"Excelsior" continued
Previous pageShe poked a finger into the air, a little tipsied, toward the book under my left hand. “What cha readin’?” She said to me and sipped her fruity drink, a vape cloud spiralling steam into the air.
Ten Days That Shook The World I told her and unhid it from under my forearm. John Reed, I said. (https://tinyurl.com/JohnReed-10days)
She snorted. “John Reed? That no good traitor.” She didn’t actually say ‘no good’. What she actually said I won’t repeat.
I voiced surprise. Traitor to what? America?
She warily looked around. The low yellow light in the vapey bar had been gobbled up by a steady increase in clientele. “You got somewhere to go, handsome?” she said more than asked, looking away from me as she blew a plume of vape into the ectopolasmic anomaly growing near the low-watt bulb in the ornate tin ceiling, as if we had just had a successful seance.
No, I told her. She threw some bills onto the bar, and I did the same, and waved a hand at the barkeep. No names. It was that kind of place.
I lowered my hat, helped her with her coat, and we left the Foggy Duck and into the close humidity of an Albany summer’s eve.
She was wearing a cute little one-piece blue dress with a black-and-white keffiyah shawl, which she left on after doffing her coat inside her apartment.
So I asked her to explain her John Reed comment, but instead she poured us each a scotchrocks, and after bending down in front of me very deeply, she struck a hands-on-hips pose and flung her right arm around the room pointing to the wall before us.
“Whadday think about my boys?” she said, indicating a series of portraits.
Lenin…Marx-Engels…Stalin…Chavez
I nodded. Somebody ‘s missing.
She frowned. “Who, Trotsky? Is that what you are, a Trotskyite?”
I told her that I was thinking Mao.
She snorted. “Well, I had to go on the down-low with my Chinese ties. Linda honey!”
I made a joke about whether the Chinese actually wear ties and she didn’t laugh. “Not funny,” she said.
If you go carryin’ pictures of Chairman Mao, I started. She finished, “yeah, yeah, ‘you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow…” We clinked glasses and chuckled. Imagine there’s no country… I began and she spit-choked on her sip of drink. “Stop!” she laughed.
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