"words"

tried to write up a reading I went to the other night & this is what came out instead...oh well.
WORDS
I shift the weight off my bad knee, leaning heavily against the cafeteria wall. A fat man sits on a tall red stool in front of me, blocking my view. Where the reader's face should be, there is only a square head, bushy red hair squashed by a cheap black yarmulke. The door next to me opens several times during the reading admitting a steady stream of students. I rest my heavy backpack against my boots and smooth my hands across the thick paint on the wall.
The dynamics in the room remind me of high school. There are the organizers - the whacky, wannabe hipster kids who run things; the hot blonde chick hanging out in the back whispering through every reading spreading gossip to anyone who'll listen; the dangerous guy with spiked hair and earrings, hanging out by the bar and glancing around to make sure he's being watched as a rotating group of women sits next to him basking in his presence; the impossibly maladjusted sitting with each other sipping bad red wine and pretending they don't care that no one cares they exist. I sit with no one. I'm standing against the wall at the back, thinking about going to the bar - there's beer here, why not have one? but the wall is smooth and hard and my back is sore, my knee is throbbing, and I can feel a cold coming on.
While I try to focus on the hopelessly bad poetry a woman with unfortunate hair and overlarge glasses is reading, I wonder if any of these people are happy, if they were popular in high school or even college. I wonder why that matters but we all know it does. We're all writers here - all outcasts on some level - too smart, too bookish, too drunk - this as a horribly thin girl wearing nothing but a dress made of scarves trips over a chair on her way to the bar for her fifth glass of wine. I marvel at the ugliness of her beige platforms and wonder how she makes it down the street in the morning or ever with shoes so tall and legs so thin. Perhaps she's a brilliant poet or a stellar wordsmith, but somehow, I think she's probably yet another pathetic post-modernist unable to string a sentence together any better than she can hold her cheap wine.
I think about why I don't want to talk to these people - people leave, they lie, they disappoint, they gossip and steal lovers, stories, and peace of mind. I think about where I'd rather be - in a house in Baltimore, drafty and creaking in the winter cold, lounging in the beat up corduroy lazyboy while sounds of crashing dishes and rattling pots come from the kitchen and then dinner on a tiny table, rickety chairs - spaghetti with marinara, one sad candle, a couple of beers, the light from the candle reflecting in his pale blue eyes. I shift my weight again and hug my backpack to me.
I can barely see the top of the head of the man standing at the podium. The words of the story flow over me - simple and true cutting through all the bullshit that has come before, all the hackneyed prose and melodramatic post-modern poetry but I can not see his face - the man who has written these words. The story is simple enough - love, lust, longing, marriage, insecurity, told with wit, humor, understated passion. And then it's done, he is done talking and I am standing alone in a room full of strangers, worse than the first day at a new school, worse than working a show on my own for a band I don't know, worse than waiting for a blind date in a bar full of people in love.
I watch the man walk away, carrying his book, his story close to his chest, his words pulled in away from the rest of us. He is tall, broad shoulders, he glances quickly at me - just someone standing near the door, that's all. His eyes are blue. I watch as he pushes the door open, watch as he walks away out into the hot, damp starless night.