Lunch Break
“I don’t think I agree with your reading,” the boy in the tight tank top said, and Darius thought, These goddamn Belmont Street fags. I don’t know why I let them into my house.
“Well,” Darius spread his hands over the Tarot cards and picked up the Fool, who was carrying his satchel behind him, “regardless of what you agree that’s what I read and that’s fifty-five dollars.”
The boy with frosted hair snorted as he reached into his pocket said, “I know a woman on Sheffield who’ll do this for thirty.”
“Then go to that bitch next time, but today you came to me, and it’s sixty.”
“You said fifty five.”
“Sixty-five.”
“I don’t think I like you.”
“But you will pay me.”
Because there was a metal baseball bat none too discretely sitting next to the easy chair where Darius read cards, the boy did pay, and on his way out the door he declared, “Your service is terrible.”
“Put it in my Yelp review,” Darius said as the door shut and he unwound the red silk cloth from his head.
The phone was ringing now, and when he saw who was calling, he frowned and greeted him with:
“What the fuck do you want?”
“I thought we should talk,” said a very sad, very white voice.
“About what? We didn’t talk when we were together, and now you seem to want to talk all the time.”
“I feel like I hurt you?”
“Do you? Do you really feel that way, Michael?”
“You were angry. I can tell you’re angry.”
“I’m always angry when it comes to you.”
“And anger is a form of hurt and we—”
“Please don’t try to be a shrink. You have a PhD in Peace Studies and… I’m not entirely sure what that qualifies you for, but it’s not to be a shrink.”
“Well, then maybe I’m the one who needs to talk.”
Darius looked at his cigarettes, decided on a vape instead.
“And so you thought that would be my problem.”
“Look. Look. I know you love to be sarcastic and everything, and you’re really clever, a lot more clever than me, but for a second could we just… be sincere?”
“Oh, goddamn!” Darius breathed out white vapor.
“What would you like to be sincere about?”
“Us.”
“What about us?”
“Why we didn’t work?”
“Cause you were fucking other people.”
“I was… It was one person.”
“Oh, don’t do that shit,” Darius said. “Don’t ever do that.”
“And I was unhappy.”
“So that’s why it didn’t work,” Darius said, simply. “Seems like you’ve answered your own question.”
“But there were reasons I was unhappy.”
“Look, Michael, I have another client coming in a few minutes. I mean, I deal with silly white people who are looking for answers every fucking day, and if the answer you’re looking for is that it’s my fault we didn’t work out, I’m not here for that.”
“That’s not what I—”
“If what you are leaning very closely toward saying is that we didn’t work out because I made you unhappy, you are leaning close to me getting on the Blue Line and coming to Logan Square to knock your teeth out.”
“There we go! There’s the escalating.”
“Motherfucker, you started this.”
“You left me!” Michael’s voice had become shrill. “You left me. I came to you and said let’s start over. And you left me.”
“And then you invited me to a wedding to throw in my face that… you’re having a wedding.”
“I was not throwing it in your face.”
“The fuck you weren’t.”
“I wasn’t—”
“The fuck,” Darius continued, “you weren’t.”
“Listen,” Michael said.
Darius took a very deep breath and remembered that there was a time when he believed this is what love was, the shouting, the anger, the rage, the insecurity.
“I am listening.”
“I love you.”
“Is this one of those Christian things, like how you’ll always have love for me and—”
“I am in love with you.”
“What?” Darius was almost disgusted.
Darius took such a deep hit of his vape, he coughed cherry flavored clouds.
“I,” Michael repeated, “am still… in love… with you.
“Now can we talk?”
“Fuck no,” Darius said, and ended the call, fiddling over the screen to find the settings so he could turn off the ringer and put Michael out of his head.
Damn, he missed old fashioned phones and the power of hanging up with bang.
“I just got flour,” Max said. “And I made sure to get yeast. Look over this list and see if we have everything.”
Max had come home with Jacen Datlow. Darius was relieved, because Jacen Datlow was tall with strong calves and golden brown with blue hair and a small indigo beard. Often he word snug, faded trousers with no underwear, but today he was in basketball shorts that hung loose, but when he bent down, as he did now, shower the roundness of his ass. He wanted to fuck Jacen.
“You all drive to these places?” Jacen asked.
“We have a few orders that go out,” Max said.
Darius wanted to fuck Jacen, or be fucked by him, and the lust that shuddered through him and ran to his balls was a relief from the sadness he’d been feeling.
“I can take care of that when you’re ready.”
Max had thought of putting Jacen to work in the kitchen, but decided against it. Too many cooks was never a good thing, and he and Darius knew how to not step on one another’s toes in the kitchen.
Darius swallowed some coffee and took a drag from his cigarette. He looked over the list, and said, “I think we got everything. Are we still doing the quiches?”
“Yes. But only three. And I think I’ll wait till tonight for those.”
