What Happens When You Connect With Your Missed Connection

I bum him a cigarette out front, idly commenting on the summer sunlight having long since tapered off and the dusky blue shade of the night sky. Business indoors has picked up significantly, the quiet chatter grown loud, spilling out the windows and down the street, fueled by increasing numbers of drinks. Stepping on my cigarette, I lean against the brick face of the bar and enjoy the loose feeling of my shoulders the booze has granted me.

“I didn’t expect you to see that post, really. Or respond to it… kinda surprising — that you read that stuff, I mean.” Dick went into detail about pieces of his art that have been inspired by reading them, but I’m barely listening, looking at everything but him. I’ve already heard enough artboy talk — he wasn’t supposed to be an artboy, goddamnit. Not wanting to hear another word about his creative side, I close my eyes and sigh.

Sensing that I’m losing interest, Dick abruptly changes the topic. “They weren’t Carhartt’s, by the way, just Levi’s.” I don’t know why I feel embarrassed for not knowing the difference and give him a coy smile. Looking through the bar’s open door at the crowd that’s amassed inside, he suggests it might be time to leave.

We’re halfway down the block when he offers to show me the view from the roof of his apartment. The night air is warm and I agree, waiting outside the bodega while he picks up a six-pack of Corona. His place is less than a block away and I have to admire his game plan — meeting me less than three blocks from home meant being invited over less threatening.

I take a seat on the rickety folding table that’s been hauled up by some resident of the building while he uses a lighter to pop the cap off my beer before cracking open one for himself. The conversation moves from what we were like in high school and our mutual distaste for other city dwellers that are rampant fans of NYC; the ones that can’t fathom admitting that this metropolis is, at best, inconveniently convenient.

Though there’s more than enough booze in my system, I’m nervous and chain-smoking, letting him do most of the talking as I move from the end of one Camel to a new one without thinking. “You’re quite the breath of fresh air,” I tell him as I exhale. There’s something ironic about using that phrase at this very moment, despite it not really meaning anything. The smoke spirals up into the dark, our words not holding much weight in the cooling night air. He points out the long, low rectangle of the nearby UN building, the sand-colored strip of the Long Island Expressway covered in pinhole shimmerings of distant cars coming and going from that far-flung arm of New York. As he points out more buildings, I’m struck by how much he knows about the city’s architecture, who’s building what and how it will compare to the rest of the buildings that make up this infamous skyline.