This last time at Second City.
Pt.1

Toronto 1998

A shy nasal whine.
He shakes his head and makes a series of strange faces.

It’s exercise, would say the experts in theater, those wearing velvet jackets and turtlenecks, smoking a pipe, maybe, but for ordinary passers is nothing more than another crazy fool. As if there were not enough around.

It is a very tall guy, Nordic traits, he's wearing strange flares, these pants are not out of fashion, are the ones that are coming back in those years, after twenty years of lapels and skinny ankle jeans. Only those seem torn, old.
The fabric, probably tweed, has that typical gap of coloured fabric that distinguishes those pants as the original head. That usually lacks in those who refer new.
The eyes are covered by a pair of large glasses with a thin metal frame, also those are dating back at least twenty years earlier.

If he wasn’t so young, he would seem to have remained locked up at least twenty years in jail and that is out right now. Maybe it's a costume for the theatre, or perhaps he just like to dress like this. It’s hard to say, but close to the theater, everything is possible.

He just got out of a French second hand car.
Even this gives him an aura of madness and strangeness in the eyes of the people passing by..

Who would negotiate in a foreign car so old and so small like that? Certainly not a tall person like him. American cars are unsurpassed, everyone knows that. Why import from abroad? Maybe just for parking, always at the expense of his poor knees.
Those comments echoed in his head in the form of a thousand characters, he knew their voices and their bodies, their customs, which he had invented, and every now and then let them speak out during his performances.

Critics would judge this behaviour as the one of a versatile actor.
Psychiatrists, perhaps, as a man with Dissociative identity disorder.

***
He enters the auditorium.
Even if he was not a star, that is not a theater like any other.
This is not an auditorium unknown.
This is an institution of the American comedy: Second City.

The best Canadian comedians have gone from here, and many years before many of them then broke into television and in North American cinema only to be known all over the world.
The older riders who wore fashionable then.
The same fashion that sees him at that time, more than twenty years later.
A tribute to a time long passed away.
Men and women who over the years had died, were deeply changed, or had made the history of cinema and now they were embarrassing it, in an attempt to bring it back, beautiful and wild as it was then.
For these actors, Second City was a perfect springboard.

Not for him, though, that looks at the clock and continues this strange exercise in the dark.

He is the latest in the empty stage lit only by one bullseye spotlight.
He does not see his audience.
He doesn’t  take off his glasses. Indeed they help him against the bright light of the spotlight.
Although not announced, nor can figure out how many and what are its audience, he begins to speak:

"This is a story that rumors to the police station in Chicago, perhaps you already know ...

Chicago Park District, the trill of a mobile phone, and a skinny boy with dark circles carved in a deep purple, with a yellowish skin colour, answers on board of a car, a black 1990 Chrysler, near the park:
"Tell me everything. Where are you John?" - The voice crackles from the amplifier of that thing black with a long antenna, which almost covers his face entirely.
"I'm ... I'm at the park, Fred, where are you?" - Asks him, looking around. He does not seem to have any kind of feelings, it seems only worried or anxious about something in particular.
"John you're an idiot! The park is roughly more than eight thousand acres! Luckily I saw you passing by. Me and my friend stayed near, leave the car and wait there!" - Creaks again that thing, before making other sounds. It shines a light of a green ill, and turns on and off in black numbers. Maybe it's also broken.

"But I will have what I asked for?" - John asks, indifferent to the insults of the voice.
It seems completely indifferent to anything. Those junkies...
"Of course you will! You'll get it all John, you have my word and Nilsen’s! Now, get out of that car." -the voice is slow and marked with a strange reassurance.

The man seems to believe what the croaking black phone says with blind obedience, but in no time at all, Fred, the croaking voice, jumps out of nowhere, gun in hand, and fires a shot in his direction.
Another older man, probably the one that Fred called Nilsen, get in scoured the steering wheel and the car at full speed.

John, is now lying on the ground in pain. The shot does not seem to be on spot, because the man seems to still breathe, submerged in a pool of blood though.

***

It's raining.

It is not a good morning to go to work.

Then, for some reason, just when it rains all the people seem unkind, under their umbrellas, they’re walking in the city indiscriminately gray.
When it rains everything is gray. All the same, wet, gray.

A Buik Riviera 1972 metallic green parks near a building of several floors higher than the others and a quite tall man alights: is wearing a long gray trench coat and trousers quite wide for his size, he has big greenish eyes, sparse hair and a strange nose, he is dressed in gray that day.
Blends well in that city, Ray.

