IV: Megan Little (fiction)

It was early in the evening. Early enough that the sun was still out but late enough to be tardy for an evening event. It had been hot all day. The kind of heat that makes you want to peel off your skin to be more naked. You could almost feel the city breathing.

The street was a mess with SUV's pulling trailers, 15 passenger vans, and overstuffed compacts. All of these vehicles haphazardly parked in a thousand spots decorated with as many signs explaining that there was only 15 minutes on Wednesdays when one could park there. When Sammy Brown got there, things looked like a mess he'd never seen.

You see Sammy Brown grew up in Western Pennsylvania, a place my father often called "God's country." The place his parents were renting from God was a very rural rancher with a giant flag pole out front displaying an American flag as proudly as could probably be done. Sammy's Dad had driven everyday from Scranton to Fort Whitman as part of a cold war project. He made missiles for the government for fourteen years and then disassembled them after the wall fell for another six. When everyone decided Communism wasn't so bad after all and all the missiles were gone, Mr. Brown got laid off. The flag never came down although Mr. Brown many a time yelled out that he was going to eat it since he hadn't enough money for food at times. Funny that they named a military compound after a poet isn't it?

But none of these political and economical thoughts were in Sammy Brown's head as his feet first touched ground on Ludlow and Stanton, no. It wasn't even the hustle and bustle. After 6 hours in the car he felt electric from the hustle. All he could think about was the girls. You see New York City has roughly 14 million residents, not including commuters who also number in the millions. That means even more roughly that 7 million of these residents are women. And by the blessing of good genes or Hudson water, any street in New York City is a running stream of beautiful women. Sammy had never seen so many in his life. He was snapped out of it by an officer of the law. A young 23 year old college dropout named Dan Fields who always wanted to be able to shoot people and get away with it. He yelled and pouted to Sammy Brown that it was inappropriate to park there. He shook his nightstick and pointed it out that it was no longer Wednesday and hadn't been for some time. He gave Sammy ten minutes in his wise and profound moment. He told him ten minutes to load the gear in and that was that. He'd be back, so in order to be able to come back he left.

Ten minutes! How could you possibly move two keyboards, two stands, three amplifiers, 4 guitars, three drums, five bags of equipment, and the cymbals in ten minutes? He'd have to figure it out. Cliff has fallen asleep on the ride. He was from Scranton too. Instead of old man Jones on his horse cart, he saw the lights of a hundred cabs fighting for the three feet of passage to the next street. He saw the distress on Sammy's face and quietly started moving his share of the gear into the venue. He knew better than to wait for instructions when the instructor was so obviously instructing. He elbowed Chief along the way. The giant awoke from his slumber and began to help.

Chief played the drums. He looked like a troll who lived under the bridge but instead of jumping out he just looked up the girls skirts as they passed. Burly and sporting a beard, he usually slept unless he was drumming. Even then it looked as if he was asleep, quietly keeping time with his eyes half open. He only drank whiskey for some reason and it usually made him sleepy. And as he started carrying drums across the street Sammy felt a lot safer all of a sudden.

The band entrance to the bar was a long narrow stairway leading to the second floor. It looked like it got narrower at it ascended and probably did. It creaked as if one more speaker in your amp would have sent you straight to the basement and for some reason it was crooked. The bar was dimly lit and the area to store your stuff before you played was more like a coat closet. Hence began a game of three dimensional Tetris that Sammy played at every show, moving the cases into a pattern that would hold them in vertical space. He had one hour to find a spot for the car before the band was scheduled to play. The bar gave them all a free bottle of water and that was that.

Fifty-five minutes later Sammy came into the bar sweating and wincing. He had spent the whole time looking for a parking spot when one finally opened up 37 blocks west of the club. He then had to walk the entire way back in the boiling of the night heat through the sea of people. It was ridiculous. When he got there Cliff had some bad news. Their set was going to be cut short. That famous jazz musician Piezo DeCantumbria who frequented the establishment in order to increase his chances of being recognized by some young college student was playing an impromptu set. They would only play twenty minutes. Six hours in the car, ten minutes to load in, and fifty five minutes to park for twenty minutes of playing. That was only ten minutes times two, five minutes times four. Five minutes is nothing when you think about it. Four times nothing is still nothing. That's terrible in terms of ratios.

They decided to do as many songs as fast and as hard as they possibly could. They jumped, flailed, power-slid, and flipped their hair for five songs before the sound man cut them off. They smelled like stale beer sweat and cigarette fingernail dirt. It was the policy of the bar to load the bands things right into the street after their set to save the vertical space. So Cliff and Chief were left to bring the things to the curb while Sammy Brown walked all the way up the Bowery for 37 blocks. 37 miserable hot and stinky blocks where New York City was a disgusting taste in his mouth. You're nobody here. In Scranton, they were the biggest thing since sliced bread. Everyone came to Chollie Mac's to see them play on Saturday nights, the whole town practically. Here, they were a drop of piss in the ocean. These beautiful women didn't want to talk to his stinky self, especially as he scowled up the Bowery with his stink lines in the air. He got in the car defeated, ready to apply to community college and become a traveling salesman.

He pulled up Ludlow St. among the rest of the trailers and hazard lights, chain smoking as to slowly but surely bring young death. They loaded the two keyboards, two stands, three amplifiers, 4 guitars, three drums, five bags of equipment, and the cymbals and Cliff had to piss. Sammy Brown was glad they were leaving, he was ready to go from the get go. The 37 block walk and the subsequent brutal automotive push through the same had made him decide he'd never return to this new Rome. A waste of time and money he'd concluded.

When it happened Cliff was still pissing so he didn't see it. Chief would have heard and seen it if he hadn't already fallen asleep in the backseat of the car. The most beautiful girl in the entire world walked by Sammy Brown and told him that she loved his band. She held up two fingers on her hand and turned to face him while still walking away and smiling to indicate the word peace. No one is sure whether or not she actually was the most beautiful girl in the entire world but in Sammy's world this girl had walked straight out of a magazine and into his heart. When Cliff came out to leave Sammy's heart had been filled to the brim by unbridled optimism towards his entire self. Suddenly he was again a good songwriter, singer, guitarist, and band mate. New York City was his bitch, their new marketing target, Jerusalem and Mecca all in one. All he wanted to talk about was taking over New York City but Cliff fell asleep as soon as they hit the turnpike. So for six hours, Sammy Brown mapped out from the first stages of his conquest of New York City's bar scene straight to his million dollar Sony Records honeymoon with the girl of his dreams who he happened to run into as he took New York by storm. He even gave his queen a name. By the time he got home, he and Megan Little were practically dead and in side by side plots. And for some reason that made him happy.

You see on smile from one girl made him go from being so depressed he wanted to die to so happy he wanted to die, but with a particular partner in crime. It was the same type of smile that made famous jazz musician Piezo DeCantumbria frequent the establishment that so many college girls would wander into to meet boys. The smile that fell Samson, Troy, and John Lennon. The interest of a woman can certainly keep a mans heart aflame with creation. Because as it's always been, there are only two things that can possibly inspire the creation of art by a man and that is impressing a woman or death. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.