davidquigg

[davidquigg]

This is a short story I declared finished almost seven years ago. I dredged it up accidentally on Saturday morning by plugging “Canon AE-1″ into my Gmail’s sent messages.

I still like this story and care about it but nonetheless have shown that I’m capable of forgetting it exists, so I’m posting it here to give it a chance to go play outside.

SOMETHING ABOUT AIRPLANES

Draw her face.

Or his.

Yes, yes, you're not an artist.

Fine. Shut up.

Just try.

Try because I want you to know what I came to know only a few hours ago.

Start simple. Get paper. Get a pencil. Sketch the shape of her face. Don't overthink. Let's stipulate that this will not be art.

Just sketch.

You're paralyzed, obviously. I had the same problem. This is what it feels like when you start to know what I came to know only a few hours ago.

Go on. Sketch the outline of her face. It's just a shape. This could be middle-school geometry. I mean, you've got to know the shape of her face. You've thought of her at least once today. Because today is either a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, and whenever it's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, you think of her. So you've got to know the shape of her face.

This is when you'll be tempted to screw this all up by cheating. Log the fuck off Facebook.

You don't get to look at that little thumbnail photo she posted to her profile. You don't get to look at it because it's cheating. You also don't get to look at it because you promised yourself you wouldn't look at it. She's not even your Facebook friend. And you've supposedly come to realize that there's something unseemly about clicking on the profile of one of your seven mutual Facebook friends and then clicking through to see their friends just so you can scroll down and smear your screen with nose grease because you're crowding in close and then closer to her thumbnail photo. Look at it this way: If she lived next door to a friend of yours, would you contrive to visit that friend's place just so you could look out his window and into hers? Don't answer that. I'm liable to hate you for your answer. Or I'm liable to hate myself less. I'm not interested in hating myself less. I'm not interested in you hating yourself less. I'm interested in you knowing what I came to know only a few hours ago.

So sketch. It's hopeless. I know. Let me save you some hours. Draw an oval. Any oval. Does the oval look exactly like the outline of her face? No. Obviously. But it's a start. Darken the inner edge of the bottom of the oval. Does the oval look more like her? Less like her? Adjust accordingly. Keep darkening inner edges. Keep assessing. Keep adjusting. Somehow you will eventually end up with a shape that seems surprisingly right.

Now pick a facial feature. Maybe eyes. You're not an artist. I know. Neither am I. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because I just need you to point to the exact spot inside the oval where her right eye should go. You've got to know that, obviously.

It's hard. But you got the face shape eventually. Or you think you did. So you should try. Just point to the spot. Just point. With the pencil. If I managed it, you'll be able to manage it.

But did I actually say that I managed it? I'm pretty sure I didn't say that. I didn't say it because it didn't happen.

Try to realize what this means and let it really sink in. Try. I say "Try" because you're not going to realize what this means. What you're going to do is wonder what this means.

You're going to wonder what it can mean that the same brain that can picture Jay Fucking Leno or Don Fucking Knotts or Angelina Jolie or Justin Fucking Bieber is only capable of rendering her as some smudge in a haze of longing.

She accused you once of just loving the idea of her. But nobody had ever been more real to you, so the accusation seemed ridiculous. And now this.

You have never had a sewer rat lick you with the ardent, rhythmic persistence of a family dog. But just the thought nauseates you, and rat-lick nausea's back-of-the-throat scuttling is what you feel now. Without knowing why. Without really knowing what this whole Leno- Knotts-Jolie-Bieber-her syndrome adds up to. Knowing, though, that it is something novel and morale-wrecking and mercilessly survivable.

Everything seems to be mercilessly survivable. This, for example. It happened years ago, when I could have drawn her face. It is happening years ago, when I can draw her face. It is happening.

She has found me out. Or thinks she has. She does not see me seeing that she is setting a trap. She is among the new CDs. In the D section of the shop. I look away.

A moment before, she did something to a copy of Something About Airplanes. I don't know what. But it doesn't matter. I'm assuming it involves some kind of subtle identifying mark. If I wanted to avoid getting caught, the specifics of what she'd done to the CD would matter. I don't want to avoid getting caught.

What she is doing now is an equal mystery to me. As I said, I have looked away. This is not an easy thing to have done. She has made a starer of me. I am not a starer. I could have been. I would have been. But back when my unfurling teenage libido threatened to ruin me, Andrea Zilpop sat me down on a humming Kenmore dryer and made me watch "The Tao of Steve" on the TV/VCR her parents had installed in their laundry room.

Andrea had seen the movie at work, which for her in those days was Rain City Video in Fremont. She hoped the movie might somehow trump my testosterone and allow me to remain someone she could bear to stay friends with. Her plan was not crazy. There is, I dimly remember, some learn-a-lesson section of the movie. But that is not the lesson I learned. What stuck in my brain instead is one pillar of the obese, irresistible protagonist's mantra of seduction: "Be desireless."

Being desireless has worked. So I have stuck with being desireless. In every way.  I do not, for example, stare.

As I said, I have looked away.

I do not want to be looking away. My face tingles from the perverseness of looking away from Mali. Mali may be her real name. Or it may not. Maybe her east-of-the-mountains parents named her Molly and she has moved to Seattle and become Mali. I don't care. This isn't about her name. This isn't about her Value Village clothes. This isn't about her piercings. This isn't even about the seemingly extravagant breast tattoo that reveals its topmost sliver whenever she interrupts her clack-clack-clack perusal of our latest used CDs and arches her back.

I am an expert on what this is not about.

I balance a stack of CDs on my left palm. New CDs. Not truly new. Used, in fact. But new to us. Willy bought them. Sam priced them. Now I'm stocking them.

Somewhere in this stack is Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I know this because an imaginary Jeff Tweedy has been singing my favorite track inside my brain from the moment I picked up the stack. "… Tall buildings shake / Voices escape singing sad, sad songs …" Jeff just sang that.

Imaginary Jeff.

When I'm stocking, there is always a song in my head. And sometime during the course of stocking, I always discover that the disc that holds the song has been in my hands all along.

