Billy Bag's Groove

Billy the Bag hung out in a Bodega in Brooklyn, behind the register on a hook with a stash of other plastic grocery bags. Mostly, he just hung there shooting the shit with his cousin, Carlos the Condom and his buddies Larry the Light Bulb and Mario the Marlborro Light. They liked to laugh a lot and make jokes behind the customer’s backs. They joked about the things they bought and how they dressed and the hang dog expressions they wore on their faces in the morning going to work and still hanging on their heads in the evening when they stopped back in off the N and R train. It was easy for Billy and his friends to laugh. They were just hanging out. They had no jobs and they had no faces.

Life was uneventful and nothing much happened at Tata’s Grocery untill one day a bird got into the store. It tore around the newspapers – careening past the canned goods. It really made a mess of things and Tata went crazy and chased the bird with the baseball bat he kept behind the counter to beat off the beggers and the thieves. Mario and Larry laughed at Tata as he smashed a whole family of beer bottles, but Billy was speechless. He’d never seen anything like this bird in his whole short life. It was beautiful. It caused chaos and that was enough for most of the gang behind the register, but Billy saw something else. He saw the way the bird seemed to break the shackles of the earth, the way it darted in and out and up and down with all the simple ease of smoke. It was miraculous. Billy watched in awed silence untill Tata magaged to herd the bird back into the street, where it hung out for an hour trying to figure a way back in.

Billy didn’t know what to call what he’d just seen, untill a customer came to the counter that afternoon to buy a forty ounce of Carey The Colt 45.

“Heard a bird flew in your window,” said the customer.

“No,” Tata answered. “He didn’t fly in the window, This bird had the balls to walk right in the front door, but he sure was flying all around the place once he got in here…. No pennies asshole.”

“Flying,” Billy thought to himself. “Flying. That’s what they call it and That is what I’m going to do. One off these days I’m going to get out of this hell hole and I’m going to fly.”

He was like a different bag after that. He was more serious now and kept mostly to himself. If Carlos, or Larry tried to bust on him, he’d announce in an important voice, “Fellas, hanging around here may be all well and good, but my handle to God, one of these days I am going to fly.”

Billy was not alone. All the bags of Brooklyn learn to fly in winter, if only for a moment.