On Going Out Alone

Meeting new people is easy with some luck and liquid courage.

His apartment had jalapeno plants and antique decanters. A gift shop selling Indian textiles was two floors down. There were tapestries and angular chairs and a foot-tall bubbler filled with keef. But I was most into the aging portrait — placed delicately above a thermostat — of a stern, glamorous woman who looked like the miraculous love child of Marina Abramovic and Maria Callas.

“He bought all her things at an estate sale,” says my new friend Ashley. She’s probably about a decade older than me, but we only know this because she made me tell her my age: 22, almost 23.
“She owned a diner in northern Wisconsin. He’s taking her things and recreating her place in New York.”

This made sense. He had thumbed through a carefully bound book on fries during the car ride over. There were jars of spices, cook books, and plants in every corner of the arched attic apartment. He was busy making coffee through the Chemex for Ashley and me — using minuscule drops of water, letting them pour through, then repeating the process.

I’d fallen in love with Advik in about thirty minutes. I knew he was straight, fifteen years older than me, and that it was easy to fall in love with strangers after a night of drinking and good music. But there I was, smoking his weed, and asking about the mysterious woman in the frame.

Advik said the woman was an eclectic loner, a stern beatnik from the 50s with a love for food and tchotchkes. He now owned her embroidered robes, her ketchup and mustard bottles with googly eyes and lashes, and her rare decanters still filled with whiskey older than my parents.

We smoked a bowl and Advik told me real treasure could be found in the yard sales of Linden Hills. I would’ve listened to him all night, learning his secrets to life so I could spend fifteen years practicing them, but Spooky Black was hosting an unannounced DJ set at Icehouse, and secrets must come at their own pace.