He enters the palace and goes to a specific office looking carefully at the signs several times, the building is quite big and he's already been there a number of times before. He snorts a little.
A lot of people are waiting outside in a very long tail.
He would like to do what he usually does in such cases, that means to show the badge and cut the tail through the first: is a cop and has to go to work.
Is already putting his hand into an inside pocket of the trench coat, to pull out his golden badge and, before showing it, he rubs it a little on the side of the coat, while mentally repeats what has already often said and will say in a  few moments: Chicago PD! Out of the way!
It is always a perfect system for cutting any tail.
This time, however, something stops him.


There is a woman dressed in blue not far from him, she's young and reminds him of someone: she is tall, brown and straight hair that fall long on the back, they frame her face with a bad fringe, which falls on the eyes of a kind of blue, a straight nose, the rounded tip, gives her a nice profile. He would mind that nose. No two people have the exactly same one. All these details that he has already seen on someone else very familiar to him. Someone who sees almost every day, as whose features cannot recall at the first sight.
Maybe that's why Ray hurries to put the badge in his pocket.

The woman looks around to kill the time that never goes out, she looks at each face carefully: she studies its appearance, facial folds and the mood of the moment.
She looks so dreamy that seems not to belong to that gray city, the rain, the gray buildings and everything that surrounds it, including Ray.

To Ray, women haven’t been his first interest lately. Assuming that no beautiful woman has ever escaped his greenish eyes glance, there was always been somebody else different, in fact, in his heart.
Maybe she will stay there forever.
A woman who has hurt him so much to fear, in a way, all the others. Yet unintentionally. He veiled his eyes in pain, smiling to her on the seat of the Riv. It was long time ago in a black night.
Then, it was not yet his Riv, but theirs. It was raining then too.
That smile: he remembers it like one of the most beautiful and saddest moments of his life at the same time.

Not that this is the kind of beautiful woman who drives him unconditionally to turn around, she only detaches herself easily from the surrounding crowd.
The queue does not flow, the two employees responsible for tax collection are both busy with errors to the central server.
The lines are busy ... These telephone modems are a complex architecture of the future that still struggle to get among the common people.
Photocopies start to turn around hand in hand. The white light of the copier goes back and forth continuously in the back of the office.
People snorts and grown that vision. The forms shall be completed manually for the moment.

At least that is what people before him are saying, as they pass plastic pens and papers almost illegible so many times that have been copied and recopied to the beam.

Ray doesn’t care too much, he takes one of those copies without a comment, as will use his fountain pen that never betrayed him. Except that time, when it left a nasty purple stain on his white, freshly starched, shirt. Ma’ bleached it for him... But it was the only time, he thinks, by looking at it, and trying to read that module. After all, it belonged to someone that was somewhat very important to him.

Inwardly, however, he's just looking forward to the gaze of that woman crossing his. He continues to think that he saw her somewhere, or someone he knows very well, it’s something in the manner and gestures she has.
She doesn’t talk to anyone, she didn’t talk yet, and does not seem to know anyone around her. Certainly can not be her voice, her accent, to make her so special.
It is said that when a person stares intently to someone is like that the glance could be felt, in some way. Ray does not know if this thing could be true, he does not even know that he is staring her intently, but she felt something, maybe, and now is looking at him: the dreamy look is also tinged with something else, the redness of tears cried, the sadness of a moment, the confidence lost in something or someone, but also a little hope to find it back soon.
Her expression changes when at the meeting of their glances, her blue eyes seem to have found in him a vague hope in this gray and strangely refers to him a formal smile.

The line starts to flow, the two find themselves soon to deliver their forms and pay those taxes last arrived. In the queue, the woman is little before him, but at the counters the two come together and listen to her conversation by his chair, it is not very easy task.
Her voice sounds calm, marked and very quiet. Too much. Especially when his loud and whiny voice covers almost all the sounds from her, while complaining heatedly with the employees of the office for their slowness.
For Ray, those long and involved grievances, jabbered for hours in a loud voice, are not implied: they are part of his genetic inheritance.
He must claim somehow his Italian origins.

The fact that he had no ears for her, does not mean that would take even the looks too busy. After all, it is difficult for a cop to keep an eye on the people.
It takes very little to him, to realize that the woman leaves the building and goes hasty to the tram stop just a few meters, it is still raining cats and dogs and she even doesn’t have an umbrella with her, but she doesn’t attempt to repair from it. She just cross her arms resting and waiting at that stop sign with a peculiar posture.

