The latest installment of the graphic novella,”The Java Knot”. – The morning cafecito had already greased the nervous system as the crew were putting on the harnesses and saddling onto bosun chairs. He was not one for those clunky scaffolds. Less mobile & less safe to his way of thinking. His mind was made after high winds slung those 2 dudes & that scaffold into the intersection of Market & 17th.
Crew readied, they strode to the edge & swung a leg over. At fifty stories, this was the moment no matter how cavalier, when the pecan sack clustered into a tight ripple skinned lemon. Over the edge & down to work. If you weren’t in free fall now, you’d set your lines properly. They’d begin where they left off yesterday, the 38th floor.
In earlier than usual, the office hadn’t gathered its sonic hubbub, so before the flurry of calls & office catch-up pulled him in more directions than a crab beset by a romp of otters, he went online to look over specs of that new Ducati he intended to have. Out the window the morning sun was still below the building across the street. Two slender ropes flirted with his window.
Andrea, the secretary he shared with 2 lugs in the adjacent offices, broke his concentration, brusquely sweeping in & setting a Dunkin‘ Donuts bag on his desk. “I was reminded to see you had everything for the conference call from Germany which got bumped to 9 sharp.”
“Somebody’s eager. All set.”
“They were out of Maple Old Fashion. I nabbed the last Chocolate Cruller”.
”Sweet”, his eyes followed the lines of the Ducati then slid from the bike seat to Andrea’s shrink-wrapped gluts as they rounded the door frame.
“Okay, time to pay for the new wheels”, he launched the balled up donut bag at the trash can placed purposely as far from his chair as the office would allow. A tightly crunched coffee cup followed. The napkin knot next. Ungh, 2 for three. He looked around for something else to pitch, then lit up the array of screens and dialed in the conference code.
It wasn’t so much the nylon ropes that kept he and his attached crew from becoming flesh bombs endangering pedestrians curious as to where that encroaching scream was coming from, as it was their mirrored avatars. It might be the touch of a boot toe or scraper to scraper kiss on the glass plane that kept a Rorschach twins high wire dance above the patient vigil of a concrete death. How much it reminds one of the cat’s optimistic glare at the butterfly fluttering ever so much closer, closer….
An hour into the conference and having concluded his part of the presentation, his mind wandered back to the Ducati when the slightest change of light in the room turned his head to glimpse a murky figure creating foamy graffiti on one of the three large windows in his office. Now he fancied himself an upper tier thrill seeker. Totally dug high finance with dizzying sums, no stranger to the poker table, & he expected to find out if that Ducati performed as advertised, but dangling in thin air from a couple shoe strings??!! And while the city looked great from here & he was mindful of the corporate cachet & bragging rights of a desk with a view, the thought of feeling the breeze on the other side of that glass made his loins wither. For sure if them ropes snapped, that little orange sucker in dude’s hand wouldn’t hold his ass.
He turned back to the screens to follow the numbers but he’d already gone over these stats umpteen times & his mind just as quickly returned to that Ducati. He swiveled in his chair to watch his man just finish soaping the center pane. His eyes traced those snaking curves of soap & as the scraper cut a clear view of sky he was now gliding along the serpentine roads of Passo dello Stelvio. The husky rumble of that Ducati reinvigorating the dwindling his family jewels had experienced only moments before.
As the window washer switched to the last of his trio of windows some blur caught his dreamy attention. Following behind his man, about ten feet off his right shoulder, was a drone. Wait. What the..? How cool is that? Is someone shooting a movie? Awesome, I’m in a…wait, they’d have to get a release signed. Might be a training film. Just then Andrea popped her head in his door,”Upstairs said to say thanks, you don’t need to hang for the remainder. I’ll fax the statements and leave the contract on your desk. The others are going off for an early lunch and asked you to meet ‘em at the elevators”. He followed her curves out the door and caught sight of his team gathering by the elevators. A round of high-fives ensued, a quick exchange of who had what on the latest round of Fantasy Football and he promised to catch up with them soon as he ordered a shiny present to himself and shut down his computers. “Oh hooooo, you’re going for the Ducati?!” More high-fives. “Congrats Guys!” Andrea said as she went past the congregation. Their eyes followed her and then settled on him. “Bet your gonna love taking some curves on your new D!”, offered one. He backed towards his office with a smirk and prolonged shrug.
