I was in a throbbing dream world of blue and concrete, but it was an electrical world I was dominating. I was me embodying the breeze, walking into a night rooftop party to discover it populated by a reunion of college newspaper people. All the usual assholes were there, even the one I know sent me that anonymous letter telling me to quit. They moved as a mass–brainless, conniving, petty. Each trying so hard to pretend what’s real. And then Brian. Looking good-humored and lost, as usual. He was warm and he was friendly. He told me I looked good. My changes were good. I wanted us to talk, to finally talk, but he was with that group, in that group. And just the fact that group was real to him meant even if a part of him could love me, he would never live in my world.
It was hard to wake up, having been surrounded by people so far in the past I was no longer connected to, they felt as though from a different lifetime, separated by a distance as great as the distance between worlds separated by death. The cool metal blues of the dream world chilled my reality. I felt them throughout the day, like spirits trapped in a jar. Muted, but present.
I trudged the block and a half to physical therapy. Met another short-haired mannish lesbian but with surprisingly soft hands. Texted B this discovery and he thought it was the funniest thing.
Went to the river. It was sunny today so I sat out along the edge in front of the gym with my legs dangling. Just let the river pass.
Poor workout while reading about a death-row psychologist whose ego is a bit off-putting. Came home and went to gym in building instead, while watching Monk, my TV equivalent of the Golden State Warriors.
Went to Theoretics show at the Triple Door. The lyrical poet has been messaging me, telling me about his creative process. As I hoped, I slipped in and found the seat I wanted despite his prowling the entrance. Ordered the usual, a Green Dragon. Wrote in my notebook as the band began.
When he finally saw me, he came over and asked how long I’d been sitting here, watching from the shadows. Not too long, I lied.
His friend, Doug, joins us. While the lyrical poet is on stage, and I am writing in my notebook, I hear a clattering below. Doug smiles sheepishly and stoops under my chair, collecting objects. He lays them on the table – a small red dice, a small white dice. 3 and 2.
“I always have these in my pocket,” he said. “I like playing around with them. They’re like my meditation balls.”
I suppress in my mind what Freud might say, and ask him why.
“About 6 months ago, my friend was into this girl, and she was going over to his place but he was scared to be alone with her. So he called up me and this other guy, said, “I really, really need your help.” So we go over, but he’d just moved into his place and didn’t have a lot of stuff yet, so we go to the store and buy some wine, dice and cups, so at least we could have something to do that night. We spent the night all playing dice games. I just never took them out of my pocket.”
Lyrical poet is alpha who allows himself to be read, but must tread carefully. I am still wary with this connection, choosing the path of greatest boundary but which can still be helpful. I can see him doing a show in LA, sending in a CD to KCRW Morning’s Become Eclectic. I can see how lonely and how focused he is. I am very careful. This is work.
He tells Doug to be careful, that I’m a baller.
I ask him how he knows that and he stammers out some kind of answer, even though I know full well how he knows that. Just watching his reactions.
While the background band is still playing, this girl walks up to the keyboardist and starts talking to him. He finishes the song and the band goes on break but she hovers over him. At one point, it even appears she’s giving him a piano lesson. I ask him later if he knew that girl and he said he didn’t. A friend of the band said the girl had said she would like to meet the band, and even though they told her to wait until they finished the set, she just walked right up to him as he was playing anyway. I couldn’t decide if this was highly inappropriate or perfectly appropriate.
On break again, the lyrical poet tested the waters. He said it was too bad I had a cold, otherwise he would rather just kick it with me after the show. I did not respond. He asked why I had to go back to California. I laughed. “Because there are other people who need me, too,” I said. He asked if it felt like we’d known each other for a really long time even though we’d just met.
“It probably feels that way to you,” I said.
“Yeah it does feel like that to me,” he said. “Like I’m complaining about my band, talking to you about things I normally would never tell someone I just met.”
“I’ve heard that from a lot of people,” I said. “It seems to be one of my effects. I’m very familiar, easy to talk to.”
I told him that being around him seemed to enhance my sense of hearing, as I was able to hear certain nuances with the music and understand what he meant about chemistry incongruencies with his band. And I could distinctly hear what people were saying around us, despite it being a noisy place with live music.
There is a moment, when the band has stopped playing, and we are all looking at each other, and a song begins to play on the sound system. I’m suddenly dizzy with it, the feeling of familiarity. Why do I know this song. I ask the guys who this is, and they don’t know. I grab a few lyrics and Google. Cold War Kids – Hang Me Out to Dry. I announce who it is and the poet asks me how I did that. I said I put the lyrics through Google and Doug said that’s how he finds songs as well. The poet looks at us in horror and asks if we’re from the future.
“We could be,” Doug said.
“In fact, I’m a robot,” I said.
“You could be,” the poet said.
He tells me about how he has a manager who’s inspiring him and helping him set deadlines. He mumbles something and I think I catch the word “alien.”
“Did you just say he’s an alien?” I ask.
“I said his thought process is alien to me.”
I note that the words robot and alien have both come up in conversation.
