Blue Graffiti
1
Y OU SEE IT, OR YOU DON’T , and from the back of the bar, I see her drinking alone.
Bathed in bar light: dirty blonde hair spun in a loose ponytail, a green Ninja Turtles T-shirt, blue jeans shaped tightly around her legs and brown leather sandals. She turns her glass slowly, like the universe in orbit. Her mind appears to wander, alone in her world. In the buzz of the Budweiser, I admit she could be a mirage. Truth is, I’ve seen every kind of girl come and go outta Jimmy’s Place over the years, but they’re never, ever, like her.
I reach for my pack of Marlboros and the stick is almost lit when my buddy Prince goes, “What the hell are you staring at?”
Prince has slicked back black hair, a clean face, and a big toothy smile with teeth that are way too white if you ask me. He owns an assembly line of black shirts doing for a living what he’d call business shit. If you ask for details on that he’ll say he’s an entrepreneur, but really he’s just soaked in cash from his father who passed away when we were in eighth grade.
His old man fell from a giant maple tree in their backyard while Prince held the ladder below. He broke his neck on the ground and died right there on the spot. Sometimes, when he gets real blazed, Prince talks about how he tried to catch his dad as he was falling but didn’t get there fast enough. Imagine. He refuses to let himself pass through the world guiltless and clean because of it, but that’s Prince.
We’ve called him Prince ever since he became obsessed with the Purple One as a child in the early 80s. He had deemed him the musical icon of our time, surpassing, he said, even the great Michael Jackson. I wasn’t sure about all that, but I didn’t care much one way or the other. It’s just nice when somebody has a hero.
I can’t take my eyes off this girl across the bar.
“Who the hell is that?” I whisper to myself. My other buddy Leon arrives with a couple more pints. I’d asked for Budweiser because it’s the most nostalgic beer there is. Leon is on the burlier, gorilla side of our species with a hairy chest and beefy arms—a big football player back in the day. He’s also a genius, though perpetually misplaced and misaligned. He does well, heading up the only construction company in Johnston but he hates it most days. In response to my questions regarding his general lack of ambition, he always comes up pretty empty. I still have faith that one day he’ll find it in him to go out to college somewhere and learn astrophysics or something profound. He’s the only friend we’ve ever had that could pull that kind of thing off, but in the end, it doesn’t matter.
Leon sets the Budweisers down and says, “Who we talkin ’bout?” I nod my head across the room.
“That blonde over there,” Prince grunts. Leon takes a look and goes, “Ah. I dunno.”
A woman bumps into her gently as she passes by, breaking her reverie. She flashes the stranger a smile, sincere, beautiful, and forgiving.
“It’s okay,” I see her say. It’s okay. The stranger believes her and carries on, then she falls back, deep into her daydream, her careful, steady hands spinning that glass. She’s the eye of the storm, the pure burning light of a lamp in the dark and I’m drawn.
“I bet she’s drinking Budweiser,” I say. And Prince, a tad more interested than before, takes a quick look over but just grunts again and says, “maybe.”
Prince is going through a slow burn break up. One of those real bummer in-and-outers where it takes weeks to finally die. Just torture. Shelby didn’t love him anymore but lacked the courage to cut the thing off swift and bloody. She was probably scared of being alone, just like all the rest of us, terrified of shoving chips into her mouth, solo on her carpet couch which was so old it rained cotton and almost swallowed you whole when you sat on it. The last time I was in her mossy apartment with the two of them I couldn’t stop staring at it, high and anti-social, transfixed by its age, and convinced Prince should never have gotten together with a woman who owned a couch like that in the first place.
If you asked me, Prince was lucky to be rid of her and was getting over it a bit too slowly for my liking. He’s annoyingly uninterested in everything at the moment. I forgive him for his apathy, but only because I’m so damn distracted. There’s no doubt that I’ve fallen in deep. I take the biggest drink of beer you could imagine and think, she is havin a Budweiser . I just know it.