Test Flights (original) (raw)

"Hi, you look just a like a girlfriend I made up back in the 80s."

That's what I should have said.

I'd had Pernil and French fries at El Castillo del Jaguar down on Flatbush Avenue w/otherdeb & Co. this Friday night while Hurricane Harvey was drenching Texas. I'd finished up when I went to the loo. Suddenly they were all gone.

So I walked uptown to some part of Downtown Brooklyn where I could resolve some puzzling {technobabble}: Sadie Quatre, my iPod Touch had started playing one of those low-charge restart tricks where you had to restart a cut at least four times from a white apple display (dead stop) to make it play normally. Usually, the same Good song fades out in the middle of the build-up. Don't let this happen while walking uphill to Mike Oldfield's Crises.
Oy!
"There's this black girl acting up on the street."
It doesn't matter whether your battery is full or empty becuase it soon will be after four or five such restarts. Thinking of the above as a pretty good disciple for travelling in the Tesla Model 3 I shall (probably) own someday, I caught the artfully timed Manhattan-bound A train at Jay Street {end technobabble}, when those shiny doors slid opened to... her.

Though petite and colourful in my mind's eye, I'd never noticed my invisible girlfriend take up so much ...volume, een if she hadn't splashed half a bottle of it on the train floor. A splatter effect I shall see for all time. (nerd) I hate when people spit. even the girls. Her gentle blonde-girl face was sculpted fine, though our eyes never met. Perhaps she'd drunk too much. Her white-blonde hair draped a curtain down her back. She played a balance game with the stainless steel supports, like they teach in Dance class. She wore just a little white bralet over something white and half undone. Tennis shoes, white and scruffy. No music played between High Street and Fulton; her two brunette escorts chattered away. I sat across the doors from them, snug in the next group of seats. M_y_ invisible girlfriend shugged and pretended to read from her iPod. She wore a pink T- shirt and grey Danskins.

I should have delivered that opening line, but she was too drunk and surrounded by girls. You know how that can be. I didn't even hear one escort call her name. I wonder what it was. She continued to hang out in my mind, but got off fo real at Broadway-Nassau. I took a breath under the train's rumble on the way to Chambers, and I asked Adrienne,

"Was she her? Were you her?"

She shrugged, snuggled up and shut her eyes.

This work was Produced Under The Influence To Influence Others Positively (PUTITIOP*). Part of a complete, nutritious breakfast.