It’s your last night in New York City. Tomorrow, your flight out of JFK will be delayed more than an hour, and you’ll miss your connection. It’ll be the first of many nights you spend in Detroit. You don’t know that yet. You have thirty-eight dollars in your wallet.
The bar you’re at, called Sputnik, after the Russian satellite, is cozy and lacking in patronage. You’re here with a friend of yours, and you’re almost drunk. The others you’ve invited aren’t here. They won’t be. The waiter spends time making awkward conversation and trading quips with you. He’s got a full-on Hassidic facial beard, but he is funny. By the time you get to Detroit and realize you’ve lost all of your credit cards, you won’t remember any of his jokes. Toward the end of the night you draw a picture on a napkin and slur at him about putting it on the wall. He tells you you’re an accomplished artist, with work in a Brooklyn establishment. You tell him the fries were greasy and that one cup of ketchup wasn’t nearly enough.
The girl you’re with is growing steadily intoxicated, and you wonder why you thought Sangria was anything other than fruity wine. It’s probably because you ordered a pitcher of it. Wine, you were always fairly sure, came in bottles. Still, your sips have become smaller over the course of the evening, while hers have lengthened, become slurps. Gulps. She’s barely a hundred pounds, and it’s hitting her hard. The conversation has devolved into status updates and whining exclamations.
You think about your visit to Coney Island, and compare it to the last two times you went to the beach. In Chicago, the sand was wet and flat, the people bunched together according to ethnicity. There was a carnival atmosphere that was missing from even Brooklyn’s shore. Vendors scooting through, children and adults playing abridged versions of baseball and soccer on improvised fields the size of tennis courts. You stand there in pants and a sweatshirt, hoping nobody looks at you. Comes up to you and asks, in a voice you can barely hear, “Por que estas acqui, gringo?” But why shouldn’t you be here? You stand around a minute or two more, until the nervous knot in your gut punches your ribcage, and then you leave. Pull the bike off the fence and ride home, angry at yourself for letting anyone get the best of you.
You think about the time before that, in Michigan. You got lost in the woods on the other side of the dune, and ran up and down yelling for your father while the both of you tried to figure a way to find each other from opposite ends of a telephone call. You sweat through your clothes, and later, as you walk along the shoreline with your shoes off you’re glad you got lost. It was an adventure to wonder, even for a moment, if you might never find a way out. If the only way you’d ever talk to anyone again was on a dying phone. He’s gone, the police would tell your parents, but at least you can say goodbye. Be glad. He might survive out there, but he’ll never find his way out, and we’ll never find our way in. Hurry it up, the cop says, he says he’s only got one bar of battery left, and he wants to save it for later. The sand on Lake Michigan is coarse, and squeaks under your feet like a party of dead mice. Your father tells you about an idea he has for a movie, where a serial killer has started killing all the movie stars, and you discuss how much you’d have to pay Bruce Willis to play himself as the one who discovers the plot and must overcome the fact that he’s simply an actor. You tell him it’s a good idea.
In New York you wait for another train. It’s the same every time. People look at you, but more often they look away. Nobody smiles. A thin black man dances and snaps his fingers to an imaginary beat, bobbing his head to music you can’t hear. He has no headphones, but he’s enjoying himself, and you’re jealous. The train comes, but it’s not yours. A woman gets on, skittishly attempts to exit, but the door closes and she is resigned to whatever fate the tracks bring her. Across the tracks, a man sits by himself, reading propaganda.
In Detroit you’ll run out of money. You won’t have your credit card. Chicago will seem so much further than it does even now, at Sputnik, with the girl drunk on Sangria. You don’t know this yet. Tonight, anything seems possible.
