I’ve crossed and re-crossed my legs many times these last few minutes. I’m restless is what I am. I have the leg syndrome to be sure, but more than that, I have a restless soul. I am a restless soul.
I’m becoming aware of a peculiar sensation, and as I sink down into it I realize that ten years and two thousand miles has brought me back around to the same place. I’m sitting here at the coffee shop—the same coffee shop. Ten years and two thousand miles away, yet somehow it’s the same place through and through. I’m even reading the same books–literally, the exact same books–that I was reading ten years ago. Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. Miller’s Rosy Crucifixion.
Retracing my steps, as it were.
There’s another sensation that’s hard to shake–the sense that I’ve lost something, as if I let something drop from my pocket while fumbling for my keys. Come to think of it, I actually did lose my something in the ten-years-ago-two-thousand-miles-away coffee shop. My wallet. Last I laid eyes on it I had set it down on the counter as I was trying to gather up the coffee mug, the chocolate chip cookie, and the bagel with cream cheese I needed to carry back to my table. What happened after that is a mystery, the mystery, as I didn’t see the thing again until four years later. I was no longer living in North Carolina when my buddy Eric called me with the incredible news. He had my wallet right there in his hands! He was my housemate at the time of the loss, and he recalled laughingly how I obsessed for weeks over what might have happened to the wallet, how I couldn’t accept that I might have simply lost it, carelessly left it somewhere, dropped it on the ground. No sir, I was certain that I was the victim of foul play. I had two theories at the time. Theory one was that I had been robbed by someone at the café. It was the simplest explanation: I left the wallet on the counter and someone behind me in line noticed it and snatched it on his or her way out. Theory two was a bit more intriguing. The idea was that I had left the café with my wallet in tow, that I had walked home and then mindlessly set it down on my desk (as was my habit) upon entering my bedroom. On the afternoon in question my housemates and I convened in the rehearsal room for band practice. The four of us were closed up in there for at least two hours. It was after practice when I noticed my wallet wasn’t in its usual spot on my desk. I frantically searched everywhere and, of course, it didn’t turn up. Immediately I started building the case against the unknown larcenist. I noted, with grave suspicion, that it had smelled like cigarette smoke in the hallway when we filed out of the rehearsal room. Our drummer Jeff was a smoker, but he had been in the room practicing with us the entire time. We never locked the front door, so it seemed conceivable that someone had entered the house unannounced, perhaps someone who used to squat at our house during the many months it was vacant prior to our moving in. Perhaps that someone knocked on the door, heard the loud music, stepped through the door while calling out to announce his presence. Hearing no response, perhaps this someone strolled down the hallway to the closed rehearsal room door, which just so happened to be directly across from my bedroom. Perhaps that someone was smoking a cigarette, glanced through the open door of my room and saw the wallet lying right there on my desk. A crime of opportunity.
I was convinced that the “smoking man” theory was how it all went down. Thinking he may have snatched the cash and tossed the rest, I searched the surrounding woods and the several dumpsters within a mile or so of our house. No sign of the wallet. All the while, the unwelcome thoughts would creep into my cranium: “Maybe you just lost the wallet.” “You probably dropped it somewhere.” No! I wouldn’t accept it! It couldn’t be! Bobby Fucking Dee does not lose his wallet! Bobby Fucking Dee is too careful, too self-aware for that kind of amateur shit!
When Eric called with the news I thought he might be jerking my chain. How could this be, that my wallet would resurface all these years later? Well, it seemed that some workers were renovating the public restroom at the diner a couple of blocks from our house (and from the café) when one of them discovered my wallet, covered in dust, hidden on top of a removable ceiling tile above the toilet. Everything, save for the approximately forty dollars in cash, was still inside the wallet, including a blank check that my then-girlfriend, now wife, had given me to pay some bills. The check had her address and phone number printed on it, so the good folks at Elmo’s Diner called the number, which was still registered to my wife’s former roommate, Michelle, who just so happened to be none other than Eric’s girlfriend! Badda bing, badda boom, and now Eric had the wallet in hand. Sweet vindication! I had been robbed, there now could be no doubt about it! But was it the smoking man? The would-be thief behind me in line at the café? Some things must forever remain a mystery. All we could reasonably surmise was that the thief enjoyed a nice meal at Elmo’s, on me, before disposing of the evidence in the restroom.
The next time I was in town I picked up the wallet and was thrilled to have it back. I had never replaced it. In fact, it is still my only wallet to this day, even though it’s falling apart and the velcro hardly sticks anymore. I just pulled it out to pay for my coffee and bagel, in the here-and-now café. Here in New Mexico they serve green chile bagels, and even green chile cream cheese, if you want to go the whole hog. The bagels are definitely different here, but I swear that the baristas haven’t changed a bit despite the ten years and two thousand miles. It’s as if déjà vu and amnesia are taking turns driving my mind, leading my thoughts around in strange spirals. It’s a memory thing, I guess, why these baristas seem so hauntingly familiar. It’s the expressions on their faces, that twenty-something twinkle in the eyes that says, “I’m on my way!”
Me, I’ve been there and back again. Back and forth. Round and around. People have died along the way. Babies were born. Promises were made, some broken, a few of them kept. Believe it or not I’m dressed in the same clothes, and here again I mean literally the same pair of jeans and the same shiny blue shirt from ten years ago. Look closely though, and you can see the wear and tear, the loose threads, the flecks of gray in the beard, the creases and crinkles around the eyes, the web-work of capillaries ever-expanding in the whites.
The wallet may have found its way back to me, but something remains lost. Maybe it was that amazing melody that descended from on high while I was strolling through town on that glorious spring day, the melody that was destined to make me a famous rock star, if only I had had a tape recorder on me. Or maybe it’s that reserve tank of Bobby Fucking Dee mojo, that seemingly endless supply I took for granted would always be on tap if I happened to fall asleep at the wheel for too many miles, or too many years.
It’s probably just a memory thing. A flash of cerebral lightning set off by too much caffeine.
The sky, here and now in New Mexico, is so cloudless, so big and so blue, that it swallows up any other words I might use to describe it. My mug is empty now, and my eyelids are getting heavy as I sink down into the sofa. Young girls are laughing all around me. Their voices blend together until they sound like birds singing.
Déjà vu. Amnesia. A dream within a dream.