A Weekend in Parks with Molly(s)

At 9:40 I get on the train.
On the train I listen to my ipod and decide that if i ever make a movie about my life, Belle&Sebastian will have to score it.
When I arrive at GC, I stand under the ceiling and call Molly P.
'Hello.... did I wake you up?... sorry, go back to sleep.'
I call Molly M. She doesnt answer so i text her: Heading to Molly p's area in approx three mins. If you call me before that i might come to where u are. Hi!!!!"
I wait for three minutes and she doesn't call so I take the shuttle to the 1 and then wait for the 1, standing on the platform, in the wet air, avoiding the eye of the middle aged father wearing a cow boy hat. He is standing with his two fleshy children and his fleshy wife and he has a lion king flyer sticking out of his cow boy jeans. I can hear the accent in his expression.

A group of acapella singers come down into the station and sing to us. I dance, ever so slightly, stepping from foot to foot, trying not to smile as widely as I want to.
I take my hair down and put it up again. I bake in the wet heat.

I arrive at molly p's a half hour later. I look up in the direction of her window.
"hi. I'm here. are u still sleeping?'
She is so I say i'll walk around, maybe go to the diner and wait for her.
I walk. I dont go to diner. I get blisters on the bottoms of my feet. I get lots of odd looks, i assume, because of my dress- dark blue with pink and yellow and light blue galaxyish patturn... I end up near spring street.
Molly wakes up and says she'll meet me at a park. when i get there she i already there, standing in a fountain.
We go to mollys house. I trade my blister shoes for a pair of Molly's flip flops.

We go to the bank and both deposite our paychecks. My first paycheck ever. I dont know what I'm doing, i dont know where to sign or how to prove that i am me. but the teller cant tell.
We both get 100 dollars worth of our checks put in our accounts right away, that brings my balance to $110
We go to a bakery and share a tiny square cup of yellow lemon custard and an iced tea. Molly says that this bakery is the competition for the bakery where she works.
the boy who serves us the lemon custard says it was only his second day working. It's only molly's second week working at her bakery, she doesnt say anything to him about this cooincidence. I would have. because the boy is beautiful.
we go to a playground, sit underneath the jungle gym and eat the ice thats all thats left of the iced tea. we talk about being little and how when we were little if our parents wanted to buy us ice cream we got ice cream, and if they didnt want to we didnt get it... and how helpless being little is.

I walk molly to work. I buy a sandwhich from her bakery. She rings me up.

I get on the A C E (?) to union square to meet molly m.
I meet her in DSW, where i try to buy a pair of sneakers that will save my weekend- molly's flipflops are blistering between my toes.

Molly M suggests we go uptown to a real comfortable shoe store and buy me comfortable shoes. First we go to a starbucks where i stand online for the bathroom for ten minutes and talk with a beautiful black man about bathrooms and how if the starbuckses of NYC ever decide to put up those snide "restrooms for custumers only" signs, then the city will start to smell twice as bad.
what we meant is that starbucks is the only place left to pee.

Molly and i sit on a curb on the edge of union square and we eat ice and talk about loving ourselves.

We go uptown and buy me a pair of expenisve 'comfortable' shoes that, after two blocks, give me blisters on my heels and the bottom of my ankels.
so, back downtown, i buy a six dollar pair of shoes at goodwill so i can stop wearing the expenisve ones so that ill be able to return them. the goodwill shoes give me blisters too so we buy band aids.

we stop at molly's apt where i wash my feet in the bathtub. and bandage my heels, my arches and my toes.

Then out for indian food where we sit in a window and then take a lot of food to go because we always order more than we can eat.
We talked loudly about how 'if i like someone, the idea of them liking me back makes them unnatractive even if i really like them, i dont want to ever catch them flirting with me" and a man follows (i mean i think he follows) us for too many blocks, walking too close to us, listening to our angst.

Back at union square we sit on the fountain and listen to a boy with, what molly decided was 'an attractive back' playing his guitar, standing on the other side of the fountain, with his back to us.
A homeless man asks the boy 'what do you know how to play?"
And the boy answers "bob dylan, paul simon."
And i call out, from behind him, admitting to eavsdropping "paul simon! paul simon!"
and he turns around and sees me and sings "april come she will..." in his own altered rythym that lends itself nicely to the song.
and the homeless man sings "setpember I'll reeeemmmeeemmbberrr." because that seems to be the only part he knows.
And i take off my shoes and put my feet, bandaged in green and purple and blue band aids, on the fountain wall in front of me.
I sing along and drum on my legs.
Then the boy plays some other songs and the homeless man dances for two homeless women who molly decides are his two wives.
Then molly walks around the fountain and, dropping some change into the boy's guitar case, tells him 'we're gonna have to hear some more paul simon."
and the boy turns around and sings to us "...i dont know why i spend my time- writing songs i cant believe- in words that tear and strain to rhyme." and I almost cry because of the song, and the wind that blows strongly through my hair and the chattering voices of the homeless on the bench and the sound of cars passing and the faces that go by and the man who splashes his children's faces with water from the fountain- that's filthy- but in that moment was fit for a baptism.

