Abandonment Like That Was Easier Then Saturday, May 31 2008

Tim slips a dollar into the jukebox and puts on James Brown as we scrub and mop, the two of us grooving across the soapy, slick tile floors with energy brought on by the prospect of the shift’s end. He counts the tips while I collect the trash and take it out around the corner, where I run into Mary, who I haven’t seen in two years. She’s wearing a matching blazer and skirt that makes her look like a flight attendant, and her haircut is one color now and looks a little more expensive. A glossy, plastic namecard is clipped to her coat and she’s holding a leather briefcase. I am unshaven, wearing an apron stained with mustard and barbecue sauce, and carrying two trash bags that are dripping an orange liquid.

She explains that she is in town recruiting for her company, and is on her way back to the hotel to change. I explain that I’m still living here and about to get off work, and it’s the first time I can ever remember being ashamed of this job. What scares me is how quickly I am able to shake it off. We make plans for a drink in the hotel bar, and I head back in to finish up the shift change.

I don’t know why we do this to ourselves. So rarely do we sit down with an old lover from a past life and not find ourselves wistful for older times or alarmed at their change in demeanor, appearance, friends, attitude. You aren’t sitting across from them, but rather what they have become, and once one dives into the chaos of this world, the change is rarely for the better.

Her eyes are as green as a fairway, and it seems they might be the only thing that hasn’t changed. She sounds more cynical, less warm; she smokes cigarettes now, and fake laughs at her boring co-workers’ jokes, and she no longer smells like a Blow Pop tastes. The cheap, chunky rings are missing from her fingers, and her shoes look uncomfortable to be in.

“I wish I was still here,” she says with a sigh, and I know she doesn’t mean that. She’s either trying to soften the fact that I’m still pouring drinks in this town, or she’s mistaking ‘here’ for ‘myself’. She probably enjoys drinking wine while she sits on Ikea furniture at parties where there are cheese cubes and no beer pong tables. I stifle the urge to say ‘me, too’.

“You really shouldn’t smoke,” I say, taking a drag from my cigarette.

“It relaxes me,” she says with a weariness that implies a stressful life, despite the fact that she’s spent the last twenty minutes telling me about how her days are comprimised of sitting at a desk checking her e-mail, amazed that she’s getting paid eye-popping amounts of money to do so. My mind drifts off to the carefree girl flitting from table to table on a Friday night, the one who would drunkenly pirouette down the sidewalk in front of me on our way home. I don’t see that girl in front of me anymore.

“You really like how all of the instruments come in one at a time,” she remarks as The Cure begins to play on the jukebox. She raises her eyebrows as if I’m expected to be impressed by her knowledge of me. At the moment, I kind of am.

“I do,” I say with a nod. She sighs and rests her chin on her palm, gazing at me in a ‘what are we going to do about you?’ sort of way, the kind of look she used to give me right before we kissed. I always felt like a naive child who’d done something so adorably stupid that she couldn’t help but squeal and embrace me.

“You seem sad.”

“Haven’t I always?”

“Not like this.” She traces a manicured finger around the lip of her glass. “How long do you plan to stay here?”

“I don’t know…haven’t really thought about it.”

Her eyes are searching me for something, and I wonder if it’s the same thing I’m searching her for. On the surface, I haven’t changed much – I still have detailed opinions about “Just Like Heaven” and I still live here and work a service job, and I’m pretty sure I’ve worn this shirt back when we were together. But I’m certain that she notices the spirit missing from my eyes. Perhaps while I’m searching her for remnants of her old self, she is conversely searching for any noticeable change in me. I get the feeling that the both of us will be disappointed.

“You know,” she begins, taking a pull from her drink and pursing her lips. “I always thought that you would be the first person I knew here to leave and do something really great. I really did. I can remember looking at you some nights and thinking ‘in ten years, I’m going to be able to tell people that I dated this guy’.”

This may be one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me, and yet it makes me feel entirely nauseous. Not only does it contain the pangs of guilt, but it contains the notion that doing something great involves making a lot of money or being famous. It contains the idea that if I never left this town, she wouldn’t find herself proud of the fact that at one time in our lives we shared a connection. It implies that she’s reconsidered her idea of me, and I don’t blame her. I want to explain all of this to her, but I think she’s too far gone for it to make any sense. Or perhaps I am.

Thankfully, before I have to respond a co-worker of her’s with a pale blue shirt and a white collar approaches, greeting me offhandedly in a manner that feels no different than if he were to pat my head. He probably sees me as just what I am – an old acquaintance she’s left for bigger and better things. The only thing I’m unsure of is how much bigger or better those things are.

“I told my friends I’d take them out for a night on the town,” she says, her eyes still back in the conversation we were just having. “Would you like to come along?”

“I don’t think so…I’ve got to open tommorrow.”

“Well, it was really good to see you,” she says with the frown of disappointment we all have when we briefly get to visit our pasts. She gives me one more burning glance of desperation, and hugs me tightly. As she catches up to her friends waiting near the entrance, I think of the wide-eyed boy who used to get butterflies when he saw her, the one whose face would get sore from beaming so wide as she drunkenly pirouetted down the sidewalk in front of him on their way home.

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Just My Imagination Wednesday, May 28 2008

Rhiannon is named after a Fleetwood Mac song, and, as a rule, will not sleep with any man who asks ‘like the song?’ or ‘have you heard the song?’ or any other variation of song reference within the first ten minutes of learning her name. There has been one exception: a minor league baseball player she’d met when she was twenty. He had spiked blond hair caked in gel and blue eyes, a little stubble over a square jaw; he reminded her of someone back at college she’d just broken up with who she’d thought she was is love with.

She sits with her elbows perched on the table, peering across the room with narrowed eyes and pursed lips. She is aware that she could sleep with any man in the bar, but she thinks it’s because a man will sleep with anything pretty that shows them attention. She decides she will sleep with someone tonight.

