Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - By David Sedaris Page 0,40

something closer to a proposal. “Be with me” was the way I interpreted it.

At the end of our train car was a little room, no more than a broom closet, really, with a barred window in it. It must have been four a.m. when two disheveled Germans stepped out, and we moved in to take their place. As would later happen with Johnny Ryan, Bashir and I sat on the floor, the state of which clearly disgusted him. Apart from the fact that we were sober, and were pressed so close that our shoulders touched, the biggest difference was that our attraction was mutual. The moment came when we should have kissed—you could practically hear the surging strings—but I was too shy to make the first move, and so, I guess, was he. Still I could feel this thing between us, not just lust but a kind of immediate love, the sort that, like instant oatmeal, can be realized in a matter of minutes and is just as nutritious as the real thing. We’ll kiss…now, I kept thinking. Then, Okay…now. And on it went, more torturous by the second.

The sun was rising as we reached his destination, the houses and church spires of this strange city—a city I could make my own—silhouetted against the weak morning sky. “And so?” he asked.

I don’t remember my excuse, but it all came down to cowardice. For what, really, did I have to return to? A job pushing a wheelbarrow on Raleigh construction sites? A dumpy one-bedroom next to the IHOP?

Bashir got off with his three big suitcases and became a perennial lump in my throat, one that rises whenever I hear the word “Lebanon” or see its jittery outline on the evening news. Is that where you went back to? I wonder. Do I ever cross your mind? Are you even still alive?

Given the short amount of time we spent together, it’s silly how often, and how tenderly, I think of him. All the way to Penn Station, hungover from my night with Johnny Ryan, I wondered what might have happened had I taken Bashir up on his offer. I imagined our apartment overlooking a square: the burbling fountain, the drawings of dams and bridges piled neatly on the desk.

When you’re young it’s easy to believe that such an opportunity will come again, maybe even a better one. Instead of a Lebanese guy in Italy it might be a Nigerian one in Belgium, or maybe a Pole in Turkey. You tell yourself that if you traveled alone to Europe this summer, you could surely do the same thing next year, and the year after that. Of course you don’t, though, and the next thing you know you’re an aging, unemployed elf so desperate for love you spend your evening mooning over a straight alcoholic.

The closer we got to New York, the more miserable I became. Then I thought of this guy my friend Lily and I had borrowed a ladder from a few months earlier, someone named Hugh. I’d never really trusted people who went directly from one relationship to the next, so after my train pulled into Penn Station, and after I’d taken the subway home, I’d wait a few hours, or maybe even a full day, before dialing his number and asking if he’d like to hear a joke.

Author, Author

If anything should be bracketed by matching bookends, I suppose it’s an author tour. The ones I’d undertaken in the past had begun in one independent or chain store, and ended, a month or so later, in another. The landscape, though, has changed since then, and it’s telling that on my ’08 tour I started and finished at a Costco.

The first one I went to was in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I was spending the weekend with my sister Lisa, gearing up for six weeks of travel, when her husband, Bob, expressed a need for lightbulbs. “Anyone game for a quick ride to Costco?” he asked, and before he could even find his keys I was panting, doglike, beside the front door.

Living in cities, it’s easy to avoid the big-box superstores. Their merciless lighting, their stench of rubber and cheap molded plastic—it’s not the way I normally like to shop. At Costco, though, I’d found these displays of pain relievers: Anacin, Bayer, Tylenol—eight major brands were represented. Pills were paired into single-serving envelopes, then stapled in rows to a bright sheet of poster board. It looked like something you’d see behind the counter