Thanatopsis: Or How I Died

I was sitting by myself in a scanty café when I poured hot, ancient coffee with a low viscosity on the front of my pants. I found this café, COFFEE, while driving myself away from vapid conversation with my vapid housemates. I thought, “Surely, no one will even notice me here—much less want to talk to me.” Giggling, blushing still, part of me was hoping the owner, or at least the person who gave the café its name, had this generic banner painted there because he wanted to give it a quirky effect; I would walk in and be greeted by likeminded individuals: liberal, smoking coffee-drinkers who would rather gouge out their eyes with sporks than drink murk processed by an exploitous corporation. There would be a myriad of beings assembled there at COFFEE: trannies, goths, eclectic rockers (redundant?); mod, gorgeous men who actually look good in skinny jeans and flawlessly sexy women resembling Jenny Lewis will be standing around the semicircular mahogany bar, smiling, laughing about something Eddie Izzard said in-that-one-show; they argue over whether Jeff Mangum will ever record music again. The small, circular tables with mismatched chairs afford intimate conversation. Someone is discussing correlations between Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! and García Márquez’s Cien Años de Soledad.

Never-been-readier, I thumped my cigarette across the near-vacant limestone parking lot, the cherry splitting from the fag, as if to say, “We are heading in different directions…” The loose gravel crunched under my boots, and it was rather a feat of accomplishment that I made it to the front door without falling on my ass. Part of a song was stuck in my head. It was there because I put it there; if I were going to fit in with the crowd beyond that door with a WATCH YOUR STEP sign off-center-placed, I would need to think of the weirdest, coolest-sounding song I know but surely not a song that everyone else would know, too…and all I could conjure was “communist daughter.” As I opened the door, I proclaimed, charmingly, aloud:

“Semen stains the mountaintops.”

[As it turns out, Owner was just an unoriginal hack.]

The eight occupants of the room all looked at me as if I had just emasculated a donkey. As a quick cover, I blamed my outburst on a bumpersticker I just eyed on the back of an old Buick as I making a left into the parking lot.

“Idiots!” I laughed.

I managed to make sixteen eyes roll simultaneously…probably a world record for a worldclass nobody like myself.

As I noticed the superfluity of flannel and Brut cologne, I decided the best thing to do was to order a cup of coffee.

The gentleman standing near the cash register—the kind with the typewriter-like numericals—asked me if I desired a cup of coffee. I nodded and lipped the word, “black,” to him.

The man brought me an olive-ochre mug with chips around the rim exposing white porcelain. The coffee smelled of smoky molasses and asphalt. I decided it best to allow the coffee to cool; this steaming bowl of tar would be too much for my delicate palate.

“What’s your name, handsome?”

I raised my head, my eyes meeting those of an obese woman with curly red hair and pasty white skin. Her calf-length dress exposed the varicose veins despite her best efforts otherwise to cover them with hosiery six shades darker than her natural skin color.

I smiled haphazardly. “Cullen,” I offered. “Well, actually it’s William, but my friends call me Cullen because my last name is Bryant. I study literature at Indiana.”

“That’s nice,” she seemed to say with her grin; Her taut lips, dominated by wrinkles, spread across her face and disappeared, revealing teeth with as much variety of color as an ear of Indian maize.

I continued, “It’s kind of grown on me because I actually like Cullen Bryant—the name, not the poet— and well, I like the poet, too, I guess. “Thanatopsis” is one of my favorites, but I prefer the writings of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. His writings of Coney Island are some of the most beautiful in the language and the aesthetic quality really lends its—well, anyhow, I’m not going to go into that detail—I mean, this isn’t exactly the appropriate audience for this kind of talk and— …”

This is where she interrupted me…indefinitely.

She cleared her throat, loudly, a gutturally phlegmish noise that suggested she should wipe her mouth with a handkerchief exited her oral orifice—a sound that came undoubtedly from her bowels. She started, “To him who in the love of Nature holds/Communion with her visible forms, she speaks/A various language; for his gayer—…”

“Hours,” the man at the cash registered intruded. “She has a voice of gladness, and a smile/And eloquence of beauty, and she glides/Into his darker musings, with a mild/And healing sympathy,
that steals away/Their sharpness, ere he is aware.”

“Wrong crowd?” she laughed, not heartily, but mockingly. She began screaming with hilarity—an almost manic howl. I began to feel a burning sensation in my lap. The coffee was smoldering on my jeans.

With no break, the rest of the members of the café began chanting.

“When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder and grow sick at heart—…”

The lady had escaped unseen and came back holding the barrel of a shotgun at my right temple.

“Earl doesn’t have a bumpersticker, dear.”

I threw up as her finger pulled the trigger.