Albino Crow

I am looking for an albatross.

This is no joke. This is no curse. An albatross spread like the span of a hand across the soft white sky of a woman's left buttock. It is a sign, an omen of true love. I have seen it, here in the photo I have tucked into the safety of my wallet. I reach into the soft leather fold and shake it out, wrinkled and faded even behind the soft plastic laminate. A naked woman with blonde hair, on her side, her left rump riding up, lies on tussled sheets that spread away from her in a puddle of crimson, like blood, or maybe paint. Yeah, I decide, more like paint, all clotted and textured. And there, on the side of her left rump, the one riding up in the air, is the albatross, a full hand's span on her buttock. I stare at her face, which is in the shadow of her arm; I imagine she is smiling and her eyes, green, are alive with an expression somewhere between love, lust and awe. I love this woman. I love her in ways that words cannot contain, and I wake up some nights with the ache of her in my bones and I cannot sleep. I have never met her, this woman in the photograph, but I know her like blood.

It is four a.m. in this no-man's land, a twenty-four hour diner on the lower east side of town. I like it here, at this time, because it belongs to that strangeness, which is not night and not light, and it is peopled not by the lost, but the purposeful. The lost wander the city aimlessly, pushing carts, begging for change, dying for the shame of others, but we are a different breed, resolute and dedicated to the annihilation of anything safe and wholesome in our lives; we spill out of bars and houses, no matter the specificities, the domicile is usually the bottom of a bottle or some other such desperation, we spill out and into this diner while the rest of the city sleeps or twitches. I say, this diner, but I mean, these diners: there are many, for we, the driven-night-walkers, are many. We aren't vampires or any such gothic crap, we are scarier than that, we are the driven earnest souls of life and we come here to wait because we believe and we have hope and we stir that heady concoction into swine-swill-coffee and mix it in with eggs over-easy and hash browns, contemplate it in the crunch of crispy bacon. We are so full of shit and therein lies all the possibility.

Returning to the photograph, I trace the outline of the woman's hip as I motion to the waitress for more coffee. I wonder what the name of this town is; I have been through so many, touring as I am with a new jazz band made up of a bunch of balding, early-retired baby boomers. Charlie, the bandleader, is the only real jazz musician among us. I should count myself too except that this is only temporary. And if keeping up with the towns is hard enough, the diners are impossible. My life in diners: forget that. I do this because I am chasing the woman in the photo, I must find her, this albatross-marked figment of my fevered dreams and desires, I live to find her and seduce her and make her love me. Make her love me in the same bone-aching way that I love her, make her love me so much that should she lose me and if, in a heart-crazed-state, she wandered into an AA meeting she would say, my name is Janis, my name is Janis and I am hooked on Clearwater. Yep, Clearwater and Janis. It was the sixties what can I say? At least she didn't name me MoonoverClearwater. That's a girl's name.

Janis left so long ago I can barely remember her, but I burn for her...