Give and Take

I’m sitting in a corner of The Stompin' Grounds - one of those comfortable, earth-tone places where all the granola heads hang out after the sun goes down - dark and slightly sticky with smoke and patchouli oil. A tall man with greasy hair and a black leather jacket sits across the room from me doing trig and playing with the chain that connects the stud in his nose with the hoop in his ear. A light drizzle slicks up the sidewalks and makes all the little Marilyn Mansons run to the bathroom to fix the eyeliner.

I loosen my tie and try fade into the woodwork as the people shuffle past. I write them on my laptop. Some guy in combat boots and a black T-shirt with a pot leaf on it stands up and screams something into the microphone. I think he’s protesting something, but I can’t quite make out what he’s saying through the feedback. I don’t think he ever fought in a war. I think it scares the hell out of him. I think he would probably piss his pants and cry like a baby if some other kid that could barely lift a rifle stuck it in his mouth with a nervous shaky finger on the trigger. Hell, I would too. The main difference between me and him is the fact that he gets up and lets the world know how scared he is by screaming some bullshit into a microphone to an audience of people who think he’s brave, and I just keep my mouth shut and write about the whole thing.

This is the coffeehouse: a meeting place for misfits like me to sit around and bitch about the world, or bitch about the people who bitch about the world. Another refill and I’m off and running again.

I write about the steam that rolls up in front of my eyes and mixes with the smoke in the air. The little trails circle around the face of some girl whose parents think she’s at a slumber party. She’s got a little bag with her - more like a big purse - probably got her other clothes in it - and her makeup. She laughs at the jokes of a pale-skinned guy with red-rimmed eyes and bleached hair and goatee. He's about 23, judging by the amount of fading in the tattoos on his arms, and she is generously 15. Her friends left 36 minutes ago. They said they were going out for Camel Lights. I know they won’t be back.

This dark little corner sees a lot. I see a familiar face in the other corner scribbling furiously on his paper, puzzling through some fantastically complex mathematical formulas. I don't do math - I write. I write the people around me. His words are numbers, my numbers are words - we’re both storytellers. I accept that. We're opposite ends of a continuum, working toward the same end - balance. But when you look at the same thing from two different perspectives like that, you get two very different pictures. Our stories of the Stompin’ Grounds and its denizens are our pictures of balance - give and take.

The girl curls her toes up in her sandals under the table and crosses her legs at the ankles as she nibbles on a thumbnail. Bleach-head leans back in his chair - the angle determined by his weight and the relative tensile strength of the legs in relation to the gravitational pull of earth and the air pressure at this altitude - crosses his leg over on his knee and grabs his ankle - the picture of cool relaxation. Confidence and fear -- they feed off each other.