The Theoretics are basically one white MC and one black MC spittin’ rhymes together. Tonight, the black MC wore black, and the lyrical poet wore white. As I watched them face off, I realized it was like the black ninja and white ninja. I think about how he thinks of himself as a black ninja, and yet he continually reveals his white. I took a picture of him and after that song, he put on his black coat. I would ask him after the show why he put on his coat and he seemed surprised I’d noticed. His coat hides him when he feels vulnerable. He said it wasn’t specifically because I’d taken a picture but just a feeling of being exposed. I told him about my black and white ninja thing, and asked him if he thinks of himself as Black but is actually White.
He laughs at me. “How do you know so much?”
He says he wished he could find some way to help me with my writing. He tells me a story he’d once tried to write. About a great man expelled by his world, only to become a god in another, and that this man had a mark on his back that matched the symbol foretold by the other civilization. He said it’s a sci fi story, and he used symbols from the Zodiac.
“From the zodiac!” I said. “Like which symbols?”
“Well not zodiac exactly. Like the hero is Balance, and he represents scales.”
“Does it have to do with you being a Libra?” I asked.
He looks surprised. “Wow, good memory, ” he says.
He tells me his story and I write the details furiously. Sparks are going off in my head, his story is one so familiar, one I’ve been glimpsing fragments of for a very long time. His words drive mine to the murky surface–El Caido, the children, the girl born with a phoenix on her back. I write them all down, rainwater falling in a bucket that just may hold my salvation.
When he’s done telling me the story, he says that he hasn’t really done the story justice, but he always thought it would be a cool series or something. I start laughing.
“Do you ever feel like the people you meet, they give you bits and pieces of what you need to get to where you’re going? Everywhere I go, I’m looking for the same thing, and all these people, through the things they say or even sometimes the exact words they use, tell me things that slowly fill in this big picture, little by little, piece by piece. They’re all building the same story. So somewhere, this story has to be true. Like I’m always talking about how there are different types of humans on earth, and some humans are more human than others. You asked us earlier if we were from the future and for all you know, I could be a robot or you could be an alien. All I know is that people seem to talk about the same things.”
As I pause, the music playing over the speakers begins to fade in. I hear a man sing, “I’m a Space Invader…” I grin and point up, and he hears it, too. He laughs, incredulous. “We’ve got some synchronicity going on.”
He invites me to hang out after the last set but I tell him I have to go home and write tonight.
“Will you at least give me some chi before I go back up there?” I hold out my left hand and he takes it, gripping it with strength. I feel his heat transfer into my hand, and my coolness seep into his.
I settle my check, and leave. I find out I’ve just missed the cutoff and my car is stuck in a garage. I’m less than a mile away from home and it’s a distance I usually walk anyway, though I didn’t tonight just because I’m at the tail end of this cold. As I’m trying to figure out what to do, I realize how deserted the streets are and the random homeless people walking around. I realize, it would be a really great night to run through the city, especially since I’m in shadow mode. I’ve only run on the treadmill once since my surgery, so this was the first time I ran outside. It felt amazing, the way the night air felt against my skin, the way it smelled. I felt like the wind. When I lived in Amsterdam, I walked so many times to work through city central that I got bored of it. So sometimes I would pretend I was a woman who was very late, and weave through the crowds in a jog. No one could say I wasn’t late for something. I would feel dark and unbounded and free.
As I was almost home, I walked by the corner bar. I was already 5 steps past it but something made me turn abruptly around and walk right in, taking a seat at the bar. I’ve lived around the corner from this place for half a year, and in fact, this was the only neighborhood place the leasing office had recommended to me. I’d been in here a few times but had never felt comfortable. Even their giant signage, a single EYE, kind of creeped me out. But something made me sit right down at the bar with a resigned determination.
The tattooed massive-chested bartender with sleek black hair approached and asked me what I wanted, but it was hard to see what was on draft from where I was sitting. I squinted, found a familiar word in large block letters- MANNY.
Ah yes, Manny’s. The beer I’d tried for the first time that night at King’s in Ballard, the night I met Gareth the Kiwi. Incidentally, I recently found that post while searching for a ghost of a line that had been echoing in my head.
Manny is also a name that has had its own little quirky story behind it recently. The guy who works at the gym, his name is Manuel but I’ve always called him Manny. In fact, he called me and left a message once and identified himself as “Manny.” The day I ran into Curtis and we talked, he asked me why I call Manuel “Manny.” He’s known the guy for years but I’m the only one who calls him, Manny. I didn’t realize that. I thought he went by Manny.
So I ordered a Manny’s, relieved to be bailed out, and sat, in this completely unexpected and unusual pocket of reality I’d found myself in.
Perhaps the first clue that something was different here was a girl who looked and moved a lot like my friend Hooch. She pointed at the TV in the corner and squealed, “Oooh! Sade!” I looked up and sure enough, Sade was performing. I marveled at how she hasn’t aged in 30 years. Some guys in baseball caps sitting at a corner table craned to see the TV, asking each other what was on the TV that had the people at the bar so riveted.
“It’s Sade,” I told them. They don’t look like they get it.
“She did those soul/r&b songs in the 80’s, like music you would put on to get down with your lady.” They still stare at me blankly.