Somewhere in the stack. This has stopped freaking me out. It has stopped seeming mystical, beautiful, impressive, oppressive.

Someone is moving into my peripheral vision. Closer. Closer. Whoever this is, they are not Mali. Even out of the corner of my eye, the blur is all wrong. And they're getting close in a looming, intrusive way she never does.

"Uh, have you heard if …" He does not pause. The elipsis is mine. Because, hell, I just have to interrupt. Here, at least.

Even if not in real life.

Because it's so obvious what's going to happen here. It's time to play Stump the Record Store Guy. And, yes, I'm human. I'm stump-able. But not by this guy. I can tell that from his blur. I don't even have to look over at him. I can also tell his question is not real. He doesn't want an answer. He wants me to know that he knows stuff that he assumes I don't know. Fine, I'll let him talk.

"Uh, have you heard if Andrew Bird is going to put out a live CD of his '05 show at Doug Fir Lounge? I think it was like April. Yeah, April 9th. Best show I've ever been to, dude."

No it wasn't, I want to say. Because this guy was not at the show. Don't ask me how I know. I just do.

"Yeah, they say …"

This is the sure tipoff that all this comes directly off the Web. Which is cool. Just be straight about it.

"Yeah, they say it was his best performance ever of that Happy Birthday song."

This is nonsense, of course. I don't claim to know when Andrew Bird's best performance of the song happened. But I do know that he performed a purer, better version in Amsterdam nearly four years earlier.

"Man, I'd give anything to hear that show again," he continues.

This is where I almost snap. I want to tell him to go back to www.archive.org/details/ abird2005-04-09 if he wants to hear the show so badly. Because we both know that's where he heard it in the first place. Not live.

This guy is talking over imaginary Jeff Tweedy's singing to involve me in his charade of self- esteem building. I want it to end.

"Let's check something," I say, smiling as I lead him nowhere near the Andrew Bird section and straight to the Andrew W.K. section. I paw through the discs, looking in vain for a recording on which Andrew W.K. performed in Portland under the name Andrew Bird.

He snorts. This ingrown hair of a man snorts. He's not even going to call me out on my error. He knows he knows more than me now. This is all he came for. He can tell himself that this is why he buys all his music on iTunes. He's smarter than all of us. Nothing for him to learn here that he can't learn by consulting John Cusack's iTunes Celebrity Playlist and clicking "Buy All Songs." I mean, John played a record-store owner in a movie. So if John recommends fifteen tracks and two of them are by Gnarls Barkley, then it must be for a good reason. Right? Right.

"I'll take it from here," he says, shaking his head.

Good.

"Uh, OK?" I say, feigning bafflement. "Let me know if I can answer any more questions." This all feels so good. The hollowness of his swagger washes away all my annoyance. Stuff like this is what I'd miss if I quit. And Mali. I'd miss Mali, obviously.

She is finished with whatever trap she was setting for me in the New section. Unless someone else with a fake question intercepts me, I am about to be standing shoulder-to- shoulder with her in Used. She does the back-arching thing. I'm way too far away for a glimpse of tattoo. But still. Still.

I would pay to have someone competent take my picture right now. Because I sense that I have never looked happier. And I'd like to know what this feeling looks like. I'd like to hold a print of this moment in my hands when I'm very sad or very old.

Mali is doing something with her eyebrows. She is acting. It is bad acting. Bad, adorable acting designed to convey concentration. She is flipping through discs in the catchall section where we indiscriminately file all bands that start with D.

She exhales loudly. Loudly and adorably. Crap, I am so not desireless.

"Hey, Hilliam," she says, looking up while still doing the frustrated, focused thing with her eyebrows.

I should explain that I was Willie before I started working here. Willie Hill. But Willy already worked here. So I couldn't be Willie at work. When I refused to be Billy or Will or Bill – Will Hill?! Bill Hill?!! – it was Evan who cracked himself and everyone else up by blending my given name and last name. Hilliam. I'd become Hilliam. And that's who I am. Here in Ballard, at least.

My parents hate it. Obviously. But they live in Wallingford. In Wallingford, I'm still Willie.

"Hey, Hilliam," she says, doing the eyebrow thing. "I've been wanting Something About Airplanes. For weeks. Does anybody ever bring that in used or do people just hang on to it?"

"We see it sometimes. In this town, there's always at least one person swearing off Ben Gibbard."

"For serious?"

"You'd be amazed."

"Oh."

"Last week. No, two weeks ago. Dude comes in. He's got an empty kitty litter bag that he's filled up with every Death Cab record, every Postal Service record. He's got All-Time Quarterback. And he's growling."

"Growling?"

"Well, words. But he's growling the words," I say and yell out "Travesty!"

Sam is closest. He yells "Travesty!"

Willy hears. He yells "Travesty!" He pauses, stomps his foot, and hollers "Unconscionable!"

"Unconscionable!" Sam yells.

"Unconscionable," I tell Mali.

"Is there more?" she asks. "I don't want to clap between movements."

"But you do want to clap, right?"

"I want to know what's unconscionable."

"And what's a travesty."

"Yes, a travesty, too."

"'Cupid.' The guy downloaded some unreleased solo tracks by Chris Walla. On one, Walla covered 'Cupid' by Sam Cooke."

"Travesty!" Mali says.

"You've heard it?"

"No," she says. "I'm just being cooperative."

"Right."

"Active listening."

"Right."

"Anyway …"

"Anyway," I say. "This guy hates Walla's 'Cupid' cover so much that he decides to sell everything ever touched by Walla or by people who touched Walla."

"So you've got his copy of Something About Airplanes?"

"Never at the end of the month."

"What?"

"We sold it almost right away."

"Oh."

"We'll get another."

"OK, well, can we do the thing again?"

"Of course. I'll call you if we get it in."

"Used."

"Right. I'll call you if we get it in. When we get it in."

"Used."

"Used."

With everything but her arms, she moves to hug me. It's a kind of lurch. You can't hug without arms. So we don't hug.

"You're the best," she says instead.

I love that she knows what I'm about to do. I love that she set a trap. It hasn't occurred to me that she might find this whole thing creepy.

