The Death of a Birthday Cake

 

Just what I needed, hearing that somebody I know died on my birthday.  Real strange, like lighting candles on the cake for you, but blowing them out for them.

Yeah, way sad, even if I knew this person for not too long, my friend.

See, here’s what happened: one night, I’m walking up on some side street toward Milwaukee Avenue in Wicker Park when all of a sudden, there’s this woman with a shaved head who’s looking lost, coming out of some dank alley with a broken bicycle that had a front wheel dented crooked, but she’s still trying to roll it along. 

This women with the shaved head I’m talking about, she was in brutal shape.  Small bruises on her arms and a few deep scratches on her face, not to mention a big, black and blue bruise all over her right eye.  Nasty business.

She wasn’t walking in a straight line, more like stumbling when she was leaning on her bike, like she couldn’t find her bare feet.  Had on this strange baggy one-piece dress too, which left me wondering, how you going to pedal a bike if you’re in some outfit like that … then I saw the rip in it along her left leg and thought, well, probably got caught in the front wheel spokes and down she went, bam, serious face plant.

Not only that, she looked damned familiar too, but I just couldn’t place her at first or figure out what she was doing heading into Wicker Park, even if there are all kinds of characters like her on the streets there … but she still stood out to me, all alone in herself, lost there in Wicker Park and come to think of it, speaking in general, she had this lost to the whole world look about her too.  Like an abandoned soul child, whatever that means.  It just fit her.

Well, man, seeing all this, I had this feeling that I should be going to find out how she was doing, how I could maybe help her out of her jam.  So, when she got nearer, I put my hands on the bent handlebars to stop her and I smiled at her.  She was surprised by that, her eyes got larger, even the one with the bruise over it.

“Hey, what’s up here?” I says to her, “You okay?”

“Am I still in Wilmette?” she says.  Her, with her St. Patrick’s Day voice, you know what I mean, Irish, way Irish.

“You’re 14 miles away,” I says. “You telling me you biked from Wilmette, that far?”

“I guess so.”

“That’s some kind of a hike to bike.”

She sniffled a little bit then.  “I must not be in Wilmette … I don’t know where I’m at,” she says.  She scratched the top of her shaved head.  “I just don’t … know.”

“Well all I know is, if you’re planning to bike back to Wilmette of all places, my friend, you’re going to need a new bike, for sure.  But first of all … you thought of going to the emergency room?”

“My bike is such a wreck,” she says. “I really liked it, nothing could compare to it.  It had a basket, a bell … where are all those things that made it look good?”

“Long gone, it looks like,” I says. “And you’re going straight to the emergency room.”

“No, she says, No.  Who are you to tell me what I can and cannot do?  Who are you?  Are you speaking ex cathedra?”

“Hey, not a sex thing or whatever you just said.  You need some patching up is all.”

But right when I held out a helping hand to her the first siren went off behind my ear.  Then this glaring blur of flashing lights, loud sounds, and there were TV cameras too.  Out of the glaring blur come two large women Chicago cops walking toward us, not aiming to arrest anyone or anything, kind of careful like.

So, one of the cops stops in front of us and says to this woman with the shaved head: “Here you are. Everyone has been looking for you.  Your friends are worried about you.  Glad we found you here.”

This woman with the shaved head, she looks confused and maybe a little scared.

“Now come on along,” the other cop says to her.  “You’re going to be safe with us.”

“But what about my bike?” she says.  “I must have my bike.”

And with that, both cops move in closer to her, soft shoe and slow.  The glaring blare just gets more blaring and glaring behind us, and then I saw that this big crowd was filling the sidewalk and even the streets around us, talking to each other, pointing at the woman and her shaved head.

“We’ll bring your bike with us,” says one of the cops while she’s touching the right elbow of the lost woman with the shaved head.

Then … I’ll never forget it, she says to me: “So nice to have met you”.  And then she turns her face to me where I’m seeing one tear and that’s it, dripping down from her bruised eye.  But it was like, it only takes one tear to wash her face clean to me, so I can now see who we were dealing with here.

“Hey, wait a minute,” I says, “aren’t you that woman who was on Saturday Night Live back in the day, singing, and after you’re done, you take out a picture of the pope and you tear it up?”

“It must have been me,” she says as the cops are taking away her and her bike.  And finally she says, “and how else should I be?”

Yeah, you guessed it, all along, the woman with the shaved head, it was Sinead.  My dearest Sinead.  And then years later, she goes and dies on my birthday, I kid you not.  Like it was all meant to be, from the start.

Now, when I think of it … you know that one old song?  About leaving a cake outside in the rain?  Well, for me, it’s a birthday cake, only, it ends up melting under a single tear from the eye of a deep bruise, my friend.