All You Need Is Love (and a Job (or Maybe Not a Job))

She makes a point of saying the cross-street, across from the building where the famous singer lived, the one across from the park where a nut with a gun killed him, and people still leave him flowers. She used to live there but she left the city for sprawl with a beach and no winter. She wants to open a doggie daycare but she doesn’t have to do shit, really. She is back to see friends and hang for Halloween, but she has no fucking costume.

She says her age and I cannot believe it, and she says she used to have a job she was really great at and she spent a decade after college staring at three computer screens for 20 hours a day. Now it is her time. She earned it. She has not worked in a couple years – well, not full time, just here and there, a few hours a week consulting, and she still makes more than me and you and everyone we know combined. Tough time to be out of work, lady. But she might not ever have to work again if she plays it right. She was one of the youngest and the best at the bank (ever), and she worked and worked and worked for this, she says.

She says she might not dress up at all, and I shake my head. She buys a couple shots. She could buy the bar. But not a costume, apparently. She says she would rather watch the parade from the rooftop garden of her friend’s building, and when she says “friend’s building” it sounds different than when I might say it to mean “the building my friend lives in.” I tell her to do both. Parades are for being in, not for watching from a distance, on high, above it all. I tell her that if she is still doing that shit, then she is still not really living.

I think about her on the train home, jealous and angry and drunk.

Some homeless old lady pulls a can of air freshener out of her bag and sprays it a couple seats down from me. Smells much better now. Her back is hunched, her hair is white and she is with a younger but graying homeless woman who looks like she might be her daughter. Same clothes, same hair tucked the same way under wool caps.

The old woman keeps spraying. She sprays her clothes and the other homeless woman’s clothes, and she sprays paper towels and their hands, and then I smell the piss. She has several rolls of paper towels in her bags. She is even sitting on a roll. She sees me typing on my phone and I think she thinks I am taking photos. She looks angry, violated, but I keep typing.

More paper towels, more air freshener. She keeps spraying and the smell goes away. My nose is clogged with chemical flowers. The women adjust their clothes and hats. They hunch forward, lean their heads together, and close their eyes. The piss smell rises again. These women do not work either.