And then molly P and Alice arrive a present us with out 12am tkts to 'Inception'
The boy is packing up his guitar when i walk, barefoot, around the fountain and tell him 'i just wanted to tell you, before you leave, that you made my night."

he is kneeling next to his guitar case, he looks up at me. "wow. thank you." he says
"paul simon is my favorite and that was my favorite paul simon song." i smile
"im chris" he shakes my hand
"katie."
"ill be back later, ive got to hang out till i make train fare."
I think about the three sacajawea coins that i gave him ten minutes ago.
"well we're gonna be around," i tell him, watching him buckle up his case. "we're waiting here until 12 when our movie is."

But we left, we went to wolfgang's and sat on his roof.
then went to the movie.
at three we were walking back to molly p's, where i was spending the night.
we passed a tall black woman, man,,, or woman...threatening a small white man.

'the streets seem scarier than usual" says molly.

in the morning we walk a million miles from molly's to st. marks where we eat brie melted over avacado on baguette and wolfgang tells me that 'cliche' is a french word. which i guess i knew. but. "i thought it was ours too."
he says cliche also means 'like, a picture" in french.
i pay for half a cab fare for molly p so she can stay an extra fifteen minutes at the cafe before going to work.
Molly M, wolfgang and i go to see "kisses' at the Angelika.
for a moment Wolfgang thinks he cannot afford to go. Then he finds forty dollars in a different pocket of his wallet.
"it was a tip." he says.
Wolfgang is a french tutor.
Molly and i accuse him of doing more than tutor french. We think that a forty dollar tip for a fifty dollar lesson is pretty impressive.
"I know. Right?" he says. "...and he always buys me brunch at expensive restaurants."

we see "Kisses."

In the bathroom i run into Nora Zehetner, the actress from "Brick".
She's wearing a bandana on her head and she looks up as she passes me on her way to the sink.
I grin at her but dont say anything.
...I dont get starstruck...

when I come out of the stall she is putting on lipstick standing at one sink, i go to the other sink and wash my hands, i cant bring myself to look at her without anything to say to her. and i dont have anything to say.
I hold the door for her as I leave the bathroom, she takes the door from me and I wonder if my wet hand left water on the door that she can feel.
Molly, wolfgang and I leave through the bottom exit and then I see Nora leave through the top exit. She walks down the steps and meets her friend, and I look at her friend because I am curious about an actress having a friend and the friend is an actress who i recognize but cant place. I watch them walk away. Noticing that they arent wearing anything particularly great... jean skirts and tank tops.

Five minutes a couple of blocks later I realize that the friend was Clémence Poésy who plays Fleaur Delacour in "Harry Potter" and the girl friend in "In Bruges."

Molly buys a soft serve chocolate and vanilla twist ice cream cone from a man with a thick accent who tells me that i have beautiful eyes... at least thats what we think he said. Wolfgang laughs at my vanity, at me because i assume that that was what the man said...

Wolfgang says that not being able to understand people with thick accents is one thing that makes him very uncomfortable.
Molly can't control the dripping ice cream in the ninety degree heat, so i take it from her and control it myself. Im licking it and returning it to a manageable state when Wolfgang says that that means I can give good head. It makes me uncomfortable to eat it after that so I give the cone back to molly and let it drip on her hand.

I get on the R and get off at times square and walk through the hot, wet-aired tunnel to port authority, feeling greatful, as i always do, for those signs that could lead you anywhere, but are always honest and always lead you where they say they will.

and I get on a bus and it takes me home through NJ and through, to my great confusion, the campus of 'rockland pyschiatric hospital" where there are at least twenty brick buildings overgrown with vines and with boarded up windows.
"cinematic heaven" my dad says when i tell him about it.
the new building, a tall ocher colored skyscraper, towers over the abandoned buildings.
there are crazy people seated in the bus stop, but none of them get on and no one got off.

Home.