Serenity Now!
June 23, 2003
My friend Serenity is back from Dublin. I was never quite sure why she moved there in the first place. It was very sudden. She was here one day and there the next. While I was in Amsterdam last Summer, I bought a cheap Easyjet ticket to Ireland and visited her for a few days. She had been there about a year by that time, and already knew everyone. Every bar, every restaurant, every sidewalk, everywhere we went, a person or two or three would come over, talk, and say, "Hi". No surprise, really, she's that kind of girl.
She liked it so much that she overstayed her visa with no clear plans to ever return. However, this made finding a job difficult. She managed to find a few, though. Waitress, coffee shop girl, the usual. Eventually, she started doing what a lot of sexy young girls with bubbly personalities and no working papers do.
The strip club she worked at was full of illegal workers. Eastern Europeans mostly, who would just fly into Dublin for a few weeks, make a bunch of money, and fly back to Hungary, or Lithuania, or wherever. Serenity was standing in the middle of the club with a glass of wine in her hand when the cops burst in and rounded everyone up. Serenity got arrested, locked up for a few hours, and a few days later, she was on a plane home to New York. And now she's here. "Serenity!” I said. “I'm excited to see you. I want to hear about your trip, I want to hear about your adventures."
"Haha—everyone wants to hear about my adventures! I was drunk most of the time."
I invited her to see Nick Cave at Roseland Ballroom tomorrow.
June 24, 2003
We met in Union Square Park and walked to Zen Palate for dinner. Imitation meat. Serenity said it, it hadn't been easy to find good Vegetarian food in Ireland, so she was excited.
"What are you getting?" she asked.
"I don’t know. It all tastes the same to me." Soy this and wheat gluten that.
After dinner, we caught a cab uptown to the Nick Cave show and loitered in front of the theater while Serenity savored a final cigarette before heading in. The opening act was annoying. Noise. don't remember her name. Nick Cave was great, though. At one point, we walked to the rear bar to get a couple of drinks, where the bartender told us, "Last night was better." But he was watching a baseball game on a small TV, so I don't know whether or not to believe him.
After the show, we wandered through Times Square. All that bright, flickering nonsense that Serenity hadn't seen since moving away.
"Let's find a bar around here to go to," she said as we swam through the crowds. But after wandering for several intense minutes, we took a cab to a bar Serenity likes in Brooklyn, with a garden where she can smoke.
She got frustrated trying to take a picture with her cell phone. Without enough light, we could only manage to take blurry pictures of shadows. She took my picture, then I took hers. She showed me a couple of photos she had stored on the phone, and I asked her to email me one of them. “That’s a great picture,” I said. But she wasn’t so sure.
"I hate this stupid phone. The camera on it takes shitty pictures. I want to bring it back to the store. It doesn't work right."
“What are you talking bout?”.
"I don't know," she said, "I just think they could be better."
"Think about it,” I said, “you're taking a picture with a telephone, beaming it through the stratosphere where it ricoches off a satellite to my computer. If you ask me, that's pretty fucking cool."
She thought about that for a second, "Yeah, I guess so."
July 14, 2003
I met up with Serenity on Saturday for a movie. We were going to see the new Johnny Depp pirate movie, but it was sold out. So we walked to Angelika Film Center, figuring nothing would be sold out there. We saw a French movie called The Housekeeper
If you don't mind slow, thoughtful, slightly absurd French movies, then it was pretty good. But I was distracted.
You see, the story is about an older guy whose wife left him. He's a mess, his house is a mess, so he hires an adorable young girl half his age as his housekeeper. They hook up, of course. I spent the whole movie flashing back and forth to my own life. True, my wife never left me, but that's only a technicality. And no, I never hired a sexy young housekeeper. But I have dated a few girls who are young enough to make my guy friends jealous and my girl friends annoyed. In fact, here I was, watching a movie beside a 20-something firecracker.
When the movie was over, I asked Serenity what she thought. Did she like it?
No, she didn't like it much. Kept waiting for something to happen.
It was French, so of course nothing was gonna happen.
She asked me what I thought, and against my better judgment, I told the truth: It made me a little uncomfortable. Made me look at myself. Told her I related to that old dude.
"You're not old," she said.
Then she started saying that there are a lot of movies about that kind of thing. Movies that she thought were a lot better. Like Manhattan. "Did you ever see Manhattan? The Woody Allen movie?"
Uh, yeah, Woody Allen, of course. The guy who ran off with his stepdaughter.
August 11, 2003
The power went out in my apartment, and I was tossing and turning in the heat when I got a plaintive call at four a.m. from Serenity. She was caught in the crossfire of some inexplicable drama. “I’m in your neighborhood, can I come over?”
Actually, I had to drive to the Kellogg Diner to pick her up.
She was drunk when I pulled up. Drunk in the kind of way that makes you deny how drunk you are. "I'm not that bad..."
"Listen...nobody can drink a whole bottle of vodka and not get drunk. Nobody."
"I don't even know what drunk is."
She came to my muggy, electricity-free loft, where she told me the story of how she got so drunk and what had happened with her friends to make her so upset.
I'm still not sure I know.
This morning, as we were leaving my apartment, I ran into my neighbors. I asked them if they'd ever had their power go completely out.
"Yeah."
"What did you have to do to get it back on?"
"Pay the bill."
September 18, 2003
"Where are you right now?"
"At work."
"I'm in Union Square. Wanna meet for a coffee or something?"
Such came the irresistible invitation from the vivacious Serenity.
I walked to the park and met her at the Coffee Shop.
She'd just been modeling for a makeup company — some kind of Fashion Week promotional thing that she had to get up at seven a.m. for. She dug into her bag and showed me the free stuff they’d given her. A T-shirt, some makeup. "I can't even believe I'm awake right now. I only got two hours of sleep last night."
I couldn't believe it either.
"Anytime I call you before four in the afternoon, you always answer the phone groggy and tell me you're napping."
"Tee hee. Yeah. Napping.
