Friday started out a forgettable day for me, but I mean that in the best way. Nothing was so bad that it will forever stand out as That Horrible Friday When…, but nothing was so exceptional, either. Bobby, on the other hand, came out of the closet at work…after a student locked him in one. Had it happened to me, I think I would have either 1) gone completely insane and violent or 2) just given up and pretended to be dead when the students finally opened the closet door. (Guilt is great)! My uncloseted teacher companion was in a bad mood, but we headed downtown anyway.
Insert one more joke along the lines of R. Kelly’s “Trapped in a Closet” right here.
First, Bobby took his laptop to the Geek Squad at Best Buy. I waited in a chair long enough to finish Art Spiegelman’s Maus II. Other people waited in line long enough to fall asleep on the floor and see the onset of age-related macular degeneration. Those Geeks are sloooow. Bobby and I were famished after waiting and headed to Sal’s in the East Village to have dinner. I’d been there once before and remember it being tasty, but that was pre-Lombardi’s. I now find the pizza mediocre. Sigh.
We met up with Wallace at Sal’s and headed over to Life Cafe, the cafe featured prominently in “Rent.” I’d have loved to sing “to days of inspiration, playing hooky, making something out of nothing, the need to express, to communicate,” but I’m not sure anyone else could have sung along. It’s not fun to be a solitaire bohemian/musical theater geek. That’s more like homelessness really.
Wallace and Bobby playfully disagreed about just about everything that night. Wallace is part hipster, part bohemian intellectual, part tree-hugging dork, part obnoxious Little League player and Bobby is a conservative, Madonna-listening, Desperate Housewives-watching McDonald’s eater. I was in the middle, literally, at the bar. We headed to another place called Grassroots before going back to peruse Wallace’s, sixth-floor walkup shoebox.
A few weeks ago, Wallace told me he was sitting on his couch one night when he heard a knock at the window. The girls in the separate tenement a mere three feet from him wanted to borrow some coffee filters. This is all six stories in the air. Wallace retrieved the filters and barely had to lean to pass them to the neighbor out the window. He settled back on the couch and later heard another knock at the window. The neighbor held out a cup of coffee for him. These kinds of interactions may be a little too close for comfort for some, but I love it. (Just yesterday, I opened my kitchen window and dropped a videotape into a shopping hand basket on a pulley system, so Richard in the building next door could borrow it. I can’t wait for the day when Kathy and Company decide to reduce the phone bills by devising a tin can and string phone system).
Back at Wallace’s, we went out on the roof deck and watched the island of Manhattan wink at us from all sides. It was so pretty and peaceful. I began to feel infinite. I sang songs from “West Side Story” the rest of the night. Remember the scene from the film when Natalie Wood is hanging laundry and dances on the roof?
Friday was special after all.
