Hugo is running around kitchen close at nine, he's taking the bread away, saving it for the kitchen to make toast.  Close at nine.  Everyone, the kitchen is closing at nine.  It was busy enough earlier.  We dealt with it.  Then everyone, with the exception of one couple, just sort of sitting forgettably over in a corner watching the band play, the singer crooning, the accordion easing in an out, the bass studied. He's ripping plastic garbage bags up out of their containers, both recycling and food trash waste, and just then, after the beginning of his mad gorilla act, up the stairs comes just the group that I had mentioned just minutes earlier to the gentleman busman.  And he had joked back to me, mentioning the name particularly associated with the late night, the chaos.

And just now, up the stairs they come, smiling.  One of the guys comes up to the bar, smelling of smoke, hey man and wants a handshake, I can't do it.  I turn back to the light over the stove and the cutting board for the bread on top of it.  A defeated boxer.  They switched the game on him, in the eighth round.  You  know what this means.  This means I'll be driven to the wine again, and goddamn, wasn't I good earlier, but now these people, smiling at me.  My friends, in fact they are my friends...

Okay guys, kitchen closing at nine.  I shout the specials at them over them.  The stoner guy always wants to deliberate...  The woman says, we can do this.  Nine O'Clock, I remind them.  It's 8:56.

"I told you."   The busboy man too is spooked, by my prediction, my clairvoyance, and by his own.   "What I say come true," he says, as he had mentioned the name, Rumpelstilsken, standing with me in the bar's space, with our backs against the cooler, looking out into a middle distance, as if we were looking at the edge of a great impenetrable forest, trying to read it.

"We came for your lovely personality," the woman says, a sort of in the ballpark of a guilt trip kind of a quip.  You've just added three hours to my night.

Even A. chuckles when I tell her, quietly, behind the bar, "I'm going to down the stairs out across the street and stand on the corner and yell at the top of my lungs.  I hope you don't mind.  Then I'm going to come back in like nothing happened."  

I get their order in.  Two salad with frisee, lardon, quail egg, one salad endive, one salmon tartar, then followed by cheese plate, liver, but not provencal, just red wine sauce, and the chicken curry....

Has it been busy tonight?

Uh, no.  (We dealt with it, earlier.  Full bar, on our asses early.  Then they all left, and we all said to ourselves, let's just pack up and go home.  We were busy over the weekend, blood coming out of the ears...)

So now you're stuck.  Now you're caught.  Off to the inevitable conclusion, they even choose to smoke some weed, and by now I don't care, there's a rat walking by my feet, and I'm, for the first time, abandoning my mother for her doctor's appointment down in Fulton, a fact which will dwell on my increasingly over serving, clearing plates, serving, clearing plates, get the damn dessert order in with these stoners...  "There were crystals in the mint ice cream and in the vanilla last time," I'm told.


The apartment really was a palazzo.  It wasn't bad at all.  It had a nice breakup in size.  My brother's tribal rug comforted the living room.  Things were still in boxes, as if to get shipped somewhere yet known.

We all  need some lovin'  I sing to myself as I clean up afterward.  I mean it only as a song, like a nice Early Beatles lyric.  How we all get so shy over the years...  We all need.  It's such a hard shell to break, after years.  To reveal all that would be a more intimate act than anything bodi

kkjm on the radio tonight.  A, as dj, m.r. controlling the wires, H on percussion.

little jokes and sayings race through my mind.  Hey Joe plays in the background.  I'd like to play Hey Joe now, on guitar...  Have I abandoned mom, her next doctor's appointment..

To make a proper Old Fashioned, I would have go down out back the kitchen and play poker for an hour, before thence coming back with some corn liquor.

Praise, very kind, from Phil and Julia, really kind, after talking about God's Covenant...   about how I bring people together.  There was Pete, who just got married, who on the right...  P and J, joined by Anjna with great pictures of her two sons for Halloween, the younger dressed as a Raj umbrellaed by his brother servant.  Charles.  Fitting him in too.  That was earlier.

It's not easy.  Stone-mason's work.  Physical, mental, an art form.  Psychological services of a high sort.   But do you get paid for it, other than the tolerance of friends who show up and see you, busy, busy, you fit them in, it feels good for everyone, that's the way it works, stress and relief, stress and relief.