The woman who loved beer feels a strange tragic presence.
This morning, I was riding around town looking for yard sales with Dirk. I was starting to feel queasy. This was due in part to Dirk’s manner of driving, which includes lots of sudden acceleration and braking. When he first hit the gas and swerved us hard into the curve where Scott Boulevard splits from Ponce, I thought, “This is it. He’s been feeling suicidal and now he’s going to take me with him for breaking his best friend’s heart.” But we survived, only for him to do the same thing again when he spotted a red and white Garage Sale sign off to the right. When he pulled us over to the curb next to what turned out to be only the dregs of a sale - a card table piled with faded baby clothing, a rusty wine rack and some sci-fi novels - I just sat for a moment. I could feel my paleness, the sweat beading on my forehead. Roiling stomach.

Of course, four or five beers the night before didn’t help. Here’s the thing that my roommate pointed out to me that did me in, and she’s right: It’s the Change-of-Venue Beer Order. If you start out at the Yacht Club with one friend, why yes, you’ll have a Hoegarden there and then when you meet some more folks at Estoria later on, you’ll order an Anchor Steam, which they don’t have so you order a Newcastle but the only size bottle they’ve got is Extry-Huge so you say Hell, okay. Next, with the threat of diminishing wallet contents looming, you order a PBR. Then you’re at the music venue down the street and so you order another Pabst there, because you just got there so it feels like you’re starting afresh. Except for the unique Pabst headache beginning to spread from temple to temple.

And so you wake up feeling fine the next morning, but by the time noon and your friend’s cigarette-smoke filled car comes around, well, the fact that he may in fact be feeling both suicidal and murderous does not seem half bad.

When we got back in the car after walking exactly one circle around the feeble garage sale, Dirk lit another Marlboro and I opened my window.
“It’s called air conditioning,” he said, hitting the button to close my window to a crack. “We’ve got that, now.” Then, as he lurched back out into traffic,
“I’m storing a gun in the car now that the city is filling with desperate, impoverished people.” I tried to wrap my mind around that but was feeling so queasy I lacked the energy even to tell Dirk I was feeling queasy. I was faintly aware that Dirk wanted me horrified or at least disconcerted by the new awareness of a deadly firearm under my seat or in the glove box inches from my sprawled, sweaty knees. Instead, the image of the desperate throngs of people marching up and down this very street had seized me and sunk me down deeper into nausea and immobility.

“I mean, my friend in Baton Rouge? He says it’s fucking anarchy and it’s just spreading. And I mean, they’re sending them here.” We swerved across two streets and Dirk swung the car around sideways in traffic and then into the Last Chance Thrift Store’s parking lot, where he narrowly missed an eggplant-colored minivan and veered into the next spot. We got out and I stumbled after Dirk—a fast walker--across the parking lot of a strip mall that feels faded and forgotten even though Last Chance is a very popular, if ill-named, thrift shop. Dirk pointed out a dead pigeon I was about to step on and I half-hopped over it. He opened the glass door for me.

“I mean I know that they’re just normal families and stuff, but with that many desperate people, I’m glad I have my gun.” I could feel the couple ahead of us with a baby both pretend not to listen. Dirk’s voice carries and he knows it.

The air conditioning inside the store felt good but my heart wasn’t in it. The light threw a dingy, yellowed wash over every rack of unwanted clothing, every shelf lined with abandoned television sets. I found myself staring at the customers picking through the detritus discarded by people who didn’t want it or collected from the houses and apartments of dead people. I wondered which shoppers were from Louisiana, which were from Mississippi. I didn’t need anything. I’d just spent the last fourteen days trying to fit the contents of boxes and boxes of my own things into one bedroom and a couple kitchen cabinets of a house already cluttered with stuff.

I remembered being five years old on Saturday morning errands with my mother, errands seemingly endlessly occupied with strangers’ driveways laden with clothing racks and tables covered with macramé and fiestaware –and then sitting in the shopping cart while she pushed it through Giant Eagle. I was never allowed to snack while we shopped, but I could pick out a toy or a record during the garage-sale’ing. We’d get home and I’d stomp up the stairs to my room with the record. Yank it from its worn cardboard sleeve. Then I’d listen to Thumbelina or Mr. Rogers and rock back and forth on the blue shag rug. It was pure joy.