It's been twelve hours since I slept for two after a long forty eight.
I am anxious, confused, and panicked.
I can't sleep.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
65: First Night.
1.
Gregory and I drove the curving country road away from everything. Away from a year of loneliness, silence, and ghosts. The sun slipped in through the tint of his Bronco’s windows. It always smelled strange in the Bronco, as if someone had at one point done something terrible in it and then cleaned it hastily with the strongest smelling shit he could find. Or, it smelled like an elementary school’s art room. I could never decide. Gregory had just bought it used in Vermont, where there were no lemon laws. He bought it for a thousand dollars and it needed brakes badly. It squealed in pain at every stop sign we rolled up to. We kept the radio up loud enough to ignore it.
Besides everything else, I had hated living this far out in the country. It took a half hour to get to the nearest sign of life, a gas station. Slow, rolling hills the road curved around. Fucking pollen in the air year round it seemed, and I prayed for work days, when I could escape my allergies and the walls I had, in only a few months, grown to fear and despise. A friend had died there. A relationship also, and somehow, a large part of me. I was feeling daily more and more like I was staring at life and the world and happiness through a long telescope, miles and miles away from a stone tower, built high above the world with no escape.
We were listening to the radio. Gregory was quiet. I was moving in with him in his apartment. I was fleeing. He had lived there for a few months. His friend was the landlord and I had drank there a few times. Not that either of us could afford booze at all, but by some stroke of luck, the previous tenant had left a stockpile of strangely flavored vodkas in one of the cabinets. One of them said “Lemon” and tasted like raisins. I drank that one. I liked the lie. He said his apartment was haunted. I didn’t know. Maybe it was.
“Is this all of the shit you have?” He asked, glancing at the rearview mirror at the small pile of boxes I had packed into the back.
“Yeah.”
“I could have swore you had a lot more.”
“I did. I left it. I don’t need it. I just wanted to get out.”
“Was any of it valuable?”
“I don’t think so. I just left some shit in the basement. CD’s. A box of clothes. A few notebooks I think.”
“All right. Well, if you want to go back and get it later, we can, all right?”
“Sure.”
“You okay man?”
"Yeah, I’m good. Relieved, I think.”
“It’s going to be awesome,” he said. “Roomies. Never had a roommate before. You?”
“Not that I wasn’t fucking.”
“Well, you ain’t fucking me, partner.” He laughed.
The gas station came into view and the first red light. I was a cashier at Sears at the time and drove this road to work everyday. Each mile to the red light was never close enough. And each mile back burned up much too fast. I had begun to get out of work at night and drive around the town. Drive slowly past restaurants and bars. Wish I was inside them. Laughing. Living. I would drive to my girlfriends work to pick her up afterward, an hour, sometimes two, late and she would scream at me. She couldn’t understand why I needed to drive around. Why she wasn’t enough for me. Why I didn’t love the country. We lived in one of her parents spare bedrooms. Her sister lived in the other and at the time, twelve dogs, seven puppies and five fully grown, shared the common areas. It was a modular home and not large. It was paradise to her and I was impossible.
Gregory drove through town and I began to think about the future. Being single, I had less money now. Less money and more bills. I had no idea how I was going to afford it. I just needed to try. I had no car, but the apartment was only a couple of miles through town to work, and Gregory was a salesman at Sears, so if our shifts aligned that would help.
It could be fun, though, I thought. Two guys, just turned twenty one. Our own place a few blocks from the bars. It could be a lot of fun. It could be a shove back into normalcy. It could bring me right back to life. I smiled.
“No weird sex stuff though,” Gregory said.
“What?”
“I mean, like, I don’t want to come home from work and find people leaking out of your bedroom in like, leather straps and dildos and duckbills or something.”
“Duckbills?”
“Anything like that, you know. Weird sex stuff.”
I laughed. “You think I’m into that shit?”
“Well, I mean, I know you’re a little, out there sometimes, and I know some of the stuff you’ve done, so…”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, man,” he said. “like that naked girl at one of your last apartments. That whole thing. Three ways and shit.”
“I can’t have a three way?”
“Well, I mean, no, it’s not like that. If you can pull it off, have a three way, but you know, a three way is like a six on the level of fucking weirdness. Try not to go above six, or maybe seven.”
“Three ways are a six? Christ almighty. You need to watch more porn.”
"Fuck you dude. You know what I mean. Also, I’m hoping to have the internet hooked up next month.”
“We should get some groceries and cleaning shit before we get there,” he said.
“Good idea.”
The summer was coming to a close and I felt like I should be mourning my relationship, but I wasn’t. I wondered if that meant it ended when it truly had to. When it was supposed to. If I had done us each a massive favor. Or, if it meant that I was just glad to be rid of it and the mystery and promise of the future was overwhelmingly exciting. These things aren’t always clear right away.
n fact, I’m still not sure about that one.
2.
Later. The apartment was small and at one time probably nice. The kitchen, where Gregory and I were sitting, taking shots of leftover vodka, was the worst looking part of it. Painted an unsettling teal color maybe forty years ago, it felt like it was large. The second bedroom was off of it, and so was the back porch, which was the third of our porches, and really not a lot more than a garbage dungeon. The floor in the kitchen was warped like ocean waves and all of the wood in it was rotted, but painted over recently with white. The stove was old and sat alone in a corner away from everything else. There was one window by the fridge with a spectacular view of the neighbors kitchen window. A ripped vinyl shade hung over it.
I took my third shot. Dark would be coming soon.
“You going to unpack tonight?” Gregory asked.
“No, probably not.”
“Right on. If you want, I’ll take you to salvation army tomorrow or sometime and get you a bed frame and a dresser. See if we can dig up a bed for you too somewhere.”
“Cool man. Thanks.”
“No problem. You’ll be all right on the couch though for now?”
“I’ve slept on worse.”
He laughed. “Okay man.” He took another shot. “Night’s young,” he said. “We should be out celebrating. First night as roomies and everything. Shit, it’s your first night being single in how many years?”
“Three.”
“Three fucking years. Christ. Let’s hit the bar.”
“No money man.” I took another shot.
“I got it tonight, then you can cover me sometime when I’m broke. Fair?”
“Sure man.”
“Cool. I’m going to get changed then. Clean up. You need the bathroom?”
“No, I’m fine like this.”
“You don’t want to clean up for the ladies?”
I laughed. “The ladies? After this long I wouldn’t know how to hit on someone if I was walked through it. Besides, what am I going to do? Bring them home to my couch?”
“Sometimes a couch is all you need.” He smiled and walked out into the living room and to his bedroom at the other end of it to get changed. I took two more shots and began to feel a little dizzy.
It was good to be free. My own place. Drinking in the daytime. Maybe I’d fuck a stranger, maybe I wouldn’t. It was up to me. I smiled, stood up and fell over.
"You okay in there?”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go get drunk.”
3.
It was my first bar experience. There were people fucking everywhere. No light. The noise was so loud it was almost the absence of sound. A deafening silence. I sat on a stool next to Gregory and tried to flag down the bartender. A blonde woman who I would guess was forty or so, but was probably just a beat twenty something. Neon lights from under the bar made her look like a glowing double-D Skeletor. She kept walking past.
"What the fuck?” I said to Gregory.
“What?!”
“I said! What the fuck!?” I made a motion with my hand as if I were drinking.
“Oh!” He leaned over the bar and stuck a few dollars bills over it.
