Heart of Darkness

The man was sitting there when I stopped. I looked around and there was a whole other picnic table bolted to the ground there on that intersection in Manhattan. He seemed a part of the scenery, backdrop, not much to concern myself with. He was a large but dismissible silhouette. I sat there and stared. The dark shape grumbled, coughed and turned shining black eyes to me. "Hello," I acknowledged. "Mmm." I received.

I lit a cigarette. The shape became a man and he asked me for one. I gave him one. He asked me for a lighter. I handed him the lighter. Soon, we were in some conversation. He probed with dialectics and then we got into some ramble. There wasn't much to talk about so we did some strange staring contest. I asked him when it would end. He rumbled and laughed. I asked him if he'd seen Apocalypse Now, as an ice-breaker, you know. More mumbles.

I asked him if he'd read "Heart of Darkness" and he claimed he had. Then he did some performance piece of that title. I think he thought I was a white kid being racist. For all I know he was a Vietnam man. More staring contest. It was a loose end I was trying to tie up for myself. I had been in the room but was much more distracted by horniness than I could to pay attention to the stupid movie. I think that I made out with that girl to Apocalypse Now. Bad magic.

He handed me the last inch and a half of dilute 40oz. I felt obliged, so I mimed a swig. Even that disgusted me. Soon, young blacks passed and he came to life. The white kid in the dark corner was nothing interesting. Maybe they had something more interesting than the nothing Mephisto and I were playing about with. He wasn't helpful in resolving my loose ends there. It was a strange occasion though, where a man with nothing had the time to show me the dark blackness of his pupils, stained with the second half of the twentieth century.

I think now, that I was looking for a movie in those black screens as if I stared I could see some echoreflection of the past, and thereby see some vaticination. Even if he held out to me a clear black orb of obsidian, I don't believe I would have been any clearer. What broke this strange game and the laughter and way he sprang to life when the young men passed by voided it in some ways, but I never did forget the strange night.