“Just go home and google her. Pull up her old album covers and compare her with this image of how she looks now. It’s the same. 30 years and she hasn’t aged. It’s incredible.”
“Are you talking Sade?” The bartender suddenly appeared behind me. “She looks the same! She’s a robot! She was made.”
“Or she’s been cryogenically frozen for 30 years.”
I note the robot reference. Again. This night has felt incredibly synchronized.
I’m taking the time to look around the bar. It reminds me of the coffee shop in Amsterdam, next door to David’s store, where if business was slow, the girls behind the bar would blast some dance music and have a dance party in the window, cracking up people passing on the promenade outside. Even the brash, tattooed bartender seemed out of place here in Seattle. I expected to see her jump up on the counter and own it, while some Irish guys drinking pints in the corner egged her on. I tell her so and she lights up. Her husband is going to graduate school in either England or the Netherlands, and she really wants to live in Amsterdam. She would love to work in a coffee shop. I tell her if she tries to find work in Amsterdam, to go to Boom Chicago, an American company that runs the improv comedy show, and talk to Ken about becoming a promoter. Once she gets plugged in, she’ll find her way. She leaves to write this down on the back of receipt paper.
I notice that above the bar, there is a crafted shrine of painted wood in the shape of an eye. I see two lamps on each side of steps leading to the next room shaped as Easter Island heads, and on the far wall is an Egyptian-themed painting, energy flowing like long tresses. On the other side of the far wall is a montage forming the face of Malcolm X. I like how eclectic this art is. It makes me feel like I’m in the Star Wars Cantina. I turn to look at the wall opposite the bar, and noticed for the first time all night, massive cases mounted side by side, almost all the way up to the ceiling. What was inside those cases…made me catch my breath.
There were rows and rows of tiger statuettes, the figures in each case facing each other as though standing off. On closer inspection, there were panthers and lions as well– an entire wall dedicated to the untamed feminine predator.
Holy. Fuck.
I spun my seat back towards the bar, staring up at the shrine of the eye. I turned back to look at the cases. On the top shelf of the left case, were two particularly large panthers, so sleek as to almost become liquid metal in their pounce.
I looked from the eye, to the Easter Island heads, to the wall paintings, to the wildcats. I suddenly realized I didn’t know the name of the bar.
I asked the girl next to me and she said we were in the Cyclops. She points to the eye above the bar. I’m watching that eye, and watching that eye, when I suddenly remember Gareth the Kiwi, and how that night he’d insisted that he have permission to draw my eye in my notebook. I happened to have that exact notebook on me so I flipped through until I found the page, an intense black eye like a full moon interpreted through the transformation of a werewolf.
I sat there holding the drawing up, like a postcard of the Louvre I was comparing to the real thing, but they just didn’t seem to add up. I started giggling. The possibility of synchronicity made my head fizz.
“What?” asked the bartender. I flipped my book and showed her the drawing. Her initial reaction was to recoil. Without context, the drawing seemed threatening.
“I met a stranger a few months ago and he insisted on drawing my eye,” I said. I pointed up at the eye above the bar. “It looks a lot like that eye.”
She looked up and her eyes widened. “Whoa,” she said. “That’s freaky. You were meant to come here.”
I pointed at the cases filled with predators, my glee rising in particular for the panthers. “I’ve been writing a lot about panthers. Tigers. Forces of nature both feminine and powerful.”
In fact, you could say it started around the last time I found proof of magic, on that cruise to Alaska. I will never allow myself to be dominated, but I began to feel the nudging urge to be tamed. I remember being surprised when Curtis mentioned Lion King the other day, and specifically, “untamed female predators.” He had touched upon a current motif. I pulled out my phone. “I want to show you something,” I told the bartender.
“I posted something a couple of days ago, but haven’t posted anything since, because for some reason, it was this post that seemed important, and I wanted it to be at the top.” Finally the page loaded and I showed her the Panther Eyes. She read the post.
“Wow, that’s really interesting,” she said. “Do you know we’re actually in the Panther Room right now?”
“Excuse me?”
“Yeah…” She leaves to rummage near the register, then hands me a red matchbook.
“This whole bar is called the Cyclops, but this room is known as the Panther Room. You were destined to find your way here.”
The people who were sitting nearby had all been listening to this thing unfold and were laughing along with it, how random and crazy this was. I asked the bartender to sign my notebook with date, location, her name and whatever message she wants to give to Tomorrow Me so that I would believe I had really been here. She wrote, “This is called “The Panther Room” at Cyclops. *heart* Mia Calarese-Cyr, 3/19/10. It was destiny, fate, meant to be.”
“Funny, it’s also the last day of Pisces,” I mentioned. Today would mark the end of a 12 month cycle. Because of it, I’d even wondered if the day would bring a little extra energy, the way company’s rush to spend their surplus budget before the end of their tax year.
“Are you a Pisces?” she asked.
“Gemini,” I said. She responded with a loaded “Ohhh…” but not one without respect.
“But I’m working with a Pisces, I said. “And I did tell him March would be an interesting month for the both of us.”
– 3/19/10
