Take the Bridge and Feed the Beast

So my knee is pretty bad and I may have torn something because the leg isn't working right. But I got tired of sitting around on my ass so I went out for coffee and conversation tonight and then I went to a punk/ska/oi show in Lowell. Funny about Lowell: there was another punk/ska/oi show in the city but I preferred the one I went to because I liked the sound guy. He was in a band with the ex-husband of the girl I loved who was killed about two years ago. He asked me to buy him a beer tonight. He still uses a picture I took of him, years ago, as his facebook pic and he talked about it to me. He told me he doesn't want to take it down. This means a lot to me in that I have to wrestle to preserve memories of those times, and to keep the continuity between the old self and the broken self, and, well, yeah . . . it makes me happy in its own melancholy way.

The rain was slight, a drizzle, and the bands sang about America, oi oi oi. And I texted a few friends, old and new. And the rain insisted. And I'd gone all day and had only eaten a pork chop, because I'm trying to push things, but I gave up and left the show and drove to McDonalds, where the man through the intercom told me that the late night menu didn't include Big Macs but that he could do up a Quarter Pounder in the style of a Big Mac so I okayed that and got into a long line and opened up the perfumed copy of my Dashiel Hammett novel. There had been pretty girls at the show tonight, but they all seemed to be dating guys in the bands. The rain fell harder and I found an empty parking lot and sat there, eating my sandwich and finishing up the chapter.

*

The rain came down and my knee gave out. I walked through the rain with my knee buckling and threatening to collapse at odd angles. The drops of rain were suffused with city lights and I decided to drive fast over the bridge on the way home, if only because normally I drive slowly and, like I said before, I wanted to push things.

The beer had been cheap. There was a guy there with a "Strike first" tattoo on his back, a friend of a friend, and he told me about how he normally carried a piece, but one time he didn't, that one time, and he he got into an altercation in the streets of New Hampshire and someone cracked his skull with a pipe. After that, he couldn't drink water for six months, because the doctors were worried that the water would expand his brain and cause his skull fracture to rupture. When they finally told him he could drink water he downed a pint of Fuji and then went out into his garage and, for the first time in six months, drank a beer.

All this made me happy. I was in good company. The girls around me had nice hair but were distant, and I looked at them, and listened to the stories.

And the rain fell in a fine mist, which, if you took care to notice, was illumined pink and blue and white by street lamps and neon and by the lights over the bridge over the Merrimac.