As Above, So Below [Hawksley Moods]

[kai]

26 June 2013

Hawksley, let me be frank: you don't look the type.

This, before she hands him a pipe and tosses him a lighter. He just side-grins at her, a sharp pull to the left corner of his mouth outward, upward, until the quick wink of his left eye seems inevitable, involuntary. They are not the only ones passing to the left, and they are not the only ones that the security at Red Rocks is outright ignoring, as though there is an unspoken pact in this place: one party will not be too obvious, and the other party will pretend not to notice, and everyone will do their best to not be total dicks.

Hawksley is a polite smoker. He doesn't breathe in anyone's face and seems rather entranced by the look of a cloud dissipating into the air above him, momentarily veiling and then revealing the rapidly darkening night sky. And he appears to be polite in general: when he weaves out to the steps to go grab a beer, he comes back with several more to share with Jim and Sera and their friends. At one point he's dancing with one of Dee's roller derby pals, legs interlaced, but he doesn't go so far as to lay his hand on her lower back or mutter some endearment in her ear; they just groove.

He introduces himself to them as Davie.

Later, much later, he gives people cards: minicards, fine-printed and trendy little slips of abundant style and minimal information. The backs vary in design: some almost rigidly businesslike, others so goddamn hipster-whimsical it's as though he had them made just for these people. 'These people' being Jim's friends, Sera's friends, a few folks standing around them that they got to know in that brief, passing way you get to know people that you share a concert with; they all get one. First name only, and not the one he gave Jim and Sera. Cell number, which begins with 303. He gets a few numbers of his own; he just moved here, he says. As soon as he gets set up he's going to do something, I don't know, throw a party or whatever. you should come.

Jim and Sera do not get one of these cards. They do, however, get his number. He takes theirs down in his phone if they give them. It's doubtful they see him after people begin to disperse, after the long trains of cars begin to get waved methodically out of the various parking lots down the winding road that will take all of them back to a different form of civilization.

[kai]

27 June 2013

"Collins, we should get red cards," he says later, while getting a massage from a petite, curvy massage therapist with a dark brown pixie cut. The new phrase he learned the night before tastes delightful on his tongue, like holding a bubble in your mouth and feeling it pop. Collins, quietly reading the WSJ in his chair against the wall, glances up and lifts an eyebrow.

"For your sciatica," Hawksley adds, opening one eye and grinning across the room at the older gentleman, "and my depression."

The look on Collins's face is dry and flat. Hawksley wrinkles his face at him. "You look like a sabkha," he says, and closes both of his eyes again. He hears a faint scoff under the rustle of the newspaper's pages turning. He tries not to smile.