Casual Encounter in a Dark Place

Manuel Jimenez

November 2005

The woman entered the bar, a girl noir splashed into a fountain of vanilla faces. She already hated the place. It didn't matter. She was going to get smashed. She needed the escape. She sauntered through the place accompanied by the black woman who'd bankroll the evening. Her company was worth at least that. With her fine features, long neck and subtle sexuality, she never had trouble finding someone willing to buy her company for an evening, either as a social companion or as a magnet for society otherwise unavailable without her. She'd allow Melissa to bounce words off her for a few glasses of firewater.

She found the bar unextraordinary. The music was too loud. She dreaded having to shout through a conversation with her date. The only consolation was that the club had a full bar. She was sick of the illicit raves and after-hour, underground clubs bathed in beer. Beer bars bothered her. If she was going to drink, she'd do it right, not spend the night guzzling glasses of sour, bitter fratboy "soda" and straddling the toilet pissing the night away. She made a bee-line from the entrance to the bar. Melissa followed attentively.

She fought her way Brooklyn style to the bar, edging herself between two guys wearing khakis, button down shirts and suffering from puffy white guy syndrom, a result of spending their college years drinking too much and doing little else, except to watch other people play sports. She ordered a seven and seven, "Seven-up double-up." Melissa asked for a draft Bass. Melissa looked quickly around the place. "Do you want to find a table?" she asked.

Melissa smelled of clove cigarettes, a kind of pleasant, sweet cinnamony fragrance. The smell mirrored her character, sugar and spice, an irritating combination of innocence and sin. The woman thought Melissa sympathetic, but annoying.

"See one?" asked the woman of Melissa. She quickly looked about as she stated the question, trying to see a free table through the crowd. Her gaze careened the place from one end to the other. She didn't see a place to sit down. She started to turn her attention back to Melissa. It was in that glance that it hit her, striking her deep and hard. She trembled, as if jolted with electricity.

"See a table?" asked Melissa.

Like a flash the woman saw him. She was silent for a moment before she replied to Melissa's question, "No."

"Over there," Melissa said, "C'mon."

She stood and stared at him as Melissa started across the room. He sat humbled over the table that propped him up. Like the flash that jolted her when she first realized what love was, she was struck by the man sitting by himself across the room. Like the flash from a gun. She knew Gregorio Cruz. She knew the look of depression that shrouded him, and it scared her. She'd seen it before...when she'd loved him.

Melissa led the way, bumping and grinding her way across the place. The woman started to follow her. Gentle touches to the shoulder and an apologetic smile worked wonders at moving strangers out of the way. The woman followed Melissa, obliquely aware of her presence.

She had loved Gregorio Cruz, years ago. From the time he had pulled out a nine-millimeter automatic and let the muzzle roar out with thunder, she had loved him. Bang Bang Bang Bang. He'd kept firing. The flash of the muzzle lit up the dimming summer sky like lightening from the thunderbird. All she could do was fall to the ground and let Gregorio Cruz face the monsters as the brass was ejected from the gun and dropped around her...ching, ting, cling. He faced them, the threatening demons, with crazed resonance. THEM; the playboy crips, Los Avenues or the boyz from dog town, she didn't know? They were bad people; evil people who would rip the life from you and laugh as you bled, or worse...rape you senseless...gang bang...Bang Bang Bang Bang...The deafening sound shocked her senseless. And when the banging stopped, there were no demons. Just an eery silence punctuated with a ringing in her ears. And that smell...sulfur..something...spend gun powder. In that silence she felt no emotion. She craved a cigarette. She got off the ground and they ran. That was the Gregorio Cruz she knew. He'd been crazy, doped up and violent, but not towards her, and that's all that mattered.

She followed Melissa, very aware of the lone figure from her home and her past across the room. Highland Park, Los Angeles was a tough place. No mansions or movie stars. For her there had been little happiness there. Highland Park is nestled between downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena. It was built on the flood plain between the Mt. Washington hills and the hills of Debs Regional Park to the east. A set of train tracks, of which there was no right side, ran next to much of the river. The river itself had been lined in concrete to stop it from flooding. Now it was just a fast moving stream that would engorge on rainy days and could sweep you to your death if you got too close. The river reminded Clara of man sitting across the room. Something that had been delicate and beautiful, but which had been changed by the neighborhood in which it ran.

Although the river itself had been destroyed, some of the topography around the river was undeveloped and left in its natural state. The poverty of the area encouraged a stasis that preserved some of the prehistorical aspects of the place, a stasis that would never have been allowed if modernity had arrived too quickly. If you were still, and quiet, you could imagine life as the Gabrielino Tongva Indians had lived it, the aboriginal people native to the area.

The woman followed Melissa to a table for two. The table was unsteady on its base and rocked when Melissa put down her drink, spilling a splash of beer onto the sticky surface. Melissa rocked the table back and forth a couple of times.

"Fuck," she said, "I hate that. Do you have a match book or something?"

The woman took the napkin coaster from beneath her drink, folded it up and placed it in the gap under the base to steady the table.

"How do you know Rachael?" asked the woman of Melissa, , referring to the person that introduced them. She wasn't interested in the answer. All she wanted was to get Melissa talking, giving herself an opportunity to clear her mind and think of the dark figure across the room. She could have an entire conversation without actually participating in it. A few well placed personal questions would keep Melissa, or anyone for that matter, busy talking about the subject they knew best and liked most, themselves. People aren't interested in other people. They want relationships on their own terms. She used this natural narcissism to get what she wanted. What she wanted now was to sip her drink and think.

"Rachael?" started Melissa, "I've known her forever. She and I went...school together...Came back...college...hooked-up...She...I...l-ke c--ld s-e m-s-lf...Me Me Me Me Me..."

Manuel Jimenez credits himself with the quote, "Self deprecation is the key to low self esteem." A reckless self promoter and polemicist, he is a liquid presence in a fluid society. Manuel makes his home in San Francisco.

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