I mean, how can it be anything but endearing to discover that the guy at the record store perpetrates a lovelorn fraud every time you mention a CD you're hoping to find used? It will go like this: 1) Hilliam retrieves a new copy of the CD Mali wants; 2) Hilliam pays for this new CD in cash; 3) Hilliam removes the CD's clear wrapping; 4) Hilliam buys the CD back for the shop, screwing himself out of about ten bucks because the CD is now, technically, used; 5) Hilliam waits seventy-two hours before calling Mali to say that the CD she wanted has miraculously appeared.

Fifty-some hours later, she calls the shop.

"Hey," she says, sighing.

Just that. She's never called before.

"Mali?"

"Uh, yeah. Does that junkyard phone have caller ID?"

"I recognized your voice," I answer unstrategically.

"From me saying 'hey'?"

"You sighed, too."

"Shit," she says, laughing. "Am I the Sighing Girl of Ballard or something? Is this how everyone thinks of me?"

"Not that specific. Sighing Girl of Seattle is what people tend to say."

"Smartass! … Want to meet up for a cigarette break?"

"You smoke?" I blurt, glossing over this unprecedented non-retail-related overture and fixating on the seeming impossibility that a smoker could smell as nice as she does.

"No."

"Then why are we meeting for a cigarette break?"

"Don't you smoke?"

"Not since high school."

"Oh, I just figured all you guys did. The shop smells a little like my grandpa's overcoat."

"Noooooooooooooo," I say, as if this truth stings badly.

She laughs. But this moment is slipping away. I slap at my pockets. I detect packaging.

"Lemonheads!" I say.

"What?"

"I've got Lemonheads. We could do …"

I'm looking around to see if anyone is within earshot.

"Do what?" she asks.

"Sorry, we could do a Lemonhead break. Are you down?"

"Lemonheads? Hell yeah, I'm down," she says. "Meet me like halfway?"

"Halfway like skatepark halfway or like kitchen-store halfway?"

"Kitchen store," she says.

We hang up.

The little guitar riff that opens "Portions For Foxes" is chiming out of the shop's speakers.

This is a coded message. What we mean when we play this song or any of the ten other tracks on Rilo Kiley's 2004 release is that we knew the sound of Jenny Lewis singing long before a National Public Radio review of her solo album introduced her to the ears of every amiable Dockers-wearer within range of Terry Gross's voice.

I yell to Willy that I'm going on break. He looks quizzical. So I pantomime smoking a cigarette. His eyebrows rise, signaling comprehension, and he waves goodbye. I walk out, striding west on Market just as Jenny Lewis sings me a warning: "the talking leads to touching / and the touching leads to sex / and then there is no mystery left."

This is not what I want to hear as I walk to meet up with Mali, hoping that the talking will lead to touching and the touching will lead to sex. Not what I want to hear at all.

So, reflexively, I play a song in my brain. Not just any song. And not even a whole song. Just the opening lyrics to a song from Jenny's bandmates' side project: "Well she gets real mean when she's drunk. / And she finally fell asleep and I'm glad. / She said, 'The only way you got as far is you did / is 'cause of me. Your songs suck.' " I've always wondered if those lyrics are about Jenny. Now, for convenience, I've decided to decide that they are definitely about her. I willfully black out the second verse where the mean drunk – whoever she is -- recants and apologizes.

Heedless now, I walk past the shoe boutique that used to be a rubber-stamp store and the booming restaurant/bar that used to be a failed restaurant.

No song plays in my head now. A rare relief.  I hear a Vespa start. I hear a clang. It's the type of clang made after a successful wallop of one of those smack-a-lever-with-a-hammer contraptions they erect in the feats-of-strength section of county fairs. This particular clang is synchronized with the Walk part of the mid-block Walk/Don’t Walk indicator. With its blessing, I now cross Market.

Continuing west, I pass the kids' boutique Mon Petit Shoe that used to be a friendly, long-in- the-tooth toy store, the yoga studio that used to be a Hallmark shop, the furniture store that used to be a competing record store, and the Puerto Rican restaurant that used to be an Australian restaurant that used to be the eastern part of the now-shrunken kitchen store.

Kitchen 'N Things is closed for the night. Mali has not noticed me yet. Her face is pressed against the store's front window, peering at something green.

I find myself wishing I were famous, wishing some paparazzi would leap from the shadows.

Though I'm not smiling, I sense that I look as happy as I feel. Again, I wish for a photograph that I could hold up and compare with every future joy. Is this pessimism, optimism, premonition? I stop my footsteps and watch Mali for a good fifteen seconds before calling out her name.

She does not turn to me right away. She peers a moment longer, seeming to say a kind of goodbye to whatever merchandise it is that she's coveting.

"Ah," she says, instead of greeting me. "I love Kitchen Uhnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn Things."

I can't honestly tell if she's mocking the store's middle "'N" or cooing it like a loved one's nickname. I don't care. Either way, it strikes me as adorable. Anything she says drives me deeper in love.

"What were you leering at, lady?" I ask.

"Brushes. Silicone brushes."

"Don't you guys sell brushes?"

"Sure. Housewares. Aisle three. But not like these. Not silicone."

I don't know what to say. She goes on. Very earnestly.

"Plus, they're 100-percent recycled material. They're made from old fake boobs."

I nod without really registering what she's said.

"Are you serious?" I ask, regaining my common sense.

"Horribly serious," she says, giggling. "Dour. Humorless. Can't you tell?"

"Smartass," I say, reaching up and giving her left arm a gentle tap. "Let's get very, very serious here. How goeth your shift, fair maiden?"

"Goeth?"

"I don't know. I'm just making stuff up. How's your shift going?"

"Fine. The usual bizarreness. I just had two customers start bad-mouthing each other at the checkout. Freaks."

"What happened?"