Skeletor came over and yelled something. I couldn’t tell what. Gregory flashed the peace sign and Skeletor nodded. Gregory sat down, and Skeletor handed us two beers. Gregory gave her cash.
“How’d you do that?!” I asked.
“What?!”
We drank our beers.
There were a number of women in the bar. Some ugly as fuck. Some gorgeous. Almost all of them looked great after our fourth round and the vodka from earlier. I kept staring at tits and asses and drowning in the scent of a thousand perfumes.
“I need a cigarette!”
“What?!” Gregory asked.
I made a smoking motion.
“Oh!” He nodded. We drank down the rest of our beers and left our stools, which were swallowed up by the crowd almost immediately.
We went outside and the world was so quiet. “Jesus Christ,” I said, digging through my pockets, looking for my lighter.
“What?” Gregory asked.
“Fucking loud in there.”
“It is a bar.”
“Fuck bars. I’ll drink at home.”
“No tail at home.”
“Like we’re fucking swimming in it now?”
“Good point,” he said.
"I think I left my lighter at home.” I looked around at the other smokers. A group of muscle-headed chest beaters. A strange kid in a leather coat. A group of two older couples, probably on a double date or something. Maybe swinging. A lone girl, somehow not already devoured by the Future Wife Beaters of America next to her.
She was thin. Straight brown hair. Heavy eyeliner. Built not so much like a woman, but like a girl who was in her final days of collegiate beauty. She seemed to know it.
I walked over. “Hi,” I said.
She looked at me, raised and eyebrow, then both. “Hi. What?”
Bitch, I thought. “Do you have a lighter? I must have lost mine.”
She examined me, tightened her lips down her face and looked at her purse. “Yeah, hold on.”
She opened up her purse and dug around, finally pulling one out and handed it to me. “Here.”
lit my cigarette and handed it back to her. “Thanks.”
“Yeah whatever.”
I looked at Gregory. He was shooing his hands at me, as if saying “Go for it man. Go!”
I looked back at her. “So, uh…”
She looked up at me. “Yeah? What? Are you going to hit on me or something? You aren’t doing too well.”
I took a breath. “Listen, I don’t do this often, and I’m already a little drunk, so, I think you’re pretty”
“Thanks. Is that it?”
“Um, no, well,” I looked at Greg. He was watching intently. I looked back at her. “My name’s James.”
“Great.”
I felt like I was fucking up.
I took another breath and tried again. “I think you’re good looking and I want to fuck you. How are my chances.”
She smiled. “If you lead with that next time, you might get somewhere. Good luck.” She smiled at me, kicked her cigarette into the street and went back inside.
I was astounded.
Gregory came up and I finished my cigarette.
“So?” he asked.
“I told her she was pretty, and she acted pissed off. I told her I wanted to fuck her and she said that if I led with that, I might get somewhere. What the fuck?”
“I have no fucking idea man, but I would definitely lead with it next time.”
"Of course.”
I butted my cigarette and we went to another bar across the street. I kept thinking about that girl. Some sort of messianic post-breakup pussy oracle. Showing me the way. I saw no one else I wanted to fuck that night. I don’t remember walking home.
Gregory and I drove the curving country road away from everything. Away from a year of loneliness, silence, and ghosts. The sun slipped in through the tint of his Bronco’s windows. It always smelled strange in the Bronco, as if someone had at one point done something terrible in it and then cleaned it hastily with the strongest smelling shit he could find. Or, it smelled like an elementary school’s art room. I could never decide. Gregory had just bought it used in Vermont, where there were no lemon laws. He bought it for a thousand dollars and it needed brakes badly. It squealed in pain at every stop sign we rolled up to. We kept the radio up loud enough to ignore it.
Besides everything else, I had hated living this far out in the country. It took a half hour to get to the nearest sign of life, a gas station. Slow, rolling hills the road curved around. Fucking pollen in the air year round it seemed, and I prayed for work days, when I could escape my allergies and the walls I had, in only a few months, grown to fear and despise. A friend had died there. A relationship also, and somehow, a large part of me. I was feeling daily more and more like I was staring at life and the world and happiness through a long telescope, miles and miles away from a stone tower, built high above the world with no escape.
We were listening to the radio. Gregory was quiet. I was moving in with him in his apartment. I was fleeing. He had lived there for a few months. His friend was the landlord and I had drank there a few times. Not that either of us could afford booze at all, but by some stroke of luck, the previous tenant had left a stockpile of strangely flavored vodkas in one of the cabinets. One of them said “Lemon” and tasted like raisins. I drank that one. I liked the lie. He said his apartment was haunted. I didn’t know. Maybe it was.
“Is this all of the shit you have?” He asked, glancing at the rearview mirror at the small pile of boxes I had packed into the back.
“Yeah.”
“I could have swore you had a lot more.”
“I did. I left it. I don’t need it. I just wanted to get out.”
“Was any of it valuable?”
“I don’t think so. I just left some shit in the basement. CD’s. A box of clothes. A few notebooks I think.”
“All right. Well, if you want to go back and get it later, we can, all right?”
“Sure.”
“You okay man?”
"Yeah, I’m good. Relieved, I think.”
“It’s going to be awesome,” he said. “Roomies. Never had a roommate before. You?”
“Not that I wasn’t fucking.”
“Well, you ain’t fucking me, partner.” He laughed.
The gas station came into view and the first red light. I was a cashier at Sears at the time and drove this road to work everyday. Each mile to the red light was never close enough. And each mile back burned up much too fast. I had begun to get out of work at night and drive around the town. Drive slowly past restaurants and bars. Wish I was inside them. Laughing. Living. I would drive to my girlfriends work to pick her up afterward, an hour, sometimes two, late and she would scream at me. She couldn’t understand why I needed to drive around. Why she wasn’t enough for me. Why I didn’t love the country. We lived in one of her parents spare bedrooms. Her sister lived in the other and at the time, twelve dogs, seven puppies and five fully grown, shared the common areas. It was a modular home and not large. It was paradise to her and I was impossible.
Gregory drove through town and I began to think about the future. Being single, I had less money now. Less money and more bills. I had no idea how I was going to afford it. I just needed to try. I had no car, but the apartment was only a couple of miles through town to work, and Gregory was a salesman at Sears, so if our shifts aligned that would help.
It could be fun, though, I thought. Two guys, just turned twenty one. Our own place a few blocks from the bars. It could be a lot of fun. It could be a shove back into normalcy. It could bring me right back to life. I smiled.
“No weird sex stuff though,” Gregory said.
“What?”
“I mean, like, I don’t want to come home from work and find people leaking out of your bedroom in like, leather straps and dildos and duckbills or something.”
“Duckbills?”
“Anything like that, you know. Weird sex stuff.”
I laughed. “You think I’m into that shit?”
“Well, I mean, I know you’re a little, out there sometimes, and I know some of the stuff you’ve done, so…”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, man,” he said. “like that naked girl at one of your last apartments. That whole thing. Three ways and shit.”
“I can’t have a three way?”
“Well, I mean, no, it’s not like that. If you can pull it off, have a three way, but you know, a three way is like a six on the level of fucking weirdness. Try not to go above six, or maybe seven.”
“Three ways are a six? Christ almighty. You need to watch more porn.”
"Fuck you dude. You know what I mean. Also, I’m hoping to have the internet hooked up next month.”
“We should get some groceries and cleaning shit before we get there,” he said.