Sitting to her left is Juliana, a college roommate and one-time best friend whom she hasn’t seen in almost a year. She’s just as beautiful as Rhiannon, if not more so, although she doesn’t know it. She certainly puts in the same effort – the gym and the salon and tanning and the vomiting in restaurant bathrooms and the hours analyzing bare thighs; the same effort went into the pink tank top and the jeans with the manufactured holes in the knees that flared out over her tennis shoes. Even more effort was put into the wavy, brown-rooted blonde hair that spilled beyond her pale shoulders. Her green eyes are raccooned with the same liner that Rhiannon is wearing. But she doesn’t know that she could sleep with any man in the bar, nor would she take comfort in that fact.

“How’s Ryan?” Rhiannon asks, examining her bare nails and cocking her eyes up at Juliana.

“Fine.” Juliana has been dating Ryan for the better part of two years. “I’m fucking someone else” she mumbles, her lips clamped to the cigarette she’s lighting.

“Who?”

“Dan.” Juliana has been sleeping with Dan, a friend from college, off and on, only when running into each other, never preplanned, for a little over a month now. Dan has been in love with Rhiannon for nearly four years. Since sophomore year of college, the two spent their afternoons together, amongst Juliana and others at first, but later in each other’s exclusive company. They spent many nights together, nights Dan thinks of as his happiest and Rhiannon thinks of as half-embarrassed anecdotes on the perils of dollar draft night. Since they stopped speaking nearly six months ago, everything that has happened to Dan has just been another thing without her in it.

“My Dan?”

“What do you mean ‘your Dan’?”

“Well, he was in love with me,” Rhiannon blurts out before she has time to think of her delivery. It comes out proud, territorial.

“Is,” Juliana whispers into her martini.

“How’d that start?” she asks, as if it’s some sort of laugh, some late night blind date show interview.

“Saw him around a lot. Talked to him a couple of times. Long talks.”

“That’ll do it.”

“I think I might be falling in love with him.”

“I wish I could.” Rhiannon’s bangs flutter upwards as she sighs.

Dan was en route to the very same bar they were at, a bar chosen by Rhiannon because of the unlikelihood of Dan’s presence there. She was right on in her assumption that it wasn’t a place you’d likely find him – with the steep prices and dim lighting and attractive people – but this is a world of chaos. Dan was being led there by Alanna, a girl he worked with five days a week for the past four months. She’d grown a sort of affection for him, laughing at his jokes and being heartbroken by all of the sad music he listened to while he read in the back of the kitchen. Most importantly, he intrigued her because he didn’t seem interested in her. Sure, they flirted, and she’d caught him eyeballing her breasts once or twice, but he talked to her, actually listened to what she had to say, rather than just reading from the lines of the script. She didn’t smoke, but she used to sit in the back alley with him while he did, on orange (his) and blue (hers) milk crates. Some days she would ask about what he was reading, which was usually one of Rhiannon’s favorite books. Other days she would moan about her hangover and tell him all about the previous night out. He would tell her to leave her boyfriend, like all the others did, but he didn’t say it so it would free her up.

That morning, like most, he had been slicing tomatoes while she sat next to him on the stainless steel countertop, dangling her legs over the edge, both of them silent and listening to the sad music. She asked what it was and he said Belle & Sebastian and she said it was different, and he agreed, and she said she liked it, and that made him smile, which he didn’t do often. She asked him what he had planned for the evening, and when he said something about staying in and reading, she demanded that he go out with her. She’d offered before, most Fridays or Saturdays, and he’d always politely turned her down, although she got the feeling that if she demanded he might comply.

 And he did. He knew he was only going because she was pretty, and seemed interested in him, and he knew the only reason that interest existed was because he didn’t seem particularly concerned with fucking her, but he agreed to go anyway, because, like with Juliana, he thought having a pretty girl around might solve some problems.

“So how’s Chicago?” Juliana asks.

“Love it” Rhiannon says, rolling her tongue and taking a pull from her martini. “But I miss it here.” She wants to ask how Dan is doing, if he’s still drinking as much as she’d heard. She wants to compare notes on how he is in bed, ask if she knows what he’s planning to do with himself. She talks instead about the lawyer she’s being seeing, the one seven years her senior who glides them into clubs and can always score coke.

                                                        ***

Ten minutes into the ride and Dan starts to think he should’ve stayed at home. Alanna drives a purple Japanese sports car. She’s listening to a hip-hop song about sex that sounds just like the last thirty he’d heard. He knew he should’ve stayed home. For some reason he’d convinced himself that tonight would be different, which he always managed to do when he went out. He was always wrong. Plus, he knew Rhiannon was back in town. He knew the odds of running into her were slim and none, but it’s always when faced with those odds that he usually ran into people, the people (nowadays, person) who could arrest him, narrow his entire focus, simply by walking into a room.

“You don’t like this song, do you?” She thinks he is deep and melancholy, too deep and melancholy to be affected by anything she could say or do; she doesn’t even consider that he himself is terrified, that the two-day shadow of hair on his face isn’t carelessness but a conscious decision, one painstakingly considered in front of the mirror, left on in an effort to appear rugged. He doesn’t care much about sleeping with her, but he’s still eager to impress her.

The first day she met him, right after he’d greeted her with a warm smile, she thought to herself ‘not a chance’. She wasn’t even really conscious of it then, it’s not something she does with every man she meets. And he’d done nothing but act polite when meeting her, but she thought it, and she’s remembering it for the first time, now, at a red light, and it’s curious to her, because now she’s thinking about sleeping with him, and she’s not sure that he’d go for it.

“No,” he says, almost apologetically. “I don’t.”

Alanna’s boyfriend is an outside linebacker for a Midwestern Division II school. He has eyes like diamonds and he believes he loves her as a person, but it’s something more akin to the coveting of her physical beauty, an entity or representation. If she weren’t attractive, he’d find her boring and naïve. Alanna’s never had a boyfriend who seemed genuinely interested in her outside of her beauty. She thinks that Dan is different. And while Dan does find her boring and naïve, there’s something else going on – a sort of ironic and comical mismatch, like an Eddie Murphy cop movie — that makes him happy. And, though he can’t exactly figure out why, he does really care about her.

