THREE FRIENDS AND I

Three friends and I walked out of the late movie around two. The Grand Lake theatre has this secret late movie on Sunday nights that the employees and their friends go to. It’s fairly exclusive and they show mostly vintage cult films. The movie that night was The Virgin Suicides, because it was Sophia Coppola’s birthday.

The trees around Late Merritt seemed to shimmer in the glow of the gleaming “necklace” of Christmas lights. This part of town is great for walking.

We got to talking relationships and I decided it would be a good idea to walk all the way over to Jack London square. It’s not too far, but it would commit us to staying out for a few hours. Everyone agreed and we set out for Broadway. Wishing for a moment that I knew a decent after-hours place, I turned around a corner and saw the moon hanging low beneath a cloud like a swollen space vegetable.

“So wait, are you with that girl or what?”

“I don’t know man. It’s like we talk but nothing ever gets decided. I just know she’s in change. And honestly, it’s fine that way.”

“I guess that’s just how it is”

“Yeah.”

We decided to walk by Merchant’s Saloon just in case they happened to be serving. They were not. One dollar PBR on Tuesdays. My mouth watered. Approaching Jack London Square, we got into a heated argument about which Springsteen album was better: Darkness on the Edge of Town or The River. I said The River, because the content was more varied. Somebody else said Darkness, because overall the songs are a bit stronger.

We finally stopped and sat down at the end of a pier. Somebody produced a flask. We talked about all the people we had known in the last five years. We wondered which of them we would still know in ten more years.

“We might as well just wait for the sun to come up. It’s clear for once,” I said.

The sky turned the color of Pepto-Bismol around six and we could see the towers of San Francisco glinting eerily.

“Time to get to work,” someone said. We all nodded and turned back toward Oakland.