For my friend Zak. First song written by yours truly and the second is “Home” by Delta Spirit.
It was dark, probably somewhere near midnight, when Zak finally left the coffee shop and started wandering down the streets of his small city home. It’s stiflingly small here, he thought to himself, gazing into the half-lit windows of store fronts. I need to be somewhere bigger. Somewhere with a cause, a problem, a drive. Not a tourist trap filled with fruit and wannabe hipster teenagers with no purpose. He scuffed the toe of his worn black converse against a slight uprise in the paved sidewalk and kept walking till he reached his home, shutting the door against the night behind him.
In a small apartment in New York City, Lavender was lighting her third cigarette. She wasn’t a chain smoker, in fact, she rarely smoked at all. The lights of her neighbor’s window reflected on her deep red hair, and she stopped caring about all the side-effects of one or two cigarettes every once and awhile. The chipped red nail polish on her hands was accentuated by the orange glow of the cig and the paleness of her slender hands. “Lav, really?” her friend, Catherine, asked from the couch.
“It’s not like I smoke very often, it was just one of those days,” Lavender huffed, blowing smoke out of her nose and into the empty air just over the balcony’s railing.
“At least put on some pants,” Cath muttered, going back to her notebook. Lavender turned, leaning her elbows against the railing.
“Why?”
“Because half of New York can see you in a flannel shirt and underwear and it’s discomforting to me to know that I hang out with you in public. Also I think it may be illegal,” Catherine snorted. Lavender gave her a glare and blew the smoke straight up before crushing the dead cigarette into her balcony ashtray.
“Ya know, Cath, you should find yourself a purpose,” Lavender asserted, turning to look down at the City That Never Sleeps.
“I think you should find pants,” Catherine replied, turning back to her Modern Art essay and ignoring Lavender successfully for the rest of the evening.
Three months later
“And my soul got crushed by a runaway train, all my dreams leaked out into the street-side drain. Yet for some strange reason I try to dream, nothing in this world isn’t ripped at the seam…” Zak’s voice drifted off with the guitar notes, and he leaned down to adjust something on the paper in the seat next to him.
“Son, you’ve got talent,” an older man nodded from two benches over. Zak smiled at him, his cock-sure, sideways smirk that always got him either a drink or into trouble.
“Thanks. Many years of practice,” he replied. The money he’d earned playing on street corners back home had paid for his ticket here, and a job running mail in an office up the street paid for his tiny tortured-artist apartment. Talent was his only friend at the moment.
“He’s alright,” came a feminine voice from a short distance to his other side, and Zak turned.
“Let’s see you do better,” Zak offered. He wasn’t used to being told he was anything less than wonderful (mostly because he was very adept) and he wanted to see this challenger either defeat him or fail with good reason. The mysterious girl took his guitar, flipping her firey hair to one side, and began to pluck at the strings until a familiar tune formed.
“Beat like a rug, ashed out and club. Well it’s all for my betterment, I’ll give you a rib, with the marrow dried up. It’s not much but a widow’s gift,” she sang, pulling at the strings one after the other. The tune kept coming, and Zak’s eyes widened. I know this song. So as she sang and played, he followed behind her with the words until they were singing a strong duet at the end verse.
“When you’re down in a hole, when your heart’s weighed down like gold, there is a hand that can reach you there,” they ended together.
“What’s your name?” she asked, handing him his guitar and watching as he scooped money from his case into a hidden pocket in the lining and put the guitar down against the blue velvet.
“Zak, yours?” he replied, looking at her from an angle through his long eyelashes. Lavender hurriedly swallowed the lump in her throat like a piece of raw sugar, finding her way out of the deep brown of his gaze.
“Lavender, but most people just call me Lav,” she introduced.
“Better than them calling you Der,” Zak smiled. Lav smiled back and watched him slowly lean down to pick up his guitar case. Come on, she urged. “Do you, maybe, want to go for coffee sometime?”
“Yeah, that would be cool,” she nodded, standing up and walking with him down the pathway. The old man on the bench gave a rough laugh.
“Damned kids always falling in love in Central Park,” he huffed, giving a toothy half-smile.
The bus picked Zak up on the corner, at the edge of the park by a streetlight and a little glass hut. For the first time in a month, he went home smiling (and with Lavender’s phone number and address burning in his plaid shirt pocket).
groundlingsup 