“Good idea.”
The summer was coming to a close and I felt like I should be mourning my relationship, but I wasn’t. I wondered if that meant it ended when it truly had to. When it was supposed to. If I had done us each a massive favor. Or, if it meant that I was just glad to be rid of it and the mystery and promise of the future was overwhelmingly exciting. These things aren’t always clear right away.
n fact, I’m still not sure about that one.
2.
Later. The apartment was small and at one time probably nice. The kitchen, where Gregory and I were sitting, taking shots of leftover vodka, was the worst looking part of it. Painted an unsettling teal color maybe forty years ago, it felt like it was large. The second bedroom was off of it, and so was the back porch, which was the third of our porches, and really not a lot more than a garbage dungeon. The floor in the kitchen was warped like ocean waves and all of the wood in it was rotted, but painted over recently with white. The stove was old and sat alone in a corner away from everything else. There was one window by the fridge with a spectacular view of the neighbors kitchen window. A ripped vinyl shade hung over it.
I took my third shot. Dark would be coming soon.
“You going to unpack tonight?” Gregory asked.
“No, probably not.”
“Right on. If you want, I’ll take you to salvation army tomorrow or sometime and get you a bed frame and a dresser. See if we can dig up a bed for you too somewhere.”
“Cool man. Thanks.”
“No problem. You’ll be all right on the couch though for now?”
“I’ve slept on worse.”
He laughed. “Okay man.” He took another shot. “Night’s young,” he said. “We should be out celebrating. First night as roomies and everything. Shit, it’s your first night being single in how many years?”
“Three.”
“Three fucking years. Christ. Let’s hit the bar.”
“No money man.” I took another shot.
“I got it tonight, then you can cover me sometime when I’m broke. Fair?”
“Sure man.”
“Cool. I’m going to get changed then. Clean up. You need the bathroom?”
“No, I’m fine like this.”
“You don’t want to clean up for the ladies?”
I laughed. “The ladies? After this long I wouldn’t know how to hit on someone if I was walked through it. Besides, what am I going to do? Bring them home to my couch?”
“Sometimes a couch is all you need.” He smiled and walked out into the living room and to his bedroom at the other end of it to get changed. I took two more shots and began to feel a little dizzy.
It was good to be free. My own place. Drinking in the daytime. Maybe I’d fuck a stranger, maybe I wouldn’t. It was up to me. I smiled, stood up and fell over.
"You okay in there?”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go get drunk.”
3.
It was my first bar experience. There were people fucking everywhere. No light. The noise was so loud it was almost the absence of sound. A deafening silence. I sat on a stool next to Gregory and tried to flag down the bartender. A blonde woman who I would guess was forty or so, but was probably just a beat twenty something. Neon lights from under the bar made her look like a glowing double-D Skeletor. She kept walking past.
"What the fuck?” I said to Gregory.
“What?!”
“I said! What the fuck!?” I made a motion with my hand as if I were drinking.
“Oh!” He leaned over the bar and stuck a few dollars bills over it.
Skeletor came over and yelled something. I couldn’t tell what. Gregory flashed the peace sign and Skeletor nodded. Gregory sat down, and Skeletor handed us two beers. Gregory gave her cash.
“How’d you do that?!” I asked.
“What?!”
We drank our beers.
There were a number of women in the bar. Some ugly as fuck. Some gorgeous. Almost all of them looked great after our fourth round and the vodka from earlier. I kept staring at tits and asses and drowning in the scent of a thousand perfumes.
“I need a cigarette!”
“What?!” Gregory asked.
I made a smoking motion.
“Oh!” He nodded. We drank down the rest of our beers and left our stools, which were swallowed up by the crowd almost immediately.
We went outside and the world was so quiet. “Jesus Christ,” I said, digging through my pockets, looking for my lighter.
“What?” Gregory asked.
“Fucking loud in there.”
“It is a bar.”
“Fuck bars. I’ll drink at home.”
“No tail at home.”
“Like we’re fucking swimming in it now?”
“Good point,” he said.
"I think I left my lighter at home.” I looked around at the other smokers. A group of muscle-headed chest beaters. A strange kid in a leather coat. A group of two older couples, probably on a double date or something. Maybe swinging. A lone girl, somehow not already devoured by the Future Wife Beaters of America next to her.
She was thin. Straight brown hair. Heavy eyeliner. Built not so much like a woman, but like a girl who was in her final days of collegiate beauty. She seemed to know it.
I walked over. “Hi,” I said.
She looked at me, raised and eyebrow, then both. “Hi. What?”
Bitch, I thought. “Do you have a lighter? I must have lost mine.”
She examined me, tightened her lips down her face and looked at her purse. “Yeah, hold on.”
She opened up her purse and dug around, finally pulling one out and handed it to me. “Here.”
lit my cigarette and handed it back to her. “Thanks.”
“Yeah whatever.”
I looked at Gregory. He was shooing his hands at me, as if saying “Go for it man. Go!”
I looked back at her. “So, uh…”
She looked up at me. “Yeah? What? Are you going to hit on me or something? You aren’t doing too well.”
I took a breath. “Listen, I don’t do this often, and I’m already a little drunk, so, I think you’re pretty”
“Thanks. Is that it?”
“Um, no, well,” I looked at Greg. He was watching intently. I looked back at her. “My name’s James.”
“Great.”
I felt like I was fucking up.
I took another breath and tried again. “I think you’re good looking and I want to fuck you. How are my chances.”
She smiled. “If you lead with that next time, you might get somewhere. Good luck.” She smiled at me, kicked her cigarette into the street and went back inside.
I was astounded.
Gregory came up and I finished my cigarette.
“So?” he asked.
“I told her she was pretty, and she acted pissed off. I told her I wanted to fuck her and she said that if I led with that, I might get somewhere. What the fuck?”
“I have no fucking idea man, but I would definitely lead with it next time.”
"Of course.”
I butted my cigarette and we went to another bar across the street. I kept thinking about that girl. Some sort of messianic post-breakup pussy oracle. Showing me the way. I saw no one else I wanted to fuck that night. I don’t remember walking home.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
A Denim Jacket and my Face Wiped with Spit
Looking through a small pile of old photographs.
I'm a little kid.
4. 5. 6. So on.
I remember that house.
That coat.
My sister is so small.
I am so small.
I remember that day. Standing outside the gymnasium before the first day in a new school.
Sun shining in my eyes. My mother fussing over something on my face.
Wiping spit on me.
Kids staring as they walk into school.
My father was leaning against the car.
"Kick some ass bud" he says.
"You're going to be fine. You'll make lots of new friends and have lots of fun," my mother says.
I could piss I'm so nervous.
I remember the camera flash.
And I look back at myself over almost three decades of new schools, new friends, and lots of fun.
Right?
Funny, now. Thinking that then I felt so aware. So old already.
I was going to be a scientist.
A lawyer.
A Ghostbuster.
I nail hoses to the road.
I'm a little kid.
4. 5. 6. So on.
I remember that house.
That coat.
My sister is so small.
I am so small.
I remember that day. Standing outside the gymnasium before the first day in a new school.
Sun shining in my eyes. My mother fussing over something on my face.
Wiping spit on me.
Kids staring as they walk into school.
My father was leaning against the car.
"Kick some ass bud" he says.
"You're going to be fine. You'll make lots of new friends and have lots of fun," my mother says.
I could piss I'm so nervous.
