For Pop's Rosin

My fingers are parched. I thought to myself, my hands are aching stretching my fingers so the bones snap, and I drank a glass of water before an endless feed of trash through unseen wires embedded deep with the thoughts troubling, doubling in my sleeping head. On the pillowcase, I stare with cheek resting on teeth rubbing against the plastic mouth guard, gums and stepping out on the floorboards, the yellow sunlight, if I could see myself in a mirror, the upper jaw impressed leaving an indentation over the lips and gums, the ultimatum was still only a half-filled glass. Rosh Hashanah was in a week before the night Yom Kippur. I drank a cup of water in the morning with ice, and the jangling at the bottom of the glass spoke because no one else was there, and I was prone to listening to notes that weren’t there.
I play the first five bars of the Kol Nidre. The bass hefted the loveliest melodies on the screechy swagger my bow carved from tip to frog, arching airily across the thick strings like a stone skipping on water. The sliding bow had no friction. The notes were distraught towering at the solo’s peak when subdominant and dominant whining in the autumn notes, whistling like a finger on the frost on an iced water glass.
Leaving home and heading ten blocks to the Starbucks.
“I’d like a double espresso,” I told the counter clerk handing her his credit card, “and can you show me the espresso beans you have?”
“You have a grinder?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
She walked from behind the counter to a furniture display case with the coffee brands and the espresso Bold nestled in the right hand corner. “You see that?” she asked shortly a head shorter than me with hair braided, coffee with milk skin, robust figure.
“Thank you,” I said, “Oh no, I’m not buying anything.”
She said, “That’s where if you are looking.” The espresso was warm in my hand now after I had signed the receipt in my pocket crumpled in a fractal.
“Where are the newspapers?” I asked, and she pointed to a stack with The Sun and New York Times. I saw before skimming the news on Hebrew schools in California, where my brother was employed in a caviar café. The New York Times read with my cup of espresso heat came through the condensation on the paper cup warming the palms with a fresh scar from a bicycle accident that sent me wheeling across the pavement.
“Shabbot Shalom,” I said from behind the newspaper and raised my hand to wave as someone I barely recognized pushed forwards to the barista, nods in passing.
The peristalsis in my esophagus was energy enough even without a breakfast, and I began to sing the prayer said over wine to the tune If You Are Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands forcing rhythm to the words in meter. I was on the same street parallel to home and lost the melody, whistling and breathing with lyrics, the pounding heart in my chest, and my wonder that the store behind a row of construction did not have rosin, and was not even open for business.
The morning was bright and I was glowing with warmth that I was rehearsing tonight the Kol Nidre for the sunset on Yom Kippur. That evening I was escorting my mother to the synagogue to hear the cantor sing, and there I was going to ask if I could play the Kol Nidre and I was far from the perfect notes. The warehouse was closed and with no sign on the knob, there were no signs the warehouse had exclusively kept hours with only a phone number as evidence there was a warehouse there. “There is nothing there,” I exclaimed in my head with construction workers across the street working and wondering what I was doing there. There was Ted’s in Mount Vernon, and the longest distance I knew was three blocks where I had walked.
At the bus stop, I had my hands in my pockets and an old woman asked if I had change for a quarter. I stopped when there was no bus and told her, “I don’t have any nickels,” and as the houses approached over the horizon, an old man called from his porch, “I want to be like you. When I was younger, I wanted to be you!” and a young man shook his head and smirked at the grin on my mouth panting.
A concrete wall with graffiti had the painting of a rose growing from the cracks tearing in the sidewalk. The graffiti paintings and chalk scratches in the sidewalk made the stroll in the neighborhood like visiting the museum.
“Hey brother!” a man sporting a Jesus Save’s red cap stopped in the street with his hand outstretched and shook my hand. “Want to get high?” he asked blurry-eyed, a black, bristly beard with a funky smell aroma between the two.
“No,” I said. “I used to.”
He said, “Not used to no?”
“You look like you are looking for something?”
“I’m looking for water,” I said.
“You can walk into any store and get water,” he said, “where are you trying to get to?”
“University,” I said.
He held his arms crosswise. “You ask anyone!” he said. I turned around after a few paces and waved, and the man said, “Not used to no!”
“No,” I muttered, “thanks, goodbye.” I walked a quarter of a block and passing a street shop with men sitting with a bottle of water on a table. “Excuse me.” I edged my feet closer like a child dancing at a wedding.
“I’m trying to get to University?”
