-Rubber Match-

We met at the local high school's tennis courts at midday, after church services had let out, but before the football game and the hometeam's inexorable loss. Defeat and mediocrity, not triumph and surprise victory had set the agenda.

The agenda had also been set by everyone but me; my father had proposed the match, my brother had suggested we finish before kick-off, and our high school classmate agreed to play only after he'd run around the high school track enough to get the windsprint monkey off his back.

I didn't want to play tennis that day, but didn't dare refuse. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy tennis, and I've got an odd combination of skills destined to keep an all-around athlete guessing for perhaps ten minutes before his or her natural abilities assert themselves and overcome my defenses. Actually, that's my modus operandi where most sports are concerned, and card games, too.

This may sound silly - but I didn't want to play tennis because I didn't want them to see the poor state of my shoes. The price of my financial independence includes my retention of footwear long after most people would throw them away, or in the very least, save them for gardening. Maybe they wouldn't see the rubber peeling off the bottom, maybe they would. I didn't want to take the chance, but also could not find any believable excuse.

While three of us waited for the runner to complete his regimen, we volleyed back and forth with three generations of tennis rackets. My father's was the newest, he had bought it in the past years. Graphite, high tension strings, the works. He refused to take the plastic off the grip, though, which gave us an advantage.

An advantage lost when you took account of the quirks of the other racquets. My brother used a metal-and-plastic racquet he'd received at the peak of his interest in tennis back in the early nineties. Mine was an oversized metal racquet from the late eighties that made a suspiciously low hum when struck. On the sideline, a pair of small, seventies (perhaps 60's?) era racquets covered the plastic tennis ball tube like an A-frame house to keep it from blowing away.

It didn't seem right to let the newcomer use the wooden racquets, so when he jogged in, I set down the metal racquet and was transported forty years into the past. All the while, I kept a suspicious eye on the widening gap between the rubber sole and the fabric, which used to meet at my toe.

The moment I took my eyes off my feet and scrambled for a wide shot in the alley (doubles meant the alleys were in play) I stumbled over what had to be the front half the sole yawning wide as an alligator. Did they notice? They didn't say anything, but I'd pushed things far enough. When I bent down to pick up the errant tennis ball, I tore the rubber appendage off and flicked it into the fence.

And came up smiling.

No extra passenger on my feet, a wooden racquet, and the ball was in my court. For the next ten minutes, my opponents wouldn't stand a chance.

-Bread Crumbs-

I will feed the birds today.

-Small Quick Steps-

Such a cad, lemme explain.

Got a call from the artist Sunday morning. She wanted to cancel our get-together on grounds of being sick. The nerve! Specifically, the one in her forehead tapping out messages of pain to the rest of her.

Not a problem, necessarily, if the scientist was nearby. I felt a bit cheeky doing so, but I invited her to the same event to which I'd intended to take the other woman. And at first, things were great. We talked, listened to live music, examined fine art, and stretched out on the riverbank like twenty-something crocodiles.

A few times, my companion darted away with little warning, to return a few minutes later after the passing clown or mime had moved away. Fear of clowns is fairly common, actually.

The last time it happened, the mime was nearly on top of us when the scientist bolted. I greeted the character, who looked questioningly after my friend, and then at me.

"I think you scared her away." I stated the obvious. "She's afraid of clowns." The mime mock-pouted and left to play with a group of mountain children as loud as she was not.

The scientist was back at my elbow in a flash. "What did you say?"

And then, "You told her that!?" She was so angry she put her headphones on and spoke seldom, but loud, until the fairgrounds closed a few minutes later. I could barely keep up with her on the way home. When we came to the point of separation, I watched her small, quick steps hammer out a longer-than-usual route home, so chosen because it served to separate her from me even faster.

Perhaps that was the time for me to shout back.

"It's not as if she's going to tell anyone!
She's a mime."

-You wanted inspiration so bad, here now, take it-

I was struggling to find something to write about tonight. Just before I called it quits for the day, I jotted down a few notes about a forthcoming Volleyball game at work, with the intent of expanding the piece by as much as I would be able to expand the team tomorrow.

As I shifted on a cheap mattress and tried to get more comfortable, I lamented the lackluster idea, stuck in limbo with the stories about the peeling tennis shoes and the new employee from Florida. But all contain some promise, so it should be said that I drifted off feeling more or less satisfied with the day’s events.

Too bad my dreaming brain was ready to lay a real bitch of a story on me.