I remember the camera flash.
And I look back at myself over almost three decades of new schools, new friends, and lots of fun.
Right?
Funny, now. Thinking that then I felt so aware. So old already.
I was going to be a scientist.
A lawyer.
A Ghostbuster.
I nail hoses to the road.
Friday, January 20, 2012
A Quick Swim
The whole apartment smelled of propane and I was getting headaches. We didn't have anything that used propane and couldn't figure out where it was coming from. I kept toying with the idea of lighting a match but didn't want to risk burning my goddamned face off. I was sort of fond of it.
So I sat at the computer and tried to write. I was hoping for some Delphic masterwork, some new Oz with creatures and characters unearthly. Maybe even a new breed of prose. The propane might even earn me a bestseller, or a bit of critical acclaim. I sat at the computer with a swirling headache, staring, and threw up in my lap.
The puke startled me from my daze and dizzy I leaped up and backward in my chair and spilled the fucking mess all over my chest, neck, face, and floor. The smell attacked me as I tried to get my shit together and get up and my abdomen kept tightening and releasing, fighting fucking desperately to let more out.
Nothing came. The dry heaves.
I got to my knees but my headache and some rush of blood prevented me from getting any further than that. I knelt on the floor of my apartment, soaked in and staring at pinks, oranges, bits, pieces, and puddles. The smell. My eyes watered and my head pounded harder. I moved myself a little forward and my knee slipped. My right half hit the floor and a shot from my hip jolted through me.
I cried out in slurred shock. I was choking on the smell. The sight. The headache. I crawled out, leaving behind me a path of hand prints and droplets across the carpet. I crawled over to the front door.
Air. I just need...air.
I got my hand on the door knob, and my hand, still wet slipped around it and I fell back to the carpet. The world was a haze. All of the colors melded together and I knew this was propane poisoning, or something like that. The door opened fast and hard and hit me square in the face as I faded out.
Suddenly I was awake again and my face was pounding.
"Fuck!"
I rolled over on my back and my face was warmer. I could taste copper now in the sting of the puke. Blood. I opened my eyes and saw Marie staring in horror at me, the carpet. The mess.
"What the fuck?" she asked.
So I sat at the computer and tried to write. I was hoping for some Delphic masterwork, some new Oz with creatures and characters unearthly. Maybe even a new breed of prose. The propane might even earn me a bestseller, or a bit of critical acclaim. I sat at the computer with a swirling headache, staring, and threw up in my lap.
The puke startled me from my daze and dizzy I leaped up and backward in my chair and spilled the fucking mess all over my chest, neck, face, and floor. The smell attacked me as I tried to get my shit together and get up and my abdomen kept tightening and releasing, fighting fucking desperately to let more out.
Nothing came. The dry heaves.
I got to my knees but my headache and some rush of blood prevented me from getting any further than that. I knelt on the floor of my apartment, soaked in and staring at pinks, oranges, bits, pieces, and puddles. The smell. My eyes watered and my head pounded harder. I moved myself a little forward and my knee slipped. My right half hit the floor and a shot from my hip jolted through me.
I cried out in slurred shock. I was choking on the smell. The sight. The headache. I crawled out, leaving behind me a path of hand prints and droplets across the carpet. I crawled over to the front door.
Air. I just need...air.
I got my hand on the door knob, and my hand, still wet slipped around it and I fell back to the carpet. The world was a haze. All of the colors melded together and I knew this was propane poisoning, or something like that. The door opened fast and hard and hit me square in the face as I faded out.
Suddenly I was awake again and my face was pounding.
"Fuck!"
I rolled over on my back and my face was warmer. I could taste copper now in the sting of the puke. Blood. I opened my eyes and saw Marie staring in horror at me, the carpet. The mess.
"What the fuck?" she asked.
Monday, January 16, 2012
A View Rarely
Marie had made a large quantity of mimosa mix and put it in a cooler. I had asked Michael the day before if he wanted to come hang out on the beach with us and as far as I knew he'd be pulling into my driveway at any moment.
I wanted to dig into the mimosas, but as it was I wasn't sure there were nearly enough to last the day.
I was living out my last days before I went to work for the cable company. The whole thing seemed ridiculous. I was so worried about going back to work. I felt such dread. I couldn't understand it. All I wanted to do was lay in the sun, drink, write, and kiss Marie and pretend that this was July eternal. It's not like I had never had a job before. Like I had never worked. I had been working since I was thirteen, building houses in the summer Colorado sun. For whatever reason though, I waited nervously. Peering through my dark sunglasses. Lusting after some impossible freedom glimpsed only through television and daydreams.
"Are you sure he's coming?" Marie asked.
"I don't know. I tried to call him earlier, but he didn't answer. He never does though."
"Oh." Marie was sitting on the living room floor, putting eyeliner on in front of a large mirror she had stolen off of the porch of an abandoned house nearby.
I sat at the computer, typing and deleting.
Michael pulled into the driveway and I closed out my program and stood up to welcome him. I'm not sure if it was ever noticed, but I have always made it a point to show a certain level of respect toward people. Even during my anger, my drunken outbursts, my stupidity, I tried. I hope that is recognized before people forget me.
He had a large black car that he had somehow acquired from his mother, I think. I was never really clear on it and I suppose it doesn't matter either way. He turned it off in my driveway, got out, shut the door and locked it. He looked up at my porch. Despite our lengthy friendship, he had rarely been here. I supposed it was too far for him to drive. I opened the door,walked out and waved.
"Hey man," I said. "How are you?"
"Good, you?"
"Good."
He came up on the porch. I opened the door and said, "Michael's here, we're ready when you're ready."
"Okay," Marie said. "I'll be there in a minute."
I closed the door and sat down on the stone steps of my porch. "I think we're going up to Buttermilk today."
"I don't know where that is."
"It's beautiful. I keep going there lately."
"You can swim there?"
"Sure. Swim. Wade. Lay down. Do whatever you want."
"Cool. Should we get booze?"
"Marie made mimosas," I said. "But we can get more if you want."
"Okay."
Michael sat next to me. We looked out onto the street, not speaking. There was a sadness to Michael that I couldn't understand. It rivaled my own, but I couldn't see the root. I couldn't speak his language. We had talked about it on a few occasions, but we never got down to it. We always just ended up offending each other. So we sat in silence sometimes.
I wanted to dig into the mimosas, but as it was I wasn't sure there were nearly enough to last the day.
I was living out my last days before I went to work for the cable company. The whole thing seemed ridiculous. I was so worried about going back to work. I felt such dread. I couldn't understand it. All I wanted to do was lay in the sun, drink, write, and kiss Marie and pretend that this was July eternal. It's not like I had never had a job before. Like I had never worked. I had been working since I was thirteen, building houses in the summer Colorado sun. For whatever reason though, I waited nervously. Peering through my dark sunglasses. Lusting after some impossible freedom glimpsed only through television and daydreams.
"Are you sure he's coming?" Marie asked.
"I don't know. I tried to call him earlier, but he didn't answer. He never does though."
"Oh." Marie was sitting on the living room floor, putting eyeliner on in front of a large mirror she had stolen off of the porch of an abandoned house nearby.
I sat at the computer, typing and deleting.
Michael pulled into the driveway and I closed out my program and stood up to welcome him. I'm not sure if it was ever noticed, but I have always made it a point to show a certain level of respect toward people. Even during my anger, my drunken outbursts, my stupidity, I tried. I hope that is recognized before people forget me.
