just keep it short. It's all a long story, that Thank God I don't have to tell the barista at Starbucks today.

I got clean the day before Valentines day and proceeded to work the worst waitress shift I've ever had. Where I walked in to eight tables that were mine that weren't regularly there, so nobody knew any of the numbers.

A few days after that my friend Heather was murdered. By her husband. We went to the services and everybody was going out for cocktails. I told them I had to just go home and slinked away.

Two years later and I acccept that I will, for the rest of my life, one day at a time, be in the process of learning what it is to "feel" in human life, instead of "get a cocktail" in order not to.

I woke up with my valentine and our littlest valentine (Penelope) yesterday wedged between us. We slept all day. Well I wrote in my notebook and Harmon slept next to me.

"Before I go to work I have to shine my shoes, shave, do my hair, put on my suit in order to be entirely ready."

Entirely ready.

Those words have stuck with me this week. I didn't see pretty women in tight dresses that I'd never be like last night. I saw people beaming they were so happy to be having a nice dinner together with each other. Dudes have long mac if they're taking their ladies out to my work, and I was happy for those women, because they deserve that. Everybody does.

I got home at about one and in the dark on top of my computer was a big russle stover box of chocolates.

So I cuddled Penelope and my love and smiled quietly, they way you do to yourself in the dark.

"Somebody
is here
to see you."

One of my bosses
says.

This is never
good. Because I
don't ever

want or appreciate
anybody
coming into my work

to watch me
be a waitress.

I am a different
person amongst those
walls.

Calm and pretty,
poised and fast.

Whitty, charming,
and I'm not allowed
to not

smile, let alone
want to cut

anybody's throat
or eye socket

out.

Breaking the masks
into each other

is simply not
my idea of a nice
visit.

My eyes fall to her
and I cannot help but
let out a gasp.

"Are you ok?"
The suit asks.

"Yes. Just
fine."

But there she sits.
I do a lap before
greeting her,

with a smile,
and a hello

because that
is what I do at work.

It is my job
to be friendly.

"Why don't you
tell all of those girls
up there

to learn your name?"

Her raspy voice
says to me in a bark.

"How are you?" I ask
with a big
wide smile, because
people are watching and

that is my job.

I give her a hug.
She tells me she is
unwell and the cat
has died.

"Unfortunate."

I can't muster up
comfort.

"How are you?" She
asks and I
just stop and feel
my face

get real for a
minute.

"Good. Everything
is good. Just
fine. I can't

actually be standing
at this bar right now.
I'm very sorry. I will

call you tomorrow."

I walk away
the only way I walk
there

quickly.

The suit told me
later, how she came
into the place,

asking for a girl
with a green bug car
from Chicago and that

she can't remember
what my name was.

And that's
fucking typical.

Some days, it's all
pretty fucking

typical.

The first guests I had in my new serving job life sat before me. I'm a waitress again, and thank god for that.

I'm back in the skirt and heels with a crumber in my hand talking with two guests of mine. For a good half hour they told me about their lives in Southern California and asked me what I thought of So Cal. Naturally I shared my story of being nearly eaten to death by a wave at La Jolla, walking Coronado with my baby niece recently, and how really, what I want out of life is simple.

"What is that?" They asked.

"A jeep. A book deal. And a few dogs. In Malibu."

They laughed before asking "What does that even mean?"

"Gentlemen. What it means is that someday I hope to be an old woman with long silver hair, walking down Zuma Beach, wearing very colorful scarves."

The man to my left stares at me with his mouth open a bit before, after a strange pause, saying the following -

"I have two teenagers, and one day we were walking down Zuma Beach, and this old woman in dozens of scarves of every color started just randomly talking with them. I have never seen anybody have their attention like she did. She was talking with them quietly about wisdom and kindness. It blew my mind and is my favorite memory of that beach."

I nodded my head with a smile, asking next about his views on quantum physics.

"What?!" They laughed.

"Parallel Universe, where everything already happened and split off into another form of living, until it all meets back again, and strange connective instances of common ground occur."

My guests glance at each other before he says

"I'm really glad you're here."

And I take a breath, because for the first time in my serving life, it isn't "You don't belong here" It's "I"m glad you're here." And so am I, because

When you end up in the exact same place you have already been, after so much living, it is in fact, completely different.

