Odds

1

I am standing in line at a convenience store, waiting to pay the cashier for the $10 of gas I pumped into the car. Not eight feet away, a teenaged girl is talking on a landline pay telephone. I can’t help but hear her.

“Mom. Yes, mom. [Pause.] All right, mom. I will. [Pause.] Aw, mom. Do I have to? [Pause.] Mom?! Please. Not now. There are people standing around. [Pause.] Okay, mom. [Pause.] O-kay, mom. I love you, dammit! Geez!”

The girl slams the receiver down into its cradle and stomps out to her car, gets in, and slams the door shut. In a moment, her car screeches away.

One customer turns to another and says, “She needs a cell phone.”

2

Remember when the Beatles sang, “All you need is love?” Those of us who bought into their philosophy are still wondering what went wrong, while those who scoffed at the Fab Four and invested in war bonds are living in New York penthouse apartments and wintering in Palm Beach.

Paul McCartney is proof positive: Forget love. All you need is cash.

3

She is five-foot-ten, a pale brunette with chocolate eyes, dressed in a Barbie-pink-and-white sun dress. Her legs are long and toned. One of the spaghetti straps falls from her shoulder as she crosses the street in Savannah, Georga ahead of me. Sunlight is kind to her. She is stunning. Down the street a knot of businessmen gawk at her. Aware of them, she turns to me and signs:

“I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U,” her hands spell.

It is all a charade, designed to arouse her audience’s interest, but I play the game with her, crossing against the light and kissing her full on the mouth.

It is a Technicolor movie and we are its stars.

4

Atlanta, Georgia. A man is negotiating a deal with a hooker.

“No extra charge to say I love you,” she tells him. “But there’s not enough money on earth to make me kiss you on the lips.”

5

In the Decatur, Alabama library I checked out a copy of Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps. Reading it at home that night, I found the words I LOVE YOU written in blue ballpoint block letters in the right margin of page 96. For days after I wondered who had written the words and what they were doing at the time. I invented a number of stories in my head to explain the words.

6

At sixteen, kissing Janice in the papa-san chair in a neighbor’s apartment, I felt the world spin wildly on its axis, and I believed I understood all the secrets of all the poets who had ever lived. She was a tiny, passionate Amerasian woman. One evening she whispered into my ear, “I don’t love you, but I love kissing you.”

Later she told me, “I love kissing you and I love you.” Four days later my family moved from Japan to the United States, and I never saw her again.

We wrote each other exactly five letters each on my return to Tennessee. At sixteen, five letters is a whole lot of love.

7

I love my readers, honest I do. But there’s no way I’m letting any of you move in here. Seriously.

Okay. Maybe for a week or two while you get on your feet. But that’s it. No longer.

There’s only so far a relationship like this can go.