He had a large black car that he had somehow acquired from his mother, I think. I was never really clear on it and I suppose it doesn't matter either way. He turned it off in my driveway, got out, shut the door and locked it. He looked up at my porch. Despite our lengthy friendship, he had rarely been here. I supposed it was too far for him to drive. I opened the door,walked out and waved.
"Hey man," I said. "How are you?"
"Good, you?"
"Good."
He came up on the porch. I opened the door and said, "Michael's here, we're ready when you're ready."
"Okay," Marie said. "I'll be there in a minute."
I closed the door and sat down on the stone steps of my porch. "I think we're going up to Buttermilk today."
"I don't know where that is."
"It's beautiful. I keep going there lately."
"You can swim there?"
"Sure. Swim. Wade. Lay down. Do whatever you want."
"Cool. Should we get booze?"
"Marie made mimosas," I said. "But we can get more if you want."
"Okay."
Michael sat next to me. We looked out onto the street, not speaking. There was a sadness to Michael that I couldn't understand. It rivaled my own, but I couldn't see the root. I couldn't speak his language. We had talked about it on a few occasions, but we never got down to it. We always just ended up offending each other. So we sat in silence sometimes.
The door opened. Marie came out, the cooler in her arms. "Ready?"
"Yeah," I said. We stood up. "Are we taking our car?" I asked them.
"Sure," Marie said.
"I don't care," Michael said. "Whichever."
"Okay then, our car it is."
We put our cooler in the trunk. The towels. My messenger bag with my notebook and an increasingly beat up Hemingway. I got in the driver seat, Marie in the passenger, Michael in the back.
"What do you want to listen to?" I asked Michael.
"What's in here?"
I handed him the large CD book. "Just pass it up when you have something."
"Okay."
We backed out, and drove.
We listened to loud keyboards and guitars. Music from our budding teenage years. A nostalgic warmth to match the sunlight. The windows were down and we careened along the hidden roads between tunnels of trees and sparse houses. We sang along to growling vocals with broad smiles and laughs. I was forgetting for a moment. Marie smiled at me. Michael smiled. It was beautiful, there in my car.
After quite some time, we pulled off onto the dirt road leading to Buttermilk, and quite some time after that, we parked. My legs were cramped from the drive and my lower back ached but I didn't care.
I got out of the car and saw a small group of hippies coming up the hill. They had a small dog with them and they were speaking loudly and one of them was cross eyed. I tried to ignore them.
"Ugh. Fucking hippies," Marie said under her breath. "Stay perfectly still and maybe they won't see us."
"Hey dudes!" the cross-eyed one said to us as we pulled our things out of the trunk.
"Shit," Marie said.
Michael laughed. I turned around. "Hey. How's the water down there?"
The cross-eyed hippie had his dog in his arms and was trying to keep his balance. It seemed too early, even by my standards, to be fucked up. I wondered if maybe his depth perception was just off. His friends were talking between them selves and slowly piling into a beaten up Jeep. "Dude," he said. "Fucking a-ma-zing. I am so fucking drunk!"
"Todd," one of the other hippies said from inside the vehicle. "Get in the fucking Jeep man. Leave people alone."
"This is why I fucking hate bringing him anywhere," another one said.
Cross-eyed Todd began to walk over to us. He tripped over a rock and nearly launched his dog. "It's cool, it's cool," he said. "I'm good. He stumbled left and right.
Marie was bent into the trunk, not doing anything, but trying to ignore them. Michael and I watched him stumble toward us.
"Wow," Michael said.
"Yeah," I said.
"You dudes like to drink, right?"
I didn't speak.
"Well, fuck, I do. Fuck you assholes," Cross-eyed Todd said. He turned around. "Fucking pig pieces of shit."
Michael began to laugh quietly.
The hippie in the drivers seat got out. "Todd! Get in the fucking car!"
"Jeep! Fuck you!"
Sober hippie grabbed Cross-eyed Todd by the arm and yanked him. Todd shook and the dog fell out of his arm and yellped a little when it hit the ground.
"You made me drop Rufus you fucking scumbag!" Todd said and shoved Sober hippie. Rufus ran to and jumped into the Jeep.
"Todd! Get in the fucking Jeep!" Sober hippie grabbed Cross-eyed Todd again and dragged him toward an open door in the Jeep and crammed him into it like too many clothes into a suitcase. He slammed the door and looked at us. "I'm sorry guys, he's, he's got a problem."
"It's cool," I said. "We've all been there."
"Yeah," Sober hippie said. "Have a good one." He got in the driver seat, shut the door and before long they were gone.
"That was a little surreal," Marie said.
"Mimosas," I said.
"Right," Michael said. "Mimosas."
We locked up the car, and walked the path to the rock ledge I had fallen in love with. The path was barely a path at first, made up mostly of roots, jutting rocks and small trees to steady yourself with. Sun light fell through the canopy of leaves in circles and mazes of glowing leaves and sticks and rocks scattered around us. I was carrying the cooler and it I could feel the mimosa mix swishing around heavily it what I was sure were waves like a small ocean. I imagined tiny cellular societies, rising and falling, their time proportionate with their size. They all feared the massive waves, laming against their city walls, killing their families, destroying their cities. The gods were angry, but soon, a millennium or two perhaps to them, I would redeem the gods. I would drain the ocean, and no longer would they fear it, but instead miss it. Tell tales of the great body of champagne and orange juice. Pray for rain. Pray to me.
We came to my rock ledge and I set the cooler down. Marie laid out towels, and Michael stood at the edge of the water, staring out at Lake Henry from a view rarely spied.
"Is there a beach?" he asked.
"Not really," I said. "There's that area over there where you can wade a little though." I pointed off to the side where the slope of the rocks was gentler and went further out into the water.
"Fuck."
"What?"
"Nothing."
Marie pulled off her shirt and shirts, revealing a new bathing suit that she was quite proud to be wearing, and deservedly so. She sat on the towel and from her bag pulled out two water bottles and a cleaned out soda bottle. She poured mimosa from a spigot on the side of the cooler into each and handed us each our drinks. I was reunited with my wonderful green sports bottle at last.
I pulled off of it and it was light. Gentle, and understandably girly. I walked to the edge of the water, sat down, set my drink down, threw my shirt off, and slid into the water. It swallowed me up to my chest and I let it. There was something about the first time sliding into the water that was almost orgasmic to me. Reverse birth, perhaps, or an escape. Sliding beneath the surface into another world, where different life existed. Where there were no rules, expectations, deadlines, or anything recognizable to society or standards. Fresh water indeed.
Michael sat on the stone and let his feet in.
"Get in," I said.
"I can't."
"What? Why?"
"I can't swim."
"What?" Marie said from the towel.
"You can't swim?" I asked.
"No dude. There's no lakes or anything near Springer."
"Springer Lake?"
"That doesn't count."
"Oh."
"You can't swim?" Marie asked again.
"No, Marie, I can't."
"Well, fuck," I said. "If I knew that we wouldn't have come to the fucking ledges. We could have gone to the beach."
"I did ask."
I couldn't remember if he did or didn't. I drank some. "Just slide in and hold onto the rocks."
"No dude."
"It's fine."
"No, seriously."
"How about this then?" I swam over to the shallower part and stood up. The water bounced and curled around my waist. "This part is good. At least this way you can still get in the water."
