strike that

half way across

These are my friends from New Orleans whom you never got to meet.

Shannon who wears short skirts and black All Stars and you don’t mess with her, because she is strong and smart and right. Shannon’s smile can turn a room. She starts sentences with your name so there’s no mistaking who they’re for. Jenn. Where did you get that laugh? Jenn. I fuckin hate you. Shannon took a lot of New Orleans with her when she left.

Amanda who shaved off all her hair and you’d hardly notice because it’s all about her eyes. Amanda heads out every night saying I’m off like a prom dress in her South African accent, and I don’t think she sleeps. I don’t think she ever sleeps. And you know if she’s working on the site with you just by the energy in the air. In a ten second video of a van at 7 a.m. full of dark and leaning forms, Amanda is in the middle. She is dancing.

Gym who worked his way through the New Orleans phone book on the day of Mother in Law Lounge’s grand reopening to find a mullet wig. Gym is a bartender in Kansas City Missouri. K.C.M.O. He takes pictures, the real kind that get printed out on actual four-by-six pieces paper, and he gets them developed with doubles so that he can give them away. For days after he left, people would just look up in the middle of eating or sweeping or shoveling and say, I miss Gym.

Mark who is absolutely crazy. He used to be an army guard at Guantanamo. He used to be a stripper. He used to be a theater major. Two weeks ago Mark got his very first email account, and then he stopped liking real people. Don’t ask him about politics unless you have some time. Do ask him to impersonate any funny part of any movie ever made, or any funny movie that should have been made.

Chandra whose kindergarten teacher said, Chandra would walk across the bottom of a river instead of using the bridge. Is there really anything more you need to know about a person, to know that they’re fabulous?

Nathan who is at once improbably erratic and impossibly grounded. Nathan is partially deaf and works it, so that more than once when I spoke to him he reached his arm around my back and pulled me in, pulled me so that my head practically rested on his shoulder and my mouth was right at his ear. And then he would say softly, What? Just a simple quiet what? as if the physical motion was as ordinary as the verbal one, as if this sudden intimacy was just the flow of conversation. And it stopped my breathing every time, but what can you do? There he is waiting for an answer. I would deliver it directly into his ear, slowly, so that I could stay.

posted by tortaluga @ 4:45 PM