Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors
It has the appearance of Any Street in any simulation of a
disheveled Van Nuys even though it’s crouched in the bowels of the tastefully
extravagant ocean village of Santa Barbara, a real “surf’s up” with someone reading
the Wall Street Journal whose most likely currently or otherwise been profiled
in Forbes, yet, as I say, it’s in the bowels of. Anyway, when I say that it
flavors of Van Nuys, what I mean is that this particular area projects the same
sort of embarrassment, economically so, reflected of course in its architecture,
or rather econo-tecture, where the buildings stand as if in embarrassment to
their creators who no doubt live off in the hills that surround and strangle this
arena—the well-to-do-whatever-they-so-desire in the fairy-tail cum real gentrification
of Santa Barbara known as Montecito-land.
It’s early
morning and already the fog, typical of this time of the year, is slithering
down the hillside ready to strangle this already depressed area in those shades
of gray that I’m finding particularly musing at present. The muse entails the
title of a famed work of Anti-art by, Marcel Duchamp (Dadaist), entitled, Bride Stripped Bare by its Bachelors. Go
figure. Apparently someone else does as well, forego the title. I watch as he very
carefully sets his cup of coffee down on one of those tipsy turvy types of
outdoor café style tables outside a coffee house, one of those tables we smokers are relegated to—those
of us who are banished from the kingdom of comfy accommodations. This
particular house of java, as is the one I’m seated at, is one of those sixties,
commune-style rendezvous, whose interior is unilaterally punctuated by
overstuffed chairs and couches of the kind that seem to have been manufactured used for just such a purpose and place.
However, as is the case with smokers such as we, of whom are banned from the
kingdoms of convenience and accommodation, we universally must suffer
tipsy-tables and hard-seated chairs whose legs just cannot seem to jointly
agree on a common plane of reference, whereupon his juggling around, moving the
table this way and that, and this again, until finally having acquiesced to the
authoritarian principles of gravity and uncompromising circumstances, he then
very carefully sets down his cup upon the table—ever so gently. Apparently, at
least somewhat satisfied that it will not fall over, he then begins to forage
around inside his backpack for what I intuitively know will produce a
cigarette. I know instinctively that it will be what it certainly turns out to
be as well: that of a filtered cigarette, a cheap filtered cigarette at that,
and I also know what his next move will be, and is. He very deftly tears off
the filter. It’s important to note, as I’ve pegged him for a Camel smoker who, like
myself, can’t afford the real thing, so he does what I do, which is to tear off
the filter of a cheap brand, whatever is on sale for the day in hand, displaying
a certain of deftness for doing so that is equal in fact to my own. Just one
quick twist of the wrist while firmly grasping the filter between thumb and
forefinger, and snap!
It’s a gray
day, as I’ve already alluded to, and to top it off, it’s Thanksgiving Day—oh
yeah! A day that seems to miss some of us—a family stay at home for some with
relatives you normally can’t stand any other day of the year. His next move,
which is to me just as predictable as the last, is to reach back into his pack
to retrieve a lap top, setting this upon the same rickety table, yet in
absolute reverence, and certainly not without undo weariness of the close
proximity of electronics to a potential liquidy demise, he activates it while
taking a long thoughtful pull off his fake Camel while in waiting for Word to
do its thing. He begins to look around, a bachelor looking for a bride, searching
without even knowing he’s doing so. He focuses his attention across the street
where I am, at another coffee house, and probably notices my filtered cigarette
stripped bare of its filter, and my activated lap-top . . . I’m sure that he’s
wondering just what I’m wondering, another bachelor seeking unbridled
prose—gazing off into the distant hills reflected off the grimy windows of a
coffee house at the gray fog flowing like a bridal train—for provocation.
C. Angelo Caci.
Tags:
Short Fiction