He nodded and got up and walked over.
"Fuck guys. Now I have to move again," Marie said from the ledge, a ways away now.
Marie readjusted herself on the rocks, closer, and I found a chair under the surface, carved out over eons by lapping waves and silt and luck and just for me at that moment. I sat back, slid up to my chin and stared out at the dancing beads of light and the mountains in the distance. Out there, a mile or more away, people drove the state route northward, or southward. They went to work, or home. They began or ended vacations. They drove hurriedly to hospitals and baseball games, and to first dates. They drove in hostile silences at the end of arguments, and screaming at each other at the beginnings of them. Out there, the world went on. This point, though, on the shore, this moment, this ledge, it was outside of time. Outside of the world. The water existed around me, perhaps oblivious. Hiding me. Reassuring me. Nursing me. A small wave covered my face and I dropped my bottle into the water.
"Shit!" With a little more struggle than I was expecting I pulled myself out of my chair and further into and against the waves as they carried my green sports bottle and mimosa out. I swam out and rescued it, rescued myself and back to my chair. Michael looked uneasy. I felt bad.
"We can head out if you want. Big empty day ahead of us. We don't have to spend it all here," I said.
"No, it's fine. This spot is fine." He waded around in the water and eventually sat on a rock so he was halfway in. The waves swayed his probably ninety pound frame.
Marie tanned on the rocks and Michael and I drank and talked about our band and shows and the sad state of our local music scene. Our conversations rose and fell in as if mimicking the waves around us, occasionally leaving us in strange moments of silence, and perhaps loneliness.
"You're probably my best friend," Michael said.
I laughed. I didn't know how to respond.
"And you're like 'you're totally not.' Awesome," Michael said.
"Yeah, no. It's not like that. It's just, what do you say to someone when they drop that on you? 'You too man!' And then we what, hug or something? It's weird, but thanks."
Michael laughed. "It's cool. It did sound a little gay once I said it."
"See, I was doing us a favor." I should have just reciprocated. He was my best friend, at least at the time, and so what if it sounded weird? In my head I could hear every strong male figure I had imagined to life in my adolescence telling me that men don't speak like that. We grunt and we know. We just know. I found it harder and harder to justify.
The sun blazed across the sky and the lake came to life. In the distance vacationers and locals alike took to their boats and their barbecues and their memories of sun, sand, and smiles, all for rainy days and long grey years. It was beautiful. I refused to believe that it ever had to end. Despite that ticking in the back of my skull. The red x's across the calendar. The dwindling bank account, I refused to believe that I had to go back to work. That I had to do anything I found unpleasant. That this day would ever end.
We swam, sort of, for a few more hours, laughed, finished the mimosas, and eventually went back to the car. The afternoon was settling in and we were all smiling, refreshed and worried that it was over.
"We should get more booze," Michael said.
"You're buying," I said.
"Let's go to town then," Marie said.
I was about to watch two people fuck in front of forty, hang out with two mimes, and get pulled around in a rickshaw, but I was smiling because I didn't know any of that. Because I didn't want to know anything and at that moment, on that perfect day in July, I didn't have to.
"Yeah," I said. We stood up. "Are we taking our car?" I asked them.
"Sure," Marie said.
"I don't care," Michael said. "Whichever."
"Okay then, our car it is."
We put our cooler in the trunk. The towels. My messenger bag with my notebook and an increasingly beat up Hemingway. I got in the driver seat, Marie in the passenger, Michael in the back.
"What do you want to listen to?" I asked Michael.
"What's in here?"
I handed him the large CD book. "Just pass it up when you have something."
"Okay."
We backed out, and drove.
We listened to loud keyboards and guitars. Music from our budding teenage years. A nostalgic warmth to match the sunlight. The windows were down and we careened along the hidden roads between tunnels of trees and sparse houses. We sang along to growling vocals with broad smiles and laughs. I was forgetting for a moment. Marie smiled at me. Michael smiled. It was beautiful, there in my car.
After quite some time, we pulled off onto the dirt road leading to Buttermilk, and quite some time after that, we parked. My legs were cramped from the drive and my lower back ached but I didn't care.
I got out of the car and saw a small group of hippies coming up the hill. They had a small dog with them and they were speaking loudly and one of them was cross eyed. I tried to ignore them.
"Ugh. Fucking hippies," Marie said under her breath. "Stay perfectly still and maybe they won't see us."
"Hey dudes!" the cross-eyed one said to us as we pulled our things out of the trunk.
"Shit," Marie said.
Michael laughed. I turned around. "Hey. How's the water down there?"
The cross-eyed hippie had his dog in his arms and was trying to keep his balance. It seemed too early, even by my standards, to be fucked up. I wondered if maybe his depth perception was just off. His friends were talking between them selves and slowly piling into a beaten up Jeep. "Dude," he said. "Fucking a-ma-zing. I am so fucking drunk!"
"Todd," one of the other hippies said from inside the vehicle. "Get in the fucking Jeep man. Leave people alone."
"This is why I fucking hate bringing him anywhere," another one said.
Cross-eyed Todd began to walk over to us. He tripped over a rock and nearly launched his dog. "It's cool, it's cool," he said. "I'm good. He stumbled left and right.
Marie was bent into the trunk, not doing anything, but trying to ignore them. Michael and I watched him stumble toward us.
"Wow," Michael said.
"Yeah," I said.
"You dudes like to drink, right?"
I didn't speak.
"Well, fuck, I do. Fuck you assholes," Cross-eyed Todd said. He turned around. "Fucking pig pieces of shit."
Michael began to laugh quietly.
The hippie in the drivers seat got out. "Todd! Get in the fucking car!"
"Jeep! Fuck you!"
Sober hippie grabbed Cross-eyed Todd by the arm and yanked him. Todd shook and the dog fell out of his arm and yellped a little when it hit the ground.
"You made me drop Rufus you fucking scumbag!" Todd said and shoved Sober hippie. Rufus ran to and jumped into the Jeep.
"Todd! Get in the fucking Jeep!" Sober hippie grabbed Cross-eyed Todd again and dragged him toward an open door in the Jeep and crammed him into it like too many clothes into a suitcase. He slammed the door and looked at us. "I'm sorry guys, he's, he's got a problem."
"It's cool," I said. "We've all been there."
"Yeah," Sober hippie said. "Have a good one." He got in the driver seat, shut the door and before long they were gone.
"That was a little surreal," Marie said.
"Mimosas," I said.
"Right," Michael said. "Mimosas."
We locked up the car, and walked the path to the rock ledge I had fallen in love with. The path was barely a path at first, made up mostly of roots, jutting rocks and small trees to steady yourself with. Sun light fell through the canopy of leaves in circles and mazes of glowing leaves and sticks and rocks scattered around us. I was carrying the cooler and it I could feel the mimosa mix swishing around heavily it what I was sure were waves like a small ocean. I imagined tiny cellular societies, rising and falling, their time proportionate with their size. They all feared the massive waves, laming against their city walls, killing their families, destroying their cities. The gods were angry, but soon, a millennium or two perhaps to them, I would redeem the gods. I would drain the ocean, and no longer would they fear it, but instead miss it. Tell tales of the great body of champagne and orange juice. Pray for rain. Pray to me.
We came to my rock ledge and I set the cooler down. Marie laid out towels, and Michael stood at the edge of the water, staring out at Lake Henry from a view rarely spied.
"Is there a beach?" he asked.