Darius nodded. They would cook all late morning, all into the afternoon, and now that Jacen was here, they could even send him out to those others orders they waited for Jamal to take. The one thing Darius could do that people seemed to need and pay for, was cook, and he had learned that a quiche made from a few eggs and a cup of flour could be bought for eight dollars, and four quiches bought a carton of cigarettes. Quiches and roast could nearly pay your bills, and three days a week all they did was cook, and the smells drifted through the apartments, and emails pinged and neighbors lined the halls, and soon Darius and Max, who were always poor were a little less poor.
“Did we get milk?” Max wondered, opening the refrigerator.
“We got milk! When did we get milk?”
“I got it while you all were out.”
He had bought after talking to Michael, who wasn’t bad, just not good, just not much of anything. But Michael was the someone for whom Max’s body longed. Even now he could feel the soft beard against his cheek, the press of his lips, the pleasure of holding on to his hips. The soreness in him when they fucked.
“You alright?” Jacen asked Darius, passing a hand in front of him.
“Do I look alright?”
“You look more than alright, buddy,” Jacen almost laughed.
Darius’s face was glowing with the memory of Michael. The memory of Jacen last night passed like a long dark shadow. Michael was heat and daytime, the sun on the curly brown hair of his chest and the strawberry and milk of his skin, the tea color of the noon day sun on his auburn hair. Jacen was white blue skin in the night, black shadows, sensations, mouths on mouths, desperate shuffling, tongues in places that longed for them, heat, sweat, the swirling of drugs and euphoric desperation.
Two nights earlier, about the same time that Max was making his way toward Evanston to pick up Jamal, Darius Mc.Cready, had been on the edge of tears. And he often was well, not if not often, once a month. He wished he’d been born in another time, or under another circumstance or wanting other things. It seemed indulgent to say he wish he’d been born something that wasn’t an artist, but he wished he was someone who would have worked well at a bank and been glad for his benefits package, or who wouldn’t have rather died than be a substitute teacher again and would have certainly been a school sub over an actual teacher a thousand thousand times over and over again. He’d felt like this his whole adult life. Back at Catholic school, where they wore shirts and tie and jackets, the boys used to ask why and the teachers would say, because when you grow up you will dress like this every day. Only the twenty first century was different. It looked friendly but lived rougher, more mercilessly. Nowadays boys in Catholic school wore khakis and polos, because the office world, the business world ,a world Darius never understood but knew paid well, no longer needed those suits and ties.
One of the reasons to live with Max was because he understood those things, but then that was the reason living with him was so precarious. Making rent was a precarious thing. Daily bread was a precarious thing. He’d gone to dinner at his cousin’s house out in Oak Park, for the Fourth of July. She and her white husband had a nice house in a comfortable area, and the whole time he talked about his students and their hillbilly parents and the signs they had in their yards for the coming election. Those morons weren’t liberals. They wanted the old madness of the crazy presidency that had been voted out four years earlier. They didn’t understand how good the world they had was. They didn’t understand that unemployment was down to four percent.
But Darius understood those hillbillies. He understood the world where full employment, if you had it, didn’t pay your bills and though, for so much of his life, he’d been embarrassed of being an artist, had to make excuses to even himself about never having had a real job in an office with a set time every day and his 401K and his dependability. But now, as one woman said, “You might as well follow your dreams, because even being practical doesn’t pay the bills, and it was shit like that which drove Darius Mc.Cready to tears. He watched in blind amazement while others seemed to thrive at nonsense and he could barely pay his bills. Wondering if he could make rent had once been an occasional question in the back of his mind. Now it was a monthly thing. Sometimes he could almost die from the weariness of anxiety, and that wasn’t a fucking joke.
It had been the full moon when he’d felt this way, and regardless if it was crazy or not, he marked full moons and half moons and dark moons and solstices. He remembered traveling on the longest day of the year, and the train being held up in some fucking disaster. It had taken five hours to get home. He should have been there by ten, but it was past one in the morning when he finally got home and he thought, “I had no business traveling on a solstice. From now on stay the hell in.” Or there were the times he felt out of sorts for days and then, looking on the astronomy page on his phone, where it showed all the planets and stars in the night sky and what time they would be there, he’d realize he was out of sorts on the full moon. So, it was just better to know about these things. On the full moon he felt especially hopeless and distraught. He had stepped out to look at it, and outside of the building a voice had whispered, here I come, I’ll let you in. It was the quiet girl who lived in the corner apartment, and he was pretty sure that apartment was vacant, that she was sneaking in after dark and spending everyday just waiting to be found out. And that made him want to cry. And children being killed in Gaza made him want to cry, and the idea that people had been blown up by their cell phones just yesterday, and then at those peoples’ funerals, other people were blown up by their cell phones made him want to cry as well. It wasn’t wrong to cry. The apt response to this world was tears.
And if tears were appropriate, then what was joy? And how did he get to it? Tears and sorrow were appropriate. They weren’t a shame. They were the fitting response to a shameful world. But how could you sustain yourself on such wet, salty and extremely costly fair?
