Chapter 1 #3
Midnight somehow and I’m still up. Still hungry.
I have to work tomorrow. I have to exist. I should get off the floor and go downstairs and catch a few z’s on the cot.
It’s right there in the cage. Not a great bed, but something.
I stand. Dizzy. It’s almost one now and I can’t go downstairs.
This is the witching hour. Girls do things after midnight they wouldn’t do in the day, so it’s very possible the girl wrote back to me. I check my email.
Nothing.
I pop a Peter Frampton CD in the boom box.
Is that weird? Am I weird? I do this sometimes.
I mimic people. I told that girl she looked like Carolyn Bessette because Angus said his girl looked like Carolyn Bessette.
Something is wrong with me, but something is wrong with anyone awake at 3:12 a.m. I check my Hotmail again, and then again, and then again, and then night becomes day.
Mr. Mooney barges in and glares at me, disgusted as the sun.
“There’s a fresh shirt in the back, Joseph.”
“Yeah, I got sucked into that new King.”
He knows I’m lying. He knows everything. Mr. Mooney is married. It’s not like he’s so in love, but he has something, someone. He says I’m not the same since we got this computer.
And he’s right.
I turn off the computer. Fuck it. All of it.
I put on the fresh shirt. A new black Hanes T-shirt that’s only here because I do this a lot lately. I stay in the shop, by the computer, by the list. It’s fucking insane. That girl on the street is like those girls on the subway. I don’t know her.
So why am I bashing my head into the mirror? Why am I making fists? Why can’t I just say fuck it and let things go? Why do I wanna sleep in a prison?
It’s true. Back in September, Mr. Mooney locked me in the cage to punish me for letting a girl walk out of here with a signed Catcher in the Rye. I liked it in the cage. I slept great. Better than I had in years. When I told him how good it felt, he hung his head.
That’s because your mother didn’t love you. Rest in peace, Joseph.
The way he said that…I didn’t know if I was gonna get out of there alive.
Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I’m dead.
I splash cold water on my face. Stop it, Joe, stop it.
The shop opens, and it’s a good thing. I’m alive.
Busy. I’m not dead, and the hope of something between me and some girl who asked me for a lighter won’t be the death of me either.
I’m gonna change my ways. No more Missed Connections.
I’m done. I delete my pathetic post, and it feels good.
The computer is bad for me, the way Craig never lets up.
The real world is a breeze. Shit closes and you can’t get what you want.
But Craigslist is always there, it’s the mother I never had prodding at me, checking to see if I’m hungry, if I have a fever.
Mooney is right. Sometimes it is that fucking simple.
Mama didn’t love me, and the girls, girls, girls all know it, because girls have a third eye, an extra hole.
They can’t love me, because they know I can’t love them.
Poor Angus will never get clean. He can carry the rocks in his pocket—there is no escape for a crackhead—but I have a shot at a good life.
The computer is my drug, and it’s not a mobile phone or a lighter or a crack pipe.
I can’t fit one in my pocket.
I can kick it—Yes I can—and I kill it on the floor.
I am clean and sober, pushing Lucinda Rosenfeld on a woman going through a divorce.
Time for my lunch break and it feels good to be out in the world.
I duck into a proper old-school coffee shop, the kinda place that won’t fold and turn into an internet café.
I open my Bukowski, but the guy in the chair next to me grunts.
“Unbelievable, right? Get a room, lady.”
He’s irate because a woman is nursing her baby.
In a better society, it would be legal for me to kick him in the nuts.
In this shitty world, best I can do is ignore him.
It’s oddly soothing to me, the mother in agony with the baby that won’t latch on.
The poor woman is spent, apologizing to everyone as if she did something wrong.
The jerk next to me storms out—I bet his mother didn’t love him either—and I stay where I am.
It’s a game, like baseball or hockey, and finally, the guy scores!
He latches onto that breast, and his mother sighs in relief.
I look down at my Bukowski. The old me would have crushed it, but I can’t do it.
I can’t open my mouth, or my soul. I can’t latch onto words on paper, especially when I spy a single, lonely computer in the back of this old-school café.
It’s calling my name, and that’s okay. You’re not supposed to quit anything cold fucking turkey.
I’m allowed. I’m not “addicted.” If I was a real addict, I wouldn’t stop to tell the new mom that her kid’s a keeper.
She needed that, and she looks up at me, into me. God, I love women, I really do. “Thanks,” she says. “Thanks for not being a jerk. I mean, what am I supposed to do?”
I make my way to the back—computers are like porn, they hide them—and I sit at the desk. It felt good to lift that lady’s spirits. We all need someone to tell us that we’re not the worst person in the coffee shop. All babies starve without milk. Not just me.
I know what to expect from my Hotmail by now…. Coldmail. That’s what I get. And that’s okay. Life is long. I’ll do better. I’ll check Missed Connections one more time, and then I’ll take a few days off. Learn to read again. Make a woman who’s not a new mom smile.
But then I find my milk.
You: NYC Bookstore Babe, touchable brown hair, brown eyes, twinkling
The milk hits like heroin, like crack fumes.
This is a first, the kind of high you spend the rest of your life chasing.
Kafka shit where I metamorphosize all at once.
My jeans fit! My head fits! I touch the mouse but I can’t push it.
What if I jumped the gun? What if you went into some other fucking bookstore and want some other fucking guy with touchable brown hair?
I want to be your NYC Bookstore Babe. I have to be your NYC Bookstore Babe.
I am your NYC Bookstore Babe, assuming this note is for me…
Is it?
It’s a little scary. I am all in. I want you even though I don’t know who you are.
Even though you might not want me. But that’s love, isn’t it?
Unconditional and pure. Simple as the black font on the white background of a Missed Fucking Connection.
It’s not just me anymore. Now there’s someone else.
You. You’re not in my head. You’re not girls, girls, girls.
You exist. You walk into bookstores and you turn to Craig for help, but you might be after some other guy in Brooklyn or some shit.
I could bail on you. Unplug the computer and throw it out the window, but no.
I can’t do that to you. Us. You have hope in you.
Passion. You wrote a message, and you put it in the bottle and I am not some boy on the beach who happened to find the bottle in the tide.
I am the prince who was built to open your bottle and drink every last drop.