 Rhiannon is talking to a pair of men she’d found to buy her and Juliana a round when she sees Dan walking through the door with a girl. His brown hair is much shorter and choppier now. It matches his sweater, which appears to have been nice at one point, but is now woefully wrinkled and has a small hole near the armpit. He clearly hasn’t shaved in a couple days and his eyes look drained. He may have lost a few pounds. The girl is arrestingly beautiful, far more beautiful, in Rhiannon’s opinion (but not Dan’s), than Rhiannon. She isn’t sure whether to feel jealous or relieved.

Juliana is walking back from the bathroom when she sees them. She knows Alanna, from a Halloween party a few months ago. Her boyfriend was a friend of Ryan’s. He wore a pair of thick black glasses purchased from Walgreen’s and a purple sportcoat and walked around asking girls if they wanted to ‘shag’ (he didn’t even make an attempt at an accent). She didn’t really think about it at the time, but now she thinks how unimaginative it was; she wouldn’t have ever realized this if she had never met Dan.

“You don’t like this place, do you?” Alanna asks, crinkling her nose apologetically.

“No” he says, pursing his lips and glancing around as if he were visiting a foreign country. “I used to like places like this.” He almost adds ‘when I was happy’, but at the last second remembers who he’s with. Sometimes, in his head, these conversations happen and the people understand.

“Why’d you stop?” she asks, taking a pull from her martini but keeping her eyes fixed on his.

“Because the only people who go to these kinds of places are guys who want to meet or impress pretty girls.”

“And you don’t want to meet or impress pretty girls?” she asks coyly, flicking her head to the side and letting a smile crease her face.

“No.” Her head cocks upright and the smile flattens.

“Why not?”

“Because they’re generally really mean people,” he says flatly, just as he notices Rhiannon, who is talking to a car salesman with too much gel in his hair.

“Do you think I’m pretty?” Alanna knows Dan thinks she is pretty. Everybody thinks she is pretty. She has given up her integrity and sanity to ensure this.

“Of course.” He doesn’t say it consolingly or encouragingly like other guys she’s set this path of conversation up for. He says it matter-of-factly, as if in regard to a business proposal they’d both read over a hundred times.

“So you think I’m a mean person?”

“I don’t think you’re a mean person…but I’d be willing to bet you’ve been indoctrinated into a mean system.” Alanna doesn’t know what ‘indoctrinated’ means. She just nods her head. Dan lights a cigarette and steals glances at Rhiannon. He wants to leave.

“Do you want to leave?” she asks apologetically.

“No.”

                                                          ***

“Dan’s here” Rhiannon deadpans, looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, where the two have sought refuge from the conversation of the car salesmen.

“I saw him” Juliana whispers.

“I kind of like the guy you were talking to…Eric.” she says cheerily, bouncing on her toes and bunching her shoulders.

“I don’t.” Juliana sits slumped in a small, faux-velvet chair, her arms making a V that slides between her knees.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“He’s in love with you…he’ll go to pieces when he sees you here.” She raises her eyes to meet Rhiannon’s, which are fixated on the mirror. “And you don’t care?”

“It’s not that I don’t care” Rhiannon says with a sigh used by housewives who describe their incorrigible children. “It’s that he goes to pieces…besides, he’s here with someone else.”

“But he’s in love with you.”

“And you’re in love with him.”

“Yeah, and as a result I want him to be happy…that’s how it works.” Rhiannon thinks this is the smartest thing Juliana has ever said; she realizes at once that she has never really loved anyone.

                                                            ***

“Ok, you’re totally going to think I’m an idiot,” Alanna warns, rolling her eyes and swiping a strand of auburn hair behind her ear, “but what does ‘introctrinated’ mean?” Dan looks at her quizzically for a second before remembering their earlier conversation. Her earnest confusion melts his guts.

“It means I think you’re a sweet person…you’re just in a fucked up world.” Dan glances around, as if to imply that this bar were such a world.

“I think I’m going to break up with Matt.”

“I think that would be a good idea.” He smiles, and then reminds himself that she will only find another variation of Matt. “Do you want another drink?”

                                                          ***

“So what do you do?” Eric asks like a game-show host.

“I’m in graduate school…in Chicago.”

“Wow. So you’re pretty smart, huh?” Rhiannon and Dan are both asked this question constantly. They never know how to respond. Neither knows that the other feels their pain in this respect.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You got a boyfriend at graduate school in Chicago?”

“No…hey, I’ll be right back. I’m just going to grab another drink.”

“I can get it for you.”

“No. That’s fine…thanks.”

“Ok” he says throwing up his palms in display. Rhiannon rolls her eyes as she turns away.

                                                           ***

“Hi.”

“Hey.” Dan looks at the floor. Rhiannon looks him in the eye.

“She’s cute.”

“She’s worthless.”

“How have you been?”

“Terrible. How’s the thirty-two year old?”

“Thirty-one.”

“Sorry…that’s not fair.” He looks her in the eye.

“No…it’s ok. I deserve that.” She looks at the floor.

Dan raises the two bottles in each hand. “I should get back.”

“Nice to see you.”

As he walks away she thinks to herself that if given the chance, both of them would choose the other’s exclusive company over the car salesman or the girl from work or anyone else in the bar. She realizes that even this realization – on both sides – cannot change a thing. When she feels the lump in her throat is liable to burst, she heads to the bathroom alone, sheds a few tears, touches up her make-up and prepares to go fuck the car salesman with too much gel in his hair.

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A World Away From This One Tuesday, May 27 2008

The four of us scramble around the room, jamming sweaters and hairdryers into duffel bags amidst the remnants of last night - two dozen beer cans, gas station soda cups, emptied chip bags, playing cards, a mountain of butts in the ashtray (which Seth empties out and slips into his bag). The girls look themselves over in the mirror, their damp hair hanging plainly, while Seth and I smoke a joint and examine the travel brochures the hotel has left out. I peel back the maroon flower drapes and stare out at the dull rain that clouds downtown Louisville. It’s so easy to fall for something that you’re departing from.

