Roadside Assistance

By Tenzin McGrupp © 2004

I never told the uptight girl that I secretly enjoyed sitting on top of the Brooklyn rooftops and memorizing what it looked like as she silently smoked in the warm hue of twilight. One day, if she gets internet access, she will see that I wrote something about her trembling hands that shook with unease when she lit her thirty-second cigarette of the day.

I used to make fun of the conventional uptight girl from Wellesley, the skinny girl in the J. Crew clothes, with a name fresh off of a restricted country club registry. During a drunken conversation at the end of a soused bar, at the end of a serious binge, in between swigs of Stella Artois, she wanted to know what it felt like to watch the wandering afternoon rain fall on top of the tarred roofs of brownstones in Brooklyn.

Sometimes I threw water balloons at snot-nosed school children while she reluctantly chain smoked French cigarettes and spoke softly, her lanky legs perched up on an old Dellwood Farms milk crate. The psychedelic swirls of exhaled smoke danced with the flock of pigeons invading the unsteady airwaves and dodging the infrared and satellite TV signals for the dozens of mindless pill poppers staring at watered-down gibberish in a welcomed daze on couches with worn out ass prints in every seat. Hungry for Big Macs and thirsty for Lite beer, I wondered whether or not they used coupons to buy Happy Meals or whether they were just too lazy to clip them out of the newspapers tabloids with headlines that read MOB BOSS MISTRESS FOUND DEAD.

The Bucket Boy, a laconic twelve-year old kid with a pair of worn out drumsticks, viciously slammed down onto his upside down, empty white bucket, formerly used to haul around medical waste, now his ticket to contentment. Every beat he threw out into the hellacious world equaled another cent that fell into the weathered Yankees hat with a few odd dollars bills and overflowing with shiny new pennies and old quarters, his take for the day and his food money for his six-pack of starved brothers and restless sisters.

The first time I slept alone in a very long time, was the moment when I knew, the faint beat of her pulsating Heart was just the obscure echo of the Bucket Boy. I gave him three dollars last week so he could buy a Dime Bag and a half a dozen Popeye's biscuits, while his overweight and racially charged mother, flung ripped open ketchup packets at his inbred stepfather, a hopeless lifer who sold batteries door to door, when he wasn't picking up all the half-used condiment wrappers off the messy living room floor.

She smiled, you know, that uptight girl from a place I never visited, but read about in books like The Catcher in the Rye and in another twisted epic, The Bell Jar. The distant place with the fancy name, like Yarmouth or New Canaan, where those proper well-bred girls recited Chaucer and silently fingered each other in between classes and after long sessions of oral gratification with half-baked, erotically challenged misfits they found in Star Trek chat rooms on Yahoo. Her smile made me think of what her eyes looked like early in the mornings before they had a chance to be tainted with the glumness and grit, after being taken hostage by the daily dose of anxiety medication and the dejected sigh while she glanced at her aging hands.

I never knew why she kept calling me early in the mornings, when I woke up with an open mind, in a warm and empty bed, or why she kept buying me drinks, when I told her that I hated Rilke and all those other poets I loathed. The seasons came and went and she could not change me, or my old ways. But still asked me to take her to the roof, like we had often done many, many reckless summers before. And we took turns sipping cheap wine that I stole from a corner bodega that laundered money for Al-Qaeda, then we squinted at the millions of lights that fluttered in the Manhattan sky, swarming like a horde of fireflies in a desperate night.

I could hear the soft sounds of her voice muffled slightly by the harsh beating that the Bucket Boy used to take from the end of a broom that his villainous mother chased him with when he did not come home with enough money to feed her habits.

Bucket Boy, let's hit the road. I can get you gigs in the Midwest and in Portland. Of course, that's if I can ever shake loose the gaze of the chain-smoking, Rilke quoting, anorexic, J. Crew-clad heiress with manicured nails and three Platinum credit cards in her new Prada purse. I'm going to swipe one of her credit cards and drive to Lost Wages and let her pay for all my gas at $2.12 a gallon.

I never told the uptight girl that I secretly enjoyed sitting on top of the Brooklyn rooftops and memorizing what it looked like as she silently smoked in the warm hue of twilight. One day, if she gets internet access, she will see that I wrote something about her trembling hands that shook with unease when she lit her thirty-second cigarette of the day.

Tenzin McGrupp is a writer from New York City.