sunday (fiction)
I’m at Simon’s with Bela. She bought us shots of aquavit. Sunday night is smoking night at Simon’s. The bar is filled with thick, white cigarette smoke, like the fog rolling in off the bay but without any of the romance. I cough gently.
Do you remember the twins, I’m asking her.
Which twins, she replies.
The twins that used to walk around the Bay Area wearing matching outfits, I remind her.
Ohhhhh. The twins.
Yes! We slam our aquavits on the heavy wooden bar, cross arms and dump our shots into each other’s mouths just as we always have.
I went out with their parents tonight. Gerry and Gerry.
Really?
Yes! We slam our aquavits on the heavy wooden bar, cross arms and dump our shots down each other’s throats just as we always have.
Yes. They are a riot. Very fun. They told me about their travels and about serendipity.
The John Cusack movie?
I get nostalgic for a moment. The bartender, seeing that look in my eye, hands me a cigarette.
Need a light? he asks.
I am light, I reply. Namaste, I say.
Namaste, he replies. His third eye glows through the nicotine haze.
The first time I saw Serendipity was with my first boyfriend, Jack. I would drive to his house in my dad’s Jeep Wrangler. I guess I met his family but I don’t remember anything about them. We would watch movies and sometimes fool around in a stuffy narrow room that had a TV and a lot of pillows and cushions. In my memory the couch is grey and the cushions are blue and purple. I can smell him still, in my memory’s nose he smells like Dove bar soap.
How was the movie, Bela asks. She orders another round of aquavit.
I hated it. I don’t remember why or what it is about, but I hated it. I hated it so much I’ll never forget it.
But I thought you didn’t remember what it is about?
I don’t. I don’t remember anything about it and I never have. I just remember hating it. When I went to college at SUNY Purchase I would go to Manhattan and hope to never run across the restaurant they meet at, which I think is called Serendipity, the whole movie is basically an ad for a restaurant, predating that Netflix show where a Bibigo employee accidentally falls in love with the CEO.
Bibigo?
The dumplings you get at Costco. Gerry was surprised that there are Costcos here. Gerry said, Mexico is so different now. It’s kind of sad.
Is it sad?
No, I mean, I don’t know. What’s sad is the loss of specificity of place, that any place is just like any other, you know? The gentrification of experience, endless homogenization, flattening, boredom. Then again it’s the same people that complain about these things that cause these things, like the Gerrys were saying, we try to go where tourists don’t go.
Gentrification is like tourists going where tourists don’t go?
Yeah, I don’t know. I light my aquavit on fire with my cigarette. Everyone in the bar cheers. It’s like, I don’t know. I’m feeling nostalgic again, the bartender slams a bottle of aquavit on the table. On the house, he says.
It’s something my parents always said too. They always said, we like to go where tourists don’t go. But they were tourists. They would go where tourists didn’t go and then tell us stories of surprise when the places where tourists didn’t go didn’t have menus in English.
Gentrification is about speculation, Bela says. She is serious, sick of my shit. Gentrification is about abstracting a concept like “living” and then selling it back to people.
Funny you should mention that, I say, pouring the aquavit on my head and lighting a match. I was telling Gerry that old story of the Suzuki Ignis that Luis gave me as a gift/curse after he moved to Paris and broke my heart.
Bela grabs the bottle away from me and pours herself a shot. She slams it on the bar before throwing it in the bartender’s face. Everybody cheers.
I was saying to them, I continue, I was saying to them that one morning I went out to the car, I was going to go to Costco, and when I turned the key nothing happened.
We know this story, everybody yells. Finally people are listening to me, I think to myself.
I know you know this story, I yell. But later I said, I mean I told the Gerrys, what car part thieves here do is pick a specific part from a specific model and rob all of them. This overwhelms the supply at dealerships and creates a situation where people have to buy the missing part back from the thieves themselves, because the thieves have the supply.
That’s good business, said one of the Gerrys.
That’s gentrification, says Bela.