 Captain’s was closed for the week, and the four of us were all looking to escape our lives, so we had set out the previous morning armed with directions towards the burial site of Johnny Cash and a strict no chain restaurant policy. We had spent the previous evening anxious, energized, carefree and alive, rollicking through the streets with companionship and abandon we simply weren’t capable of back home. It feels so electrifying to not be attached to one’s own life – this is what fuels the passion in road trips, kisses from strangers, rebellion.

I can see in everyone’s eyes that our minds are with someone else, who is somewhere else, and after a few days we will return to them and our lives. The percieved difference is that I think they’re looking forward to returning at some point. They want a break from the monotony, a time to relax, an opportunity to find clarity. I want to do this forever, spending every morning scrambling to make checkout time as I head out into another foreign day void of responsibility or identity or connections. Each little green sign on the highway is a life further away from my own and everyone I meet is a strange person in a strange land that I will only know for today.

 As we pull out of Louisville, I crane my neck around to get a glimpse of the city skyline in the afternoon rain. I imagine myself having a life there, a neverending assortment of lives in Louisville and Nashville and Paris and Tucson and everywhere but where I am. Location doesn’t cure my ills, but it takes me away from them, and if I never stopped moving, perhaps they would never catch up to me. The loneliness of the open road invites the promise of the open road, and it’s an attractive promise, as my stationary life back home feels no less lonely and much more void of potential.

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Completely Alone at a Table of Friends Tuesday, May 27 2008

I blankly watch cars pass up and down a street I don’t know the name of in downtown Lexington, and the thought occurs that none of this feels a lick different than the last decade or so. The fact that I’m in a multi-level patio bar similar to one in my hometown certainly helps the comparison, but this feeling, this decision to stare off at cars passing by in lieu of participating in the evening, is nothing new. A few feet away, a dozen of my closest friends are yelling and cackling with abandon, drunk on rum and the buzz of the evening. It’s the same recantations of Captain’s lore that it’s always been, and it’s not that I disdain that sort of thing, but at the moment I’m not equipped to participate.

But when was I ever? Certainly I’ve eroded to this point – there was a time when I was participating in the moment and not just present in the moment. But as I’m in the midst of a reunion attempting to recapture better times, I’m reflecting on those better times and realizing that back then I’d felt the exact same way; I was just slightly less miserable and therefore possessed more social tact. Or perhaps I wasn’t comfortable enough with these people to openly throw in the towel and gaze off. If there’s a silver lining to this, it’s the comfort I have with these people.

Every single one of us is smart enough to know better. We watch it all pass by and we know that we’re indulging in stupidity or feeding the rumbling stomach of the society we’ve been molded to live in, but we do it anyway, and I imagine my friends can do it because they just don’t think about it so much, but I do, and so therefore I can’t. These are all warm, thoughtful, understanding people, but they still jump through the hoops of it all, and I think that we have to in order to avoid sitting against a brick wall staring at the dull glow of the word ‘TAXI’ until it blurs into one round ball of light.

Why do I fight so hard to adapt to a society that is clearly out of it’s mind? Why do we lay the blame at our own feet, or at the feet of friends and lovers? We’re not the ones who are mad. And if we are, it’s for all of the insanity we’ve had to put up with. The hours of doing make-up in the mirror or acting disinterested or acting overly interested or forcing smiles and hiding ourselves, because we aren’t the people everyone else is, and the only way to fit in with them is to take a needle to yourself and stitch out an indentity that is alright with all of this chaos.

I rejoin the circle and the conversation, doing my best to smile at recantations of sexual escapes and not to frown when we talk about the 9-to-5 lives most of us now lead. Every now and again they take a crack at making me laugh, and they often succeed, as I’m not actively trying to scowl. I don’t think I could explain it to them and if I could I think they’d just tell me to shake it off or get drunk or try to have fun or get laid or take pills or meet new people or see someone or try not to think about it or any number of distractions we look for instead of actually addressing it.

 As the evening comes to a close we throw a few rounds of shots down our throats that none of us need, and all of the girls huddle into the bathroom to discuss the cute guy with the Polo short who likes Valerie, and the guys sit around burning cigarettes in silence save the occasional comment about pizza. Perhaps the rampant consumption of alcohol before last call is just a way to get ready for the madness and idiocy of the next bit – the standing around in line for food with dozens of other twentysomethings barely able to form a coherent sentence – this is where we make decisions that have an inordinate impact on our psyches. These are the people whose actions we have to live with in the morning.

 I hang outside the brimming pizza joint, making eye contact through the window with an overweight employee whose arms are stained with dough. His eyes are weary, and it’s the most knowing glance I exchange all night. I ask Valerie to get me a slice and lean against a parking meter while the Polo shirt guy rests his hand on the small of her back. I watch the parade pass, and I can’t help but feel I live in a world that I feel completely alienated from, and I can’t help but think I’ve always felt that way. Seth and Amber devour a pizza on top of a USA Today stand while I stare down the streets of a town that I know nothing about, but one that feels like every other I’ve ever been in.

“Here you go,” Valerie says with her ever-present giggling smile, handing me a barely cheesed slice that takes two papers plates to cover. It’s nearly impossible to frown when faced with the earnesty and glow of her crystal blue eyes and blushing smile. It is baffling to me how this girl manages to gracefully walk through this world with a pleasant warmth and a caring heart that never wavers. I don’t think there’s much of an angle or an end with Valerie, and that’s something I don’t think I can find anywhere else. She has a resolve I’ve seldom seen, and I often wonder if it’s ever going to get cracked by the rest of us. I hope for the sake of the world that it doesn’t.

“Thanks,” I say, staring off blankly before remembering that I owe her a smile.

“Hey, I don’t really want to go home with that guy, so could you please just rescue me?” Her voice is almost always in a cheery sing-song, and it bothers me to see Polo Shirt in the distance, scanning the crowd for her presence. I’m not jealous of him – my heart and mind are back home – I’m just angry. Angry that he doesn’t see the value of this person in an otherwise bankrupt circus.

