Noah Cicero - Best Behavior

Amanda and I went outside so I could smoke. Amanda didn't smoke. Both of her parents smoked but she didn't out of protest. I enjoyed smoking. It relieved stress. It made me feel better. It gave my hands something to do. I wasn't concerned with living to 100. I wasn't concerned with my death at all. Death seemed like the least of my problems. I had a lot of problems, had a shitty car, had bills to pay, had a shitty job, never felt like I belonged anywhere. I don't know if feeling like one belongs anywhere constitutes itself as a problem but it was a problem for me. Smoking helped with that. I felt like I was a smoker. I was part of a great legion of those who smoked cigarettes and lived unhealthy lives.

The sky was overcast. It was a dreary day. Young and old black men stood around smoking laughing about girls with nice asses. Nobody was taking anything seriously. It was too early in the day for that.

Amanda said to me, “Are you coming back?”

“Coming back where?”

“Here.”

“Of course I'm coming back.”

“I'm worried you won't.”

“I don't know what I would do there.”

“You might not come back.”

“I don't have enough money to leave.”

“You have friends though; they might get you a job.”

“No, I'll return. I have to finish school.”

“I'll miss you.”

“You'll have Joseph,” I said.

“But I can't talk to him like I do you.”

“I'll come back. This is where I live.”

“Do you think you can live here forever?”

“I don't know. Do you think you can live here forever?”

“I don't know. I've been here forever.”

“I'll return; you'll be picking me up soon enough.”

“I don't like to sleep in the house alone.”

We went back in and waited for the bus. I waited in a line. Amanda stood with me. The security guard called everyone going to Pittsburgh. It was time to board the bus. We moved slowly in a nice line. I didn't have a suitcase. Just a book bag. I didn't even bring a change of clothes. I knew I would get off the bus at Times Square and didn't want to carry luggage for miles.

It was raining.

I hugged Amanda.

She looked sad.

I didn't know how to look, so I went with what she was doing and looked sad myself.

We let go of each other. I walked toward the bus and looked back at her, smiled. Trying to reassure her that I would return.

She smiled back.

I got on the bus.

I walked to the back of the bus and sat in the closest unoccupied seat to the bathroom.

I closed my eyes. They were hungover and tired. I fell asleep and woke up in Pittsburgh.

I entered the Pittsburgh bus station. Every time I had been to the Pittsburgh bus station it was a different one. It was new and shiny. Americans love new and shiny. When something gets old and spray-painted, the bathrooms have too many cocks drawn on the walls. The sinks look a little aged. They don't paint over it. They don't remodel it a little; they send in bulldozers to demolish it. When it came to public works, it occurred to someone one day that demolishing and rebuilding something from scratch created more jobs than remolding. So America decided if a public building was even a little run down, instead of fixing it up, build a new one. It was logical.

The bus station was nice. It had good lighting. Not too bright, not too dark. I went to the bathroom and the walls of the stalls were made of metal so no one could write on them and they could wash easily. From every corner of America, from Maine, to Florida, New York to California, Americans love to write on bathroom stall walls. Men love to draw cocks. I've shit in bathrooms in Nebraska, Oregon, and Georgia. Every bathroom stall in America has a penis drawn on the wall. There was always a comment about how much somebody loved to suck cock. Usually there was one or two racial slurs and that old Homeric poem, “Here I sit broken hearted, come to shit and only farted.” There were some people that didn't consider literature on bathroom stalls to be classy. So a lot of new bathrooms had metal walls.

I left the bathroom and went outside to smoke. I went out the front door, going nowhere. I didn't know Pittsburgh well. I didn't know where I was. I knew there were several rivers somewhere in Pittsburgh, but where I didn't know. Everyone walking by had Steelers coats on. There was no ashtray outside of the gas station. Society fought a war against smokers and won. Instead of putting our cigarettes in ashtrays we put them on the sidewalk. It was a strange victory they had won.

Went to the food court. It was pathetic. A little black man in his 40s was making cheeseburgers by himself while talking on his cell phone. Everyone was on their cell phone. It didn't matter what color, what age, what gender, they were on their cell phones. Who they were talking to I didn't know. What they were talking about I didn't know. They were talking though. If they weren't talking, they were text messaging. I grew up without cell phones. All the people I knew, including myself, didn't starve to death because we didn't have a cell phone. We had friends. People were able to get married and have kids. People had jobs. I looked around the food court and four people were talking on their cell phones and two were text messaging. Who were these people I thought. What did they need to say? Did they even talk to those people they were talking to in person? Does anybody want to talk to anyone in person anymore? Does anyone fuck in person or just talk on their cell phone?

A young journalist once told me while walking across campus that people had cell phones to be perceived as important. That they were so important, integral, essential to the functioning of society that people called them all the time and they needed to respond to that call because if they didn't civilization would collapse and humanity would be plunged into the state of nature . The state of affairs would cease, hospitals would crumble to the ground, roads wouldn't be repaired, the police would go on an endless lunch break, Saddam Hussein would be resurrected and put back in power, martial law would be declared, the constitution suspended, little children would disobey their mothers, boyfriends and husbands would instantly cheat on their girlfriends and wives, gay people would become straight, the straight gay, mayonnaise would start tasting like mustard, abortion would become illegal, and history would end in a whimper because they didn't answer their cell phone call and talk loudly in a public place.

A cute Asian woman in her late 20s stood next to me waiting for cheeseburgers. We looked at each other and then at the cheeseburgers and the little black guy talking on his cell phone. We couldn't speak the same language but our looks were enough; they said, “These cheeseburgers are gonna taste like shit.”

I brought my cheeseburger to a table. It somewhat tasted like a cheeseburger. I wasn't sure when the cow was killed, where it was killed, what kind of cow it was, what the cow ate, but I was sure it was killed a long fucking time ago, it was probably a miserable cow, and the cow ate bad tasting grass that had little nutrition.

I imagined a miserable cow standing out in a field in Brazil alone. It was probably two years ago. The cow was chewing on some bad tasting grass. Looked around not caring about anything. Doing what cows have always done; ate grass and drank water. Then it was killed one day and its sirloin was ground up, stuffed in plastic bags, frozen and sent to America. Eventually it made it to a bus station in Pittsburgh.

I got in line for the bus. It was a terrible looking series of humans. Many were missing teeth; the men were bald, the women looked older than they were. Kids were everywhere. Their clothes were bought from thrift stores. Their shoes had holes in them and they didn't smell good. It wasn't a collection of well-educated-well-balanced-well-rounded individuals. Fate had not done them well. They were the kind of people one imagines Jesus spoke to when he gave The Sermon on the Mount. Jesus walked up there and looked upon 1,000 suffering Jews wearing torn clothes holding their babies in their arms, men tired from work, a nation stifled by Roman imperialism. Their faces dirty missing teeth, trying to forget the past, tired of the present and terrified of the future.