“You don’t know where that is?” the man asked with a thick beard.
“I usually drive through here,” I said thinking the streets were in bad need of road work.
“Here is not so nice to live,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, but really Waverly is an affordable place to live.
“Take 33rd,” the man said with a thick beard.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Listen, need anything else?”
I paused for a moment to think, “No, thanks you.” I was hovering on the bottled water like a bee. I was dehydrated and walking back to the 33rd street heard a street crier selling movies from an exhausted building with boarded-up windows and grassy potted-plants. He was sitting across the other side of a fence, and from the street ahead was the thump of a beat box and a boy drumming rap lyrics.
The rapper had rhythm with no noise. The latest happening in the neighborhood was a front porch set afire as a threat to a mother’s phone call reporting dangerous crime, and without lyrics. Her neighbors’ porch was torched because the arsonist mistakes the woman, suspiciously with no evidence contrary even with daily rounds on the street for the day without leads. I was a stranger there asking directions to a crime scene, 33rd. At the crossing 33rd became University and in a few blocks University became Hopkins. In the X and O café the poster advertisement was a bald shaven, black Russian Jew with a round face blowing the silver, amplifier horn torn from an old horn. He was ahead in a crowd with cheering protestors and concert-goers in an outdoors amphitheater in a crude black and white with red streaks impressing on the consumer the red states. I was in the café cooling off with an ice mango smoothie.
“Did you see the heat index today?” the waiter asked the people in the cafe.
An hour later I walked through Ted’s front door into a vestibule and squeezing my thighs with hope the urine did not leak out, I came in. “Carlson,” I said as I saw Ted because I preferred darker rosin and Carlson is the darkest brand. Ted moved behind the counter and said, “Sorry, we’re fresh out, but here ‘can see if we have.” As a half hour earlier a woman, my mother came and asked for a case of bass rosin. Ted had none, but just then as he was saying that, the delivery truck pulled in the parking outdoors and had a box with Pop’s bass rosin.
“My son prefers dark rosin,” she told Ted. “If he wants, you can return the rosin for a refund,” he said, so when I asked Ted for a case of Carlson, he might have thought this was a joke that I intended to get a refund for the Pop’s.
“Oh, Pop’s is fine,” I said, “whatever you have.” I was happy to get out of there as in truth, I was so exhausted trying not to mess his blue jeans. Pop’s rosin, a word of warning, must not be left out in the sun or the rosin will melt. Pop’s rosin or tree sap is wrapped in white paper creases in a red snapped case.
I went to the shop enmeshed in placate wood with steps leading, OK Natural, and asked the clerk, “Can I use your bathroom if I buy something?”
“Sure, go right ahead. Take the steps, they lead next door that’s closed,” the clerk said. After using the facilities, I had a water bottle marked for sale with an orange sticker to the cashier. Sign over the register said, no credit cards less than five dollars and VISA.
“I only have Discover,” I said.
“Take it, that’s fine,” the cashier said, “but come here later and buy something.”
I observed for blurry moments the passing footwear and walked having drunk the water with ease across long stride streets with breaks in the red concrete where rounding bicyclists knocked tires against the hardened curves. I read the awning vanished beyond the vanishing point, The Jesus Saves Rehabilitation Clinic, banner. The path was not too hard to the café and there I had my bottled water. I had the separate brands on the table unequal distances with my eyes adjusting for the closest bottle. I was watching behind the bottles like a bushman, the curly, orange woman with her small aquiline and small comfortable man. My feet had no feeling and were dead weights and when I closed my eyes, rolling swirls appear, and I could not stop the café from shaking. The cashier was reading her newspaper behind the counter. I hoofed my dead pyrrhic feet over there to ask for the tap.
“The tap is over there,” a voice said from behind the display case of pastries on the counter.
In a moment, I saw where the girl had motioned with her hands and scooped the ice with a plastic cup and she said loudly, “don’t look at me!”
I was simply enjoying the clouds and the violet rays peeking behind the houses when I was struck dumb. The weedy aroma was at a bus stop close to home.
“You have the time?” I asked the boy smoking the marijuana cigarette.
“Eight o’clock,” he said.
I cursed under his breath and began to rush home. I was late. I had never telephoned my mother and was dead tired. I did this for Pop’s, for the Kol Nidre and my mother who would be less whining when the bow sang on those strings. I was late, was in trouble and my mother was crying. The sunset behind the clouds and the violet night was blue, gray and black.
I knew I would be late for the Sabbath.