This is the [Present Tense] My ex-girlfriend (the one I loved) is welcoming me back after four years of silence, (and, I confess, two years or more after I stopped thinking about here regularly.) She’s beckoning me through the entryway of a dim house, and her face is more joyful than ever in life. The detritus of a party covers the floor, but all the guests are leaving. Last to go is a forgettable, nameless guy wearing a baseball cap backwards; he is sharing a toast of champagne with us, and trundles off into the den to sleep on the couch. She is leading me into the bedroom, and setting me down on the mattress.
Now it’s [Past Tense] She gets up and goes into the bathroom, the anticipation was lovely. She emerged wearing a simple dressing gown, and joined me on the bed, but not under the covers. Our eyes adjusted to each other’s love.
“It’s good to see you again,” I said.
“I know,” she replied. “So, will you be alright here for tonight?”
“Sorry?”
And now for [Present Tense] She’s getting out of bed, She’s telling me she’s got to go to the den tonight, I take her arms.
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, not for him or me.” I am referring to her history of abuse. She’s smiling sweetly as she touches my cheek, and my hands fall to my sides like dumb mallets.
“I have to,” she says, “He expects it.” She closes the door, leaving a blaze of light at the bottom of the jamb.
“Why am I here?” I squeak, getting out of the bed to pitch a condom into the trash. A high-pitched whine and rhythmic thumping begins. The blaze of light dims, and I see a tape transcriber on the bureau. The ribbons are a terrible mess, and the mechanism incorrectly set. I put my hand on it, and the source of the sound and the sound itself stops.

Now I’m awake at 2:45 AM, ready to go back to sleep, having discharged all of this in the past half hour. Thank you for the inspiration. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

For an encore, why don’t you cobble together a “falling while immolated” dream, you evil, wretched psyche.

-Monolith-

Rigid doesn't begin to describe my coworker. Twice divorced, no kids, caretaker of four cats and living in her brother's house, she carries two part-time jobs, and advocates for feminism and islam at the same time.

In my darker fantasies, we debate the role of women in the Quran, and all her nuclei divide and grapple with each other in the form of zillions of angry microscopic soap bubbles.

Actually, debates of any kind are taboo. Last week she held forth for ten uninteruppted minutes on humankind's (no, she used the gender-specific "men's") tendency to destroy, as extrapolated from the body's "battle" at the cellular levels to fight off viruses and hostile bacteria. It made me think of Dr. Yamaguchi in Tom Robbins' 'Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas':

What you mean, 'conquer'? What you mean, 'destroy'? Western Medicine all a time think in terms of destruction. In west, person get virus, he wish kill it. Get tumor, fire magic bullet at it. Not a healing, but a gunfight. O.K. Corral, ne?.. My method not warfare. My method pacify. Make friend with tumor. Friendship with cancer. Change friend's diet, teach friend good manners.

That's what I was thinking until the room became silent. Aloud, I said:
"I'm afraid I can't quite agree with your example, because-"
"Forget it." she hissed, suddenly on the edge of tears.
"Oh, I'm sorry." I said. "I thought you were finished. Please, continue."
"Just forget it." She stalked out of the room.
"No, really," interjected my boss. "You can go on."

No good. Lillith-Fatimah was already gone.

-Into the Twixter-

My weekly service gig at the food bank has another element, now. Ever since the volunteer coordinator talked about introducing me to his daughter, all of my duties there are less volunteer, and more obligatory. To think that a service project lasting less than two hours per week could have someone imagining how weird it would be if this guy should become your future father-in-law. And mind you, this is before I met the daughter.

Now that I have, these thoughts haven’t quieted down. And the only reason why they haven’t gotten louder is working across the hall, working her last day, in fact.

Some part of me wanted the getting-to-know-you lunch with the Artist on Tuesday to fail miserably, making the choice that much easier. Likewise, it would have simplified matters if the Scientist had turned down my offer of last-day-on-the-job drinks tonight.

Neither did, and both gave me a turn today when they nearly collided. I am not, strictly speaking, dating either one of them yet. But if they did run into each other, I can easily see how things would appear. They might strictly-speak my ass right out of the building.

The Artist

It started with an email from the artist’s father that I believed had settled the matter once and for all. He told me there must have been a miscommunication, because she had to work all afternoon and couldn’t meet me then, as I thought we had arranged. His comment at the food bank on Wednesday had seemed odd then – now it came flying back:
“Even if you two don’t hit it off, she can probably introduce you to some other people in town!”

Guess she wasn’t really interested, I thought, and felt the tiny but familiar wrench of rejection coupled with a sigh of relief that part of the equation had fallen into place. Both feelings jumped out of my chest at 11 AM when the Artist intercepted me in the library. We perused the stacks for a while, and exchanged phone numbers. I am currently lying to myself, pretending that everyone else: coworkers, students, tutors, etc. all believed she was a patron, but it must have been sadly obvious that she was not. Still, my luck held – the scientist did not round the corner as she wrote down her number.

I’m conditioned to believe that sort of thing usually happens, and when it does not, I exult like a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court who just learned his execution date coincides with a solar eclipse.