"Well, we've got like two weeks left at the store before they tear it down to build the bigger, better store with the stacks of condos on top," she says, pausing to make some kind of crazy jazz hands that I take as a signal she finds the whole "bigger, better" thing to be bullshit. "Anyway, this woman pays for her stuff and starts chatting with me about where I'll be transferred during construction. Turns out, she knows my new store. I say that I've heard everyone's mean to each other there. She tells me, in this well-meaning-slash-excruciating detail, everything she knows about the nice people who work there. She also gives me advice. Career advice. Life advice.

Meanwhile, I'm ringing up some semi-older dude with a twelve-pack of Bud. The first woman does not stop talking. The dude keeps glancing back and forth between me and the woman.

Mostly, looking at me, though. Finally he leans in toward me and says, 'I think she likes you.' I pretend not to hear. Because like what, what am I supposed to do? Join in? Give him a little giggle? Help him slam this lonely, sweet woman who is so intent on being nice to me that she will not leave me the hell alone while I try to do my job? No. No. I won't. So I ignore him.

"And that should be the end of it. But as he walks past the woman with his beer, he says, 'Why don't you just leave her alone? She's not interested.' Now, the sweet woman stops being sweet. It's go time, man. She's like, 'Why don't you back off? Go home and drink your Budweiser and mind your own damn business.' "But she gathers up her plastic bags and heads for the door, where they go off on each other a little more. I manage to tune that part out. But now I've got the rest of the line to deal with.

The next guy is this mumbler. So, you know, he mumbles something. I say, 'What?' He says, 'I feel so low-maintenance all of a sudden' and glances over at Advice Lady and Budweiser Prick.

And, of course, he's low-maintenance by comparison. And that would have been totally great if he hadn't felt the need to point it out. Still, I say, 'You are low-maintenance and I appreciate that.' Luckily, he doesn't stick around to chat. He just takes his strawberries and his Odwalla and gets out of my life."

I tell Mali, "Oh my god. You're way too nice. I don't know how you can deal with people like that."

I say this. But it's not what I mean. I mean something more. I have a whole theory about this.

The theory goes like this: In all the world of retail, the most exhausting thing a woman can be is sexy and nice. Nobody girl-chats with mean and sexy. Nobody flirts with plain and nice. And pretty much every kind of customer just wants to flee from mean and plain. But sexy and nice? You get everybody. You get everybody who wants to see you naked. You get everybody who wants a friend. It is endless. And retail is already endless.

But I don't say any of this. Because what makes me any less weird than Mali's customers if I use her crappy-shift story as a clumsy excuse for telling her I think she's sexy? Better to impersonate a friend right now. Better to save telling her she's sexy for some dizzy, panting, half-dressed moment in our hypothetical shared future.

What words should pass through my lips if I manage to wipe away this smile? I simply don't know.

"You make me smile," I finally say since it is true.

"That's just because I'm too nice," she teases.

"No, it's in spite of that. Nice people make me frown. Every last one of them."

"Until now?"

"Until now."

"You're so full of shit."

I smile yet wider. She smiles, too.

This continues. Continues for longer than I want to document here, for longer than anyone would want to read. I remember every word, every gesture, every crumbly nibble of the cupcake we share down the street, every last expansion of my smile.

****

The film was trickier than the battery. My hands and the film and the inner workings of my neglected Canon needed to collaborate. They did, eventually. I thumb-flicked the lever to advance the film. I clicked the shutter release. Thumb-flick. Click. Thumb-flick. Click. Thumb- flick. I was ready.

The 16 I boarded is a southbound bus. But first it goes west. It drives along 45th until it reaches Stone Way. This is one of the vivid intersections of my acne years. Here stood the closest McDonald's to my house. It had a drive-thru. Very convenient. I knew people who went there.

But I disliked all of them. My loose confederation of friends always made the walk – and later the drive – east to Dick's drive in, where we could dine without the nuisance of chairs, tables, or even walls.

For reasons that seem, well, petty to me now, each of us would raise a middle finger whenever we passed that McDonald's at Stone and 45th. So the teenage me would have certainly flipped me off as the 16 turned left on Stone and I found myself missing the McDonald's and resenting the condos that had risen in its place.

The 16 goes south on Stone and jogs diagonally to the southwest before merging its way onto the Aurora Bridge. In some unremembered year when I was not yet a grownup and, therefore, still impressionable, a bus like this one fell from this towering bridge. A guy named Silas Cool shot the driver and then himself. I've harbored a gut-level uneasiness about this bridge and about people named Silas ever since. The closer I get to my own natural death the more it shames me that I don't remember the names of the murdered driver or the one passenger who died in the fifty-foot plunge.

This forgetting didn't trouble me at all that day on the 16. The uneasiness eclipsed all other thoughts. What power we all held. How powerless we all were. Any of us could pull a pistol and, for reasons known only to ourselves, change – or even end – the lives of dozens of strangers. There would be no stopping it. So I averted my eyes from the driver and from all the possible catalysts of my death.

I stared out the window toward the shrouded Cascades and twisted a ring on my AE-1's lens, compulsively changing the size of hole that light would pass through if I took a picture.

And so it is that my first shot that day was radically overexposed. The resulting photo – of the front end of a climbing seaplane that seems to just barely clear the bridge's railing – is more striking, more beautiful that anything I would have shot on purpose. I wouldn't know this until I got the film developed. Even then, I would need to shoot five more rolls before understanding the error that gave me this treasured image. It would take another dozen rolls before I could replicate the effect more or less at will.

I shot nothing when we passed the Space Needle. I shot nothing downtown when I got off to transfer to a 174. Nothing as we passed the home of the Mariners, the Seahawks.

I traveled with the camera pressed to my eye as we neared Boeing Field. But the overcast sky had suddenly switched from being a veil filtering the sun to being a shroud. This mid- morning dusk made the camera useless. Even using the widest opening in the lens, I would have had to expose the film to light for one-eighth of a second. Such a small sliver of a second is actually a long time in the world of photography. It is a fatally long amount of time when you're shooting from a moving vehicle. Unless you happen to know enough to pan the camera and keep the lens pointed toward whatever passing object you're shooting. That's when things can get interesting. Spectacularly interesting. But, as you may sense already, the only spectacularly interesting photographs I could make at this point were accidental.