“Yeah, no problem…you actually restored my faith in humanity a little.” She laughs at nearly everything anyone says, but does it in a way that doesn’t feel patronizing.

“I don’t know what happened,” she says sheepishly. “He was cute…Amber and Gina were kind of encouraging it…I just don’t want to.”

“That makes sense,” I say, staring off in contemplation of whether I should proceed with the next bit. “I really don’t like any of that…I’m not trying to judge…I just don’t understand why we do things like that.”

“I don’t either.” I put my forehead to hers as Polo Shirt lingers nearby, and I lay a hand at the small of her back, which draws an easy laugh. The two of us are often able to stare into each other’s eyes and smile dreamily for extended periods of time, which effortlessly lends to our performance, although he still hangs around idly as we gasp for air from laughter (which isn’t a part of the act).

I begin to pity him, chasing something so false, while I engage in something so comfortable and real. Most of the time I feel a swirl of envy and disgust for the world around me, but at this moment, I feel solace in the fact that I might have it somewhat right. I can’t do much about the rest of them. Finding joy when one is unable to muster it artifically is perhaps one of the better feelings in life.

He makes a last ditch and pathetic effort to grab her attention, and the girls push her towards him, but in the end I grab her hand and we pile into a cab with a few of the others.

“Thanks for rescuing me,” she whispers as I try to watch the blurred and moving red lights of the fare as it ticks by.

“Thanks for giving me some faith in the world.” We smile at each other in silence, the glow of streetlights passing over her eyes, until a song on the radio catches my attention.

“This is Flock of Seagulls!” I yell with a slur, drunkenly unaware that I’m in a cab and not in the exclusive company of friends. “Turn this shit up, man!” The cab driver turns it up without hesitation, and for a moment all is right in the world.

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I Think It’s Better the Second Time Around Saturday, May 24 2008

As she fumbles to get the key into her front door, the realization occurs that this is the best part of the night. The bits that occur after the idle twenty minute chatter in the kitchen are certainly nice, but isn’t the knowledge or feeling that this person is eagerly and willingly walking you into their bedroom equal to or better than the physical sensation of the act? If that weren’t the case, it wouldn’t matter who was on the other end of that sensation; we’d fuck like blind rabbits. Isn’t the person in question usually carrying out some sort of role or aim we’ve concocted for them? Isn’t that the point?

I am more alone here than if I were by myself in my bedroom. The drone of my fan is missing. The person warming the back of my neck with her breath is a stranger. The most she can provide for me is a prop body for me to close my eyes and pretend it to be the one I would rather be with. I sold myself out there, recognizing her excessive giggling and brushing of limbs. I said things I didn’t mean and censored opinions and laughed at dumb jokes and ignored inane commentary and did nothing but prove to myself that being myself isn’t the reason I got here. And for what? What have I sold my character and time for? A mediocre drunken blowjob? Twenty minutes of thoughtless, distracting pleasure? This is far more shameful than paying for it monetarily.

I peel her arm away from my body and slip out into the quiet night, the slush of wet snow making a squishing, sucking sound as I walk. We often choose these partners on the merit of a thoughtless interaction – no phone numbers, no breakfast, no strife. But this is never the case. They are serving as an antidote to loneliness, an assurance. A replacement to disperse affection on and fuck when we can’t be with the ones we want. The situation cannot be casual and mutual, as neither party understands the other’s thought process. A disconnect exists that prevents comfort and flippancy.  I used her while I thought of someone else. She was no different than a walking, talking, flesh-and-blood masturbation tool – a blow-up doll with a pulse.

I stop into UDF to grab a pack of cigarettes and to get the sting of feeling back into my numb fingers. The skinny middle-aged man behind the counter is the same one who sold condoms to us a few hours earlier, rolling his eyes as we stumbled and howled and gazed into each other’s eyes dreamily near the coffee machine. Now he gives me a sly smirk and a wink as I hand him a five. 

 When you think of the people you’ve slept with, one tends to think in the collective rather than the individual. The individual may be remembered, but even the lust-driven moments between just the two of you still carry all of the baggage and weight of the others. Sometimes I think the fact that you’re having sex with the person you are in the circumstances you are is half the battle. And I think somewhere deep down it’s tied to the desire to love and want to be loved. We wrap that in attraction at times, we wrap it in physical pleasure sometimes; it’s like those little Russian dolls that encase smaller dolls that encase smaller dolls. And at the base of it is this passion and love.

Without that passion, that seeking of affection, that hazy sense of romanticism, you are merely fucking a stranger, and with every stranger I fuck I feel a little less able to ever believe in those things again. We de-emphasize love while we scrutinize sex, and why are we scrutinizing sex in the first place, outside of the lacking of what we expected it to provide? We attach some grandness to it, some buzz, that it can’t live up to because, well, it’s just sex. It’s mythos lies in the giggling and high fives of friends, the images of media, America’s green nature on the subject; without affection, it is simply a pleasureable sensation, something akin to a massage at the spa.

 By the time I arrive home my pant legs are soaked halfway up to my shins, rings of salt dust layering around their ends. Seth is asleep on the couch, an episode of “Taxi” glowing from the television. I peel off my jeans carefully, making sure not to touch the frozen ends to my skin.  The tips of my toes are still numb as I crawl into bed. Every now and again I hear the faint sound of Danny Devito’s animated ranting. I grab an extra pillow and pull it to my chest, drifting off to the low hum of my fan and the canned laughter of a 1970’s studio audience.

 

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No One Knows the World is Upside Down Wednesday, May 21 2008

The people around me are garden-variety in many ways- most are mere carbon copies of carbon copies of various menial drinking acquaintances and lovers from my past. The conversations are often performative and recycled, but there seems to be something attractively safe about all that. Every unwitting misogynist who passes the time discussing sports or noting attractive women, every brown rooted blonde reciting her father’s politics, is another reinforcement for throwing in the towel and letting it all pass by with a laugh, and another way to avoid the weightier things that matter.

