We Come to Our Senses by Odie Lindsey Read Free Book Online

audience?”
    How can this be? I’m sold. So sold. Oversold. I couldn’t possibly sell more on this thing.
    IF.
    If you met someone who chose to live of, but beyond, the façade of dogwood-flowered, South Battery coastline; of, butbeyond, the high-heel click on terra-cotta patio and lime-rind-and-seersucker; if she chose to move beyond historic district fund-raising and neo-southern cuisine . . . and who instead sought out the cracked concrete back porch of a Gullah-owned shrimp shack; who found inspiration in a shrimp burger with a side of under-the-table, Styrofoam-cupped American beer—would you leave her?
    Could you? If she knew how to overthrow the manicured ritual of a Kiawah Island wedding weekend, where paunchy young men in Brooks Brothers knits drain designer beers at every emerald putting green, while their counterpart women, women whose southern lips have grown thin from years of décor-smiling, sit bunched up in air-conditioned villas, sipping premix mojitos? If. If she could be of this culture, yet scoff it all off for a midnight drunken joyride over marsh road? If her brown hair flew out the window, fanlike, as the two of you traded hard opinions of Paris ’68, of F. Scott v. Hemingway, or for that matter of the Only Ernest that Really Matters Anyway—Ernest Tubb? If your collective ceremonial garb was balled up on the backseat; if you had nine bucks between you for beer, gas and adventure? If you wound up chilly and huddled together on the predawn beach, wrapped up in a cocoon of musty, wedding-band quilt?
    Could you leave her? And if you could, how on earth would you get over it?
    GAS-N-SAVE is out of Winstons, so I buy a pack of generics. Give up the ten bucks and get the balance in fuel. I scan the door-side magazine rack while the clerk rings me up. The cover of a woman’sjournal pimps a vibrant nineteen-year-old actress whose name we all know. Her pout and airbrushed flesh support the headlines “Sex Quiz: Rate Your Mate” and “Seductive Lingerie for Bedroom-Bound Babes.” I wonder if I need to start reading these things, to grow.
    At the pump adjacent my car a young pachuco and his girlfriend—the passengers of the golden Cadillac convertible—yell at each other. He is wiry and postured, wearing baggy khakis, black kung-fu slippers and a white muscle shirt. Not American, perhaps not even a man; I look at him and critique this stereotype, as if he’s been snatched off the street by Production.
    She, however, is radiant and original. Uncommonly tall. The sun is sheeny in her cascading black hair. Her skin color is somewhere between chocolate and butter, and I imagine her of royal lineage (Oaxacan being the only identifier I am familiar with). The syllables her wine-colored lips splay, the intermittent “fuck you’s” and “bastard’s,” as churned within glorious Spanish, crescendo over him with feminine mastery.
    â€œ HEY? ” the Producer asked. “I mean, really, kid, why do you create?”
    â€œWho knows anymore?” I replied.
    â€œTo connect , right? Right?”
    â€œYeah, sure.” I’d had enough. By that point I no longer bore an awareness of anything, save the platinum letter opener he used to pick at his fingernails. And the fact that I wished Marcy would come back.
    â€œâ€˜ Yeah, sure ,’” he mocked me. “That’s what all you cred-heads say:‘ I write in order to connect with people ,’ or ‘ Because I want to share in our universal human emotion ,’ or some other humble horseshit. But, hey? Interview over, these darlings don’t really care about the Everyman. They’re too intellectual, too precious with their ‘art.’” He paused for effect, then pointed at me. “Now, THAT, kid, is selling out.”
    â€œI’m listening to you. Now you listen to me. This script is—”
    â€œQuit trying to be high-minded and