Big Fun City: Part 2

Part 2/2: A fictional experiment in first person in which Nick meets a new local resident and reevaluates his relationship with...ew...BFC.

Caution tape lines the streets and encircles gaps in the sidewalk where intricate patterns once led the way. Tourists collect the broken stones and tiles. As I walk down the street, an entire corner is sequestered by police barriers. Masonry had fallen from a roof, exploding like an asteroid during the Cretaceous into the street below. The authorities don’t have time to clean it up or fix it, but they ensure the safety of the new faces that fill Big Fun City. They put up plastic barriers to make it clear what happened. When the next one falls, they’ll be ready with more barriers.

Why the masonry is crumbling in the first place is of no true concern.

My coffee date is soon but I’m not far. I stand on one of the busiest streets of Big Fun City and watch the crowds. I panic just a little bit, startled by the faces and languages and clothes and smells all around me. I look for someone local. I listen for the language I spent so much time learning. I find it only next to a police officer wearing a bright orange vest. He stands against a wall, unflinching at the prospect of falling masonry. I stand next to him to feel something local, something native to the place. He looks at me and nods. He has a strong jaw and flawless skin. I nod back. He wasn’t on the dating app’s grid this morning, so I assumed he was born here, raised here, part of many generations of Big Fun City inhabitants who had made this place so great. So big. So fun. So attractive to the world at this moment.

I could ask him, but fear takes over. I imagine him responding in my own language that he moved here last week. That he was from the same town I grew up in four decades ago. No. I avoid any confrontation.

My panic scares me away from the street, taking familiar back roads to the rendez-vous spot. The back streets are torn up, striated with construction tape and barriers. A woman shaking, red cuts all over her face, dressed in jeans and a parka despite the spring weather approaches me.

“Sorry to bother you,” she says in a language I understand but cannot identify.

“Yes?” I respond.

“I’m just trying to get something to eat, and I’m short a few,” she said. She shakes even more as I continue walking. I don’t bother apologizing anymore. Big Fun City seems to have real problems. It always did, I am sure, but these new problems scare me.

Moving quickly, I see the place for coffee on the corner, a newfangled type of shop, the type you’d see in any major city on any continent, laden with sleek lines and generic font with words like “artisanal” and “authentic” splattered on the window, providing a veneer of, well, something, but nothing I am buying.

This is Big Fun City. We never needed this here, but globalization is a march that, penguin-like, cannot be stopped. I roll my eyes at myself. I sound like my dad, I know, but is this what people come here for these days?

My date, or whatever he is, walks up, baggy jeans and a ruddy complexion that makes him look a mix of a study abroad student and an alcoholic seeking the next insert for his brown paper bag. I tell myself that I’m not being judgmental. Just honest. He looks like so many of the new residents of BFC, who come because they want to stretch their money farther perhaps, but fall victim to their own fortune. Bohemian, they call themselves. He chose to dress that way when I, so long ago, had no choice but to buy second hand. I feel like he has appropriated something from me.

He stinks of cheap whiskey and cologne samples found in a magazine. I diagnose him, as well, with a mild case of Peter Pan syndrome.

“Hi, I’m Greg,” he says. His accent is affected but unplaceable.

“Hi, I’m Nick Livingthorne,” I say. I’m so used to using my last name, but he doesn’t care.

“Want to grab a coffee here? They make a wicked smashing cortado with non dairy sheep’s milk,” he said.

“Non dairy sheep's milk?” I ask.

“Yeah, it’s oat milk that passes through a sheep’s system and then they steam it to perfection. Seriously amazing stuff,” he says.

“The sheep pisses out the oat milk and they froth it?” I ask.

“Yeah, it’s all the rage in BFC. It’s like, some old tradition here or something,” he smiles.

It’s not. I know it’s not. I lived here for ten years and drank my weight in coffee weekly. I worked in a café for six months, even. There is no such thing as a sheep’s piss vegan cortado. And if there is suddenly, well, there shouldn’t be.

“I think I’ll pass,” I say.

“Your lost. I hope they still have some left today, inshallah and all,” he says. I have absolutely no idea where this creature has come from but I am positively certain I won’t be leaving to discover any more about him.