The corners of his mouth were still nudging his earlobes when he strode into his office. He shut his screens off and then, still facing his screens, his mouth went slack as his brow knit. The now dark screens bore the reflection of his figure back lit by the squeaky clean windows. And on the center pane, was a round shadow. His turn was measured, but he came full around to see it. And just it. A black circle with a smaller disk in its center. It was about 6 inches across and on its other side, an orange handle. Bright orange. The drone was gone. The ropes, also gone.
Drawn on a Stillman & Birn Gamma Series sketchbook with Faber-Castell Essentio Broad nib fountain pen end Pitt Artist Pens.
So, Joe. Enigmatic. Been seeing him every so often over the last seven or so years whenever I need hi-fi ink jet copies of my drawings. He’s good. Very technical. The strip mall store he works at is pricey but Joe’s tops. I know if he’s on the job the moment I walk into the place and look in the direction of the frame & print department. Whoever’s working is seated behind a large screen computer. If they’re not sporting Tin Tin’s haircut…I leave.
I’m quite fascinated with Joe. Told me once he was a history major in college. Eastern European events. Knows a good deal about the Vikings in Russia & Byelorussia, about the Balkan Wars, Crimean War, all that Iron Curtain stuff. I had heard about the connection between the words ‘Slav’ and ‘slave’ but it was Joe who told me of the derivation of ‘cíao’ from ‘slave’. He’s keen on mechanical pencils and fountain pens and is usually sporting an ever changing pair. Likewise here. I comment on his. He on mine. A couple of hopeless gear heads. He likes plaid cowboy shirts with Mother of Pearl snaps, lots of panels, exaggerated cuts on the yoke. Dude must have dozens tho he favors a powder blue and brown combo.
Dropped in last week to take advantage of a storewide 40% off Halloween sale and place an order. Saw Joe in the parking lot on a cig break. A busy man, I let him have his peace. I watched from the printing desk as I waited for his return. I hadn’t seen Joe in a month of Sundays so the arm sling was a new development. Didn’t appear to slow him down much as he looked to be texting while nursing a make. He was already reaching for another cigarette as he crushed the previous butt beneath a high top Chuck Taylor. A pack of smokes is always part of his ensemble. Filterless. Total old school. Like my Uncle Bill. But so unlike my uncle’s measured, dreamy eyed way of languidly drawing the smoke deep into his lungs, and pausing to give the system every last second to snatch the cargo of nicotine before two wispy dragons slowly writhed from his nostrils. Joe was on a mission. For uncle Bill it was breathing. Just that. Joe’s urgency showed in impatient lips and eyes riveted to some something before or behind dilated pupils. Each drag is deep but the cigarette makes it back to his pucker before the exhale seems complete.
What these committed smokers had in common were finger tips of amber and caramel tinting. Like aged meerschaum pipes. Teeth to match.
I turned to look over his workstation while he power dragged. Orderly. The ever present cup of coffee. Didn’t matter when I showed up, there one sat. The other feature to Joe’s shift was the array of post-it notes. A handful on the counter top and several stuck about the perimeter of the computer screen. Usually in three different colors. Sky blue, bubblegum pink, mint green. Don’t know if it was a color coded system but Joe struck me as a man of systematic observance. I had never given them further consideration, but with time to kill……I slid a glance sufficient to note Joe still fixated on his cell phone and puffing like a car‘s exhaust pipe.
I didn’t learn much from a quick look because they weren’t in English. There were numbers, perhaps phone numbers with crossed sevens and that Euro #1 with the long upstroke Yanks sometimes mistake for a seven. A buncha Greek frat letters. Some letters were backwards. Maybe Russian or some such alphabet. One word, ???? was followed by what looked like a date & hours of the day using the 24 hour clock. Odd. And if you’re entering orders into a computer, what’s with all the notes to self?
