Fated (36 page)
Authors: S. G. Browne
Tags: #Humorous, #Romance, #General, #Contemporary, #Fiction
“Are you here to gloat?” I ask. “Or is the magician going to discover a cure for herpes?”
“Him?” says Destiny, pointing to the street performer. “He’s not one of mine. Must be on your path. Oops, silly me. I mean on Chance’s path.”
This is one of those times I wish it weren’t impossible to kill an immortal.
“What do you want?” I ask.
“I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d see how things were going.”
I spread my arms wide, still holding my unfinished hot dog. “Well, as you can see, this is my office and I’m just finishing up my gourmet lunch. . . .”
“There’s no need to be flip, Fabio.”
“Really? I thought I had a pretty good need.”
Destiny doesn’t respond, just sits there smiling at me with that Cheshire-cat grin of hers.
“What do you want?” I ask again.
“I want to help you with Sara,” she says.
I haven’t laughed this hard since the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees.
“I’m serious,” says Destiny. “I feel bad about what happened and I want to try to make things right.”
“Well, in case you didn’t hear, Sara has a restraining order against me,” I say, regaining my bitterness. “I can’t go anywhere near her for another eleven months. Not to mention that she doesn’t remember me.”
“Minor details,” she says. “You forget how influential I can be.”
“So you’re saying you can get the order of protection lifted?” I ask. “You can get her to fall in love with me again?”
“All I’m saying is that I want to help get you and Sara back on good terms,” she says. “The rest is up to you.”
I look at her, sitting there all red and immortal, and I want to believe her. I want to believe she wants to help me, that she’s offering to make things right. The problem is, I don’t trust her.
“No, thanks.”
“Suit yourself,” she says, standing up. “I’m just trying to make amends. But if you change your mind, all you have to do is wait for Sara behind the Met.”
She saunters away toward the shadows of the Terrace Arcade as I struggle for a snappy comeback. Before I can come up with anything, Destiny’s gone.
A few days later, I see Sara jogging through Central Park. She doesn’t notice me, probably because I haven’t shaved and I’m wearing clothes I got from the homeless shelter and I’m taking a leak behind a tree. But just the sight of her is enough to make me realize how much I miss her. How much I love her. How much I can’t stand my existence without her.
Damn that Destiny.
In spite of my common sense telling me it can’t work, I keep hearing Destiny’s voice saying she can get Sara and me back on good terms, saying she wants to make things right.
Maybe she’s just fucking with me, wanting to have fun at my expense, watching me and laughing at my mortality, but I realize I can’t give up on this. I have to find a way to get Sara back. To get her to fall in love with me. To get her to lift the order of protection.
So I go back to the shelter and get cleaned up. I talk to one of the volunteers about the employment referrals they offer. I inquire about their programs for helping me find permanent housing.
After all, I can’t exactly bring Sara back to the shelter to watch
Letterman
.
Letterman
.
While the coalition does offer employment and housing services, their waiting list is longer than I want to wait. So I panhandle on every available street corner. I go shopping for something I can afford. I practice what I’m going to say when I see her. And I hope Destiny was serious.
Three days before the end of February I’m sitting on a bench in Central Park behind the Met across from the Greywacke Arch. I’m wearing the clothes I got evicted in, though I had them laundered at the cleaner’s down the street from the coalition, so with the shower and fresh shave I had this morning, you’d never guess I’ve been homeless for the past month. And while I’m still getting the hang of being human, I figure it’s probably best if the woman you’re trying to convince to fall in love with you doesn’t know you’re living in a shelter.
It’s early in the morning and the sun has just begun to creep up over Queens. Other than a few people walking past and an old man sitting on a bench across from me, there’s no one else around. I wrap my left hand around the bouquet of daisies I bought, then look to my left and wait for Sara’s confident, feminine form to come jogging into view.
This is one of the places where I first saw Sara jogging. I don’t know how Destiny knew that. Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe it was just a lucky guess. But I know Sara still runs past here regularly, because I’ve been stalking her again.
Old habits die hard.
I think about how we first met on the subway. The silent introduction. The way she smiled at me and held my gaze, disarming me and captivating me at the same time. I think about how my heart races whenever I think about her. About how, whenever I look into her eyes, nothing else matters.
She’s in my marrow.
She’s in the air that I breathe.
And every breath I take of her intoxicates me.
I don’t have to wait long before the object of my intoxication appears. At her approach, my heart pounds and my palms sweat and I’m consumed with both fear and joy at the same time.
When she’s less than twenty feet away, I stand up and hold out the daisies.
I can tell by the expression on her face that she sees me, but instead of stopping or running the other way, which I thought might be a distinct possibility, she keeps jogging toward me as she pulls something from her fanny pack and holds it up in her right hand as if to show me what it is.
And I’m thinking maybe she has a present for me, too. Maybe Destiny was right. Maybe everything will be okay.
“Hi, Sara,” I say, raising my right hand in a greeting, my left hand wrapped around the flowers.
Before I can say anything else, Sara is reaching out toward me with her right hand and spraying me with something.
After that all I hear is screaming, most of it mine.
I stagger away, wiping at my eyes, and somehow manage to stumble through the Greywacke Arch and over to the Turtle Pond and stick my head under the frigid water, trying to put out the fire in my eyes, which only seems to make it worse. When I finally manage to open my eyes a little, I hear sirens in the distance along Fifth Avenue, drawing closer.
Fucking Destiny. I knew I shouldn’t have believed her.
I can barely see as I scramble away from the Turtle Pond and make my way west through Central Park, past the Delacorte Theater and the Romeo and Juliet statue. Parting is such sweet sorrow, my ass. More like bitter agony, if you ask me.
