The apartments were small with thin walls, full of the young and those who wished to be so. I was there on a sublet deal feeling my way to the end of my Master’s degree; just a few more months and I would go home.
It was hot outside and hotter in my apartment. I walked the streets and thought of snow lacing the branches of trees back in my hometown and the quiet night hushed by the moon. Here the side walk sizzled and the night air felt thick. At the corner, white lights shown brightly, and the music muffled out onto the street.
The squat brick building here full of the up and comings would be back home the neighborhood bar where families gathered for fish Fridays. The music wouldn’t be the contemporary new age but old rock and roll music enjoyed by moms and dads after older siblings lead their sisters and brothers home to bed.
I stayed with my stale drink and watched the drummer unabashedly.
By the end of the night the band members looked like travelers at an airport with their big clunky instruments snapped up safe in cases engineered for keeping fans at a distance.
“Live around here?” asked the drummer.
“Yes.”
“I’ll walk you to your car.”
“No, I walked here.”
“Then I’ll walk you to your door.”
For five minutes I was being escorted home and wished my parents were keeping a safe distance behind us. I did not belong in the bare essential apartment surrounded by all the up and comings. I didn’t belong in a bar when the nights in the hot and humid town pulsed with loneliness. I didn’t belong on the street in the middle of the night walking with a man that nearly drove me mad with sexual desire.
The drummer walked with me into the terraced apartment complex and I thought of Babylon. Neither of us spoke. Few lights shown through the mass of windows staring down upon us. Some flickered with television light, a few with dim reading lamps and others completely dark, hiding exhausted lovers in tangled sheets. We reached my door with and I wasn’t sure what to do, so said ‘thank-you’ and held out my hand.
He took it gently, but when I turned to go into my sterile environment, he would not let go.
“What’s your name?” I asked, and he dropped my hand.
“Does it matter?” I had to suppress a smile; God-like he answered a question with a question. Yes, arrogant, and silly, and never knowing how to communicate man, I thought to myself, your name matters. Then my heart went out to him as a mother would a child. I wanted to chide him and coach him and tell him how to act. But my ideas would seem a trap. His all leather furniture destine for the basement of a white cottage house with a Robert Frost stone fence around the yard and boring sex on Saturdays.
“No,” I said “it doesn’t matter. ” I entered the apartment and made myself close the door without turning around. I did not want to face him while the door closed. I had reached my summit, it was time to go home.
I never went to that little bar again but I would see the drummer once in a while in the parking lot of the Babylonian apartment complex. Coming and going for with a long tall blonde and then a few weeks later with a stunning redhead.
I arranged my life, cashed in everything, sold my furniture and dreamed of heavily shellacked yellow pine chairs, deep sofas, with forest green cushions and a cabin in the North to put them in. I dreamed of thick cream paper and the sound of my pen scraping the surface, spreading ink in my language. Sounds of vowels and consonants in my head and the sudden shriek of an owl outside my window.
They will all say I’ve changed, emptied, but that is not the truth. The truth is, I love the drummer without knowing his name.
