works by w.pham

works by william pham, 2005-present

We All of Us are Always Slaying Dragons in Our Heads

He met her in a coffee shop, that grand nexus of hypocrites and poseurs and socialites and students and teachers and businesspeople and failures, complete failures -- that is to say, people of every sort, people, human people. How it happened was this: he walked up to the counter, ordered a cup of coffee, and sat down outside. The person he ordered the cup of coffee from was not her. He then drank the coffee slowly, leaving it plain and black. In the various and incomplete list of human archetypes, he fell into the last category, that of the complete failure. When he was graduating from high school they told him to go to college. He went to college and they told him to get a degree in business because he had a sharp mind. In his fourth year they told him to get an internship because that's how you get a decent job, but not before you go to business school. He went to business school and graduated and got a decent job. And in the columns of numbers and flow charts and Monday morning presentations and stale donuts and bad coffee, he found no solace. So he quit. And they wondered why, and they told him to find a new job, find a good woman, get married, settle down, buy a house, have kids. Be the best you can be. Fulfill the amazing human potential you have, that amazing human ability to look at numbers and flow charts and attend Monday morning presentations and eat stale donuts and drink bad coffee. But he would rather have a decent cup of coffee whenever and wherever he wanted than keep on waiting for the next direction from the audience to his life.

Exit, stage left.

They were all hallucinating anyway.

He had about enough money saved up to live comfortably, alone, for a year. And if by the end of that year he had not decided what to do, he would take out a loan and live another year. And if by the end of that second year he still didn't know what to do, he would go to Australia. Why Australia? Why not, he decided. It seemed like an appropriately American idea that in Australia one could find a freedom unknown at home.

While he was going over this immaculate plan in his head, a young girl, somewhere between 17 and 26, carrying that strange mystique of all young girls in which age is indeterminable but beauty is unmistakable, asked if she could borrow the empty chair next to him and he said yes without looking up from his cup of coffee, and that may have been a mistake because for all we know, he may have fallen in love with her at first sight (people say that that is a Myth but they are all very wrong). But he didn't look up and he did not fall in love with her at first sight and she had borrowed the chair anyway for her boyfriend of certainly a brief duration; you could tell because when she leaned in to say something to him, he still looked convincingly interested.

Anyway he spilled some coffee on his lap and in a moment of surprise brought on by the scalding sensations in his lap he dropped the cup of coffee onto the ground, where it shattered into some not-insignificant amount of pieces. He walked back into the coffee shop, looking sufficiently embarrassed, and was using napkins to dab at the crotch of his pants. In retrospect he realized that he had overestimated the amount of coffee he had spilled onto his lap, and surmised that he would be able to grow and maintain an erection in no time at all. Which is exactly what happened when he turned around from the napkin dispenser and saw the smile of a girl. It was a comforting smile, as if to say "I understand that you just spilled coffee on yourself and are sufficiently embarrassed, and I sympathize with your situation" but in many fewer words -- that is to say, none at all. And then she noticed his modest erection in the corner of her vision and blushed, and said a few words which he couldn't really make out because she was mumbling and walking away, and then he noticed that her hair was red, and tied up in a ponytail, and she had a very nicely shaped neck. And then she was gone and he remembered that the crotch of his pants was still very damp, though no longer scalding.

He paused. And thought for a moment. If he were to catch up to her (crotch still very damp) and tap her on the shoulder, apologize, then ask for her number, would that be construed as an offensive and reprehensible series of actions on his part? If he were to simply go home, change his clothes, and send his pants to the dry cleaners, wouldn't that be a far more sensible course of action? And furthermore, where was the cheapest dry cleaning place anyway?

Lost in his thoughts he began to move toward the door where he bumped into a girl carrying a dustpan full of broken coffee cup pieces and a broom. She dropped the dustpan and broom but in a daring grab he was able to catch the broom. Unfortunately the coffee cup pieces scattered across the floor. It just so happened that this girl also had red hair tied up in a ponytail and a very shapely neck, and was wearing an apron, and also was the same girl of the previous embarrassing encounter.

They stood there, not saying or doing anything, time stretching out like a rubber band to an inexplicable and very uncomfortable duration, as the crotch of his pants was still damp and she had just dropped her dustpan. He realized that she was an employee, cleaning up his mess, and though this should have been evident to him prior, his mind had been occupied by other matters, like shapely necks and red ponytails.

"Do you know where the closest dry cleaners is?" he asked and immediately was sorry he had asked that question. He estimated that there were about four hundred thousand questions that would have been better to ask in those circumstances; it was a rough estimate, really more of a ballpark figure, but he felt he wasn't too far off the mark when she looked extremely taken aback. He was still holding the broom she had dropped.

"A couple blocks down, Hyde and Green. Hyde Street Laundry.," she replied. He didn't really know why she had given him an actual answer, instead of just being indignant, which is what he would have done had a complete stranger asked him a question like his after subjecting him to two embarrassing encounters of the sort he had put her through. But he was grateful anyway, and he tried to express this to her in the following fashion:

"Thanks," he said. It was at this point that he came to an extremely important juncture in his life. Everything society had told him, everything he had learned about men and women and the nature of man-woman relationships from friends, family, television, books, and magazines, seemed to intimate to him that this was the time to end contact with this girl due to the inconvenience he had visited upon her. But then he thought of romantic comedies, which had explained to him that it was at these very moments that he should seize upon invisible and fairy-tale opportunities for lifelong happiness and love.

"This is going to sound really weird --" he smiled bashfully and scratched the back of his neck " -- but have you ever been to Australia?"

"No," she said. Then she took the broom from his hand and walked away and through the door marked "Employees Only," before he could even begin to suggest that maybe it would be interesting to see a different part of the world and maybe learn something about oneself in the process.

Maybe Australia wasn't for him. Maybe they were right.

We all of us are always slaying dragons in our heads.