Half Gum, Half Candy

April 30, 2005

When Dusty, the S&M receptionist, called to say she was out with some friends at the neighborhood bar, I nearly felt too exhausted to accept her invitation to join them, but not quite.

"Yeah, okay. I'll come out to say hi, but I need a few minutes. How long are you gonna be there?"

She said not to worry, they'd just arrived.

An hour later, I walked around the corner to the crowded bar. I scanned carefully to see who I recognized. Since there aren't too many places to hang out in my neighborhood, I recognized nearly everyone, but no one I really knew. Dusty wasn't there. I jostled through the crowd to the courtyard, where it was quiet enough to make a phone call.

Dusty answered, and it sounded like she was at a bar, so I thought maybe she was inside after all. "Where are you?" I asked.

"We're at the new bar, but we're heading over to where you are right now." I could hear her discussing muffled plans with whoever she was with — appearing to clear up disagreements over where to go and when — before she came back on and said, "I'll be there in five minutes."

I took a seat at the bar and ordered a drink. I haven't been drinking much, and it was the only one I planned to have, so I nursed it while making small talk with Mandy, the bartender. "You want one of these?" asked Mandy, holding up a package of Japanese candies that someone had left on the bar. "They're weird, but kind of good."

I held out my hand and she shook an individually wrapped gummy, yellow cube into my palm. I peeled away the paper and looked it over.

"It's like half gum, half candy," said Mandy.

The packaging was written entirely in Japanese, so there was no way of knowing what flavor it was meant to be. At the first chew, I guessed lemon, but after gnawing for a bit, I changed my mind and decided it was grapefruit. Grapefruit with the consistency of a pencil eraser. Half gum, half candy was a good description, but I think half delicious, half disgusting is more accurate. In any case, the way it caused every sip of beer to taste like floor wax made it easier to nurse my drink.

I was soon joined at the bar by a woman I recognized as a friend of Dusty's. She'd grown up in the same town in Ohio as Dusty, and they knew each other from "the scene" there, but it was purely by chance that they both wound up in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn. When they ran into each other, their shared roots made them fast friends.

The first — and only other — time I met this woman, she was going on and on about two things: how old she was, and what an awesome dancer she is. We were all at my Irish neighbor's apartment, and when Dusty put Prince on the stereo, the woman stood up to strut her stuff. I don't know what passes for an awesome dancer in Ohio, but after all the buildup, the woman's performance was lackluster at best.

Anyway, when she sat down next to me at the bar, she asked if I was waiting for Dusty.

"Yeah."

"Me too."

"I figured."

She bored me with a story about her Spanish roommate who was only going to be in New York for a few months while she worked on a PhD in Astronomy. "She's really smart," she said.

People come to New York to study all sorts of things — Art, Law, Medicine — but I thought coming here to study Astronomy was a little strange. "That's ironic," I said. "You can't see a single star in the New York sky."

"Yeah, whatever. She's doing some kind of research. She's really smart. She has another degree in something else — molecular something-or-other. It's crazy, she studied really small stuff and now she's studying really big stuff."

"It's all the same, don't you think? The holographic universe and all that."

"Huh?"

"Never mind."

Dusty finally arrived, already drunk. "Heeeey," she said, and gave us each a hug hello. "There's a biker party at the clubhouse down the street. They have a stripper and everything. Beer. We poked in on my way here. Justin stayed. I'm gonna go back. Let's go."

"Nah. I'm beat," I told her. "I think I'm just gonna finish my beer and go home."

"Oh, c'mon. You sure? I mean, it's a biker party in Brooklyn. Don't you want to see what that's all about? I do. Besides, I have to go back; I left Justin there. Don't you wanna go? They have strippers and everything."

When it became clear I wasn't going, Dusty turned her focus on her friend, but her friend wasn't interested either.

Dusty left, and the woman turned to me. "We're getting old," she said.

"No shame in that," I shrugged, before swigging the last sip of warm beer and heading home.