So I'd only shot that lone photo from the bridge by the time the bus pulled over on East Marginal Way long enough for me to get off at my stop. This put me in the city of Tukwila, essentially across the street from the Museum of Flight. I intended to throw down the $14 to go inside. It was my whole reason for riding the bus this far. But I got detoured. In all my family and field-trip visits to this place, I'd never noticed that the outdoor airplane display was plainly visible – even to deadbeats standing outside the fence, especially to deadbeats with long lenses on their cameras. Turning my back to the wind, I removed my normal lens and replaced it with a zoom lens that allowed me to get closer to the airplanes without getting closer to the airplanes.

****

We are at Besalu. Mali and me. She got the table. I got the coffee and pastries. It's not busy. A rarity. And this is a relief. Because I didn't have to stress that we might have radically different approaches to getting a table in an overstuffed café. I'm of the laughably civil school of table- getting: literally, ask every person ahead of you in line if they need a table before taking one.

Mali might believe in the more standard, snake-a-table-as-soon-as-you-see-one-and-screw- everybody-else approach. If so, I am not ready to know this. I'd be willing to tolerate it. But unlike so much else, it's not the sort of thing I could manage to see as an adorable quirk.

"Oh, they look so good," Mali says, reaching for the plate of pastries that I'm just about to set down.

"You've seriously never been here?" I ask.

"No, this is my first time above 58th Street."

"Wow."

"Don't you ever have that? Streets you just don't cross? Whole parts of neighborhoods you don't bother to explore?"

I think about this. She talks.

"You think I'm lame," she says.

"No. Not at all. I was just thinking about what you said."

She nods.

"When I was growing up in Wallingford, there was this McDonald's …"

She is nodding furiously. I realize what's going on.

"Please, go ahead and start eating," I say. "You don't have to wait until I get done talking."

She smiles. Not at me. At her ginger biscuit. She takes a bite. She stops chewing, stops moving – the way you might if you were about to spit out something unexpectedly rancid. She closes her eyes. She swoons. Literally swoons.

"Amazing, isn't it?" I say.

She resumes chewing, swallows, reopens her eyes.

"Oh my god," she whispers, slapping the table with both palms and making Jurassic Park ripples in our coffees. "I could have kept that bite in my mouth for the rest of my life."

"Amazing, huh?" I say, realizing as the words leave my mouth that this is essentially the same thing I said less than a minute ago.

"Uh, yeah," she says.

She swivels, looks back toward the kitchen.

"Does he make these right here?" she asks, jerking her head toward a dark-haired man who's loading some kind of dough onto both sides of an ancient-looking scale. With a big knife, he slices a hunk from the left pile of dough and drops it on the right pile. The scale falls into balance.

"Yeah, him and two other people. But it's his place," I say.

"Would it be inappropriate to run into the kitchen and hug him?"

"Probably," I say, laughing hard until I start to wonder whether the little artistic venture I'm about to unveil would stand a better chance of shining in some other café, some place without its own resident culinary master.

I'd planned on offering Mali a taste of my croissant at this point. But that would be an impossible act to follow. I push myself. If I just say the words, I'll have to go ahead and do it.

"Hey, let me show you something I've been wanting to show you," I say, sliding a Ballard Camera envelope from the pocket of my jacket.

There are three more envelopes just like this one on my bed at home. They are thicker envelopes. This thinner one holds what I consider to be the eight presentable images from my four rolls.

"Come on. What is it?" she coaxes, noticing the hesitation I thought I'd managed to hide.

I've given a lot of thought to what comes next. Just hand her the envelope? No, seems almost apologetic. Hand her the images one at a time? Too controlling. Instead, I've decided to lay the images out. Three columns of two, topped by the remaining two photos. Why? Don't know. But this is what I've decided.

I put down the first two pictures. A smile – so full, so deep, so reassuring – takes over Mali's face. It animates me. I lay out the six remaining photos with the flourish of an overcompensating tarot reader. My chair is now meaningless. I am an idiot marionette, dangling, waiting for her reaction.

She's deliberate. Each image gets a long, careful look. I become aware that I'm sweating. I breathe fast. Then faster.

Please. Say. Something.

"Did you download these?"

"No," I say a bit too enthusiastically. "I took these."

"Who did you take them from?" she says, holding a hand to her aghast mouth.

She is messing with me. She knows what I meant. I know she is messing with me. I know she knows what I meant. But I am so keyed up that I start to defend myself.

"IdidnttakethemfromanybodyI," I blurt.

She lowers the hand from her mouth. It has been hiding a smile, that same smile. I breathe again. I am ready.

"I took these," I say. "With my camera."

She stares at me.

"You've never told me you were a photographer."

"I'm not."

And I take a deep breath because I'm about to flay myself.

"There's something about you, Mali. You just make me want to make things."

She squints at me.

"To create things, you know. For once. Instead of just talking shit, you know."

She squints tighter. The eyes close now. But a tear leaks from each eye.

Her left hand slides across the tabletop. I put my hand on top of it. We stay that way. While I'm not totally sure what has just happened, I know that it is powerful, and I sense that it is powerfully good.

****

Arranged in the same pattern but in a different order, the photos are now Scotch-taped to the wall next to Mali's futon. I wake to find her looking at them.

"I have a new favorite," she says.

"Oh?"

"Yeah, this one," she says, jerking her head in the direction of all of the photos.

She can't point. Her arms are around me, encircling my left shoulder, my neck, my right armpit. We went to sleep this way. I can't decide what would mean more to me: us having held this position all night or Mali having chosen to recreate it as soon as she woke up. This is another one of those endearing-either-way choices.

"I'm sorry, Armless Lady," I say, straining to kiss her neck. "I'm having trouble seeing where you're pointing. You're going to have to describe your new favorite photo."

I am expecting it to be that first photo I took, the one of the seaplane cresting the Aurora Bridge on its takeoff from Lake Union. Its accidental overexposure makes it unique among these eight photos. Also, I'm disinclined to admire any photo that I made on purpose. I still feel incompetent. Incompetent but strangely helpless to resist the urge to keep creating. So my camera is here by the bed. There's a new roll of film in it. The camera has a self-timer. I could set it on Mali's bookcase and photograph us right now.

