Don't Forget to Write

I Take a Dive and a Climb

Bruno left, and I sat at my desk and wrote. It had become even more of a habit now, to write every day. Instead of writing papers for richer college kids though, this time I was writing something for me. A story. A nonsense story with rambling thoughts and silly dialogue. A story without a discernable plotline. Writing just for the sake of writing, in all of its cathartic joy. It must not have been earlier than 9 or 10 in the morning when I heard a knock at the door. I opened it to a tall, skinny, black man with short hair who I had never seen before. "Hey, what's-" my eyes darted over his shoulder at the thick cloud of smoke pouring out of his room. "Jesus Christ!" I stepped out of my doorway to look into his apartment, wearing shorts, socks, and a T-shirt.

"Don't worry," he said, but the sweat on his face and the huge pupils in his eyes said that he might have been trying to convince himself as well as me. "It's not smoke. There's no fire. It's steam. I think it's the heater, but I don't have my phone. Can you call the Super?"

Fernando turned off the heat, so the steam stopped, and a few minutes later he was up on our floor with a set of tools. The two of us watched Fernando work on the pipes for a little while and shot the shit. This guy, Marcus, had just moved here yesterday from Chicago. He was a stage actor who had been doing well, but wanted to chase the roles in New York and get to Broadway. "It's good to do well in a city like Chi-town," he said, "But every stage actor knows that you haven't made it until you've made it in New York. What about you? Are you an artist? You strike me as the creative type."

"I scribble a bit, short stories and poems mostly, but nothing good. I've never tried to get published or anything like that."

"Why not?"

I shrugged. "I do it for myself. It's good for the soul. Keeps the demons at bay."

"Have you showed it to people?"

"No, you're actually the first person I've told, a kind stranger who just moved in next to me."

"Ah, a closeted artist." He shook his head with a smile. "You know at one point I was a closeted gay man and a closeted artist? I don't know which one was worse to tell my parents. I mean the gay thing, that was tough. They're religious, you know. Very old fashioned in some ways. But they came to accept it, they loved me for me. But when I told them I was an artist, and that I actually wanted to make a living off of it... oh man, I had never seen my parents so concerned. They thought they had failed me. Like trying to be an artist might as well have been a life sentence to poverty."

"Geez that sounds tough. I'm a little embarrassed to tell people, myself."

"You're gay?"

"No. You wish," I said jokingly. "About the art thing."

"Oh, right. Well, you should put yourself out there. You have the eyes of a writer."

"The eyes?"

"Yeah. eyes that don't just look, but see."

After the pipes were fixed I turned to go back into my room, but the door had locked behind me. I reached for my keys, but didn't feel them. I put my hands in each pocket, pulled them out, slapped the outside of my shorts, then put my hands back in my pockets. Still no keys. Bruno wasn't home and Milo didn't have opposable thumbs.

"Fernando," I called down the stairs, running down in my socks to meet him. "Fernando! Do you have a spare set of keys? I left mine in my apartment."

"Oh, no. I'm sorry," he said through a thick Hispanic accent.

"Is there anything you can do to help me?"

"Maybe. Come downstairs."

I followed him to the first floor and into his apartment. His three little daughters greeted me in princess costumes that they were trying on with a mix of "Olas" and "Hellos," and one said "Trick or Treat!" I bowed and said "Encantado, princessas." Fernando led me into his bedroom and pointed out the window. "Climb the fire escape?" he suggested.