Joshua Bolotsky

“Here, here is the quiet truth, so sequestered and ill-displayed it's only found while searching for something else entirely, like a way out of your life: you believe your quiet faux-awkwardness and lack of social sense to be charming somehow. A part of you really believes with painful earnestness that someone, watching you standing along in the movie line fumbling with the half-combed remnants of a cowlick, will see your complete lack of deception and swoon. They will cradle you and retroactively replace the father figure you so desperately needed ten years ago. And that is why you're doomed.”

Tepid applause and a few misplaced “Woo!”s. He would tastefully burn this place down one day, gastank handle jangling from one hand and a digital camera in the other, for posterity's sake. Edward and the gang were sitting in their usual table, a few feet away from the platform upon which he witnessed, just below the giant Java Joint pastels. Edward, Becca, and Katherine Graham.

“That was great, man,” Edward had chosen (as he knew he would). “Really super, Arthur!” came tumbling out of Becca's stupid mouth. Then, after a few seconds of quiet reflection, “Super-duper even!” Perfunctory laughter. “Oh man oh man oh man oh man,” was the weapon of Katherine Graham, her fake exuberance embarrassing him, and, apparently incapable of finding a new adjective, “That...that was great.”

He would ignore the inconvenience.

“Thank you all so much for coming, you guys.”

A chorus of Of Course and Wouldn't Have Missed It.

The poetry series at Java Joint was a fine choice to debut the new monologues. He'd had enough of the exclusive engagements at Steve's Comic Relief, and it would be quite a while before he made another appearance at the nightmare that was the Ocean-Monmouth County Public Library.

But that wasn't fair, really. The Library was surprisingly nice and well-funded, with a fashionably left-leaning tint in its scheduled events and gay outreach that'd surprise someone who knew Brick from reading its paper or seeing the proudly autographed pictures of Ronald Reagan hanging in the Mayor's office. They had good books and a halfway decent coffee stand.

They also had no idea how to run a poetry reading, as any ideal library would. They were of no use.

Java Joint at least had its stereotype down pat across the entirety of its allotted hole in the wall. The first thing you'd notice upon entrance was the bar; local wish-they-were-bohemians (“if you're really such a stylish rogue, what are you doing in Brick Township?”) with filthy dreadlocks sitting on 50's-style stools in front of an always-changing chalkboard with the latte special of the day. Some unbearably postured Ocean County College dropout shuffling from customer to customer, already bored with his summer job. Adjacent to the bar-lobby but separated by a two-step climb was the Main Dining Area, with a little triangle of 5' baselength and 1' height in the corner upon which the band/poet/monologist/fortune-teller/weirdo could do their thing. Behind both the bar and the MDA was a little backroom where local civic groups or meetups could congregate among little couches, kitschy chess sets and local artists' wares. Food which was either unbearably Spartan or lined with grease which formed a pond below your tongue. Smoking allowed, but of course, though cloves were preferred. Waiters with studded black belts and Mod haircuts, waitresses with blue eyeshadow and names like Tai.' This was Hip in Brick Township, New Jersey.

He put his mind back into the conversation.

“So, Art, are you going to go to all the other clubs?”

“e.g.?”

“I don't know...Cool Beans, Joey Harrison's Surf Club—“

“Please tell me you're kidding. Harrison's?”

“Hey, you'd be surprised. Their events are going to be a lot better this sum-.”

“Ed, in my experience Harrison's is only good for date rape and contracting tetanus.” Waiting for snickers. “Why would I want my name associated with such a hive of scum and villainy?”

“I don't know...attention.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up Ed,” intervened Danielle with that combo of good humor and curtness that would change the subject, the only thing Danielle was much good at. “The last event I went to at Harrison's I couldn't find a drink without a roofie in it.”

“I'm just saying...”

“Let's lay off Eddie now,” he allowed. “So, Kathy, how's the art going?”

“Well, let me just say that if you were to walk into the back of Java Joint right now, you'd see some of it on the wall!”

He uttered an “um” and immediately regretted the question.

“So, I take it they bought some?”

“Yes.”

“Well, good for you.”

And that was all it took to start a cavalcade of misplaced praise. Didn't they all realize how pointless it was, art? How fucking meaningless it was? What was the point: to show that you were pretentious enough to stick with a form of communication that became obsolete the second someone figured out how to build a darkroom? It was the same reason wimpier kids kept with their vinyl records and mixtape, hoping to charm somebody with their embrace of the long-since-irrelevant. It was just like Katherine Graham. Katherine Graham, who listened to shitty Japanese rock (“J-Pop!”) and dyed her hair a tacky watermelon green. Katherine Graham, who didn't yet realize that her attempts to act like one of the guys had long ago transmogrified into a working existence as one of the guys. Katherine Graham, who thought she was Ray goddamn Lichenstein.

The girl he'd fall in love with would be nothing like this. No. The girl he loved would be gaunt. Jackie Onassis sunglasses and harsh words to all that proved her mere tolerance of you was the highest compliment. (This was the problem with girls who first charmed you through how nonchalantly they treated your debilitating hideousness, smiling at you and acting generally nice. They would make you think they liked you. Then you saw the way they talked to everyone else and realized that, no, you didn't meet the one woman in the world who would not only excuse the concentrated ugliness called your face but in fact bask in it, nope, nosirree. You had met a generally nice person, one who would go home and think of you at two times, either when she thought of nice boys or quietly sympathized at the predicament of your ugliness, wishing she weren't so shallow. She would go to sleep not knowing that somewhere, just a few blocks away, the way she gave a self-knowingly adorable look signifying that she caught your bullshit and was okay with it, or the way her glance revealed a complete lack of artifice, was keeping hands from being knifed off clean like a new pair of perfectly fitting gloves. One of the seraphim who, as a supplement to her own perfectly self-justified existence, just so happened to keep people alive. Forsaken souls, lonely and disqualified by genetics who'd otherwise die tonight, that you will never know. Words couldn't express.) Mistakeless and breastless, a chest with two concave craters where you could stick a reluctant finger in and all feel all the bones rattle, uncomfortably encased far too closely around an overtaxed heart. All sharp angles and unspoken remonstrance.

He vaguely remembered a PBS documentary about quantum mechanics, and some mention of the Heisenberger theory or something to that effect, some half-baked notion that no observation is objective because all observation changes what's being observed irrevocably. It's like being on this planet the most wonderful thing in the world would still exist in its context, its very existence necessitating it. It can't be perfect. That was the world — it got its claws into everything.

Or like aliens. The way you can't guess what aliens are like, because you're always imagining bipeds, ants, venus fly traps — you can't create a new creature in your mind without using some point of reference to what you've seen before. Same with imagined lovers.

No, his lover would have to be a living, breathing loophole, not of this world. Stepping out from a tearing in the fabric of the universe (revealed to be a comic book background sketch, the paper of which could be merely crumpled) or coming out of a clam or seafoam, into the ocean right in front of everybody, to marvel at her not-of-this-worldness. She would say to everyone but him, a beach full of desperately pining onlookers, “Why don't you all go back to your human lovers?” and they would have to drive recklessly so as to promptly commit suicide in the comfort of their own homes.