Kim's Watermelon Gun

I am on the light rail. I am traveling to my downtown office from the Medical Center.

The trip will take eighteen minutes.

The rail cars are grey and sad and although they are not yet old, they look old. A long, dull seat runs along each side of the train, so that when there are other riders on board (which is rarely), I am able to stare at the person across from me with impunity. In my head, I write a story about each person I see.

Most of the stories involve what the person sitting across from me will do when the train crashes.

I am wearing obnoxious, jumbo-sized headphones and listening to The Flaming Lips’ Clouds Taste Metallic (1995), which is the best album The Flaming Lips ever did.

  

♫ And Kim's got her watermelon gun

Cause it’s the consciousness of love ♪♪

Just north of Binz, a new kid steps onto the train and sits across from me. Twenty-two. White. Six-one. Snappy pin-striped business suit. He’s got those kind of generic good looks where I’d never be able to identify him in a police line-up.

The thing is, he is staring at me. With an intensity, he is staring at me, even as he seats himself. I turn and look over my shoulder, out the window, into the rain, but there is nothing outside but grey. It’s been weeks now since the rains began and they are not letting up.

Business Suit is trying to get my attention, and I can feel the heat of his stare on the side of my head, down my ear and along my cheek. He is saying something that sounds like “Freaky!” and I begin wondering whether I am going to have to kill him before this is all over.

♪♪ And wouldn't it be dumb

If all their atrocities were just forgiven? ♫

My fingers dance to the music. My head remains turned and I watch as the train clunks through grey. Down the seat to my left, a big black woman looks at me and then looks across at Business Suit. She wonders if I hear him. If I see him motioning for me.

I do.

Business Suit motions for me to take off the obnoxious headphones. He says, “I dig this look you’ve got going!”

He is interrupting a sacred ritual, shoehorning himself into the midst of “Kim’s Watermelon Gun,” and he shows no sign of giving up. Being ignored is not breaking Business Suit.

With my hands dancing to the song, I turn to him, give him a stern single nod, and go back to staring out the window.

This is all I will give him.

The train pushes north through water, past Sears, past a mystery building calling itself the Label Warehouse, and Kim’s still not giving them her watermelon gun.

Two blocks. Three. Business Suit goes in for another try. “Seriously,” he says. “You look like an alien or something. You know, like so ugly that it becomes really, really shocking sexy?”

I try and remember any worse conversation starter from my past. I cannot.

The world outside the train is grey and my whole upper body is moving to the music now. Business Suit throws up his hands and gets off at Holman although I am confident that the Ensemble Theater was not his original destination.

He brushes my leg as he steps by me. “Bitch, I was paying you a compliment,” he says.

The umbrella which he begins opening is a black Alexander McQueen with a gold skull handle. It clicks open over his head as he steps out into the rain and he says, “Fucking dyke.”

I assume this to be a lucky guess. I burst into laughter. The big black woman to my left clicks her tongue. Shakes her head. She looks apologetic somehow. Embarrassed by humanity.

My trip downtown on the light rail will take six more minutes.