More than that I didn’t get as an acrid bite to my nostrils announced Joe’s return. He slid into his chair, his eyes following an imaginary dotted line from mine to his post-it notes as he turned on the computer.
“ Mister Joe”.
“Hey”.
Our brief exchange thoroughly muted by our face mask; de rigur in these days of pandemic, his appropriately bearing a Day of the Dead motif.
“Once I clear the previous orders I‘ll open your account”.
I tried to cover my inquisitiveness with a question of faux innocence.
“Gad zooks Joe, quite the hieroglyphs there. S’that advanced math to figure out your scale conversions?”
His eyes briefly glanced down at the colored squares of paper then returned to the screen before the muffled response came,”It’s Cyrillic”.
I redirected the conversation to his sling. “That’s gotta make for an awkward day on the job.”
“Beats letting it hang”.
“Hope you’re on the mend”.
“Getting better day by day”.
“Good to hear. Been wearing it long?”
“ ‘bout six months”.
Each response took appreciably longer than the previous. I’m slow, but eventually I get the message.
Every so often a buzz would grab my attention followed by Joe rotating the wrist of his sling bound arm to show he still held his cell phone. A glance down, a tap or two, then the wrist turned to again conceal the phone.
“What do you have for me today?”’ he asked.
“I’d like scans and 50% enlarged prints of four drawings from my sketchbook”. I set my backpack on the floor and fumbled thru the stuffed contents to pull out an old ledgerbook I was currently drawing in. “The pages are marked”, I offered. He took the book and opened it to the pages I had marked with little post-it notes. As he did, I noticed his had been removed.
Drawn with Faber-Castell Essentio fountain pen, and Pitt Artist Pens on Stillman & Birn Beta Series sketchbook.
Latest installment from the graphic novella The Java Knot. “So, it’s more than a habit… this pull to draw out in public. I don’t bring a book to read, I’m too fidgety for that. I’d rather check out my surroundings. Mostly, if honesty overtakes me, I prefer to watch people. Closely. Some would call it staring. But that sounds too passive to me. I go over them like an eagle casing the river below, looking for movement beneath the surface. Trying at times to understand the substructure of cheek bones, jaw muscles, the coordination of a hand’s architecture as it returns coffee cup to saucer then glides to flip the page of a book. But I also watch, as if, like the eagle’s penetrating glare beneath the waves, I can sense a current of thought. Knit brows, pinching lips, the coordinated grip of the masseter and temporalis muscles setting molars firmly into their opposing cousins. Frustration? Displeasure? Disapproval? Disgust? And will my drawings capture a fleeting moment of unguarded commentary, which, if elusive to presumptuous certainty, feels as though I’m now driving the streets of that someone’s neighborhood.
I sauntered to my recently favored cafe to find an interesting looking gent, with long uncoiling ringlets of Grey hair, seated curbside at a table, both hands occupied, one with coffee, the other with cellphone. I seated myself at an adjacent table such that we were facing each other, if obliquely. He no sooner placed his cup, empty, upon the table than the waitress appeared from within the shop and replaced the depleted cup with a full one. ‘Keep ‘em coming?’ she asked. ‘Keep ‘em coming’, he said. She turned directly to me, and asked my pleasure as I pulled sketchbook and pens from my satchel. Hot cocoa, bitter, no whip.
About then, a bicyclist coming up the street, glided along side the curb, slowed, nearly stopping beside the gent working his second cup, deftly laying an envelop on the table before him, and continued on. No exchange of words, nor looks. No nod. As I opened my sketchbook to a fresh page with little fanfare, the envelope slid into his jacket in like fashion with the hand returning to cradle the cup. His heavy lidded eyes never wandered from the cell’s screen.
I had payed little attention to the parking meter directly behind him, but as I began laying in the preliminary lines of his head, torso, the table and meter, I was amused to see the words PAY HERE backing his right arm. The very arm which had retrieved the envelope as if an extension of the meter.”
Drawn with Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens and fountain pen on Stillman & Birn Beta Series sketchbook.