“Aw man, they don’t have any SmartWater®” says some woman
at Gate B14 in Terminal 5 of JFK. Jackie and I look at each other
and roll our eyes and whisper under our breath, “Aw man.” This is
the only thing I’ve ever wanted. Hey, sure I like sex and vacations
can be nice too and if you’re giving out awards I’ll take one
but the best is being alongside someone who just gets you, and it,
the whole stinking pile of noise and nonsense streaming by
and sweeping every one of us along. Lucky, I think, is the word
I’m looking for, looking at Jackie who’s searching in her bag for
a pen for me to be able to try and write some of this down, when
the woman comes back around the corner from which she’d previously
disappeared and says to her I think son and daughter-in-law and
their baby her grandchild, “look what I found!” in each hand
a bottle of SmartWater®. She shakes her arms up and down a little,
swinging her hips in some sort of ridiculous victory dance,
the biggest goddamn smile on her stupid happy face.
“Are we in a SmartWater® commercial” we wonder aloud, and off we go,
riffing, about the woman and her family chugging the plastic bottles
in one cartoony gulp, then proceeding to solve complex chemical equations,
even the baby getting in on the fun, nursing at the plastic nipple atop
the SmartWater® bottle then pulling out a little baby-sized chalkboard
and broken piece of pink chalk to write out, 2 + 2 = THIRSTY!
That’s Jackie’s bit, and maybe because we’re the same age and
raised on the same steady stream of capitalist television propaganda,
each and every cheesy late 80s early to mid-90s advertisement
shouting “BUY THIS” that I can absolutely and completely see it
as she writes it into my mind, the baby in cheap black sunglasses
which he lowers to look and wink at the camera before saying
in a deep basso voice, OH YEAH…
She’s sitting next to me now on the plane, asleep
against the window, and I’m looking at her
eyelids and the curve of her soft left cheek as it gives way
to the lips and mouth. I can’t stop time. Not with words on a page
and not with my futile one-word prayer, which nonetheless I slip between
the motions of the above-all-else-and-everything moving clock:
Tick, tock, stay. Tick, tock, stay. Tick, tock, stay, stay, stay.