We sit with coffee — his cup has the sheep’s piss drink — and I sip my own black brew. The coffee tastes like lavender soap, blueberries, and loose pennies at the bottom of a grade schooler’s backpack. I taste it twice, wondering why it cost the equivalent of five dollars, and excuse myself to the bathroom.

“Hurry back, mate, I’m thrilled to learn more about your aura,” he says. I nod and leave the coffee shop while he’s sipping his drink giddily. There is no way on God’s green earth I’ll ever have sex with that man.

Is this really what Big Fun City has become?

I wander further from the center, but the cacophony of languages follows me like a United Nations debate, echoing across the street as I imagine little flags above each group of people that passes. It’s fun to identify some and wonder about others. And they’re all here for the same reason — because the person in front of them is here. What more reason did they need?

Rushing away, I orient myself across broken streets and through another Segway tour to my old neighborhood, where I imagine the dusty old buildings and restaurants would remain untouched. Error upon error. A new condo reaches high into the sky, sleek glass facades gleaming like a pristine shard of glass through a human’s foot. It was wrong to me. 

My apartment building, where I spent my formative years, has a fresh coat of paint. The ground floor, once home to a sweet old lady who handed us all candies on the weekend — I never ate them, but still — is now a concept store for soaps and cleaning products far too expensive for local inhabitants to purchase. Two women wearing ponchos walk out, prattling on about how nice the quality is, and how cheap it was compared to their home. I wonder if they know I can hear them using the c-word in public. Regardless, such was the sentiment in Big Fun City these days for everyone, well, everyone except for the people living there.

I realize that, perhaps, this love story has come to an end. We both changed, for sure. I have grown in many ways, seen more of the world than I thought imaginable, and entered a phase in my life where I wanted something sure, something stable, predictable even. I wanted what I could know and count on, and Big Fun City wasn’t that. 

BFC — it rolls bitterly off the tongue — twisted and writhed seductively, bending to the will of whoever was willing to pay for it, unnerved by how much the fabric may tear or the masonry might crumble in the process. I can’t blame it. I can’t begrudge it. It was forced into this, against its will. It’s a city in survival mode, reaping the benefits of a prolonged harvest that will inevitably end one day, leaving its denizens with a mess to clean up, with broken sidewalks to patch and overpriced coffee shops that would fold and cede their rents to whoever could afford it, be it some international chain or, worse, another bank. 

So many banks. 

Why are there so many frickin’ banks?

The new wave of immigrants would leave, the wildebeests having crossed the vast plains to greener territory, the waters of the river calm again, the crocodiles waiting, hungrily, patiently, unable to follow.

The very soul of the city is defined by those who clamor for it. It never belonged to me, as much as I thought it had. And it never will.

Crossing a major intersection, I dodge a checkerboard of police taped squares and metal barriers that framed giant holes on the cobblestones. Safety first, right? On the corner, by a fountain that once gurgled water calmly and where a violinist used to play every Sunday night, I hear no water and spray paint covers its basin, long since dried and now home to nesting pigeons who make no qualms about defecating all over the sidewalk.

The bookstore, however, is still there. Of course it is. I walk by, and in the window, I can see it all too clearly. Posters of that damned book, now in its third edition, the text advertises, fills the display. A handwritten sign on the window reads, “Sold out for now.”

I shudder.

The title, The Best of Big Fun City on a Shoestring, in bright red letters, glows like embers. And the subscript, so poignant, so annoying: “The first and most popular guide to BFC.”

The editors wrote that last part, to be sure.

It should have stopped with the first edition.

And the worst part? God damn it, I could just vomit. The posters with yesterday’s date on them. “Meet the author!” they say. 

And that name. Nicolas Livingthorne, splattered across it.

I shudder again.

Shame and guilt snake up my spine.

I whisper, “I’m sorry.”

It’s over.

I walk back to my hotel to pack my bag and prepare to leave, hoping to catch a train the next morning to someplace else where I can try to rekindle what I had with Big Fun City, to search for something that no one else is looking for yet, and that hopefully they never will.