"Not really," I said. "There's that area over there where you can wade a little though." I pointed off to the side where the slope of the rocks was gentler and went further out into the water.
"Fuck."
"What?"
"Nothing."
Marie pulled off her shirt and shirts, revealing a new bathing suit that she was quite proud to be wearing, and deservedly so. She sat on the towel and from her bag pulled out two water bottles and a cleaned out soda bottle. She poured mimosa from a spigot on the side of the cooler into each and handed us each our drinks. I was reunited with my wonderful green sports bottle at last.
I pulled off of it and it was light. Gentle, and understandably girly. I walked to the edge of the water, sat down, set my drink down, threw my shirt off, and slid into the water. It swallowed me up to my chest and I let it. There was something about the first time sliding into the water that was almost orgasmic to me. Reverse birth, perhaps, or an escape. Sliding beneath the surface into another world, where different life existed. Where there were no rules, expectations, deadlines, or anything recognizable to society or standards. Fresh water indeed.
Michael sat on the stone and let his feet in.
"Get in," I said.
"I can't."
"What? Why?"
"I can't swim."
"What?" Marie said from the towel.
"You can't swim?" I asked.
"No dude. There's no lakes or anything near Springer."
"Springer Lake?"
"That doesn't count."
"Oh."
"You can't swim?" Marie asked again.
"No, Marie, I can't."
"Well, fuck," I said. "If I knew that we wouldn't have come to the fucking ledges. We could have gone to the beach."
"I did ask."
I couldn't remember if he did or didn't. I drank some. "Just slide in and hold onto the rocks."
"No dude."
"It's fine."
"No, seriously."
"How about this then?" I swam over to the shallower part and stood up. The water bounced and curled around my waist. "This part is good. At least this way you can still get in the water."
He nodded and got up and walked over.
"Fuck guys. Now I have to move again," Marie said from the ledge, a ways away now.
Marie readjusted herself on the rocks, closer, and I found a chair under the surface, carved out over eons by lapping waves and silt and luck and just for me at that moment. I sat back, slid up to my chin and stared out at the dancing beads of light and the mountains in the distance. Out there, a mile or more away, people drove the state route northward, or southward. They went to work, or home. They began or ended vacations. They drove hurriedly to hospitals and baseball games, and to first dates. They drove in hostile silences at the end of arguments, and screaming at each other at the beginnings of them. Out there, the world went on. This point, though, on the shore, this moment, this ledge, it was outside of time. Outside of the world. The water existed around me, perhaps oblivious. Hiding me. Reassuring me. Nursing me. A small wave covered my face and I dropped my bottle into the water.
"Shit!" With a little more struggle than I was expecting I pulled myself out of my chair and further into and against the waves as they carried my green sports bottle and mimosa out. I swam out and rescued it, rescued myself and back to my chair. Michael looked uneasy. I felt bad.
"We can head out if you want. Big empty day ahead of us. We don't have to spend it all here," I said.
"No, it's fine. This spot is fine." He waded around in the water and eventually sat on a rock so he was halfway in. The waves swayed his probably ninety pound frame.
Marie tanned on the rocks and Michael and I drank and talked about our band and shows and the sad state of our local music scene. Our conversations rose and fell in as if mimicking the waves around us, occasionally leaving us in strange moments of silence, and perhaps loneliness.
"You're probably my best friend," Michael said.
I laughed. I didn't know how to respond.
"And you're like 'you're totally not.' Awesome," Michael said.
"Yeah, no. It's not like that. It's just, what do you say to someone when they drop that on you? 'You too man!' And then we what, hug or something? It's weird, but thanks."
Michael laughed. "It's cool. It did sound a little gay once I said it."
"See, I was doing us a favor." I should have just reciprocated. He was my best friend, at least at the time, and so what if it sounded weird? In my head I could hear every strong male figure I had imagined to life in my adolescence telling me that men don't speak like that. We grunt and we know. We just know. I found it harder and harder to justify.
The sun blazed across the sky and the lake came to life. In the distance vacationers and locals alike took to their boats and their barbecues and their memories of sun, sand, and smiles, all for rainy days and long grey years. It was beautiful. I refused to believe that it ever had to end. Despite that ticking in the back of my skull. The red x's across the calendar. The dwindling bank account, I refused to believe that I had to go back to work. That I had to do anything I found unpleasant. That this day would ever end.
We swam, sort of, for a few more hours, laughed, finished the mimosas, and eventually went back to the car. The afternoon was settling in and we were all smiling, refreshed and worried that it was over.
"We should get more booze," Michael said.
"You're buying," I said.
"Let's go to town then," Marie said.
I was about to watch two people fuck in front of forty, hang out with two mimes, and get pulled around in a rickshaw, but I was smiling because I didn't know any of that. Because I didn't want to know anything and at that moment, on that perfect day in July, I didn't have to.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
A Six Dollar Bottle of Wine
When do you start to worry? When you buy a bottle and feel bad about it? When everything in your brain says "wait, just, don't," and you do anyway? Or maybe it's when you realize that the only time you're worth a shit is when you're half cocked? When you're truly productive, fun, funny, alive, or happy? What then? Do you sit down and say, "I think I should kill all of that and see if I could be that way by myself?" Have I spent rent money? No. Have I cheated on my wife? No. Have I driven a car into anything? No. Then I'm still okay, right? I'm still functioning and I still have perspective, right? Right?
I don't know. I worry.
Im not sure if this sort of thing runs in my family or not, though it would be nice to know. What does run in my family, on both sides, is a sort of silent depression. A very British sense of defeat. Even if this was a trait, I doubt I could ever know about it. "Hanging on in quiet desperation..." as Roger Waters said.
I've been an asshole. I've said irretrievable things. I've made myself someone else. Repeatedly. In some eyes, I will never be seen as who I am, but who I was in a moment. So, what then? Would I stop? Would I make some fucking pledge to change? To toss aside this opiate? Would I say...
"I don't need this."
I worry. I worry that I do. Here I sit, drinking another bottle of cab, after swearing no more today. After swearing no more this week. No more at least until I get paid again.
So, where do I stand in all of this?
Face it or don't, right? Is it a problem? No, perhaps not. Is it an addiction, well, I don't know. I won't die without it, but I certainly wish I had it regularly. Its very much like sex I suppose. In college, I took psych 101, learned about "drives". The things that keep us motivated on primal level. The sleep drive. The hunger drive. My professor was wary to add the sex drive. We won't die without it, but we do a lot for it. I would in fact argue, that at the core, we do everything for it. Maybe that's the same level. Hunger, sleep, they are level 1 drives. Without them, I die. This and sex, that's a level two drive, I do everything I can for them, but I would go on without them, I suppose.
When do I worry?
When do I take a stand either way and either say "this needs to stop" or "I am functioning, happy and fine"?
Goddamn this all.
I don't know. I worry.
Im not sure if this sort of thing runs in my family or not, though it would be nice to know. What does run in my family, on both sides, is a sort of silent depression. A very British sense of defeat. Even if this was a trait, I doubt I could ever know about it. "Hanging on in quiet desperation..." as Roger Waters said.
I've been an asshole. I've said irretrievable things. I've made myself someone else. Repeatedly. In some eyes, I will never be seen as who I am, but who I was in a moment. So, what then? Would I stop? Would I make some fucking pledge to change? To toss aside this opiate? Would I say...
"I don't need this."
