I liked this place better when it wasn’t living up to its reputation.  The first time.  With Skelly.   She brought me here along with some crackers, a knife and cheese, wine poured into paper cups.  We were skipping stones—nothing more than ripples on that pond—and I said, “Hey Skell, you made it up about this being a duck pond.” 

Of course, there’s more ducks than you could shake a stick at today, which is what I’d like to do about now.  Not that waving a piece of bark in the air would necessarily do much good; in fact, it might even stir them up into more of a raucous.  They’re honking, splashing, generally having their feathers all flapping, fighting with the occasional pigeon, getting chased by dogs.  The grass is still damp, it soaks a chill into my spine, and I’m thinking this probably isn’t the best place to try and get some sleep.

It’s a little eerie how a crowd of students will emerge onto the lawn around the whole or half-hour.  They stand in groups under the trees, by the bridge, chattering and laughing like they’ve got nowhere to go.  Here like a small town for five minutes then vanish.   I don’t remember it seeming all that unusual when Skell and I went, but of course we were on the inside then. 

Earlier, much earlier this morning, I was with a few of them.  The maybe/maybe not boyfriend.  The pretty blonde who announced she loved her pussy after half a cup of coffee. The somewhat overweight third wheel who was embarrassed and begged me to take her across the street from the Pancake Palace to the Allsup’s for a pack of cigarettes.  When we got outside, she wondered if we could ride over on my motorcycle.  And from there she wondered if we could take just a quick spin around the block.  It didn’t take long to see that it was fine by her if we kept on moving right out of town, maybe to Hollywood, or Malibu, or Hawaii, even though she might not be anticipating the problems with that.

When we came back, the blonde one was swapping tongues across the booth with her overly earnest guy friend.  Her eyes were open but not on what she was doing or who she was doing it with, and it didn’t take long to figure out what the story was there.  She’d indulge him for the odd minute or two, then push him aside with approximately the same attitude she’d taken toward her scrambled egg platter.  Every once in a while she’d reach over and pick at it.  At one point, she seemed to be suggesting the guy go out and buy her some tampons from around the corner, and he might well have done it, although the way his face twisted up in response you could tell he was close to reaching his limit.   She must have sensed it, too, because she withdrew the whole proposal about as quick as she’d sprung it.  Giggled and threw her arms around him, claiming it was only a joke.

When she’d asked the two of us if we’d fuck each other for a million dollars, he’d only smiled a toothy grin but I’d said, “Sure as shit, do you know what a million bucks could get you?”  I considered mentioning I’d do it for a lot less, but that’s when my motorcycle pal startled me by saying I had the perfect nose.  She said, “It figures you have that nose.”  I said, “Yeah, you think it would.”  I didn’t understand why she seemed to be saying it like she wanted it.  To wear maybe, or keep in her purse for the right occasion, although who knew when that might come along.  It was at least a couple sizes too big to have looked respectable on her.

I had met them outside of Denny’s on Central in the Double Q, which is Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is a long way from Malibu and Hawaii and a lot of other places.  Skelly came up with that name, ‘The Double Q’.  It was in retaliation to the lame ‘Burquee’ tag the local weekly was trying to hang on the city.  Albuquerque wasn’t a cute town, she said, and besides, how many places could claim a single ‘Q’ in their name, let alone two.  You just couldn’t take things like that for granted.

So I pulled up to the Denny’s—I think this was around 1:30 in the morning—and there on the front door is a handwritten sign saying, “Closed.”   I couldn’t believe it.  This is Denny’s we’re talking about here, the restaurant that’s supposed to always be open, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty five days a year.  Three hundred sixty six on leap years.  Now I happened to know that the door had been smashed on Monday, repaired and then smashed again on Wednesday.  But this sort of thing went on all the time around here.  Now it was Thursday turned Friday and apparently management had had enough.

