Monday in July. I am at the fruit stand once more, enjoying the slow pace of things. It was a good weekend, filled with things. Mike came over on Friday, while Bill was in Manhattan working with the theatrical society he joined a few months ago.
He was performing in a few 10 minute plays about Baseball and wrote and directed one of them. Before that though, it was a different story. The night before I went to bed leaving Bill and Mike to talk about theater. Mike has an active interest and Bill has his tales to tell. They stayed up later than either one of them intended and I slept soundly.
The next morning was filled with rain. There was a plan, perhaps only in my head, where the three of us would head to the supermarket. It was a steady, heavy rain and Bill had his play to work on for that evening’s performance and Mike was helping him with his lines.
So I wound up going to the supermarket in the rain. The umbrella I had sufficed as I walked from the apartment to the cigar shop to the supermarket. Halfway to the supermarket I started to doubt my resolve to get groceries, but I knew I needed my provisions.
I puffed on a small cigar and crossed street corners that were slowly flooding. I got what I needed from the supermarket and 20 minutes later I was heading out only to face a few inches of water where only a few minutes earlier things were relatively OK.
It poured and poured and my usual route needed to be recalibrated. I thought I was lessening my exposure to the flooding but I was only kidding myself. I was merely a block or two from my apartment and my work boots were washed out.
About 3 inches of water on the sidewalk and about 6 inches off the curb which was where I needed to go. Once you were wet, there was nothing to do about it except to trudge on through. I rang the buzzer to my building and Bill buzzed me and Mike helped me out on the stairs to the apartment as I stepped out of my soggy work boots and left them in the hallway to dry.
Bill headed out after that and I was left hoping the performance would be canceled that night due to the rain. It wasn’t and Mike and I soon were on a bus headed to the evening’s performance. And it was very good. 8 10-minute plays about baseball.
Bill was in a few of them and also wrote and directed one of them. His first time for that. And it was impressive, not just Bill’s input but the whole evening of entertainment. Mike was moved to tears a few times. Overall we both liked the plays very much and found Bill’s fellow members to be very nice and welcoming.
A walk to the subway followed since it started to rain again. Mike was hungry and so we went to Benny’s where I had not had a slice of their pizza in quite a number of years. It was just as bland as I remembered and at $6.00 not worth it. But we were hungry and something needed to be done.
We got back to the apartment and ate the warm slices, I had 2 and Mike had one of two, saving the other for Sunday. Bill went to bed and I was there at midnight, past my bedtime. Sunday arrived and I did the bike ride again, this time to North Bergen for a change of pace.
It was a good ride, nothing exciting. Easy to avoid people and they were more receptive to my buzzing when I approached them. I rode back to Hoboken, stopping at an ATM for some cash. There was what could be described as a yuppie though I don’t think that word is in use these days.
He was having a problem getting in with his bank card and his frustration showed with each attempt. I told him to let me try and sure enough access was granted. I had my bike on the railing outside and in trying to remove it, sliced open the ring finger on my left hand.
It bled a lot despite my trying to stem the bleeding. Bill was at the matinee of the plays and Mike was home, somewhat distressed by the blood. He opened the very old bandaids and I applied them as we sat and watched Alias, a show that he used to watch back in the day. It was the first episode so he filled me in on who was who and what was what.
Bill was soon home and we watched Spain beat Argentina in the World Cup final. Mike was soon on his way home and Bill and I watched the Hannah Waddingham/Olivia Spencer show on Amazon, followed by episodes of Jeopardy that we missed.
I was soon asleep, dreaming of trying to sell issues of Playboy that my brother Frank used to own. There was a pawnbroker interested as well as my Rasta pal Jesse. It was an odd dream interrupted by a dehydration headache I had. I got out of bed, took 2 gelcaps and was fast asleep after that.
A Google Gemini rewrite as a Samuel Beckett essay
## Notes on the Mud, the Rain, and Other Provisions
**I.**
Monday again. A July of sorts. Sitting by the fruit. The fruit does not care; it simply rots at its own measured, unhurried pace. A weekend elapsed. Words were exchanged, weight was moved, water fell from above.
Friday. Mike arrived. Bill departed for the city—that vast, absurd theater across the river—to engage in the ritual of small plays. Ten minutes each. Plays about baseball. Men standing on dirt, hitting a leather orb with a wooden stick, attempting to return to the place from which they departed. A futile geometry. Bill wrote one, directed it, inhabited it.
