For readers who are confused by these stories, there is now a post with the title “Bridge.” It explains what this is, gives context and more, not just orientation but a deeper glimpse into the main and supporting characters.
Sorry for the many typos and other proofreading errors.
Mitchell had a lot to say. Can you listen?
He told me something related to his story of the friend who was raped- I told you yesterday and before; Mitchell had repeated it a few times. It moves him. Me too.
We had dinner out in a hip artist’s neighborhood- let me describe it a little: you pass through blue shade of old brick buildings, some with lofts, others housing restaurants or bars, galleries for people seeking community of the like-minded, support of peers struggling to find themselves in their work and in the world of people Mitchell’s age, lol.
I walked first toward home. Mitchell followed later (he was meeting a friend outside). It wasn’t even late, just evening, but Mitchell worried about me. It was Sunday, the streets fairly empty. Sunday was the same day that happened to his friend.
He passed a vacant lot behind a broken chainlink fence and saw someone there, prone, by the sidewalk amid the rubble and litter of the lot. He thought it might be me, that I had been attacked and then left in that place like that. But he couldn’t see clearly enough to be sure. The figure lying down was turned away, face not visible, in shadow.
“Hello,” he said to find out if it was me.
He saw the person stir in response. At least they were alive.
Clearly it wasn’t me. It was a man.
Having spoken, Mitchell felt he couldn’t just leave.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“No,” came the answer.
“Yeah, I can see that,” Mitchell said in a voice lowered out of respect. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m hungry,” said the man. Small, dressed in black, anyway dark clothes, as I had been, he seemed half-swallowed by the terrain. He spoke in the barely audible tones of someone who had given up on the world. That was, Mitchell said, a reason he had lowered his own voice.
The man seemed angry and rightfully, Mitchell thought. He spoke to me about his abandoned state. I’ve seen homeless people, of course. We have them in Japan too. Some even make tent villages.
“I wish I could help get you something to eat,” Mitchell said to the guy, “but I don’t have any money with me and am too far from home to go get some.”
A murmured response followed.
Mitchell felt he should say more.
“Do you want me to call the police?” They might be able to take him to a shelter and a meal, was his thought.
“No!” came the answer, sharply.
“Okay, but this is no good.”
Silence. The man seemed resigned to his fate for now at least.
Mitchell tried to think of what to say.
“I know it’s tough at the moment, but you have to believe it will be better in the future. This is temporary. In a year from now, you’ll be in good condition, leading a regular life. You have to believe that. I do.”
The man looked up at Mitchell for the first time, seemed to revive a bit, show some curiosity. He had been lying, prone, but now raised himself on an elbow.
“Do you really think so highly of me?” he asked. A genuine question. He seemed pleased by the possibility.
“And I’d thought he was angry at me along with the rest of the world,” Mitchell explained to me.
“Yes,” he answered him. “And I’ll tell you why. It’s because I too have been in despair. Everyone has had moments when they felt they’d lost everything, there was no hope left, no coming back. But there is. We all do come back. And you will too.”
He took some comfort in the fact that he had at least spoken cogently to the guy. Most people wouldn’t have stopped, even checked him (Mitchell of course had had a special reason for doing so).
“Still,” Mitchell told me, “I left with him still lying in the field of broken bricks (a building must have been razed there), sprawled hungry, homeless. I hadn’t changed his lot at all probably.”
But he said even so he’d felt all right walking away because at least it hadn’t been me there. At least I hadn’t been attacked, raped, left like that.
He met his friend as planned and they got in his car and when inside, before taking off, Mitchell cleaned things left in a white bag of fast food from before. His friend waited, helped.
“Don’t throw away the napkins.” Mitchell said he could use them and explained how- because he sweats a lot and worries about the smell- and laughed.
“I sweat a lot under my arms, a lot, always have, so I carry paper napkins to wipe my armpits occasionally. Otherwise it can get pretty rank. Ha ha.” The concern was funny but a private one he didn’t usually tell people. He’d taken that friend into his confidence, expected to be assured by him that he shouldn’t worry.
“I don’t really have a problem, do I?” he asked.
His friend answered frankly. “Actually you do have one. You have a big body odor problem.”
Mitchell was surprised. He’d believed all along it was at least half his imagination.
They were going to meet me later (his friend and I had met) and Mitchell said he’d wondered in the past if I’d noticed his body oder- I must have- and if it had bothered me. It seemed not to have. Maybe I liked him so much I didn’t care so much if he smelled of sweat or didn’t find the smell bad.
Of course this wasn’t the first time we’ve talked about that. Mitchell said he meant he’d speculated on my reaction when we were first seeing each other. Now of course he knows I like everything about him. He laughed again when saying that. He wanted to tussle me to the floor as if to some rubble-strewn littered lot to roll and tumble. He pawed me. He did smell of sweat after his long night out.
In fact, he stumbled some, became a little clumsy. He’d become embarrassed. We weren’t exactly doing a graceful dance there in the living room (before an audience of house plants).
Mitchell was moving to a new apartment when we started seeing each other and in the company of that same friend and others one afternoon he called the phone company from the coffee shop where they’d been talking and heard a recording that his number was “under a shut-off order.” As if he hadn’t paid his bill in a long time. But he had. Upset, he had to find the nearest phone company office to hash out the misunderstanding in person. He explained to his friends that he was leaving and asked for their help locating the office. He knew it was on the same avenue as the small Greek coffee shop they’d stopped into but wasn’t sure exactly were. If he went the wrong way, he’d lose time. “Do you know whether it’s to the left or right of here?” he asked his friends, among them the same one he saw yesterday.
I don’t know why Mitchell told me all this. Do you mind my telling you? It just kind of stuck in my brain.
Mitchell said the funny part was that his first thought was about me, if I came over to his apartment and thought he was a guy who didn’t have a telephone, couldn’t pay his bills.
That friend saw his concern about his sweat smell and laughed encouragingly. “Don’t worry. You’ll find a way to solve the problem.”
Mitchell likes, trusts, respects, even looks up to that friend, so it’s no surprise he asked his opinion. Last night they went to a college reunion, where Mitchell saw an old classmate he also liked but remembered had rejected his friendship- there’d been a one-sided falling out- and as he watched others greet the man (at a piano, he played piano; music was his college major; he had red hair- Mitchell told me more details), he realized he shouldn’t approach the former friend as the others were though he wanted to as well. It was partly pride that held him back. They had not met since college, and there was no reason to suppose the man’s hard feelings had softened in the meantime. Mitchell didn’t want to lay himself open to a possible rebuff, humiliation.
He acknowledged that his decision not to attempt an overture, gamble, may have been overly cautious. “We lose opportunities for human connection like that,” he acknowledged, “but sometimes there’s no helping it.”
He said he really wondered how the old friend was doing now. They used to hang out, have a good time. The end came over a woman, and not because both wanted her. There was no competition or jealousy, at least not in the sense you might expect. The woman was friend to them both but from the beginning it was clear Mitchell would win her as girlfriend. His male friend, guy at the party playing piano, had cheered on their courtship. The problem came after Mitchell got together with her and no longer had time for the guys. His friend felt abandoned, hurt, resentful and finally cut all their ties completely. “Can that kind of rancor, hurt last?” Mitchell asked me, and I saw the genuine distress he still felt over the emotional rupture from the past. His eyes showed something I can call innocence, wonder like that of a child, as he speculated on whether the old friend might have forgiven him by now. He didn’t know, might never. I wanted to give comfort, if I could, if he’d allow me.