Fish’s house is a long narrow rowhouse nestled on one of the narrowest streets that allows parking in the United States of America. It’s a one-way street barely two car-widths wide, part of a series of such confusing glorified alleys that make up his rather cute neighborhood for struggling families in Philadelphia. People push in their parked cars’ side mirrors to make sure they don’t rankle against the opposite-side mirrors of the cars trying to squeak by them as their tires hug the curb, leaving a soft sheen of black rubber on the off-white cement.
Up the street a few blocks and across a street with plenty of lanes and parking stands the Melrose Diner, a Philadelphia institution that’s been through about twenty-five ownership changes in the last decade or so by most accounts. No one wants to let the place die, but everyone seems to come in with their own attitude of neglect or refurbishment. Many locals will tell you the place used to be amazing but has since fallen on hard times. It seems most online reviewers agree. The place still has the look and feel of the glory days of chrome, and the food and prices don’t disappoint. The waitstaff is wildly inconsistent, ranging from grizzled and gruff but thoroughly competent to young and diffident and apt to forget one’s table altogether. There seem to be more staff than patrons, no matter how full the place is.
Today I awoke with a hangover I couldn’t have had. Granted, I’ve been prone to dehydration lately and my late-night meal included two Coca-Cola Classics, the most I’ve had in one sitting in many years. Fish and Madeleine and Skipper and I went out to a Mexican restaurant and bar down the road to play my new copy of Settlers and drink and eat spicy food and entertain our hip waiter to no end. Skipper coached me in the ways of being divorced and I settled into a social setting where Emily’s absence was more permanent than temporary. It was fun in many ways, almost something like real fun instead of the pale shadow of former fun that so many normally good activities have felt like lately. But I also had to resist the urge to order alcohol for the first time, to chase two Cokes with something that might impair my memory enough to staunch my hemophiliac wounds. As a reward, this morning greeted me early with the sound of shrieking children out the window and a feeling like my head against a board. Just to remind me, I suppose, why I don’t cross that threshold.
It’s Labor Day, a day to celebrate, and Fish’s quaint little block that recently reversed its one-way direction to favor the flow of children’s bicycles over crosstown vehicular traffic had decided to host a Block Party. It was too early to feel I could move, let alone move my car, but the ballplaying children of Philadelphia awoke early to a last Monday without school and were all too ready to whoop their farewell to summer while careening down the narrow strip of asphalt. I felt the tug of guilt at the Prius standing in their way, felt a tug of concern for the dent of a football against the metal, plastic, glass, felt the pang of realizing how much of my last year of life had been spent preparing myself to have a child in the next couple years. The laughter, the fragility, the innocent hubris of youth, wafting up the brick face of the building and through the screen window, gently settling on my overly sensitive ear unfettered by the pillow that covered its twin. Memories of my own childhood, its joys and traumas. Am I glad to be born anymore? Maybe it’s for the best that I will likely never reproduce.
I held out for hours, navigating the minefield of memory and contemplation that has become my quiet time alone, will define said time for probably years to come. Occasionally sleep would snatch me away for blissful tens of minutes, sometimes only to relinquish me more profoundly in the throes of melancholy recall than ever before as penance. I tossed. I turned. I heard the doppling sound of whizzing children underneath the window. Finally, as I heard another car being moved, I could wait no more and groggily donned pants and shoes for the slide of a quiet blue car for less demanded pastures. It was only 9:30 in the morning.
Upon my shuffled return, I saw no reason to be awake, so I returned to the alternation of nightmare, relief, and waking memory that had adorned the few hours just behind me. It was not until the first hour of the afternoon that I decided pillows and air mattresses were no match for my headache and coffee would be necessary. Nothing and no one in the house stirred, so I scrawled a hasty note and descended the creaky stripped stairs for the throng of Block Partiers and the chrome monument just beyond. The place was abuzz, a hubbub of 80% capacity denoting a leisurely lunchtime crowd. I found a corner of the counter, spread my palms wide on the cool formica, and waited to express an interest in equal measures of coffee and water.
I was unlucky with the waitstaff this time around, drawing one of those disinterested and distracted waitresses who seem querulously unsure why people keep asking them for things as they try to enjoy their afternoon. This turned a somewhat officious trip for necessary fuel into an unending odyssey of reading Huxley and observing my own cast of conversational characters as they traversed the booths and seats in my vicinity. Most everyone was with someone else, and all in a famously good mood. Monday holidays in America are a reprieve, a get-out-of-jail-free card, an unexpected stay of execution. They transform Sunday-night-dread into delirious revelry, Monday afternoon drudgery into the false hope of real freedom. People slapped backs and pounded tables and laughed themselves silly, stuffing forkfuls of nourishment into already pudgy faces as they warded off the feeling that tomorrow they die.
But halfway through the meal, a kindred. Hopelessly awkward but with his own ugly sort of charm, a man in his forties or early fifties, unkempt without being unclean. Glasses and a moppy wave of brown hair holding off the last vestiges of beginning baldness. He had reading material like I did, sat six seats away around the counter’s long swoop. A regular, clearly, addressing at least three waitresses by name and lingering over the discussion with my inattentive friend as he dorkily voiced a profound need for coffee. “I don’t just need coffee, I need it bad!” he explained, taking a reflexive self-giggle at his ability to poke fun at his tired chemical demands. I realized he’d been up about as long as I had, and I could guess in a roughly comparably tormented state. I don’t need to tell you he lacked a wedding ring.
It was as I had already set my plate aside and was vainly hoping for another coffee refill that the next man joined the counter culture, squarely ensconcing himself between the older man and I. He, of course, even older, maybe mid-seventies at the most, unafraid to wear his large hearing aid with pride or take his time in the shuffling walk and little grunty struggle up to the counter seat. Not only a regular, this one, but a regular for perhaps longer than I’d walked this planet, warmly greeting waitresses not only in his immediate vision but behind him and around him as they paused with laden plates to return the entreaty even more warmly. A favorite, a kindly old soul offering the last of his Social Security and social interaction to the disenchanted diner denizens who take his tips home to too many children they see too little. He was past the point of reading, perhaps exemplifying a desire to merely see and be seen, to exchange softspoken words in his only hour-long exception to an otherwise silent world.
It hit me about then, double-checking his own lack of wedding ring and the corresponding absence of a tired gray-haired companion back home, that I was dining with my future selves. Oh sure, I wasn’t quite as overtly geeky as the ten-years-on manifestation, nor as hopeless as my nearer model. But I would be. I will be. I can see it all before me now, and shortly before leaving took time to make quiet appreciative eye-contact with these portentous brethren. I am he as you are me and we are all together. The jilted, the never-loved, the lonely men who find solace in the busy clatter of frying eggs and hastily scrubbed dishes and excited conversation of those who are not solo. This is how we do it. One day after another, one meal at a time, fueling ourselves on a long slow drive into an oblivion whose final exit no one will care to see.
I raise my cup to you, good sirs. To me. May we adorn the counters of a million restaurants to come, indirectly finding a way to feed children who will never be our own.
