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The Bridesmaid (A 500-Word Memoir Finalist) |
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by Sean Beaudoin
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2:52 |
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I lived in a welter of sweat and raw dumbness until I was twenty-five, leaving Texas on a bus full of tight hats. Six days of sandwiches and bourbon, a thousand miles of gravel, the port of Oakland rising behind steel containers labeled in Chinese.
All the way downtown, schoolgirls slap each other’s lollipops to the sidewalk, hey, bitch, hey!
I duck between trams, stepping light. Mingus thumps alive in my headphones, buzzing ovals that make your temples ache. This is some years before the ones you cram up the Eustachian, delivering tinnitus and rap-metal in equal measure.
Horns and yelling as traffic accelerates through the yield.
Market Street is impacted with gum, a black-pock Braille that appears to breathe in the heat. On TV there’s warnings about this flesh-eating disease. I keep seeing a guy with a canoe missing from his thigh. It’s a big chunk gone pink, marbled deep to bone. A few people underhand him change.
For some reason the alleys are full of whole oranges.
I buy a tin of smoked fish, shovel it with crackers crisp and partially-hydrogenated, an evil which will choose to reveal itself some years later. I take pictures at random, shutter recoiling from actual film, a place downtown you can rent darkrooms by the hour. The guy at the desk offers two months rent for my grandfather’s Leica.
Breathe in rude chemistry, agitate in a bath of purple developer.
There’s a Rasta on my street, paperbacks laid out on a blanket. Joss sticks smolder between his toes. He says six for a buck, ten for a buck, depending. You sort through enough Zig Ziglar, there’s always one about bi-planes, Fokkers and Spads roaring out over the trenches of the Somme, all the characters named Ernest and Willard and Harriet.
Depending on what?
My friend Highguy wants to start a band, Storming Kabul. He’ll be Ace Storming and I’ll be Billy Kabul. Seems obvious now, but this is a long time before people with opinions bothered to hear about Afghanistan. Highguy tends to worry your nerves, idea, idea, idea.
Besides, I don’t play an instrument.
Back then, everyone had roommates. I lived with The Fat One and her skinny husband. They also took care of Gail, if taking care meant cash her SSI while she rode the basement Serta. There was a Newport allowance, $15.31 for a carton that ran quick. Then it was Gail cadging shorts on the stoop, Gail in an ironic dress and oversize canvas Chucks, Gail wire-eyed like a punk Sarah Jane Moore.
She disappeared with the cat.
In January, we found her crouched behind the Boys and Girls Club, two-fingering mayonnaise straight from the jar. The Fat One was pissed. The skinny husband said okay, it’s okay, wiping Gail’s face with grass. The checks in her pocket were pressed together like old rubbers. That winter I turned thirty-one. I got a new job and then another.
There was cake and then I was thirty-two.
Sean Beaudoin is the author of Going Nowhere Faster and the forthcoming Fade To Blue (Little, Brown-Spring '09). His articles and short stories have appeared in numerous publications including; The Onion, Narrative, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New Orleans Review, Glimmer Train, Barrelhouse, and Redivider. He is currently working on a crime fiction novel. www.seanbeaudoin.com
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