Coffee. Pressure drop. There was a spiral staircase leading nowhere, and people milled around it drinking coffee and waiting for their bowels to move.

Toughen up. Toughen up. Toughen up. Toughen up. Jove’s monkey slapped its mantra against the little pastel furballs of his mind. They didn’t like to be slapped; they liked to choreograph synchronized swimming on the smooth linoleum of Jove’s public persona. Sure, it was only the top floor above an agonizing mob who occupied the lower extremities in the name of a freedom few people would ever call free, but it was shiny and polished and slippery enough for intricate spiral patterns of motion. So long as that monkey left them alone. Today, at the moment, the fuzzies were terrorized and frozen, troubled and fuming. Tiny poofs of subdued rage. A menacingly mechanical primate smacking them like tennis balls. Toughen up. Toughen up. Toughen up. Toughen up.

Meanwhile, Jove’s eyes scanned the faux-fifties coffee counter where he lingered over lunch break. There were three people reading, each a different medium: one, a bulky laptop once the top of its class, two, a tiny wristbound square that required frontal stroking with the index finger every few seconds, and three, a newspaper, the last refuge of scoundrels. Jove, like usual, was able to stare without staring. So accustomed was he to becoming invisible that his body fuzzed into just the right demeanor completely on cue, so it looked like he was engrossed in the spoon that crept in concentric circles through the murk of his mug.

The three were, it seemed, rather straight and satisfied, though he didn’t claim to know the digests of their bedrooms. They just seemed so… unquestioned. [1] Instead of doing his English Lit. homework, Jove wrote them each a little poem, slaloming through snark as he went.

~

Gentle Ben, glasses aflare, you think that none know where you stare

but little birds perched at the glass can see the glow of hand-on-ass.

Back at home, your betrothed

awaits your research of the exposed,

those raunchy bodies you feign despise

to look at ‘fore her dainty eyes,

but know you well this gloomy fact:

you steal from them your every act.

~

Mary, Mary, whores and fairies ain’t got nothing on your aviaries,

sanctuaries for the flocks that dazzle ladies like those rocks

fastened to that golden ring that says now you’ve got everything,

so you & the girls, out you go, way lit by the diamond’s glow

you put it on your registry, a week of birds and one of bees,

so first you must watch feathers fly, then pollinators buzzing by,

then to that hubbs a marriage great you finally can consummate,

unless in times of bees and birds, you find out you’d much rather be hers.

~

Oh, Columbus, Mr. Magoo, find out who is watching you

there’s treasure to dig in every cranny

it’s not “What is it?” it’s always “How many?”

the media darling whose boots are divine

has front page courtship on The New York Times

and somewhere in section thirteen of C

you’ll find a head count of deaths overseas

but here on page four, so sexy and sweet

you can read up on starletts you never will meet,

and on to the hot gas of Those Who Are Right

where pages are dripping byproducts of Might

you’ve only one friend there, and that is the period;

the comma too wordy, exclamation too serious,

and the question mark never makes an appearance:

no conviction nor bluff, it couldn’t get clearance,

so flip back to the comics with Garfield and Friends

there’s a spot of relief from opinions and trends

but then you’re in classifieds of a dead market

seeking a sturdy car or at least a place to park it

so others will know how much you do care

how smart you’ve become, how dignified an air,

here you can show what a Good Guy you are,

what time is it, noon? well, it’s off to the bar!

~

Surprisingly uplifted, Jove looked down at the notebook where he had been musing before this sudden dose of limerick-laced glitter had spilled into his bad mood. The last thing he’d written, up above the sharp-edged sparkle that won his black little heart’s black little medal for the day, was this: “fuckers all bunched up telling me I can’t have sex.”

Who is telling you that? piped up his inner politzi. Uhhhh. They are. They all deny my validity. Even to him, the very one imagining that comeback, it sounded like bullshit. They what? They don’t know you from the cracks in their asses. On what grounds do they “deny you,” as you put it? Jove had grown sick and tired of defending himself to himself, yet had found no suitable distracting replacement (“Go get the ball, boy! Get it! Get it! That’s it, boy! Goooooood dog.” [2]), so he dutifully responded with both defense and defeat. I’ll tell you on what grounds! They don’t have to ask any of these questions, they don’t have to paw through their youths to find one single example of a time their family didn’t hate them for who they were, they don’t have to endure the projections of thousands of blind reproducers in a centuries-old game of divide and conquer.

