My Baby Takes The Morning Train

He has a reputation to uphold. He has been deemed a great writer by many, and his friends go to him for book suggestions and to decode the meaning of films. He majored in English. He writes poetry. He turns everything he encounters into a simile, and lives as if he were the metaphor. He keeps some of the hippest novels and philosophy books that young people love in his bag at all times. He's reading Murakami right now.

But to him, the world's best can-we-be-sure-if-he-is-really-a-good-guy-or-a-bad-guy protagonist is the long, skinny blue block. His highest drama is Tetris.

Pumpkinhead Revisited

A man with a long toggle coat, dark jeans, and a pumpkinhead jogged across 3rd Avenue with his bulldog and pressed his face against the glass of Sal’s Groceries. The stare was fixed on a woman standing in front of a row of cereals. Intent on making eye contact with her, he stood transfixed, although he already knew they had nothing to say. He tied his dog to a tree and walked into the store. She was on the phone.

“Well, I’m not attending Kodak Week because I don’t think that’s living. I think that’s slowly dying.” She put down a box of Mueslix and gave a more energetic twist towards the Golden Grahams, which made her duck below the man’s giant orange head. “Excuse me,” she said, annoyed, and picked up the cereal.

“Daisy. Daisy, it’s me.” The girl looked up and caught his eye.

“Oh! Jim! I didn’t recognize you.”

“Well, I haven’t seen you since college. It’s been like five years.”

“It has been. Five.”

“You also may not have recognized me, because I now have a huge pumpkin for a head.”

“Yeah. Yes. That did it.”

“So are you still playing?” he asked. She was not dressed for the weather and he let his eyes take a little tour.

“Yep! Remember, I sent you that CD?”

“Oh…oh yeah. I never actually got it.”

“What? Your email said you really liked it?”

“Oh yeah, well you know. Internet manners.”

A voice blared from Daisy’s phone, and she remembered her mother. “Anyway, Mom, that is nothing I would ever want. I wish you would actually listen to me for once.” Jim backed up from the conversation and traced his finger through the maze on a box of Teddy Grahams. “Anyway, I really can’t talk right now.” She hung up. “So!”

“So yeah. Just wanted to say hi. I’ve got to get home.”

She put down the box of Golden Grahams and had him follow her to the refrigerated section. “So, how did you wind up with this?” she asked, pointing at his pumpkinhead and picking up a case of Blue Moon. “I mean it’s totally cool, totally cool, it’s different.”

“Thanks,” Jim said, smiling and pulling down on one of his toggles. “Same kind of generic story. The whole ‘what do you do’ kinda thing…ha! ha,” and Daisy laughed too, a little too loud.

“Remember all our little rendezvous in the LGBT garden?”

“Listen, Daisy,” Jim said, in a tone that made the girl shift the beer from her right to her left hand. “I’m not very good with this whole revisiting the past thing. I’m just trying to… get on with it.”

“Oh. Well I was just wondering if you can still do that, with the pumpkinhead.” She wanted to ask him something, but in the physical sense, couldn’t seem to do anything but scan the varieties of beer, chanting Amstel, Bud, Corona almost outloud (Sal had arranged the cheaper beers in alphabetical order). But she had an incredible urge to let him know. She felt completely selfish, though, because in asking him she just wanted some kind of assurance on his side. If she really meant it, and he agreed, it would just happen au natural. “Jim…I would love to make you dinner at some point.”

“Aw, that’s so nice. I kind of have a light diet nowadays. You know, photosynthesis,” and Jim pointed to his head. “Anyway, I just wanted to say hey, or hi or something. I’m on my way home—I’ve gotten really into Evelyn Waugh.”

“I wasn’t doing anything tonight, either. Oh! Want to rent the Brideshead series? Have a marathon?”

“That would be fun, but I think I’m just going to read my book.”

“I guess I’m more into watching than reading,” Daisy said, but Jim didn’t laugh.

“I guess that’s the difference between us,” he said.

Daisy put the Blue Moon back on the shelf and wandered back to the cereal aisle. “O-kay,” she said, “it was great to see ya.” Jim followed her to the checkout counter and Daisy stared Sal in the eye as she took a penny from the leave-a take-a jar.

“You’re still doing that? Why do you do that? It’s not funny, it just makes them uncomfortable.”

“I don’t know,” Daisy said as they left the store, past a “Warning: Asbestos” sign that they both had missed on the way in. “Maybe it has something to do with my parents being divorced so many times.” Jim didn’t laugh then either. Daisy tossed her hair against her shoulder in the way that used to get him where he couldn’t on his own, shaking out the asbestos.

“C’mon, Aloysius,” Jim said, bending down to let the dog lick his pumpkin. “See ya, Daise.”

“Yep. See ya in cyberspace.”