Down on Mainstreet

A stage monologue in one act

Character: Unnamed narrator (male-presenting, 20s–30s, a tad worn down by life, scruffy and bearded)

Setting: A dimly lit stage. One stool. One streetlamp or overhead light casting a cold glow. The sound of distant city rain, a saxophone somewhere far off.

(Lights up. The narrator steps forward slowly. He speaks with that tired, gravel-wrapped tone of a man who’s lived too long in his own head. Every line tastes like cigarettes and three-day-old Chinese takeout, unheated.)

You ever stand on a street corner so long you start wondering if you’re part of the sidewalk?

I have. Midnight. Cold in the bones. Mainstreet.

Place smelled like fried grease and broken dreams, lit by a flickering neon sign that swore it was a club — but it wasn’t. It was a low-rent purgatory with a liquor licence. And inside? A woman.

Tall.

Legs like the first sin.

Red lips. A kind of sorrow in her sway that made you feel like she’d been born with a slow song playing somewhere behind her eyes.

She wasn’t like the others. Most women in joints like that were all show and no story, hard edges and dead smiles. But her? She was a novel — the kind you don’t lend and never finish. She had a softness to her, sure, but it was the kind you find in faded photographs or old love letters that came back stamped Return to Sender.

She didn’t dance for the crowd. I don’t think she danced for anyone but herself. Like she was swaying with someone — or something — she’d lost a long time ago.

I’d stand outside every night trying to get my courage up. Watching her silhouette cut through the smoke and half-light, her wave-like undulations burning semaphores into the underside of my eyelids that would later animate my dreams.

Never went in. Never said a word. Parked myself aslant Eternity like a character in a French New Wave movie. Smoked Gauloise, affected a shrug.

And the bouncers watched me. Bigoted, tiny-minded, gum-chewing louts in monkey suits, megalithic as dolmen, faintly redolent even from my perch across the street of the peppermint scent emanating from the men’s lavatory.

(Pauses. Lights dim slightly, like memory creeping in.)

You’d see the hustlers too — Bruegelesque scenes of scrofulous bottom-feeders and dead-end kids, shaven-headed Hare Krishna dupes with tambourines, swaggering superbos and hectoring know-it-alls, all crowding the glass like they were window-shopping for something they’d never find. Didn’t even know what they were looking for.

And I’d be right there with ’em. Told myself it was different. I wasn’t like them.

The sort of lie you tell yourself when the truth starts fighting for breath and you find yourself logrolling down the rapids of a creepy obsession.

But this much is true: They wanted her the way the lonely old grubbers ogled the salted nut bowls and the prewar boiled eggs impaled on the rotating spit behind the bar.

I wanted her the way a drowning man wants the sky, raptors circling on the updrafts.

She’d come out after closing, heels tapping on wet pavement, coat drawn tight like a secret.

Always alone. Down on Mainstreet.

One time her heel stencilled a leaf onto the sidewalk.

After she turned the corner, I pried it loose and took it home to one of those dives on Fifty-second street, uncertain and afraid.

(He snuffs out the cigarette. Silence. A beat. The low hum of the city creeps back in, tasting of the void.)