Not only did this little incident lead into my encounter with the university trio—they screeched into the parking lot a few moments later blasting alterna-disco and looking for some excuse to stay awake—but it also proved to be the solution to a random koan I’d been carrying around since high school, courtesy of an acquaintance named Geoff.  After disappearing into his parents’ Blue Mountain retreat with a huge bag of weed and some rice and beans, he’d emerged two weeks later with a number of self-revelations and one important question.  Why, if Denny’s never closed, did they bother to put locks on the doors?   Well that answer became all too apparent this morning.  Situations such as vandalism arise and doors must be locked.

 It was a bit of a disappointment for me because this was one of Penny’s nights to work and I’d been hoping to see her.  Skelly and I always got a good laugh out of the woman’s name straight rhyming with the place where she waitressed.  You could never just say, “Penny.”  It always had to be, “Penny at Denny’s” as in, “Penny at Denny’s should make more money.  She’s a star and she’s worth it.”

 Penny could often be heard lamenting the fact that she tried hard but never seemed to get anywhere, which was true enough as far as I could see.   She was the frumpy embodiment of the work ethic.  She was a librarian posing as an apron.  She relentlessly brought me cream when I asked for black coffee, and I had a somewhat awkward crush on her.

One night she told us she’d just come from Isleta where she’d hit the slots ‘big’ and made three hundred seventy nine bucks, and there she is seriously thinking about quitting her job to gamble full time. Never mind how many nights she’d gone to the casino and lost.  Penny is the kind of girl I’d like to take out and treat special one night and maybe not fuck. But you learn. You learn that if you can’t give someone a fair piece of your time, then it’s best not to give them very much to begin with.   If you slept with her and left, she’d think you were like all the other guys and that would put her in a bad way.  But if you didn’t sleep with her and she had a nice time, then she might get expectations about someone who wasn’t in it for the long haul and that could put her in a bad way too.

I wonder what the ducks think about the whole thing, relationships and the rest.  One of them’s waddled over by my feet and seems to be barking on about something.  I can’t quite make it out.   They must be a fairly promiscuous bunch, these ducks; I mean there are so many of them around.   Skelly would know about it I’m sure.   She used to site various species in the animal kingdom to support her early theories about the nature of love.  Back in school we’d taken a canoe out on Casco Lake, paddled over to one of the islands there and run naked around it, plied off the boarded up windows of an abandoned cabin, and on that splintery wood floor I hadn’t been the one who’d insisted monogamy was a farce. 

I remember thinking then that she was probably just testing the waters, trying to gauge how reasonable the idea sounded with somebody else listening in.  I hadn’t exactly disagreed with her.  At the time, my reading list had been pulled almost entirely from the existential bin, and I’d buried my head deep into the tomes like they were bibles.  It seemed to me like this was simply a case of taking responsibility for your freedom.  Why not go ahead and commit yourself to some potentially liberating arrangement like an open relationship?  How bad could it be when all parties involved were willing participants?  Of course, everything was so damn speculative then. 

Later, with things between us taking a shift for the serious, this notion of freedom began sounding less and less like a moral imperative, and more and more like an excuse for getting one’s own way.  Still, I wanted it.   And there was Skelly standing right beside me, holding my hand and appearing so confident about the whole thing, even though she’d already lost any interest she might have had in pursuing it for herself.  “I knew this would happen,” she said, her voice reaching towards steady, “and I told you a long time ago I can handle it.”    Ah yes, the reality of that little epiphany.

She dealt pretty well with the whole thing for a while because, frankly, I didn’t tell her a whole lot about it.  When you don’t know all the details, it turns out, it’s not as bad as you think.  You’re always suspecting it’s bad.  Maybe the worst.  Skelly’s mind would go round and round but there was no where for her to get off.  There were so many scenarios.  So many ways.  I should have trusted my instincts and let it go at that.  I knew it about the frustration. That it was driving her a little crazy, that it was driving her a lot crazy sometimes.  In retrospect, though, at least it was manageable.  We were getting along all right.  Still making each other smile every day.  That was before I betrayed us with some good old-fashioned honesty.