I never cared for Shakespeare. The pompous prick.
By the time I make it out to Central Park West and head down to catch the subway, I can’t hear the sirens anymore and my eyes have opened enough so I actually have some peripheral vision, but it still feels like I have a thousand needles jammed into each eyeball.
I take the B train downtown and get off at Rockefeller Center, then wander into St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where I sit in one of the pews near the back and strike a pose as a dutiful worshiper while I come to grips with the fact that I’m an idiot and that the love of my life has just blasted me in the eyes with pepper spray.
I’d like to think it was just a knee-jerk reaction. That all Sara needs is a little more time to come around, to remember me, to realize she loves me. Except I know a memory purge is irreversible. She’ll never remember me. And at this point, it’s unlikely she’ll ever love me.
As my tears continue to wash the pepper spray from my eyes, I get up and wander around the cathedral, checking out the stations of the cross, until I’m standing in front of the pietà. I don’t go into churches much. When you used to take regular meetings with God and he had you on his speed dial, you tend to get your fill of him. But it’s kind of creepy looking at Josh like this, dead in Mary’s lap, frozen in a moment I witnessed.
While he wasn’t quite as beautiful as most artists depict him and while no one ever gets his expression just right (Josh always tended to have this look of amusement on his face, even when he was in mortal agony), seeing the savior like this, through my pepper spray-induced tears, makes me realize the selfishness of my romantic endeavors.
Even if I could get Sara to remember me or to fall in love with me, I’d be disrupting her destiny. She’s supposed to be the mother of the coming savior, the Madonna of the new millennium, and I’d be getting in the way. Not exactly the notoriety I’m looking for. Plus since I’m mortal now, I could theoretically get Sara pregnant before Jerry took his shot. And I don’t know how good I’d be as a father, let alone the surrogate dad of Jerry’s bastard Messiah.
So in spite of my love for her and how painful it is for me to admit it and the fact that I’m totally pissed off at Destiny, I realize I have to let Sara go. For the good of the humans I tried to help and for the cosmic wheel of the universe, I have to give her up.
The tears that were once washing away the pepper spray are now washing away my grief.
I leave St. Patrick’s and head toward Second Avenue, stopping at a corner store to pick up a forty of Country Club malt liquor, which I finish off in less than half of the twenty blocks back to the Coalition for Shelter. By this time, morning has passed the midway point and is near to running itself out, so I figure I might as well stop off and grab another forty, since the first one went down so easy.
The second one goes down easier. And suddenly I’m feeling better.
I’m reminded of another one of my favorite artists of the late twentieth century, the band Sublime, which seemed headed for greatness until lead singer Brad Nowell died of a heroin overdose. Like so many other musicians on my path.
On their first album, “40 Oz. to Freedom” was the title song that seems to capture my current frame of mind: “Forty ounces to freedom is the only chance I have / To feel good even though I feel bad.”
I’m less than two blocks from the shelter, blissfully drunk and beginning to understand why forties are so popular, especially since they’re so cheap and I’m on a limited budget, when I see a police car drive past on 77th a block and a half ahead of me.
Instead of continuing along Second Avenue, I head east on 76th to First, then north to 77th, where I peer around the corner and see the police car parked out in front of the shelter, its driver talking to another police officer leaning in through the passenger window.
As if I didn’t have enough problems.
I don’t know how they found me. Probably through the NYC Department of Homeless Services computer database. But my guess is that after I broke the terms of the order of protection, they’ve issued a warrant for my arrest.
That’s what I get for listening to Destiny.
I glance back down the street through my eighty ounces of inebriation and wonder what I’m going to do now. I have no girlfriend, no possessions, no place to sleep, and the cops are looking for me. So I do the only thing I can.
I walk into the nearest liquor store and buy another forty ounces of freedom.
CHAPTER 52
The next month
passes by in a bleary-eyed blur of forty-ounce fixes and cheap wine chasers. I drink pretty much all day, mostly alone, every once in a while with another homeless person who happens to be sharing my bench or plot of grass or piece of cement.
passes by in a bleary-eyed blur of forty-ounce fixes and cheap wine chasers. I drink pretty much all day, mostly alone, every once in a while with another homeless person who happens to be sharing my bench or plot of grass or piece of cement.
When I need food, I get a ninety-nine-cent double cheese-burger from McDonald’s or I hit up the occasional soup kitchen. When I need a place to sleep, I find an alley between some Dumpsters or a nice bench out at Battery Park. And when I need money, I panhandle in the Village or SoHo or occasionally up in Chelsea, but never any farther uptown than Penn Station. I don’t want to risk going near the East Side or anywhere I might be more likely to run into Sara.
I avoid Central Park altogether.
My coat is filthy and my clothes stink, as do I most of the time, since I haven’t bathed in a month. My hair is oily and matted and my beard soiled and scraggly, with more than a few ingrown hairs. I have dirt under my fingernails and blisters on my feet and my shoes are stained with water and wine and urine. When I cough, my lungs rattle. When I throw up, my throat burns and my stomach feels like it’s trying to escape.
Any pleasure I once derived in helping my less fortunate humans has been lost beneath a thick, crusted-over layer of loss and despair and self-pity.
When I’m not begging for money, most of my days are spent with a bottle in a brown bag and whatever food I can afford, hanging out underneath the Williamsburg Bridge or down at Battery Park, watching the ferries come and go. Though I do treat myself to Riverside Park on days when I’m feeling adventurous. Sometimes, on clear days like today, just before sunset, I’ll take a walk along the promenade, then head down to the pedestrian footpath that skirts the Hudson and I’ll sit on a rock and stare at the George Washington Bridge.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about getting a closer look.
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