The other morning I was in the first apartment I’d ever shown. Including the open house the day before, it was my fourth time showing it. I was waiting for an Israeli mother who had to okay her husband and son’s decision to put in an offer for the place. She was going straight to her agent’s office from JFK. The agent, Gil, called me after I arrived, apologizing that they would be fifteen more minutes late. So I was alone, and though tempted to break out my computer and write a little, instead I walked over the cherry tone wooden floors and familiarized myself with my surroundings, which indicated the lifestyle and personality of the current tenants.
On the wooden block island, next to the purple hyacinths that provided the place with a welcoming fragrance, was a facedown volume of Bukowski’s, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills. I picked it up, and as is often the case in life, the first poem I opened to left me feeling like I had experienced the best one in the whole book. I don’t remember the name, perhaps it was “Train to San Diego,” or something like that, and in it, it’s clear that despite the speaker—who I imagined as Bukowski—despite his feeling like shit—smoking a dime cigar and needing eight teeth pulled and wearing his dead father’s pants after he’d died more than a decade ago, despite all that, here he was hopping on this train to San Diego or wherever and when the conductor asked him how he was doing, he responded, “Great.” I thumbed through some other poems, including one about Beethoven playing football, which was rather funny, but none of them carried the same import to me as that first one, and I soon lost interest in the collection, considering the importance of Bukowski as a novelist and as a poet.
I closed the book and looked at the titles on the dark shelves—big books, sketchbooks and design books became books on esoteric Spanish painting and novels in English, so that down the shelf the books became smaller. The couple who lived here were Colombian, I’d met them the day before as well as on the way up, coming out of the elevator. The man was a tattoo artist; his girlfriend was blue-eyed, very pretty. On the opposite wall was a work table on which lay a pocket-sized book of arcane symbols. Flipping through it and seeing what signified ‘overcoming knowledge’ and ‘the rise of Mercury,’ I wanted briefly to get a tattoo. I imagined having one of these symbols tattooed on my shoulder and emerging from a cool bed in a dark room with a beautiful woman between the sheets, her asking about its significance and me sitting on the bed’s edge while I put on socks and say, (thinking how cool I am for having a tattoo that she’d never seen before and would never see again) ‘That’s a symbol of the final stage of the alchemical process.’
Then I closed the book and put it the way I’d found it. I looked at my phone. Fifteen minutes had passed, the amount of time the agent said it would take for him to arrive. I looked up his name and found that he was coming from Manhattan, mentally estimated how long it would take to cruise down Lexington Avenue and across the Williamsburg bridge and pocketed my phone, figuring I had at least ten minutes more alone.
I studied the death moth, Acherontia atropos, framed on the wall, the umber patterns on its wings, its hideous thorax. I looked at another frame that held four butterflies, wondered briefly about how the transcendent blues on the wings could exist in nature and what purpose they served.
Shifting my attention back to wall with the bookshelf, which stood before another desk, I looked more closely at a small clay figure which I had noticed the day before. It was sculpted into a bent-over position, its hands and feet hooks. More hooks sat in a small dish nearby, on a rectangular piece of white, brick-like stone about an inch thick. What the hell, I wondered. Is this what it is to be a tattoo artist?
I read the two pieces of content on the wall: an Anti-100 Years of Cinema Manifesto, and wondered if the tenant had written it, decided he hadn’t and looked up who did to find the name of an avant-garde Lithuanian film director, dubbed the godfather of experimental American film. I was happy for that, for learning the word ‘triolet’ and the name of this director, not that I had any great urge to watch one of his films. The other piece was about punk and MTV and Fugazi, which I didn’t bother reading, since I’m not a big Fugazi fan, and it seemed less important since it was smaller and placed closer to the dark bookshelf, rather than high above the table like the Manifesto on a piece of 8 1/2 x 11.
At the counter I smelled the hyacinth again, enjoying its rich, gardeny scent. I opened the drawer and saw the box of an herb vaporizer and a long tube which seemed to be an accessory to it. I wondered where he kept his weed and wondered if I could find it. I lifted the towels toward the back of the drawer, noticed the tank cleaning supplies for the maintenance of the beta fish, whose filter bubbled pleasantly near the bedroom. I squeezed a black film case, and remembered my friend who kept his weed in a similar case. To my delight, it was full of light-green buds.
At that moment the door buzzed. I jumped, placed the film case back the way I’d found it and closed the drawer, walking to buzz in the agent and his client, momentarily considering the immorality of taking a small bud for myself, and deciding that I liked the couple and that to do so would be to violate their trust. And when I heard the knock on the door and said, ‘Come in,’ I forgot all about that and prepared to do my job.
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