The Scientist

Hours later the Scientist came into the library. She told me it was her last day; I surprised myself by asking her out on the spot. She accepted, and we chatted as much as one can on their last day of work, when there are so many other people to say goodbye to.

At some point my community service came up; she was intensely interested in the food bank. Interested, she repeated, in volunteering there.

In the Norse version, this is the part where the heroes realize that the jaws of the great wolf Fenrir scrape heaven and earth. No one escapes their Ragnarok or mine intact.

-Arts and Sciences-

Just won't be happy until I'm a cad, will you?

In addition to the Playdate whom I did not repulse, the Student-worker is flirting hard to get my attention. And before I go any further, I see that some better names are in order. "Playdate" should never have been used as a noun here, only as an event. Our next outing will not include papa or her cousin, and she hardly qualifies for such a snotty moniker. As for 'Student-worker,' no one outside communist party leadership sounds right tossing that around.

How to name them? And yes, I am fully aware that my experiments in nomenclature may have played a role in the deterioration of past relationships.

The two women in question have names that begin with "A" and "S." This makes me think of "Arts and Sciences," (often abbreviated as "A & S") which is convenient - "A" is an art student, and "S" is going into the dental profession; she can stand in for science even if dentistry is not the "Science" in the academic sense implied by "Arts and Sciences."

Choosing between an Artist and a Scientist would not have required any deep thought on my part a few years ago. But age has shaken my certainty; much to my chagrin, I have no favorites at present.

And, lest you become revolted at what appears to be verbal egotism, a written kiss-and-tell, bear in mind that having two simultaneous romantic choices surprised me as much as anyone. I average one relationship per year, which is usually nasty, brutish, and short.

-Play Date-

The date is set.

On Tuesday, the four of us will meet at an Italian restaurant a few blocks away from where I work. The volunteer at the food bank and instigator of this get together, his niece, (whom he claims has met me) the daughter, supposed object of my future affection, and me.

I've got grave misgivings, and for many reasons.

1. The man has described his daughter as an artistic girl, which I like. But the laws of pink-and-black-apparel are very clear on this point; the black-clad woman who meets me also meets my whiffenpoof hair, antiquated expressions, and near-ignorance of alternative music. Conversely, the pink-clad princess attracted to me because of the above isn't someone in which I'm usually interested.

2. I'm still not entirely sure of the volunteer's motives. Perhaps I'm doing him an injustice, but anyone so unnecessarily complimentary to someone they've just met should be viewed with suspicion.

3. He tells me the niece met me while I was working at the college. That I was very helpful, even though she knew almost nothing about navigating a library. She even (he says) wondered where the card catalogs could be found. I can't picture her, but I think only three people have asked me where the card catalog was, and two of them were younger than I am - meaning that the card catalog had been replaced with the online public access catalog about a decade before they were born.

4. And most important, the events of Friday. Months of fleeting glimpses and chaste technical assistance with a student-worker (she's graduating in days, so it won't be unethical!) came to a climax that day under the noses of my boss and coworkers. The back and forth was fun, made even more so by my need to keep the appearance of respectability while surrounded by so many eavesdroppers. We still don't know much about each other, but made tentative plans to get together.

When it rains, it pours.

The student-worker wore red.

Oh, and papa's buying lunch.

-Writing to say she saw him-

WHOLE FOODS- Me: Shy little red head in green pants. You: Tall Man with cute smile. Sorry I ran from your smile. Give me another chance?

-From "i love you, i hate you" in the Philadelphia Weekly

-Just Friends-

In a wedding where the guests are restricted to spouses or soon-to-be’s, the bride’s brother brought a friend. Not a girlfriend, as both hastily correct parents and grandparents. Just friends, longtime friends who met in their first year of college, a young man and woman familiar but never intimate. Since the bride’s brother and friend are designated as overflow, same as me, the three of us roomed together and formed a temporary cliché, and I was surprised to find that our threesome easily exceeded the wedding in chatty fun.

Physically, he’s become much more imposing than I remember. But he still carries a smile and a sincere laugh, so it’s surprising when he lifts his sleeve to display bruises he picked up in a bar fight. It was very one-sided, he explains, just like this one - here he gestures at a scab along his hairline.

They correct another guest in unison. “Just friends.”

“Do you ever claim to be more than friends to get rid of a guy you’re not interested in? I ask her.
“All the time. He doesn’t mind.”
“And vice versa?”
Not an issue, she says, he is never interested in girls like her.
I’m watching very carefully to see if she twitches over this, but it’s inconclusive until she regards her closest male companion, stuck in space and peering into the screen of his camera.

“He likes girls with thin waists.” She tells me, and puts her thumb and forefinger together with a silver-dollar sized circle of air in between.