Gary had these wide eyes and grin that never left his face when he ran into Mark on Main Street just up from the canal bridge that morning.
It hadn't been that long that he'd been out of town and nothing had really changed.
But,
"It all feels so different," he laughed. "Everything looks the same only - I guess I'm not used to seeing it anymore, y'know?"
And Mark did, kind of.
Gary had been downstate to school and was now home for the holidays and, though the two of them hadn't really known each other that well in school, Gary seemed genuinely thrilled to have run into Mark and they went around for coffee.
Gary had gotten in the evening before. He told about coming up on the Thruway and pulling into the old town, the old neighborhood. He was out, now, he said, just to look around and couldn't get over the feeling of being somehow a stranger to it all. It was great being home but he was a day late getting back because he'd stayed on a day with friends he'd made at school so they could binge together one last time. They'd been out the night before break and decided it just hadn't been enough. They had all stayed on and did it over again.
"That was goddam special, let me tell you!"
Mark had been commuting across town to MCC and thought he would transfer eventually but wasn't sure where he'd go.
They should get together, Gary decided when they were back out on the street. They should go out somewhere, close a bar.
"Man, I just can't come down, y'know? I'm not ready yet. I need to JUICE!" he bellowed suddenly and made people stop and stare.
They planned to get together that night and go down to Monroe Ave in the city. Gary had been a few times before but never when he was on his own. Mark could, maybe, show him around.
"Gona be a blast!" Gary was certain.
They arranged to get together and agree that it would be a good night for going because it would be out ahead of the snow that everyone said was coming. When they met up that evening Craig Martin, who had been in their class as well, was with Gary. Gary was still up as before and Craig switched off to the back seat of Gary's car so Mark could sit up front for when they got off the Expressway downtown.
Craig had run into Christie Steiger earlier in the day much as Gary had run into Mark. Mark recalled her as another of that crowd. When Craig and Gary weren't recalling their old times together, Craig was on his cell in the back seat with Christie. He wanted her and her firends to make it down to the Avenue and meet up with them.
"It's early. Nothing happens before ten."
He was on the phone with her again when they left the car in the lot off Oxford Street.
"We're here...at Oxford's...on Monroe.... Come on down!... Anytime 'fore closing."
When they came out of the alley onto the street they fell in with a crowd crossing from Spike's that had gotten segmented when it tried to ignore the traffic which was heavy both ways. They all went into Oxford's Pub together.
Coming down the sidewalk, Gary had noticed that the Mark's across the way on the corner was no longer a Mark's, had become something called Rookie's Express but was still a pizza parlor.
The summer before Gary had been 'down here,' with a couple of friends, he told them over their first beers. They hadn't been able to get in anywhere then, but it was one of those summer nights and they hung around anyway. They got an old panhandling bum to buy them some beers in the corner store at the other end of the block up from Spike's and drank them in the lot between the bar and Subway. It was the lot where the bums hang out on the steps of an enclosed porch and stairs up the side of the building. Later they went for slices and sodas from Mark's, sat on the curb and watched stretch limos pull up and unload whole dozens of guys and girls in front of Oxford's.
They saw a fight nearly break out that the pub's bouncers broke up. Some faggot in these big strange glasses thought he was part of one of those crowds and kept trying to horn in with them.
"But this other guy?" Gary related, "He wasn't havin' the loser. He was going to throw down, go hands with this guy if his friends hadn't held him back. Then the bouncers shooed the dork off the block."
"Gil Farnum?" he added. "He nearly laughed his ass of the curb. Actually - off the curb. Dweeb came back up our side of the street. And he's shouting all this shit over there to the bar, y'know. Startin' things back up again. Only one of the bouncers, man. He stepped down in the street and jus' looks at the guy - and he runs off again! Jus' looks! And Gil fell over on my lap he was laughing so hard!"
"You knew Gil, right?" Gary asked, his face a mile wide with the memory.
"Freakin' Farnum!" Craig called him and pulled on his long neck.
Mark said, yeah, he remember Gil but he wasn't sure which one of that crowd Farnum had been. Maybe he was the blond wrestler who shaved his head to look more intimidating.
There was a gang from Spencerport next to them in the bar for a time. They were buying rounds for one another and, after Gary shout out how they were all from 'the Port' too - just not saying which port, they were included in on the beers.
"We were 'O5," Gary claimed.
"'04," Craig corrected him, popping peanuts and grinning.
"That's right, '04."
Gary got into a running gag with one of that crowd, the two of them sharing memories that had never happened. Perhaps they were memories of things that had happened - just not all in the same school. Some times Craig and Mark were asked to confirm a memory.
"Oh, yeah! Sure! Sure - freakin' best time I ever had!" Craig would say.
From time to time, Craig would go out on the street for a smoke and to make another of his phone calls to Christie Steiger and her lot. They were always somewhere and might be coming around to the Avenue.
Mark would go out, too. At first he would bum a smoke from who ever else was there on the sidewalk but he had never smoked that much and, after a time, even other peoples' smoke made him nauseous. He would go for a walk up the block, instead. For late in December it was a mild night, but he would shove his hands in his pockets and pull his hoodie up over his head and walk along like that. The other end of the block everything was closed and dark. One time he walked as far as the Expressway and stood out on the overpass in the middle with the lights of the traffic whizzing to him on the left and away from him on the right. There was still such a lot of traffic and the cars and trucks traveled so fast that their head lights seemed to streak toward him before disappearing beneath his left foot only to reemerge red eyed and going away beneath his right.
He was returning from one of these walks at Last Call.
Gary and the Spencerport gang were just then blundering out on to the street. There were, maybe, two dozen people out in front of Oxford's leaving the bar but not going anywhere right away. The front door of the pub was more open than closed then with everyone who was coming out or hurrying inside before it was straight up two a.m. They were doing "Teen Age Waste Land," for last song.
One of the 'Port crowd came out later than the rest. He had a slight build and curly hair and stepped around the clot of people who'd come out of the bar last ahead of him. He didn't hurry to the curb side but he walked straight there as if he needed to get where he was going.
He stood at the edge of the avenue straight up and still for a long moment waiting. At last his head bowed a bit forward and what he did was more like spitting up than the spewing that usually happens outside a bar at two in the morning.
Gary's Spencerport High classmate pointed.
"I went to school with that man!" he boasted in the same big voice he'd been using inside the bar.
With out looking around, the kid on the curb lifted his right arm in a weakened gesture of triumph and acknowledgment. When he did look around, he wore an accomplished grin and was glad to have that out of his system.
Soon different ones were piling together with their arms around one another's shoulders posing for prom night snaps and declaring their Spencerport affiliation. Gary and Craig Martin were among them.
There were cheers of,
"S-port! S-port! S-port!"
And there was laughter.
Gary grabbed both Craig and his new friend and called for the girl taking the pictures to immortalize the -
"Class of 'O4!"
Mark stood up the street and watched.
It occurred to him, and he wanted to tell it to someone, that he'd never had a real friend and didn't believe he ever would. He wanted it out in words spoken, too, that he had never been anywhere and that nothing had ever happened to him.
He wanted only to go home; but he had to wait.
THE END.
Christmas, 2008.
