Glass Candy

The Purple Rose of Cairo

Love's eyes love to look on brightness;
Love loves what is gaily drest;
Sunday, Monday, all I care is
Thou shouldst see me in my best.
-- Antonio's Ballad

I live downtown, and this weekend it was overrun with people who normally don't leave their suburban havens for a place with such a small amount of available parking. Tis the holiday season though, and parking or no parking, they're all here, infecting my neighborhood with bad fashion and too much makeup. It was especially bright and sunny yesterday, and Christmas shoppers, doing their Christmas things, usually in couples, smiling, with a coffee from Starbucks in hand, was a vision that kept me from leaving the house. I was hungover, strungout, and without any food I couldn't put off venturing out any longer. I had spent most of the day in my underwear with my pot pipe on the coffee table, a guitar in my arms, and an empty fridge. But all too often I found myself pacing back and forth looking out the window, worrying about my behavior, and thinking about what I was going to do about all the hours ahead of me. I had to get out of the house so that the day wouldn't bleed seamlessly into the night. I needed to go somewhere and then come home to make things feel normal, but the excuses were plentiful and so was the agoraphobia. Finally around 4pm, after much wavering, I decided that the best place for me was the cinema, and King Kong, clocking in at three hours and five minutes would keep my mind occupied long enough to get my head into a place so that I could dine alone in a crowded room and finally get something to eat.

I walked slowly towards the huge multiplex cinema, it seemed to take forever just to reach the top of my block, my headphones flooded my ears with music, isolating my trip to a vision only experience. I kept my head down though, because I was convinced that I would run into someone from the party I was at the night before, where I was openly shoving cocaine into my face with Nymphalidae on a black leather couch in the living room. We were doing the Christmas party circuit together, Nymphalidae and I. We had been at three parties in total, but it was the last one of the night, in the west end, with a hired dj, catered food plates, and a fully stocked bar with three bartenders behind it that provided the most antics. Of all the women that I have written about in Big and Tall, Nymphalidae has been the most popular with readers. I often get inquiries from blog creeps asking me if we've had sex, or urging me to post a picture of her, and of course I forward them all to Nymphalidae, so she knows she has fans. I thought of this as I watched her throwing martini glasses off the 8th floor balcony, narrowly missing a cyclist on the street below. I found it immensely sexy, until I was tapped on the shoulder and scolded by a blind woman who could hear all the glass breaking despite the balcony being stuffed to its concrete barriers with other guests. I looked into the blind woman's vibrant, blue, vacant eyes, and told her that it was an accident, but she could hear us laughing like idiots, so I had to stop Nymphalidae in mid swing as she was about to toss a third glass over the rail.

Little snippets of the night came back to my memory as I made my way to the theatre for the 4:15 showing of King Kong. The way Nymphalidae held me all the way home in the cab assuring me that I would be alright, how I had to climb a nine foot fence to get back into the party after I had locked myself in the complex's courtyard while trying to get to a bank machine, and how I stood in the washroom with Nymphalidae and another woman as Nymphalidae took nude photographs of her. I just wanted to get to the theatre so I could hide away for a few hours until it was dark and the streets emptied a bit. I finally arrived in the lobby of the theatre, and it was packed. On the far wall I could see a sign saying that King Kong was sold out. This was not good, this would never happen if it wasn't for the shoppers I thought. They were inescapable! The restaurant's were full, and the bars had no available stools, which wouldn't normally be a bother, but something about the night before had left me completely disconnected from the world that I was seeing around me. I couldn't identify with any of these people, and I thought they were all looking at me, like I was ruining their happy vision of capitalist holiday revelry. As if they wanted to see evidence that people are actually miserable during this time of the year. I wound up aimlessly walking into a used dvd store, and spent an hour perusing their entire collection until I came upon a copy of the Woody Allen film, The Purple Rose of Cairo. It was all about a lonely and depressed woman, who finds solace in the moving shadows of the cinema. After leaving her abusive husband one afternoon, she sits in the theatre all day, weeping, and watches The Purple Rose of Cairo over and over again, until one of the lead characters in the movie turns to her, professes his love to her, and then climbs out of the picture to greet her. She is then invited into the show to live out her fantasies in a world of moving pictures, ultimately giving her the power to change her life when she returns back to the real world.

I took the dvd up to the clerk, paid for it, and took it home under the cover of darkness. I made some popcorn, and while it was playing, I tried to climb into my twenty inch Citizen TV, but it was too small, I was too big, and that damn glass was in the way.