But if there is a silver lining in being depressed to the point of apathy, it’s that I find myself to be a wholly better human being – I’ve been beaten into some sort of doe-eyed innocence that affords loads of genuine empathy, regardless of how trivial or shortsighted the cause of anguish. There is never an angle or an end (although there is always percieved to be one). It just seems that when one is brimming with meloncholy, they are much more aware and sensitive; less apt to take advantage of someone, no matter how petty the use or the object. It’s also much easier to look past the mundane and find the good when one is searching desperately for it.

And besides – what’s not garden-variety about someone who’s lost their wits and ended up working at a shit job with no direction?

It’s a breezy Wednesday night in June, and the patio the is teeming, half of the crowd constitued of Captain’s employees drinking the same drinks and playing the same songs and having the same conversations that we did last week. The Police ring out from the speakers but no one seems to listen to what they’re saying. They just bob their heads and laugh in the glow of the red and yellow neon that washes over the patio.

Joe is saying things to the girl from Bagel Shack to make her think he’s sensitive, Devin is saying things to a group of guys that implies she’s comfortable and experienced with sex, Jamileth is telling Brad that it’s fine when it’s not, Tina is denying sleeping with Adam when she did, I trade stares with Devin when I really want to approach her, Tim is pretending to be interested in the vacation story of a skinny blonde with a pink dress and Becky pretends she isn’t thinking about her mother while Lana makes scornful comments about the guy she likes. We are all stifling our deepest impulses. No one sees the desperation in the others; most don’t even see it in themselves.

We want those that don’t want us and we’re annoyed by those who do (unless they have a pretty face and don’t express it). Our conversations aren’t much more than a manipulation of our thoughts and desires and impulses and beliefs. The guys walk a fine line of conversational attitudes towards girls they’ve never taken the time to know while the girls are drawn to the most attractive thing that’s aloof. We suppress opinions, shake hands and smile with those we deplore; the whole thing is an act, a huge, elaborate act that’s so well pulled off that we’re not even sure who we are or what we want or who we love. We have souls, but we choose not to acknowledge or share them.

One doesn’t need love to have a good fuck, but it seems we forge and foster awkwardness and isolation. These days one-night stands feel like I’m fucking myself, fucking my ego, not someone whose company I appreciate. Even if I enjoy their conversation, a submerged iceberg of apprehension and rememberances of past are apt to ruin the comfort. There should be affection. There should be comfort. Perhaps it’s this self-imposed isolation that makes our heads spin when we find a real connection. Perhaps I just think too much.

A little after midnight I slip out of the scene early with Kevin. We pass through the haloes of streetlights, his bellowing laugh ringing out in the quiet night, a few strands of his shaggy blonde mop glued to his forehead by perspiration, and suddenly the weight of my thoughts is lifted. Probably the most intelligent, self-actualized and true person at Captain’s, Kevin and I spend the tail-end of most nights together, discussing history of politics or Thoreau. Heavyset and often seen sweating, redfaced and wearing the same dingy tie dye t-shirt, he is slightly green around the edges, possessing a certain ‘aw, shucks’ demeanor that is the result of a small town upbringing, although these days I consider to be an asset rather than a setback.

If the rest of the world were more like him, things would be simpler, easier, funnier, more logical, less complicated…but also much more boring. This isn’t to say that Kevin is a bore in any sense (quite the opposite actually), but rather that his simplicity and honesty take away the maddening complexities of life and the human condition. I identify with Kevin, and I’d like to be more like him, which is certainly a better person. But I begin to wonder if me being a better person entails a less interesting, less happy and more lonely existence.

I’ve been living logically for far too long. I miss the feeling of buying into something wholeheartedly, of being a gullible, dumbstruck fool. Quiet nights and intellectual debate are probably healthier and more enriching in the long run, but I miss being less self-actualized. I’ve tried to break from it, mentally drawing up a crush or executing a night of foolish drinking antics, but I think I’m at the point where something needs to come to me. You can’t plan for that sort of thing; it’s essentially guaranteeing failure. Planning to have a lot of money and a wife and kids and a house and happiness is exactly why we take tap water jobs and get into bad marriages and have kids too young. You can’t search for happiness. You can’t plan whimsy. To do so is to deaden it, to kill it before it has the chance to blossom. I can’t bring myself to search for it anymore.

In the meantime, Kevin and I leave the bar early to smoke grass, listen to the Beatles and discuss philosophy while the rest of them complicate their lives trying to be something they’re not. I do not know if he shares the inexplicable envy of the unwitting world that I possess.

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Let’s Just Pause and Add Our Own Intentions Tuesday, May 20 2008

             The second floor (formally The Crow’s Nest) had been remodeled to resemble the trendier clubs in town that were doing more business. Trembling and impractically small steel tables and stools littered the blue-tiled floor in a desperate attempt at a chic art deco feel. Even cheaper was the way the patrons dove right into the act, wearing their best pointy collared shirts and sleek dresses meant for more swanky affairs. A wildly futile idea to install a DJ loft with no exit had failed after one attempt, so the equipment was often placed into a cramped set-up in the back of the room, the pool table pushed against the wall to await splashes of beer and the digs of high heels. Throngs of people trying to be something they aren’t in a place that’s trying to be something it isn’t.

 With a core of my friends having moved out of town, lately I had been spending my weekend nights alone, and their presence looming began to feel what most of the world feels about Monday.  The weekends were what really showed you how lonely you were. Seth had worked Saturday mornings at a butcher shop near Cincinnati since he was a teen, and with him and Amber not speaking he was rarely around for the weekend, save for his Saturday night bar shift, which I usually showed up for early in order to save money on drinks.  Seth and I played classic rock on the jukebox and discussed our respective Friday nights (mine usually consisting of having a few drinks by myself and falling asleep watching our fish swim in the aquarium). It was my favorite time of the evening, before the place began to fill in and the closest semblance to a confidant was available for idle chatter.