I sit in my office with my Dunkin Donuts coffee that I bought in dimes and quarters. Steve, whom we lovingly call "Snoopy" on a good day or "Snoop Dog" when it's your business
he's in is at his usual post, just outside my office at the conference table, reading todays paper. His coffee cup has a post it stuck to it with clear packaging tape. It reads "PROPERTY OF HEATHER CORRADIN ONLY." Retalliation from roughly October, when he took my Thin Mints and wrote his name on the box. (I have ceased writing my name in giant block sharpie letters on his newspaper every morning since said cookie incident.)

We have bad days sometimes, where he drives me absolutely nuts. I poke fun at him and he waters the plants all of the time grumbling "Well SOMEBODY here has to do it." When the truth is, those plants in our office came from his moms funeral, so I let him water them. I don't tell him that, I stare at him dumbly and say thank you for taking such good care of the plants.

He doesn't work here he lives in the building, and it is his thing to come and read the paper with us every morning - code for getting the dirt for what's going on with every single person in the building. I appreciate his neurosis and identify clearly with him when he says "I hate change" often. We really aren't so different.

He will take anybody in the building to the airport, to doctors, you name it. Snoopy is a harsh food critic, and I hear about where he has eaten the night before and what he didn't like about it every morning. He would give Vatell a run for his money. He wears free t shirts, mostly from the casino give aways. Lately it's been a Remy the thirteenth shirt and I laugh "You spend $150 on a 1oz scotch pour and they gave you that shirt?!" Of which he replies "It was free and I have no idea what it is."

Snoopy calls me "Nicole" because there was this creep out living in the building a while ago, he would stalk me in the parking lot and pitch a fort in my office for thirty minute intervals. At one point I was cornered with this guy and Snoop laughed and walked away. The guy kept calling me "Nicole" but I felt if I corrected him I would just have to talk to him longer. So that stuck beyong the five weeks snoop had a fit of laughter over it.

Today out of half coffee buzz half giddy delerium that my boyfriend is coming to visit me I said "Soooo SD what are you doing this weekend?!"

"I"m flying to St. Louis for work." He says. I gasp.

"And you will be back when?!"
"Next week."
"You weren't going to tell me?!"

His back is always to me when he reads the paper and he turns to me, surprised.

"Listen Steve. Since I've moved to Vegas shit hasn't exactly been stable. I've moved three times, gotten another job, fought with my friends, figured out how to grocery shop and not get lost here, lost my mentor, missed my family to sickness, dealt with visitors, flipped out on guys, fallen in love, fought my own self into recovery, lived on $300 bi weekly, been too depressed to get off of the couch, survived burning man, worked 85 hours a week, and a slew of other extremes. I have no Goddamn clue every single day I wake up what the fuck is going to happen, but I know two things. One, no matter what happens, I will be ok and I can handle it, and two, you will be in front of my office door reading the newspaper every morning. You are one of the only constants I have had since I came here, so please, in the future, tell me when you are leaving in advance."

He laughs a little as I feel the magnitude of the truth I just, in a ramble, realized.

"Next time I'll let you know Nicole." He says as he gets up to take Giavonni to the grocery store.

"Thank you."

-

I'm trying to sit
at an Italian club
with Antoinette

for dinner. She
takes me out,
introduces me

to people as her
daughter. She laughs
the loudest and

reaches for my
hand. She tells
them proudly

that I am a
writer, an
artist,

and one of the
only good parts
of living in

Las Vegas. I
watch her

complacently
watch a man
that drops her

fathers name,
how he went

to Sam's daughters
wedding in
1954, and he
wondered what

ever happened
to her. I saw in
her what we share

the most, besides
trying to live
here.

It is our
stare.

She narrowed her
eyes, tapped her
three ruby
clad fingers
on the table,

and in a dead lock
passed the man
her business card.

He turned white,
got up and
didn't come
back.

She said nothing
of the exchange
as we left.

She only put her hand
on my back and said
in her raspy voice

"You'll never have to
have power like that.

Yours, unlike mine,
is your own, and more
authentic. Remember

that from now
until you're as old
as me and after."

We parted ways
at the elevator
in our building.

I thanked her for
bringing me,
and for what she
taught me

today.

"I love you."

I told her.
And the woman
that told me once

that she's never
loved anybody,

turned her back
and with an absent wave
of her hand

said
"Kid, I love you
too."