Seattle Loses its Cookies

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Wednesday
February 21, 2001

Finally got outside around 4, to meet sarah downtown at bozotronics (dexter & mercer) where it was high time i got my camera fixed. i was happy to hit the street and see some faces after another day of being a zombie with the screen. that man just off the bus with his lunchpail, workworn and weary but smiling just a little in passing. a pickup truck that stops suddenly and i brace for the possibility of someone jumping me (back on my old new york guard), but it's just a handsome guy eager to call on a friend, his face could be out of a walker evans dustbowl photograph, GQ, or a vladivostok potato stand. at the corner of 38th and fremont way i bump into jessica, who 18 months ago contributed vocals to tonka while on a cigarette break from her job in still life cafe above john berry's old place (replaced now by smooth concrete of new condo parking garage). "How's work?" I ask. "It's sucking the life out of me," she says, "I hate to be so honest but that's the way it is." I invite her to the Slides of March and continue walking, across the George Washington Bridge (which most people know simply as Aurora). It's a nice view, and I have nice thoughts, a little crazy, maybe, and I look down at parking garages, and i see the cars, and i take a few last pictures with my broken camera. it's possible, you see, only it takes a bit of squeezing and after only a few my fingers hurt so i figure what the hell i will swallow the loss and spend $79 to get it fixed, it has been good to me through 38,000 photographs, i can't abandon her now. oh, i am so full of my own thoughts that in my haste to make it on time i forgot the sensible shoes i was to bring to sarah so she and i could stroll home this drizzly warm evening, so i suggest shopping some shoes and we head all the way back down to 2nd and bell, where a real change vendor starts talking and talking with no sign of relenting and i finally say we've got to go and sarah is embarrassed about going into fluevog's with him standing right there under the awning out of the rain, as if there were something embarrassing about buying pricey shoes when he's trying to scrape up just a few bucks for a bottle to make the night go down smooth and forgettable as any other of the past 25 years, and maybe it is decadent and insensitive but bill gates is forestalling the revolution with billion dollar donations for homeless shower and laundry facilities and anyway i noticed he too had been wearing shoes. we didn't catch his name but the brown shoes with beige trim sarah settles on are named aimee, after the fluevog new york store manager. we walk down 1st, up 2nd, down 3rd, like rats in a maze, looking for that italian place i stumbled upon back on N30, and we finally find it by looking up the indy media center (which i'd remembered was just next door) in wet yellow pages tethered to a payphone, and it's called Bruno's, Mexican and Italian food, long and narrow, we find our cheese, pizza and sandwich, coupla American beers, Bud and Rainier (Rainer darker, skunkier, the color of piss when you're hungover), and our waitress speaks little english and knocks things over. three 12-year-old boys being treated to dinner by someone's mom at the next table wonder if i'm going to eat the whole 14" the waitress sets in front of me. they're about to close up when we leave, no more coffee, i take the cold dark tea, and say to the man behind the counter, "this looks like new york," and he says with an accent and a lot of pride, "that's where we're from. 27 years!" "are you bruno?" "yes, i am bruno. 27 years," he repeats. "you won't find many places like this," he says. "not out here," i agree. we go up 2nd avenue, cut through seattle center, a woman in a beige concrete corridor stands alone looking at art(?) on a wall but we can't be sure, she might as well be staring at a brick or thermostat for all we can see. going up the steps and steps and steps that are 2nd avenue when it crosses queen anne hill it starts raining harder, alike on us and stone-porched mansions and windowless multimillion dollar bunkers, so we duck into trader joe's and as a bearded man sings the virtues of the jelly selection we pick out the prettiest jars that will be our future highballs and continue home weighted down, pausing only to pick up winter-loosened cookies (those hemispherical reflectors you find in regions where the roads are not supposed to freeze) and pile them on the pizza box (half the pie leftover, i had to disappoint the boys at bruno's), which is getting very heavy, and sarah says, "We're lucky," just as her paper bag breaks and jars clink on the street but she must be right because nothing breaks and we make it home over the long bridge in the face of headlights kicking spray tho' i can't see a thing through rained and fogged eyeglasses. we put away the groceries and line the path to our door with yellow and white cookies and it's anything but a job to curl up in the sauna with a magazine i don't read as sarah falls asleep.