One good thing about fights with inner voices is that you don’t have to see the expression they would be wearing when they have absolutely no use for what you just said. The voice, if it can be called that, sighed, if it can be called that. Jove rolled his eyes just to fit in. He felt the familiar tug of muscle, tendon, and nerve. The voice barrelled on:

First of all, you probably made that up, and if you’re gonna make shit up and believe it, you might as well make up shit that has you enjoying life a little more. Maybe even shit that has you laughing in their faces. Or giving up caring what they do with their lives so long as you are another happy and self-actualized being on this planet. Or I could be way off, and you need to secretly loathe them more and blame them for your deficient sex life. What’s the bottom line, kid, honestly? That’s right: you’re not getting any.

Ugh. Jove hated this terminology, and hated even more the fact that his internal logging system had not wiped it from the memory years ago. “Getting” applied to things you can buy at Walmart. “Any” implied that there was a lot of something, or at least a certain quantity of it, and people were out in the streets just scooping it up, and here you are, orphan bowlfulla nothing. Put together, “Getting Any” was like a modern frat system’s fantasy football gambling terminology for Whatever Thankful Fulfillment Incarnate Spawned Them Here Into Sacred Life [3]. How completely inane. How totally immature. Made Jovie want to shoot little rubber bands at people walking by. Made him want to play ding-dong-ditch. Made him want to cry. Made him want to stand up and yell in that trendy coffee box, “Suck my hidden cunt, you idiotic prisoners!”

Oops. He must have been mouthing the words, because subject B (Mary, Mary!) was giving him the over-the-glasses glare, the kind for which you don’t move your head and shoulders at all, the kind that jams the penny of your irises into the slot machine of your eyelids, making it so you can’t win and no one else can play. Oh well. His beef was no longer with her anyway. Nor was it really with the imaginary footballers with very slim chances of discovering Tantric Divinity. It was with that wretched VOICE, the know-it-all that seemed to actually know it all.

OKAY! I am pissed off and I feel lame and juvenile because I want to be with someone in a special way and I can’t possibly fathom that the type of person I actually want to be with would show up in this two-bit mochas-for-posers crap factory to just hold my hand until I land on something beautiful to say. I have no hope for the love that I want, so I talk shit (secretly) about other people and believe that they all want to keep me from having what I want.

There was a silence. Really. In Jove’s head, for just a moment, for the first time since the forest Faeries of his youth, there was a silence where silence was designed to be. Then:

The royal blue coffee bowl sloshed in his hand, spilling dark brown sludge all over his beautifully-woven recycled silk scarf. These details cranked their chains through his mind as the main attraction rolled forward: things were flying every which way, glasses breaking, apple cinnamon tarts mashing into neighboring chairs, hot liquids scalding hands and refashioning clothing. People screamed, not because they couldn’t figure out what to do, but because it added to the drama. After several seconds of utter mayhem (as far as management was concerned), the earth-shaking horror subsided and Jove was faced with a pathetic scene of bougie café survival tactics.

It was an earthquake. The little kid inside clapped hands, a real live earthquake!

People were wedged up against the big glass at the storefront, all hugging into the one place that would shatter first. Others were huddled under the dingy shellacked card tables that had passed most undergrads’ expectations for “trashy chic.” [4] Still others were laid out on the floor, rolling in breakfast goods. Some were walking out of the bathroom with dazed frowns and spooky look-around eyes. Jove found himself holding the empty coffee mug in one hand and the curly blond mane of an Economy professor in the other. His scarf was ruined. Her hair was ultimately fine.

People slowly regained mobility and stumbled out of the coffee shop, kids in a post-horror-movie glaze of giddy intoxication.

As narcissistically grandiose as it was, Jove found himself asking the inner know-it-all: Was it something I said?

-**

 

1. Unquestionable?
2. Good news for your trainable thinking mind: help on the way.
3. WTF IS THIS Life?
4. As opposed to “cheeky trash,” which is an epithet flung at your narrator quite often.