 

When that time ended,  I usually sat perched at the marble bar staring blankly at some Mountain West Conference basketball game I couldn’t care less about, stabbing at the ice in my drink with a little red straw and thinking about a girl I knew who used to attend Colorado State as one of their players drains a three. I am unable to live in the present – only in the past and future, and anymore it feels like I’m losing the ability to live in the future. There is only the past, and the past has been a bitter experience.

 

            Every now and again a raccoon-eyed girl will approach the bar to get cranberry and vodkas for her friends, and we will be faced with the prospect of idle chatter while she waits for the bartender to make change and I wait for my life to begin. The conversation is patronizing and hollow, but not in the way it used to be. There used to be excitement in having this window of opportunity to impress a dolled-up girl with highlights who smells like cherries.  Now it’s almost an unwanted distraction.

 

            As the night goes on, the room swells and the music becomes more misogynistic and devoid of feeling. The people are more banal and their breath smells like my father’s. There are lessons to be learned from even the buffoon, but their points are often made in retrospect – at the time they seem entirely green and tedious. It feels more often than not that I’m watching a parade of some sort, with very little actual involvement.

 

            The girls get sloppier and pile into the bathroom to take bumps or talk about the guy they plan to go home with (though I imagine most of them would rather be with a boy from their past; a skinny shaggy haired kid from adolescence). The guys slur their father’s opinions or discuss how awesome Tom Petty is or take one more shot than they need to.  Every now and again they cross paths long enough to exchange menial, drunken banter that is only a formality, a pre-cursor. Most nights I look at them and think about how truly pathetic it is that they take each other home. I reach into my past and see the pathetic nature of my sexual relationships, and the pathetic relationships of those I laid. It wouldn’t be so sad if we were ourselves.

 

            Eventually watching it all gets to me, so I saunter through the red brick streets alone, passing the howling and cackling of the care-free people around me as I head for another bar for reasons I can’t quite discern. They are still trying. They still have hope. They still have faith that it’s not all a joke.

 

            The thought often crosses my mind that I’d be better off staying in at home, that I’m merely going through the motions of a process that I no longer believe in or derive joy from. Sometimes I just find myself bored, sometimes the solitary joint I’ve smoked gets to me and I feel the need to hit the town. Sometimes I’m just throwing up a Hail Mary to evade loneliness. Perhaps I’ll meet someone or run into someone. Of course, I always will, but they rarely seem to awake me from my numb and lonely slumber.

 

            On a warm October night I trudge the hill from our apartment to the bar sometime after midnight, only to find that the second floor is already jammed with the participants of the parade. I’m leaning against the brick wall of the patio, smoking a cigarette and pondering the location of my next barstool, when Devin appears from around the corner. We haven’t spoken much outside of agreeable chatter ever since her admittance that she was too ‘emotionally invested’ in me.

 

From what I had seen and heard from afar, she had been on a recent kick of excessively making out in the public eye, all a part of her giving the general idea that she possessed appeal (which everyone knew she had) and sexual prowess (which everyone knew she hadn’t), attempts that were thinly veiled and yet earnestly heartbreaking. Lately she had been flirtatious at work, and I could see the glint in her eye that existed when we first met, although I still didn’t trust it. I’ve seen that glint in her eye, and it’s a hollow, play-acting glance, one she’s gleaned from magazines and cinema and gossip; one that a guy like me has no part of. I am uncertain as to what the appeal is, but I’m quite sure it isn’t me.

           

            She is wearing a sleek black dress, with a white, stringy shawl, and her hair is swooped and pulled back tightly. Her make-up is excessive, but it’s adorable in the sense that she’s trying, in her own way; she looks like she stepped out of a different era, and I have reservations about the more superficial aspects of that, but I admire her individuality that bleeds into the whole exercise.

 

She enters with a group of friends, one of whom I notice as one of the guys she’d been seeing casually lately. The group filtered upstairs as she hung behind to say hello. Her tipsy body sways languidly as we make idle conversation, and the thought begins to creep into my head that I miss her.

           

           “You look really nice tonight,” I say as a peace offering of sorts – Devin is usually trying to extract my attraction from me, as if she’s perturbed that it isn’t there.

           

            “You think I look sexy,” she says in a mocking tone, a smile creasing her face as she squints her eyes and bunches up her nose. She sways closer towards me, until I can feel her breath.

           

             “I think you look nice,” I reiterate, my voice sounding like Kermit the Frog’s as our noses now press together. She puts her lips to mine, and I kiss her back a second or two before pulling away slightly. This all feels like a part of the warped need for attention via the exhibition of physical affection to satisfy ego. This is not at all what I want.

           

              “We haven’t done this for awhile,” she says with a bubbly giggle, and I begin to wonder why we’re doing it. Alcohol? To impress someone? To encite jealousy? The thought that she is attracted to me, or wants to do this outside of an image-conscious motive does not cross my mind. Rather than think it through, I kiss her again, and as she sways and stumbles on her heels, I hold her up as best as my slender frame will allow me.  We twirl and kiss, and I slide my fingers around her ears, and I let myself enjoy it for a brief moment before I retract into my shell.

 

            “You’re here with someone,” I whisper, our faces still close enough to smell each other’s breath and study each other’s blemishes. “And it just seems that when we’re in public…” I trail off and let go of her arms, my shoulders slumping. “”It just seems like it’s for attention.”

 

            “Dan, it’s not,” she purrs. “I miss you.”

 

            “Look, go hang out with him. We’ll talk later, or something, ok?” I kiss her once more before she leaves, but it seems forced, and as she walks back upstairs I wonder why I can’t seem to get excited about this girl. I conclude after a another drink and a few cigarettes on the patio that I can’t get excited about her because I can’t trust that she genuinely likes me, and decide to march upstairs and tell her so.

