“I hate it here,” he shouted. But Ben didn’t hear him, wrapped in conversation with the same South African girl he had been prowling toward all night. There were roughly seven hundred flat screen tv’s in the bar, all of them showing highlights from the afternoon’s football games.
David reached across the table and tapped him on the shoulder.
“What?” Ben shouted, annoyed at having been interrupted.
“I’m leaving,” he screamed, and forced a smile into a shape that could only have looked like an expression of pain. “It was a pleasure meeting you!” he said (excitedly!) to the South African girl, who obliged with a nod. She looked drunk enough to throw up.
Ben made like he was getting up, but David put up his hand to stop him.
“That’s okay. I can walk myself out!” he said. He gave a thumbs up and turned to pick up his coat. Ben and the South African girl watched, as if amazed at the amount of clothing that he was putting on to deal with the cold.
He put on his hat, scarf, and mittens. Then he put on his coat. Of course, then he couldn’t button up the coat, so he took off the mittens and buttoned. Then the mittens again. He had begun to sweat already. The whole process had already taken about three minutes. The South African had put her head on the table and Ben was trying to save a desperate situation.
He waved one more time, squinting at the devolving conversation through the slit between his nose and forehead. He turned and fought the crowd on the way out and pushed through the double doors into the frigid, frozen, tundra of the Midwest night.
The door closed behind him and he relished the relative quiet of the street. He stood in it for a few moments before the cold wind took his breath.
“Jesus,” he muttered, and started walking toward the El, burying his hands into his pockets and his neck into the back of his collar. It would take about an hour to take public transportation back to South Chicago at this point in the night. He found a heating lamp outside a bar and decided to stand under it and smoke a cigarette to warm up a little. Trains came so infrequently and he didn’t want to smoke on the platform.
He got under it and took off his mittens, extracting his cigarettes from a pocket in the coat. While he tried to get the pack out, he felt his phone vibrate from somewhere deep within the recesses of his layers.
Then, perhaps predictably, a train rumbled by overhead. He cursed softly, pulled a cigarette to his lips, lit it, and then began searching for his phone.
“Yeah?” he said, when he found it, exhaling an enormous cloud of smoke and warm breath into the air.
It was Ben:
“Dude, total abort. She puked everywhere.” He could still hear the bar noise in the background.
“Yeah I figured that would happen. Kind of sooner than I thought though,” David said. He took a drag and felt himself shiver a little bit. He looked up at the pale orange of the weak heat lamp.
“Well do you want to go get a hot dog or something?” Ben asked.
This was his life, he thought to himself. It was happening. Right now. Under this heating lamp. He sighed into the phone.
“Did you get her into a cab or something?” he asked.
“Yeah, just. I had to give the driver fifty, so if we go for eats, they’re on you.”
He didn’t say anything. Took a drag.
“Kidding. I’m kidding. I’ll pay for hot dogs. Where are you?”
Flurries had begun to fall and another Southbound El train burst into the above station. He could hear the announcement of the stop and the door chimes.
“Fuck,” he said. “Tell you what, come down toward the street toward the train and we’ll take a cab home. You can pick that up.”
“Deal. I’ll be toward you in five minutes. I don’t have to put on seventeen layers of clothing.”
“Right,” he didn’t want to argue with him. He just wanted to get home and crawl into bed. The morning held promises of laundry
About five minutes later, Ben came walking up the street, his shoulders lifted high against his head, trying to hold in the warmth.
“You look like a chicken nugget standing under this thing,” Ben said.
David hailed a cab and they got in and drove toward Hyde Park along Lake Shore Drive. He sat looking out the blackness of the lake as they headed south. The lights on the water intake pumps in the middle of the blackness blinked slowly.
“So,” Ben said. “Do you want to talk about the Mary thing?”
Something about the lights and their solitary blinking out there in the middle of nothing on the cold night. It captivated him. He almost never ignored the skyline on these late night rides. But for some reason he didn’t feel like looking west.
“You’ve been moping since we left four hours ago,” Ben said.
“Did you ever see those things out there?” David asked. “The intakes for the city. How do you think they keep the pipes from freezing out there on the lake?”
Ben leaned over to look out the window at the lake.
“Huh? I dunno. Wikipedia it or something.”
David ignored him.
“It’s five degrees out. I’m covered head to toe in fleece. And I am still freezing my balls off. How do you think they keep the same thing from happening—”
“Look. You don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. There are other women out there in the wide world. That’s all I’m going to say about it. It’s just cold and you can grow a beard or something. Jesus.”
“A beard?” he asked, and turned to Ben.
“Totally. It’ll be hideous. You’ll love it.”
It did sound warm, that was for sure.
