Rabbits of Men
1.
hey there was a bar tonight with scarlett and hardy in it and we hung upside down in subway cars, me and scarlett, and i met an old hippie documentarian and his beard and we talked until i couldn’t listen anymore and then hardy told us his girlfriend cheated on him, is he still attractive enough he wonders, who knows hardy who knows is this hippie crazy i don’t know. transferring trains scarlett got me to pee on the subway tracks, then more subway cars and alcohol bars and leotard lips from which dropped a lily leaf into my beer, then i couldn’t concentrate on anything anymore. but scarlett’s hair was substantial and hardy’s voice carried me out of it and back into the bar and into the warmth with these new friends in a new city and unfamiliar new excitement, and then i’m home and the radiator heat is crawling on me and the roach spray smells like urinal cakes. the hippie documentarian, will he really give me a job? who cares? if he does i’ll pour all my energy into it because i need to pour something into something, it makes no difference what either something is, it’s the pouring i’m concerned with. going to a movie with a ballerina tomorrow night, an engagement i’ve anticipated so much it’s materialized into something tangible that i can take a bite from like a cantaloupe. tara, do you taste like a cantaloupe?
2.
A man alone with his rabbit is something I saw once. It was after a late night drinking whiskey and I was on his couch and he thought I was asleep. He thought I wasn’t watching them play hide and seek. He thought I couldn’t hear him call the rabbit by name, then hide his face from the rabbit behind the door jamb. When the rabbit hopped into the bathroom, the man stood up and went to his cabinets for cereal. I heard him open a box and I pretended to be waking up. He said, “I have a tape from last night when we a cappella serenaded this poor girl outside the bar.” I said, “Yes, that was great because you’re my friend.”
When I met this man, he told me his name was Barry and I told him I’d just proposed marriage to my friend’s little sister who I had not seen in two years and who I had never dated but loved very much and who now lived in another part of the country. He understood completely. He asked her name and I told him, Lily. He told me that once in Israel a girl he’d met at bar invited him to go to Spain with her and he’d refused and now he regretted it. I thought about his story and said it made me wonder if I should move to the town in Iowa where the girl I’d wanted to marry went to college. He gave me serious advice that I don’t remember. I only remember that he took me seriously.
He had a college class with a guy I hated. When they passed around a sheet for everyone’s phone number, the guy I hated wrote underneath his name, “please do not call after ten p.m.”, so Barry wrote under his own name, “please do not call before noon.” When I told Barry I saw the guy I hated at a concert given by musicians I regard highly, and that I felt angry that this guy was there, that he dared invade something I like so much, and worse, suggested with his invasion that he also likes things I like and perhaps is less deserving of my hatred, Barry said, “He likes that band? He’s got good taste. He sounds pretty cool. Maybe I should start hanging out with him. Do you have his info?”
The first time I called Barry up, he was watching Platoon. It was two p.m. on a Wednesday. He said, “I can’t hang out with you tonight because my girlfriend is coming over. We’re probably going to have sex, and I’d rather do that than hang out with you.”
The first time I saw Barry we were working together in a pornography store with an anachronistic eighties hair-band guy with a beard and body odor. Barry didn’t say anything for three hours, then he said, “So are you guys afraid of death?” He told me later he’d been curious how the anachronism would respond. I’d said to him, “Yes, of course.” Then he was surprised, he also told me later, that someone had answered him seriously. The anachronism silently frowned and sucked on a GPC cigarette.
Now Barry lives far away because I moved. Somehow I always move to a new town and do not have my old friends around anymore. I don’t know anything about his life now, except that his girlfriend left him because he refuses to make any money. And that he bought her a gold cell phone after they decided to break up (she’d told him she thought she’d look hot talking on it, then asked him to buy it for her, which he deliberated on until their breakup which freed him of any obligation to buy it for her, the idea of which had been stopping him from doing it because who wants to go around doing what you’re obligated to?). The last time I talked to him I told him the girl I’m seeing won’t break up with her boyfriend. I told him she used to be a professional ballerina. That she is beautiful and sweet and has been mid-breakup for months. That her boyfriend says I’m only putting on an act in order to sack her, and doesn’t believe in god, and thinks art is worthless, and looks down on everything except science, and threatened to have the police throw her out of their apartment if she leaves him. Barry said, “I love this guy. He hates everything.” I told Barry, “Things already remind me of her and I’ve only known her for two weeks. I gave her the ultimatum tonight, I said him or me, and now all I can think about is missing her and cigarettes.” Barry said, “Why are you thinking about cigarettes? When was the last time you smoked, even.”
3.
standing in the subway with the smiling, bitten-fingered ballerina and the train comes rumbling like a parade of tin drums, here it comes, here it comes like our sweet golden future, just gotta lose that extra baggage! she says,
don’t you understand, or
can’t you
try to understand?
i know you do because
nobody doesn’t understand
the narcotic comfort
locked in old companions.