I don't.

I didn't.

I never did.

She releases her hold on me and slides her left hand down my chest. She retrieves my right hand, brings it to her mouth, and kisses it before delicately folding everything but my index finger in toward my palm. She guides my hand until my index finger is pointing squarely at the blurriest photo of the bunch. Shot from below and slightly off to the right, it shows the nose and two cockpit windows of a commercial jet.

"Really?!" I marvel.

"Yeah. It reminds me of a clown's face."

"Hmmm," I say and then stare at it until the plane's nose becomes a clown nose and the two windows of the cockpit become the clown's eyes. "OK. Yeah. Clown face. Got it."

We're quiet until I say, "It's funny. You can't see it in black and white, obviously. But the part that looks like a clown nose was painted a total clown-nose red.

"I believe it," she says.

Her arms are back around me.

"I have to say, I'm surprised that's your favorite. You seriously like it more than the really similar one that's in better focus?"

"Seriously. That one looks like a plane – not a clown."

"Didn't realize you have such a thing for clowns."

She laughs, gives me this tender headbutt. I expect banter along the lines of "Well, I'm lying in bed with a clown." But she must not want banter. So I retrace our conversational steps.

"I'm trying to figure out what it means that I set out to take pictures of airplanes and your favorite airplane picture makes you think of a clown."

"Don't think about it too much," she says. "The clown thing is just a tiny part of it. I'd like it without the clown thing. What I like most is that the picture looks like a mistake."

"You like it because it looks like a mistake?"

"I like it because it looks like a mistake. But mostly I like it because I don't think it's really a mistake. Of all of these, it's the one that looks most like you were pushing yourself, reaching for something. And I guess only you know if you actually reached what you were reaching for. But whatever. I like that you trusted me to look at it. I like that you trusted me to see past the blurriness."

"I almost didn't show you that one."

"And maybe that's what I mean. This is the one that stopped you. This is the one where you needed to decide what this was all about, whether you were going to show me some flawless, boring-ass pictures or whether you were going to show me you."

"What's weird to me," I say slowly, "is that I'm showing you a me that didn't exist a week ago."

"Well then maybe what you're showing me is us."

It is a flat, detached, factual statement. I try to catch my breath.

I can't.

I couldn't.

I never could.

[davidquigg]

I told my friend I’d make her a compilation of all the versions I could find of Hamlet and Horatio meeting in 1.2.

So here’s that. Just 3 minutes and 17 seconds of Hamlet and Horatio being Happy To See Each Other.

[davidquigg]

These are weird times for a Cold War kid like me. Right-wingers shrugging off Russian infiltration got me thinking about Red Dawn (1984).

A quick tour of the movie’s Wikipedia entry led to a passing mention that seemed too silly to be real: “Cuban Colonel Bella instructs the KGB to go to a local sporting goods store and obtain the records of the store’s gun sales on the ATF’s Form 4473, which lists citizens who have purchased firearms.”

So I streamed the movie, fast-forwarded a bit, and damn if it isn’t right there.

Fever dreams aren’t new. The commies were parachuting into Colorado and America’s Achilles’ heel turned out to be that the Feds required gun-buyers to fill out a form.

[davidquigg]

The gay couples erased from a classic Seattle history

Decades before Stonewall, deep in the murk of the Depression, a University of Washington grad student infiltrated the Hooverville homeless encampment on Seattle’s waterfront, encountered “rampant” homosexuality, and got the following offer from one of his gentleman neighbors:

“If you live with me I’ll treat you fine and get you a good job later when I get mine back. I always get my boys jobs and they always come to amount to something.”

I found this story of a quid pro quo in the 1935 master’s thesis of Donald Francis Roy, who would go on – presumably without his suitor’s help – to become a Duke University sociology professor. Roy described his suitor as a man “who sought to win the writer’s favor after the loss of a former male paramour.”

His thesis sketched Hooverville’s sexual realities like this:

“Homosexuality is undoubtedly rampant. Women may be scarce, but there is certainly no dearth of fellow-men. While most of the ‘natives’ would be loathe to confess such a stigmatizing relationship, several make no pretense of concealing their ‘marital’ status.”

Roy documented a “Negro, who had wooed and won a white lad, turned out indeed to be a good provider, but insisted that his 'wife’ perform a few household duties, and from this demand there arose a domestic discord that ended in tragedy. After months of wrangling over the question of who should sweep out the shack, during which time the place accumulated more and more dirt and rubbish, the white boy turned upon his nagging 'husband’ with a revolver and shot him.”

To find Roy’s teeming thesis, as I did, by sitting in my house and downloading scans of typewritten pages almost a decade older than my parents, is to appreciate that we live in a golden age for couch-potato curiosity. History literally awaits us.

In 1998, back when I first moved to Seattle, I read a classic local history, Skid Road by Murray Morgan. One snippet from the book stuck in my mind ever since: “Mr. Roy had as neighbors 632 men and 7 women. The men ranged in age from fifteen (a young homosexual) to seventy-three (a destitute physician) …”

Morgan made no other mentions of homosexuality at Hooverville. Morgan cited a research paper full of gay people and gave readers only one gay person. He left out the men I mentioned above. He left out an offer Roy got to “stay with me and I’ll hustle you all the food you can eat. I’ll bring you chickens, pork chops, oranges or anything you want.” He certainly left out Hooverville’s “undoubtedly rampant” gayness.

All those omissions may explain why Morgan’s “fifteen (a young homosexual)” stuck with me. I found the four words — and the life story they implied — incomplete and therefore compelling. What did it mean, in 1930s America, to be a homeless gay teenager? Was he out to his Hooverville neighbors? Did they hurt him? Did they tease him? Did they pool their pennies to hire a bargain-basement prostitute to turn him straight?

