At East Village

I suddenly realize that I can’t remember the names of maybe half, of maybe a third of the women I’ve been with. This is a problem.

I’m in East Village and I’m reading Charlie Williams’ “Deadfolk” and I’m absently gazing out at Alfredo’s across the street and I suddenly realize that I can’t remember the names of probably half, more like a third of the women I’ve been with and I’m troubled by this thought. By this problem.

There is a napkin on my table. It has small, wet blots on it because almost every time I take a sip of coffee I OCD myself into thinking that wiping my teeth, after, with a napkin, will somehow help with the stains. It doesn’t, I know it doesn’t, but I keep doing it anyway. It is said that the, or a, definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior over and over and expecting a different outcome. I sip my coffee and pluck the napkin from the table and I discretely wipe at my teeth that will nevertheless remain sepia until I brush them, later.

Someone emerges from Alfredo’s. He is fifties-ish, bearded. He wears an oversized flannel shirt and from the breast pocket of this he produces a pack of cigarettes. He lights the cigarette and smokes it hungrily, there, on the sidewalk out in front of the bar. I am reminded of the Alano place downtown, by where Safeway used to be, by where Trader Joe’s and scattering of other businesses I don’t go to are, now. I think of the Alano people as they periodically burst from the door in groups and pass around cigarettes, lighting them and inhaling them with the same frantic motions of a junkie sucking from a crack pipe. Fifties-ish bearded flannel guy stares down passersby, the thumb of the hand not holding the lit cigarette tucked in his belt. I wonder why he is drinking in the middle of the day and I wonder whether or not he’s ever been to the Alano place downtown for meetings.

It’s more like forty percent, really. Maybe, anyway. Forty’s not so bad. When you really think about it. I take another sip and I rub the napkin across my teeth and I try to remember the names of the women I’ve suddenly realized I can’t remember.

Alfredo’s.

I’d met that Ukrainian woman in Alfredo’s. The light is understandably dim in Alfredo’s, and back then, back when you could smoke in a bar, smoke hung at table height. She walked in alone, on legs with thighs that wouldn’t produce a whisper if clad in corduroy. I was reading by the fireplace and I noticed her immediately; any unaccompanied female who happened in to Alfredo’s with thin perfect legs and not-bouffanty hair was bound to draw attention. Through the thick drapery of smoke and in that low, orange light she and her thin legs and her not-bouffanty hair were all, as a package, very pretty.

Never was it my style to outright approach. To pay for my ticket to random coitus with offers of drinks or meals or other jejune dipshittery. I’d go to bars and I’d sit and read and smoke and quietly get drunk. If some girl I’d never met wanted company, later, she’d have to come to me and she’d have to be the one who suggested plans for the very immediate future. And sometimes they did. Sometimes once a week. Sometimes several times in a week. Sometimes a month apart. Through this method, I read often and I got drunk often and I sometimes got laid for free. Such were my twenties.

That Ukrainian broad was one of them. A fine example. Two vodkas, neat. She was all but ignoring attempts at conversation by the men in Alfredo’s. By the bartender. By cackling, raspy-voiced women. She sat and she drank vodka neats and she stared at the large mirror behind the bar. Her legs, expressed in a knee-length black skirt, took me back to being twelve and to staring at Carole Bouquet in the “For Your Eyes Only” movie poster for an entire summer.

Beers later, I felt eyes. I looked up and I scanned the room and I saw her looking at me. There was a question, I knew. She turned around and seemed to be considering a hidden notion and then she grabbed her vodka neat and her handbag and she headed to my table. “Yoor readink KUNDERA?” she squealed. “May I seet?” And she sat.

I held my copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” as though I were, at any moment, going back to reading and I asked, “Where’re you from?”

“Ukraine.”

“Ah. Kundera’s a Czech.”

“Oh I know dees.”

“Is that bad?”

“No. Ees goot. I luff Milan Kundera. I haff never see American reed dis.”

Drinks. More drinks. Somewhere, in there, I say, “I have a large statue of Stalin in my living room. Is this a problem for you?” She laughed and she slugged my arm. Then she faked an apology and then she caressed the spot she’d slugged and then we ended up holding hands.

Her apartment was up on the hill behind Monterey Peninsula College. She drove and I gauged the distance, the walking time it’d require to make it home in the morning.

On her couch we drank and we joked and she laughed at what I had to say and we kissed and she noticed me gawking at her legs. “I veel be back,” she said and she padded out of the room with bare feet. There was a single lamp on. Framed photos of strangers hung on the walls. A kitchen table cluttered with books and with papers. The material of the sofa was thick, brown, too textured. The sofa was like the cheap couch they’ll provide in a Motel 6, knowing you’ll never want to sit in it for long anyway. Foreign-looking bric-a-brac on particle board bookshelves. Sliding glass doors, shut, the view of town and of the bay blocked, obscured by drawn, discount store curtains.

When she returned she was naked and she was all business. The lack of landscaping bothered me. During, though, during, she said that she was forty-two. She said it like she’d gotten one over on me. I was mildly surprised because I’d thought she’d looked, like, thirty. And still, during, she found it appropriate to announce that she was married. Had kids. And then she came.

I didn’t. Couldn’t.

Flannel shirt guy flicks his cigarette out into the street. He grasps the brass handle of the thick, wooden door and he gives it an authoritative tug outward. The thick, wooden door gives and flannel shirt guy heads back in, as though returning from a successful hunt. Now I have no one to look at so I am returning to my book and my coffee and the napkin that won’t remove the stains from my teeth. I am reading “Deadfolk” by Charlie Williams and I am drinking coffee and I am wiping my teeth following each sip and I am trying to forget that I’ve suddenly realized that I can’t remember.