Crocodiles/Alligators

I woke up from an uncomfortable curled position on the seat beside me to step outside for a cigarette at the truck stop at three in the morning. A black man in suit pants, a light collared shirt and alligator shoes also stepped off the bus and had a cigarette next to me on the curb. He asked if I’d ever been to New York before, and I explained the context of my travel. He said he lives in Pittsburgh, but ‘really’ he was from Denver. I told him about George, and he said Denver gets 300 days of sunlight and it’s beautiful there, with the mountains and the air that’s cold in the shade and warm when you leave it. He said he was retired and wanted to see the country but would eventually return to Denver.

            That bus ride was lonely and I didn’t sleep well, fortunate as I was to keep the empty seat to myself when people were ushered on and off the bus, and I thought that man was a dose I needed of the person whose absence churned an emptiness inside me.

            I had a half hour to wait in Newark Penn Station until my train arrived. I hung around the front doors to have my last cigarette when a man stumbled out of the doorway, found a half-smoked stub on the street, place it in the corner of his mouth, and look around Newark like he’d found El Dorado. He looked like a homeless crocodile hunter. He had another half-smoked cigarette tucked behind his ear underneath a cargo hat with small metal spikes around it, and he was wearing sandals in the cold weather. He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and looked up at me with a yellow, crooked-toothed smile.

            “Would you be offended if I said you look beautiful?”

            “I guess not. I mean, you just did, and I’m not.”

            He started talking about his entire family history, his mother sick from losing a husband, his siblings, and his travels around. I asked why, of all places, he would want to go to Newark, an empty city of gang violence without any saving grace.

            “People keep asking me why I go to the places I go, but then I see something like you, you know?”

            He asked if I was a dancer. I said no, a painter.

            “Of course. The arts. Creation. You look a deity. Goddess-like.”

            I told him where I went to school and he talked about creation/destruction, scientology and the theories of morality around it. I said I had to catch my train.

            “Good luck at school. I’m sure you’ll earn full marks.”