In 2010, a full dozen years after I read the book the first time, I finally returned to it and found that Morgan’s source for “fifteen (a young homosexual)” was Roy’s “Hooverville A Study of a Community of Homeless Men in Seattle.” With absurd ease, Google spirited me to a University of Washington website and an occasionally illegible scan of Roy’s thesis. I found what I take to be the kid on page 42. He’s 16, not 15.

Roy wrote, “The youngest resident encountered by the investigator was a white boy of sixteen, who dwelt for several months in connubial felicity with a man of fifty-three.”

Maybe Roy’s turn of phrase — “connubial felicity” — is exactly right. I’m left to hope so. Because my first thought of a boy or girl mired in a Depression-era shantytown as the sexual partner of a man 37 years older feels more bleak than blissful, more opportunistic than connubial. Roy, in fact, describes the boy as a “chronic adulterer” and tells the story of how “he was caught in the act one day by an outraged spouse and promptly divorced.” Roy writes, “the lad left the community immediately.” To where? To what? To whom? Roy doesn’t say.

But at least Roy gave us more than the skeletal facts of "fifteen (a young homosexual).” And I wonder, since the boy would be roughly the same age as my nimble Nana* who still volunteers every Tuesday at the public library, if he’s out there somewhere mocking the actuarial odds. Failing that, it’s both thrilling and daunting to know that more of his story — and that entire community’s story — might be out there, somewhere.

———— 

* My grandmother died during the almost six years since I wrote this and set it aside. I mention that only as a way of saying that time has passed, and I haven’t gotten around to doing what I really want to do: go to Tacoma, look through Murray Morgan’s papers, and see if he ever wrote a draft of Skid Road that didn’t erase Hooverville’s gay people.

I’m posting this now because this week The Stranger published “Books About Seattle That Everyone Should Read” and Skid Road is on the list. Eli Sanders put it on there. He also recommended a book called Gay Seattle, which might conceivably tell me everything I want to know about this. I’ll add it to my list, but first I’ll be reading Eli’s own book, which comes out Tuesday.

[davidquigg]

Today’s NYT front page: a little context about “Seattle’s shrine to defiance”

A house in my neighborhood is on the on the front page of the New York Times today. For what it’s worth, here are photos I shot of the house and its surroundings in April and September of 2006, before developers paved paradise and put up a parking lot and a Trader Joe’s and an L.A. Fitness.

These photos are probably a Rorschach that will validate anyone’s pre-conceived ideas about whether it was noble or crazy to refuse to sell and move out. That’s fine. Just figured I’d give some context.

This 2008 Seattle Times column gives context that’s before my time here in Ballard: “The tiny house in the industrial flats once was part of a row of picket-fence-lined cottages along a working-class street.”

[davidquigg]

I'd like to move into one of these or spend even more time photographing them. Timea Tihanyi at Linda Hodges.

[davidquigg]

He names his photo -- a green floor, a yellow wall, a white baseboard, a pair of Mary Janes with heel enough to hint at good trouble -- "where Mom left her shoes." A truer title might be "where Dad left Mom's shoes" or "how Dad forbid any of us to move Mom's shoes" or "grief freezes" or "Dad froze" or "how a skidding station wagon jumped a curb and turned the pulsing movie of my pulsing childhood into a pulseless snapshot" or "slick, bare feet on a dewy lawn" or "would Mom have been able to dodge that fucking station wagon if she'd had her shoes on?" or "could Dad have thawed someday if Mom had died wearing those shoes instead of leaving them on a green floor by a yellow wall three strides from our kitchen counter?" or "why did she have to be out there in the rain?" or "would it have killed her to go a day without weeding?" or "nobody ever weeded again" or "vines strangled her marigolds" or "saving her marigolds by weeding every day might have saved us" or "weeding is a saner way to honor a gardener's life than forbidding motherless children from moving a pair of shoes" or "soil might have healed us" or "we never healed" or "does any language use the word 'orphan' for a motherless boy whose father might as well be dead?" or "the possibly irrational fear that a rambunctious friend would trip over the shoes and knock them across the green floor is the reason the orphan never invited any friends inside ever again" or "the possibly irrational fear that a girlfriend would say 'cute shoes!' and pick the shoes up is the reason the orphan never invited a girlfriend over" or "the shoes were just a symptom" or "the only person I'd bring into the mausoleum formerly known as our home is a person I wanted to scare away" or "I never wanted to scare anyone away" or "girlfriends went away anyway" or "the universe doesn't care that your mother is dead. expect to lose again and again" or "when Lisa dumps you for a varsity benchwarmer, you will hold your head high so as to not notice what shoes she's wearing" or "shoes imprison" or "sacred objects" or "the ugliest scene you will ever see in the mausoleum is tear-streaked Grace, three years your elder, screaming 'Dad, if you can't even care enough about life to come to my graduation, I swear to God I'll throw these shoes in the river'" or "Dad skipped graduation" or "Grace didn't throw the shoes in the river because the shoes were back at the mausoleum and she wasn't ever going back there" or "Grace must have known Dad would skip graduation because she packed all her clothes and stuff in her Chevette before she drove me to school to hear her give her valedictorian speech" or "Grace's speech didn't mention Mom's shoes or Mom or Dad or the past or even the present" or "Grace lived for the future" or "'shut up! sorry. just be quiet, Jimmy. just please be quiet.' is what Grace said whenever I started to say, 'Gracie, remember how Mom used to dance to that super-fast song called …'" or "Grace was still in her graduation cap when she hugged me goodbye, pointed the Chevette south, and didn't let the engine cool until she finally found a town with low enough rents and fat enough waitressing tips to get herself a basement apartment with a little flowerbed outside" or "shoes are no substitute for a sister."

[davidquigg]

In which I get over myself and decide it's OK to crop a photo I shot with my Nikon.

[davidquigg]

28 degrees.

[davidquigg]

HOW REQUESTING SOME LESS REDACTED HEMINGWAY FILES FROM THE FBI LED ME TO GOOGLE "HARLOW SHAPLEY ACE UP HIS SLEEVE"

Months ago, maybe longer now, the FBI responded to my request that they revisit their Hemingway file and, hopefully, conclude that they don't need to redact quite so much of it. The bureau pointed me to this 122-page file, which is part of the really pretty amazing archive at http://vault.fbi.gov.

