Orange Suitcase Read Online Free PDF

bottles.
    Retrieving jewelry from a sink catch. Applause from a girlfriend’s weeping friend.
    Hiding Christmas gifts and peeking on the 23rd. Used books with love letters and lists forgotten inside. Lockets. Broken fingers. Maybe old luggage filled with photographs. A Polaroid of newborn rabbits on a dishtowel. Receipts. Hidden cigarettes.
    Definitely a couch, a foldout with slept-on sheets. A relative is visiting for a funeral and our apartment smells like a grandmother’s house. Mildew, definitely, and the dead turtle my cousins found and hid beneath the couch in the basement. A frisbee in flight. A do-not-disturb. That girl with the pink t-shirt and oranges.
    The alarm. Voices. Alarm. An arm.

505 W 22nd Street. NYC, 2009.
Former site of a fishing store.

“Something About Vegas: A Note on the Second Edition of a First Novel”
    I ’ve heard it compared to childbirth, and that’s partially true. Because even though you don’t worry about college tuition or breast-feeding or vaccinations with a story, a story can still wake you in the middle of the night seventeen years later, telling you how even though it’s been on its own for seventeen years, now it’s in trouble, and now your story has its own story about how it got pregnant one weekend in Vegas, and how now there’s going to be a wedding and a new family and more stories and a pastry chef named Marcel is moving into your house, baking sheets and all. All you can do is listen, because that’s what good parents do, and that’s the only way you’re going to get any sleep.

“Something About Last Time At The Cedar Tavern”
    I ’m reading an airport paperback and waiting for Peach in the wooden booth we shared last time. Last time was a summer afternoon; today it’s just started snowing. Last time, which was really the first time, I fell asleep when he went to piss. He returned and put a bottle of brown mustard under my nose; he sat and poured the last drops of brown beer into my glass. Kerouac pissed on an ashtray in this bar, he said. I wiped my nose and eyes. And Pollock ripped the bathroom door off its hinges, I said. We clinked our glasses and drank.
    The waitress interrupted with another foamy pitcher and set it between us. I remember she was beautiful, vaguely Irish with Killian’s-colored hair and something of an accent. You’re talking about the old location, she told us. The bar used to be down 8th street. We moved decades ago. She took our empty and walked off. Peach refilled his glass with the new pitcher. It was our fourth. Franzen set a scene of The Corrections in this location, I said. Peach nodded. Sad there aren’t any ashtrays to piss in anymore, he said. I nodded. One of us needs to write a good story about this place, one of us said. Before we leave this city.
    Now Peach settles in across from me and shakes small snowflakes off his collar. I close my book and we order a pitcher of the brown stuff. In a week the bar is closing down; this is really the last time. A waiter brings our beer and we clink glasses and say, Here’s to the last time. Then, together, we remember the first time: how the waitress said what she said, how we drank until we had to piss again, how we fell asleep again. We remember how Peach returned from the bathroom and woke me with a shake; how I lied and said I’d dreamed of ripping the bathroom door from its hinges. We remember how he’d stood on the toilet to piss out the window, how he’d pissed-out the Irish waitress’ cigarette as she stood in the alley on her break. We remember how four years later I wrote this and sent it to him.

“Something About Marriage, Pt 3”
    1
    O n our 50th anniversary she will give me an orange suitcase full of photographs. Pictures of our wedding, our first apartment, our first trip to Berlin. Thank you for the adventures, she will say, quoting from a movie we’ll both have