excerpt from Nonpaying Customers Who Saw The Blimp

I’d never met an actual person named Jasmine. The word meant Thai rice or a flower; that was that. Anyone named it must be a hippie. But then I met her, pronounced with y-sounding j, like the birth control pill—Yasmin. We got on, and I adapted. Jasmine was a birth control of sorts; she ate up my time, so I didn’t go out looking for women like I used to.

She’d shout, ‘Men, cut your hair! Your husbands and wives depend on it!’ Jasmine disliked men with bad hair. And she said most men had bad hair. There was no excuse. I told her she should become a stylist. She said she couldn’t handle it—men fell into a bad haircut and stayed there. I said probably that stood for something else.

‘Well, I can’t be complicit, there, Stuart,’ she said.

‘You could help them.

‘I’m a painter.’
I pictured her in a River North loft, canvas after canvas against a wall, beautiful under rays of sunlight that glittered with dust motes. But Jasmine took rollers to rehabbed condos or apartments. Most times she only applied white. She dreamed buckets of fuchsia, curled on a twin mattress in a condemned building the city had apparently forgotten. She’d had a bed frame, but one night she woke with a jolt and found herself halfway through the floor.

Jasmine had this body—and skin radiant as wet paint. I thought thoughts about it, then she set me straight again. ‘Stuart, there’s gonna be no ‘we’ here, got it?’ Heading to the blue line, she walked ahead to let it sink in. ‘Remember your goddamned light bulbs.’

‘Oh, right.’ Three bulbs—important ones—had blown that morning. I needed to buy more before I went home.

Spires of some church—I hadn't bothered to learn churches' names—sprung up from street grime like a white weed. A hot afternoon. I wanted to go in and sit.

‘You thirsty?’

‘Stu, we gotta get there. It’s already started.’

‘You just said ‘we.’’

‘Yeah, well, you know what I mean.’

Fucking summer. I couldn’t get comfortable.

She grabbed my face and forced it left. ‘You see that?’

A man, riding a bicycle, struggled to pull a heavily loaded shopping cart along with his right hand. I tried to see whether I’d been where the cart was from.

‘That man knows hard work,’ she said. ‘You have no right to complain about anything.’

‘I wasn’t complaining.’

‘You were. I heard you.’

‘But I didn’t say anything.’

‘Shut up, Stu. We gotta get there.’
She was right about that, at least. You had to arrive early, or everything good was gone.