He was standing on the back of a truck outside the Lowes Vanderbilt Hotel.
It was a big moving truck, unlabeled, and there were two other guys pushing heavy black rectangular boxes with brass buckles onto the truck.
"Evan Solomon!" my memory shouted at me. Memories always seem to shout at me and slap me in the face. I had dated Evan Solomon seven years before, in college. Presently, he, like the other two guys, was wearing a loose button down shirt and jeans with work boots. He had his hair pulled back into a pony tail, and his glasses, the same small round ones I remembered from when I was nineteen, were perched too high up on the bridge of his nose. He looked dirty. When I saw him I kept walking. Evan Solomon? As I passed the truck, questioning whether or not it had been him, I saw a little plackard next to the door of the truck that said, in scrawled handwriting, as this was obviously a truck that had been rented, "Separation Music Group."
And that’s when I laughed. I knew I shouldn't, but the corners of my mouth shot up as high as my eyebrows did, because it started to hit me that that had to be him. It had to be him because Evan Solomon had been a Recording Industry major when he was in college with me. It was a running joke that RIM majors never really made anything of themselves, and that they all ended up drowning in overexposure with the rest of the would-be bands and singers and mixers and djs and audio production engineers. If you saw someone older out at a bar somewhere wearing inappropriately youthful looking clothes, you might stifle a laugh because you just knew that they were another casualty of the campus RIM program. Only a quarter of students coming for that program ever made it into upper level classes, and those that didn't, or who made it all the way out and then flatlined, seemed doomed to wallow in what-could-have-beens and drink away their sorrows, still insisting they were the next big thing.
I remembered Evan playing his guitar, with his oddly spaced teeth, in his oddly furnished dorm room. I remembered us meeting in the hallway of a boys dorm under blue-white flourescent lights. I remember being set off by the creamy complexion of his skin, and the way he looked at me and grinned with that gap between his teeth. I remember him growing his hair out later, long after we had stopped seeing each other, and him showing me one day the pills that supposedly kept him from "freaking out." I had laughed then, on the inside, thinking he was going no where. In his mother's house. His best friend smoking pot in the basement. Petting a dog with three legs. Everything seemed broken.
Passing him on the street, seven years later, seeing him load a truck with audio equipment he once thought he'd be paid to operate made me chuckle a little bit. His hair, looking similarly long and greasy, the gap in his teeth now making him look creepy, the color of his skin taking a grayish tint. Was it the weather, a coincidence, or was it really the smoking catching up to him? He didn't see me. He didn't even blink. I probably bled into all the other suit and skirt clad office workers strolling up and down the sidewalk on our ways to lunch.
It seems so surreal to connect the dots of past and present and finally see it all. Long ago, neither of us could have ever predicted our futures. We tried to, but the cards always seem to fall where they may. Who knows what any of it means.
All I know is that I wish I could have seen myself then as I do now. Not that I wouldn't have talked to Evan at all, but that I would have been more conscious of who I really was, and what I really deserved, and what that meant. They always tell us in school that we can be whatever we want to be, and do anything we want to do. But could the crack in this magical statement be the part where we percieve who we are? And what we percieve we can do?
I passed him again on my way back from picking up my lunch. He and the two other drivers were trying to put the truck in gear. Yeah. It really was him. I kept walking toward my shiny building and took the elevator up ten floors to my desk.
And that’s when I laughed. I knew I shouldn't, but the corners of my mouth shot up as high as my eyebrows did, because it started to hit me that that had to be him. It had to be him because Evan Solomon had been a Recording Industry major when he was in college with me. It was a running joke that RIM majors never really made anything of themselves, and that they all ended up drowning in overexposure with the rest of the would-be bands and singers and mixers and djs and audio production engineers. If you saw someone older out at a bar somewhere wearing inappropriately youthful looking clothes, you might stifle a laugh because you just knew that they were another casualty of the campus RIM program. Only a quarter of students coming for that program ever made it into upper level classes, and those that didn't, or who made it all the way out and then flatlined, seemed doomed to wallow in what-could-have-beens and drink away their sorrows, still insisting they were the next big thing.
I remembered Evan playing his guitar, with his oddly spaced teeth, in his oddly furnished dorm room. I remembered us meeting in the hallway of a boys dorm under blue-white flourescent lights. I remember being set off by the creamy complexion of his skin, and the way he looked at me and grinned with that gap between his teeth. I remember him growing his hair out later, long after we had stopped seeing each other, and him showing me one day the pills that supposedly kept him from "freaking out." I had laughed then, on the inside, thinking he was going no where. In his mother's house. His best friend smoking pot in the basement. Petting a dog with three legs. Everything seemed broken.
Passing him on the street, seven years later, seeing him load a truck with audio equipment he once thought he'd be paid to operate made me chuckle a little bit. His hair, looking similarly long and greasy, the gap in his teeth now making him look creepy, the color of his skin taking a grayish tint. Was it the weather, a coincidence, or was it really the smoking catching up to him? He didn't see me. He didn't even blink. I probably bled into all the other suit and skirt clad office workers strolling up and down the sidewalk on our ways to lunch.
It seems so surreal to connect the dots of past and present and finally see it all. Long ago, neither of us could have ever predicted our futures. We tried to, but the cards always seem to fall where they may. Who knows what any of it means.
All I know is that I wish I could have seen myself then as I do now. Not that I wouldn't have talked to Evan at all, but that I would have been more conscious of who I really was, and what I really deserved, and what that meant. They always tell us in school that we can be whatever we want to be, and do anything we want to do. But could the crack in this magical statement be the part where we percieve who we are? And what we percieve we can do?
I passed him again on my way back from picking up my lunch. He and the two other drivers were trying to put the truck in gear. Yeah. It really was him. I kept walking toward my shiny building and took the elevator up ten floors to my desk.