Life got busy -- and fun, frankly. So I let the updated file launguish, thinking I'd get to it any day. Today (after waking from an exhilarating dream about being a reporter again) I decided to give myself the gift of a journalismish activity. So I read the Hemingway file. Rather, I compared it with the previous version of the file, which formed the basis for the Hemingway chapter in Herbert Mitgang's 1988 book Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors.

Whole paragraphs and pages are newly visible in the updated Hemingway file. But the FBI continues to redact the page that I wrote about here. That's disappointing. I'd still like to know who, presumably at the Mayo Clinic, was talking to the FBI about Hemingway's ostensibly confidential hospitalization for serious mental and physical problems.

My first read suggests that the updated file is not so useful to those interested in new Hemingway information but a potential boon for anyone interested in Gustavo Duran. He's the focus of the bulk of the newly available material in the Hemingway file. I know almost nothing about Duran, so I'm just throwing his name out here in the hopes that someone with an interest in him has set up a Google Alert triggered by mentions of his name.

I did a bit of research on Duran this morning. Maybe I'll return to it. But I ended up being at least temporarily more curious about other material on the same page as a 3/15/50 NYT report about Duran denying claims he was a Communist.

There's a brief about the death sentence imposed on a man who wanted to kill his wife and decided that dynamiting a Canadian Pacific Air flight carrying his wife and 22 strangers would be a good way to make that happen. In 1949!

Then, on the same page, there's an item labeled "Astronomer Says He Has 'Ace Up His Sleeve'." It deals with Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, who denied "charges by Senator McCarthy that he was a member of numerous Communist front organizations." It includes:

The astronomer said that he had "an ace up my sleeve" if the Senator did become specific in his accusation. He then added that "if it comes to a fight, I shall speak out strongly and fearlessly." He did not elaborate on the "ace" he professed to hold.

And so that's how I came to Google "harlow shapley ace up his sleeve." The search led to a snippet from an oral history, which "may not be quoted, reproduced or redistributed in whole or in part by any means except with the written permission" of People Who Put Interesting Stuff On The Internet And Tell Other People Not To Quote It.

The interviewer says "I’m curious to know what was the ace up your sleeve. Or was this just a bluff?"

Shapley answers: "I don’t know. It sounds like a bluff. I don’t remember what that referred to, there was a good deal of tumbling around."

The same "harlow shapley ace up his sleeve" Google search also turned up this, which is less germane but more interesting:

According to Dr. Shapley, he and Frost met at an annual faculty get-together during one of Frost's stints as poet-in-residence at Harvard. Frost sought Shapley out, tugged at his sleeve--figuratively, if not literally--and said something like, "Now, Professor Shapley. You know all about astronomy. Tell me, how is the world going to end?" [1] Taken aback by this unconventional approach, Shapley assumed Frost was joking. The two of them chatted for a few moments, but not about the end of the world. Then they each became involved in conversations with other people and were soon in different parts of the room. But a while later, Frost sought out Shapley again and asked him the same question. "So," said Shapley to his audience in 1960, "I told him that either the earth would be incinerated, or a permanent ice age would gradually annihilate all life on earth." Shapley went on to explain, as he had earlier explained to Frost, why life on earth would eventually be destroyed by fire or ice.

"Imagine my surprise," Shapley said, "when just a year or two later, I ran across this poem." He then read "Fire and Ice" aloud. He saw "Some say" as a reference to himself--specifically to his meeting with Frost at that gathering of Harvard faculty. "This personal anecdote," Shapley concluded, "illustrates one of the many ways in which scientific knowledge can influence the creation of a work of art and also elucidate the meaning of that work of art."

And here's Frost's poem.

[davidquigg]

Patrick and I have gone “screen free” around Bean. That means we aren’t checking our phones or looking at our iPads around him. I was beginning to feel like he saw us online too much. It began to seem like the only thing we did, especially since I rarely open the novel I’m reading around him...

[davidquigg]

"… this resolute determination to meet 1950 head-on was a kind of refuge."

- Didion. This whole passage. So so SO damn good.

[davidquigg]

Two passages from Malamud's "A New Life" (1961) that especially grabbed me today.

[davidquigg]

These are the least unintelligible of the many no-look, deliberately overlong, every-ten-seconds photos I shot on a walk from Piazza San Marco to Zattere last Tuesday. Sloppy as they are, they really do capture my experience of our walk and of that beautifully delusional/hypocritical touristic itch to flee places packed with a bunch of damn tourists.

[davidquigg]

"… said one senior FORMER prosecutor who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak for the Justice Department." Come on, NYT. I just don’t buy that there’s general confusion out there in the world about whether former employees are the officially authorized voice of their former employers. So the “spoke on the condition of anonymity because …" rationale feels hollow. Hollow words make my faith in a story go all wobbly. Moving on.

[davidquigg]

You don’t write as a writer, you write as a man—a man with a certain hard-earned skill in the use of words, a particular, and particularly naked, consciousness of human life, of the human tragedy and triumph—a man who is moved by human life, who cannot take it for granted. Donne was speaking of all this when he told his congregation not to ask for whom the bell tolls. His learned listeners thought he was speaking as a divine—as a stoic. He was speaking from his poet’s heart: He meant that when he heard the bell he died. It’s all in Keats’s letters—that writer’s bible which every young man or woman with this most dangerous of lives before him should be set to read. Keats is already a poet in these letters—he is certain, in spite of the reviewers, that he will be among the English poets at his death. But they are not the letters of a poet. They are the letters of a boy, a young man, who will write great poems. Who never postures. Who laughs at himself and who, when he holds his dying brother in his arms, thinks of his dying brother, not the pathos of the scene. You can put it down, I think, as gospel that a self-advertising writer is always a self-extinguished writer.

- from the how-should-a-person-be section of Archibald MacLeish, The Art of Poetry No. 18 in the Paris Review

[davidquigg]

Steve Davis's "Back to the Garden" at Jim Harris Gallery in Seattle.