The night prior, the two of them—Mike and Bill—sat in the dimness, tossing syllables back and forth regarding the stage. Theater talking to theater. I retired to the dark, leaving them to their infinite, late-night murmurs. I slept. The void was merciful, if brief.
—
**II.**
The morning brought rain. Not a drizzle, but the relentless downpour that reminds one of the inherent absurdity of roofs. An idea had existed—a phantom obligation—that the three of us would venture forth together to purchase provisions. It remained in the mind, where most useless things reside.
Bill was chained to his lines, repeating words written by others or by himself, preparing for the evening’s delusion. Mike served as prompt. The duty of the market fell, as duties inevitably do, upon one alone.
I went out into the gray. An umbrella was hoisted—a pathetic canvas barrier against an indifferent sky. I walked. The apartment to the tobacconist, the tobacconist to the market. A small cigar was lit. Smoke inhaled, smoke exhaled; a brief combustion to mark the transit. Halfway there, the familiar paralysis set in: *Why proceed? Why eat?* But the body insists on its calories.
I crossed intersections that were slowly ceasing to be pavement and becoming lake. Inside the store, items were acquired. Twenty minutes of commerce. I emerged. What had been passable was now submerged. Inches of turbid water.
The habitual route was abandoned. A new route was attempted. Self-deception. One path is no better than another when the earth decides to flood. A block from the shelter, the boots gave up the ghost. Water in the socks. Three inches on the walk, six at the curb. Once the saturated state is reached, hope ceases, and one merely trudges.
I pressed the button at the entrance. A buzz echoed from above. Bill released the latch. On the stairs, Mike observed the wreckage. The boots—heavy, bloated with liquid—were stripped away and abandoned in the corridor to contemplate their own dampness.
—
**III.**
Bill vanished into the storm. I harbored a quiet, reasonable hope that the deluge would cancel the spectacle. It did not. The world insists on going forward, rain or no.
Mike and I boarded a conveyance. A bus. It moved through the wet towards the theater. We sat in the dark and watched the eight small spectacles of baseball. Bill moved across the boards. He had fashioned a piece of it himself—his first attempt at organizing the chaos into scenes. It functioned. The audience was moved; Mike, indeed, shed tears at intervals. The performers were polite after the curtain fell. They smiled. We smiled. We exchanged the required pleasantries before retreating back into the wet night.
A walk to the subterranean train. Hunger intervened—that mechanical nagging of the belly. We entered Benny’s. A slice of baked dough and cheese, untouched by my palate for a decade. It retained its essential character: absolute blandness. Six dollars sacrificed for nothingness. Yet the organism required mass. We consumed it.
Back in the room. Midnight arrived and passed. I had outlived my bedtime.
—
**IV.**
Sunday. The bicycle was retrieved. A pedal forward, a pedal back. To North Bergen this time, for no particular reason other than it was not Hoboken. People were encountered, buzzed at, avoided. They moved aside with a quiet, meek compliance.
On the return, cash was required—that paper representation of vanished effort. At the machine stood a figure, modern, frantic, defeated by a piece of plastic. He attempted entry to the vestibule; the door refused him. Frustration mounted—a small, useless human drama.
> *”Let me,”* I said.
I presented my card. The door opened. The universe permits passage only when it chooses.
Retrieving the bicycle from the iron railing, metal bit flesh. The ring finger of the left hand was opened. Blood. Red, steady, absurdly plentiful for so small a puncture. Inside, Mike surveyed the injury with a quiet, visceral alarm. He produced bandages from a bygone era—adhesives long past their prime. We wrapped the digit.
We sat. On the screen, a narrative from the past unfolded: *Alias*. Images from years forgotten. Mike explained the mechanics of the plot—who was betraying whom, who possessed the secret, why any of it allegedly mattered.
Bill returned. The screen shifted to men kicking a ball in a far-off arena. Spain. Argentina. A final. Then women in another drama. Then *Jeopardy*—answers seeking questions, or questions seeking answers, the endless cycle of useless erudition.
—
**V.**
Sleep came at last. Dreams arrived, as uninvited as the rain.
I was attempting to barter paper back-issues of a vintage men’s journal—relics belonging to my brother, Frank. A pawn-broker hovered in the gloom, evaluating the glossy flesh. Jesse, the Rasta, stood by, waiting for a resolution that never came. A surreal commerce.
A sharp, dry pain in the skull shattered the illusion. Dehydration. The brain crying out for the fluid I had spent Friday trying to avoid.
I dragged the frame from the mattress. Two gelcaps were swallowed. The dark returned. Silence.