I worry. I worry that I do. Here I sit, drinking another bottle of cab, after swearing no more today. After swearing no more this week. No more at least until I get paid again.
So, where do I stand in all of this?
Face it or don't, right? Is it a problem? No, perhaps not. Is it an addiction, well, I don't know. I won't die without it, but I certainly wish I had it regularly. Its very much like sex I suppose. In college, I took psych 101, learned about "drives". The things that keep us motivated on primal level. The sleep drive. The hunger drive. My professor was wary to add the sex drive. We won't die without it, but we do a lot for it. I would in fact argue, that at the core, we do everything for it. Maybe that's the same level. Hunger, sleep, they are level 1 drives. Without them, I die. This and sex, that's a level two drive, I do everything I can for them, but I would go on without them, I suppose.
When do I worry?
When do I take a stand either way and either say "this needs to stop" or "I am functioning, happy and fine"?
Goddamn this all.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
The Disappearing Wrist
I sat in a booth on one side of a dance floor littered with harlots in tight dresses and boys pretending to be men. I didn't even want to be there, but it was New Years Eve and some of the people I was with decided that clubbing was the way to go. It was dark save for a few spotlights and reflections from the surely tacky-by-now mirror ball dangling from some unseen rafter above us. The music blasted so loudly and through such a terrible speaker system that I couldn't tell what type of music we were listening to, much less the song. Bass pounded, I knew that, but any frequency higher than it was lost. I alternated between my beer and a string of whiskeys, both of which were bought for me, and a steel water bottle full of wine that I had smuggled in.
Marie and her sister and Kris stood on the other side of the booth wall, on the dance floor. Occasionally they danced, so to speak. Mostly they laughed and wiggled and laughed.
I sat with John in the dark, staring into the abyss of a life style that neither of us quite understood. Every girl on the floor wore tight, short dresses. Most of the girls were far too overweight for them, and spilled flesh wherever the dress just couldn't take the goddamn pressure any longer. I watched a young man who may have just turned twenty one cram most of his hand into a particularly obese girl who had apparently given up all together on pulling her dress down as it rode up. I watched in awe.
"Do you see that?" I asked John.
He looked at me and raised an eye brow.
"I said..." I shook my head and held my phone up and pointed to it. Then I pointed to John. He looked curious for a moment then I repeated the gesture and he nodded and took out his phone.
I texted: "Is that guy fingering that girl?" Send.
John's phone lit up. He read the message and typed. My phone lit up.
"Where?" He asked.
I looked at him and pointed out across the floor. There was no question about it now. The beast was blocking the young man out of my vision almost completely. Only his arm was showing as it bravely circumnavigated the planetary monstrosity and then just below the wrist it disappeared again, far into her underwear. I imagined whale songs far under the sea and the look on the behemoth's face only reenforced the idea. I was in this club. But at least I wasn't that fucking guy.
I looked at John. He was still watching.
Marie swung her legs up over the half-wall and slid into the booth. She was good and drunk. Smiling for no reason. Puckering her lips and in every direction giving her smoldering supermodel look that she swear she doesn't give. She leaned over me and kissed me. "Hey!" She said.
I smiled.
Kris came over the wall and slid in between Marie and John. Marie's sister went off to dance with a man in a cowboy hat and suspenders.
"I fucking love you!" Marie said.
"I love you!"
"What?!"
I kissed her and she kissed me. It morphed into a nearly adolescent display of tongues and indifference to onlookers. Hands, grips, gropes and grinds. I went with it. While we were kissing, two girls stood against the wall. I looked up. One looked good in her tight, ridiculous dress. The other was the fat friend.
"Hey!" I said to Marie. "You're drunk! Poke her ass!"
Marie looked. "Her?! In the silver dress?!"
I nodded.
Without hesitation, Marie turned around, and grabbed the girl's ass. A fucking handful. Apparently satisfied, Marie whipped back around and began putting on makeup in the mirror of a compact.
"Who the fuck just grabbed my ass?!" The girl asked, loudly.
We all looked up at her, except for Marie.
The girl looked at me. Her face wasn't much to celebrate. "Did you just grab ass motherfucker?"
What luck. In my left hand, I still held my phone. In my right, my beer. I held them up. I shook my head and shrugged. She looked around our booth. "Queers."She and her friend waddled down a few feet.
I looked at Marie. She was laughing.
I sat back in the booth and finished my beer, then my whiskey, then my wine. My body was warm and my head pounded. I wondered if there was a three-way in my future before the night was up. I doubted it.
Marie and her sister and Kris stood on the other side of the booth wall, on the dance floor. Occasionally they danced, so to speak. Mostly they laughed and wiggled and laughed.
I sat with John in the dark, staring into the abyss of a life style that neither of us quite understood. Every girl on the floor wore tight, short dresses. Most of the girls were far too overweight for them, and spilled flesh wherever the dress just couldn't take the goddamn pressure any longer. I watched a young man who may have just turned twenty one cram most of his hand into a particularly obese girl who had apparently given up all together on pulling her dress down as it rode up. I watched in awe.
"Do you see that?" I asked John.
He looked at me and raised an eye brow.
"I said..." I shook my head and held my phone up and pointed to it. Then I pointed to John. He looked curious for a moment then I repeated the gesture and he nodded and took out his phone.
I texted: "Is that guy fingering that girl?" Send.
John's phone lit up. He read the message and typed. My phone lit up.
"Where?" He asked.
I looked at him and pointed out across the floor. There was no question about it now. The beast was blocking the young man out of my vision almost completely. Only his arm was showing as it bravely circumnavigated the planetary monstrosity and then just below the wrist it disappeared again, far into her underwear. I imagined whale songs far under the sea and the look on the behemoth's face only reenforced the idea. I was in this club. But at least I wasn't that fucking guy.
I looked at John. He was still watching.
Marie swung her legs up over the half-wall and slid into the booth. She was good and drunk. Smiling for no reason. Puckering her lips and in every direction giving her smoldering supermodel look that she swear she doesn't give. She leaned over me and kissed me. "Hey!" She said.
I smiled.
Kris came over the wall and slid in between Marie and John. Marie's sister went off to dance with a man in a cowboy hat and suspenders.
"I fucking love you!" Marie said.
"I love you!"
"What?!"
I kissed her and she kissed me. It morphed into a nearly adolescent display of tongues and indifference to onlookers. Hands, grips, gropes and grinds. I went with it. While we were kissing, two girls stood against the wall. I looked up. One looked good in her tight, ridiculous dress. The other was the fat friend.
"Hey!" I said to Marie. "You're drunk! Poke her ass!"
Marie looked. "Her?! In the silver dress?!"
I nodded.
Without hesitation, Marie turned around, and grabbed the girl's ass. A fucking handful. Apparently satisfied, Marie whipped back around and began putting on makeup in the mirror of a compact.
"Who the fuck just grabbed my ass?!" The girl asked, loudly.
We all looked up at her, except for Marie.
The girl looked at me. Her face wasn't much to celebrate. "Did you just grab ass motherfucker?"
What luck. In my left hand, I still held my phone. In my right, my beer. I held them up. I shook my head and shrugged. She looked around our booth. "Queers."She and her friend waddled down a few feet.
I looked at Marie. She was laughing.
I sat back in the booth and finished my beer, then my whiskey, then my wine. My body was warm and my head pounded. I wondered if there was a three-way in my future before the night was up. I doubted it.
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