Ray follows her and tries to talk to her:
"Do you have an umbrella?" -he says approaching.
The woman looks back at the man, her figure made does not seem to ruin under the rushing water. She sketches a half-smile of thanks when Ray opens his umbrella, also gray, and throws a slow sigh: "thank you kindly" - she says, nodding.

That response has something of already well heard.
More than once, too many times:
"Taxes are a real pain, isn’t it?" - asks Ray, trying to familiarize..
The woman holds a slightly inquisitive gaze to him:
"Yes, but we have an ough to the State." - Saying so, adjusts her hair and rubs her jacket, now wet, her eyes are now more distracted than before and seem to have lost that glimmer of hope that he noted earlier.
"If only it would protect citizens as it should ... ey ... " - continues staring eyes to  Ray with an expression of little disappointment.
That last syllable, so longed for, he does not leave any doubt. It’s no Chicago talk. She’s not from here, or at least she didn’t live here for long.

"Anyway, my name Ray, my car is parked nearby I can give you a ride, if you want, so you don’t waste time waiting for the tram?" - He asks pointing at the way he parked.

These are the rare times when the prejudices of a particular accent and nationality are positive, not negative, as usual. If it really is as he thinks she is, he has nothing to fear from her. And a lift is only but a simple favor.
If he's wrong, he's still a cop, the weapon of order is always at hand.

"Very pleased, my name is Alexandra. I'm Grateful for your kindness, but I'm not too keen on bothering you by take advantage of it, Mr. Ray! I'll have to go to other offices, fill out many other forms, wait for other people. It will surely take a while with all this traffic. I wonder why, but when it rains, in all the cities of the world, traffic is always congested in the same way ... "- she says calmly .

Ray tries to take it with philosophy:
"Hehe, as you wish... Alexandra! Can I leave you the umbrella at least?" -He smiles, it is not such important matter.
Alexandra folds back the umbrella and hands it to him, while looking at him, she folds her arms.
“No! That means you could keep it!”- he insists.
She only raises  her shoulders and comb her wet hair with the fingers, mentioning a slight tremor, perhaps because of the cold or the humidity. The wind from the Michigan is unforgiving in autumn. A fine line of black mascara is leaking a little from her eyelashes.
"No thanks, do not worry, this morning I do not expect any special date!" - she answer looking away and smiling kindly.

Ray warn her little worried:
"But if I leave you like that, you’ll gonna be sick!" -she seems to pretend not to hear him.
"Excuse my question, Ray, are you from Chicago?" - asks Alexandra doubtfully.
"Yes, why?" - he says as his eyes fall on her legs and shoes, also blue, she looks like a flight hostess dressed like that.
She lacks only the features of a cheap, low cost, Mid-Western airlines, the bun, an unnecessary striped shirt and the cart of food.
The woman lowers her eyes, raises his eyebrows and straighten her shoulders a little.
"Because usually people around here do not care too much about the ills of others" - replys her honestly.
Ray thinks about it only for a moment: it was true. Even he himself, years before, would not hesitate to let her in the rain. It must have been all that time spent with Fraser to made him change, for sure. Fraser ... It must be just the accent and the abuse of all those kind words, that make him slightly compare that woman to his companion. At this thought he shakes his head slightly embarrassed. Too many, too many, too many kind words. He’s not used to it yet.

And she, in the extreme of that courtesy, the legs aligned and her feet together, her wet hair, while she’s cleaning the mascara from her cheecks and looks at him sometimes curious, sometimes disappointed and sometimes distracted. The blue of her eyes seems to take ever new ways at every glance. It's probably the rain. It's actually the exact same blue all the time.

Ray doesn’t give up and tries again:
"It’s not hot, for sure. Would you like a coffee? There is a bar nearby that makes an excellent espresso ... So... I, I wish I could go there with you, it won’t take long. After all, the espresso is served in very small cups! "- he smiles, trying to lose her up.

Alexandra turns his head toward the road with a surprised look and then towards him, impulsively takes his hands, moving her legs as if she was thawed immediately:
"Thank you kindly, but I said no, that's my tram it’s coming, see you at ... The next payment?" - She smiles, even though her eyes still betray it, it's a pretty smile, it seems only just for him.
Ray looks at the tram driving away with her inside, he waves his hand in a quick gesture and she replies back, then he gets back in the car.
The espresso will be for another time.