 

            “I really miss you, too” I say, resting my forehead on hers. It occurs to me that I’m continually focused on her breath, and that this is likely due to the fact that I hadn’t felt someone else’s breath against my skin in months. It’s also always been a reminder that kisses aren’t as advertised: there’s clumsiness and hot, alcohol-tinged breath and it’s usually is occuring for reasons other than passion. Being able to feel the warmth of someone, to see the little veins in their eyes, to believe that when they’re kissing you it’s because they generally care about you and want to display affection; I’m not sure that I’m capable of that. I would be kidding myself to think that someone striving to be as elegant as Devin was would pin the hopes caused by black and white glamour magazine ads on me, but I do get the feeling it’s tied into this twisted world of illusion and ego gratification. And I don’t really see the appeal in that anymore.

 

“I miss you, too, ok? But you’re on a date with someone…or at least you’re dressed that way…and you always tell me that you kiss people for attention…I don’t want to be the guy you kiss for attention, ok?”

 

            “I don’t really like him all that much. And I miss kissing you.” Despite the gin-soaked wavering of her voice she says it with assurance. “Kissing you is comfortable.” I kiss her forehead gently, and it’s so pleasing that I do it again and again and again, licking the taste of make-up from my lips as she hugs my slim frame. I’d kiss her mouth, only I can see out of the corner of my eye that her companion is watching us.

 

“And as far as attention…Dan, know me for who I am. When I kiss you, it’s beyond all of that stuff. When we kiss it’s comfortable and I like it. But if you feel differently…” She walks off before the ellipses can trail from her sentence, and I begin to walk towards the door, unsure of how to handle the situation but certain that it’s not to be handled in the Crow’s Nest when she’s on a date.

 

I replay the incident about fourteen times or so on the walk home. It seems much better the second time around – more earnest, more doe-eyed, more real. I begin to wonder if I’m not allowing her a chance, or if I’m simply keeping myself from the inevitable hollow and careless ending. Sooner or later, I’m going to have to step back into the world, and be idiotically passionate about something, and pursue it, and potentially be jaded even further than I am. I seek earnesty and affection, and perhaps I have found it, but perhaps it is merely Lucy holding the nose of a football, beckoning me to try and kick it. She usually pulls it away. But I cannot wait for conditions to be perfect.

 

I can walk away, and retract into my solitude, and say ‘well, that was nice’. If I think nothing of it, no ill can come of it. This is how it’s always gone for the two of us, and it makes things go smoothly, but it’s insane not to notice the affection and confusion festering as a result of it. No one’s been as warm and interesting to me as Devin in years, and it boggles my mind given the apathetic and deadened person I see in the mirror every morning.

 

 We’re seeing two different things, her and I. Her vision is one of an elegantly dressed seductress, gazing passionately, cherry lips parted in anticipation. This is the vision that the boys want, that garners attention, that she laces her every word to incite. I’m seeing a confused but bright soul stumble through all of this madness. I see the blemishes she’s piled make-up on. I see the girl in the hooded sweatshirt pondering the dualities of love. She is dressed up for the show, and she’s putting on her act, and I’m not sure which version just kissed me, nor do I understand why.

 

 Perception splinters the reality of two individuals, of an individual from the rest of the world. But there is a universal understanding gasping for air. One has to believe that to be able to face the day. I don’t know what Devin thinks when she kisses me or why she kisses me, as frankly I’m unsure if I’ve given her any good reason to, but when she looks me in the eye, I think we resonate with that understanding. But perhaps that’s just my perception.

 

 As is always the case when Devin and I do this, we are quick to have a discussion about the reasoning and ramifications of the incident. She often approaches the situation meekly, almost apologetically, which I recognize as the result of my persistent coldness. Perhaps she has to justify herself to me, as I’m quick to doubt her. Perhaps we both just think too much. It’s a quiet Tuesday at Crow’s Nest, and we avoid each other for a futile period before slipping outside to the top of the staircase.

 

 “You shouldn’t get involved…more,” she pauses, almost as if she’s contemplating the loaded implications of the word ‘more’. She grits her teeth and sighs, a strand of her bangs floating languidly like a streamer.  “You shouldn’t get involved more with me if you think that I’m not going to be the right version of me all the time.” She pauses to collect herself, and I want to hug her to end the visible frustration she has, although it’s certainly endearing; I always seem overly flattered to notice that someone had spent a great deal of time thinking about me. I decide I will kiss her if the chance arises. “I’m not trying to run around on you…I figure that you realize that when I’m with you that’s me with you…but I’m not only with you.” She lets out a grunt. “This is not clear at all.”

 

 “I don’t…Devin, I just want you to be genuine with me…I don’t want you to myself and I’ll accept any version of you that you are…but I don’t want to kiss you in public while you’re on a date with another guy.”

 

 “What about other times?”

 

 She puts down her head, flicking her eyes back up at mine, and I know it’s a move she’s rehearsed, but something about the situation just seems genuine, too genuine and clumsy and embarrassing to be something of glossy magazine fodder and so I kiss her, deeply, pushing her body up against the back of the wall. For the first time in as long as I can can remember, I am making the move, I am initiating the kiss. Kissing is caring, and caring is trying, and trying is hope, and I’ve just dove right back into the whole sordid mess.

 

Pulling away, I give her an intense look, a look that is so burning and real that I haven’t the slightest clue how it’s percieved. I am now a fool, a gullible, naive, fool, and I’ve given her the license to the identity she’s always craved. I am trusting her with this, and it goes against every principle I’ve laid out for myself in this post-apocolyptic wasteland.

 

It feels kind of nice.

 

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And It Breaks Me Up To Hear It Monday, May 19 2008

“We’re having a cigarette after this,” Jamileth says flatly as I’m staring off at the breaded mushrooms bobbling in the crackling grease pool like numbered lottery balls around the confines of a fryer basket.

 

“You’re the boss,” I say, hurling a hunk of sauerkraut that smacks the flat grill with a sizzle akin to a tire splashing through a puddle. Jamileth, freshly graduated from college and without a plan, is within a year of my age (which is about as close as it gets with this crowd), and had recently been promoted to an assistant manager position that mainly entailed working a double shift on the days the bosses were out golfing.

 

She is the daughter of a prominent indoor soccer player in Cleveland, exotically pretty with a dark complexion. Rather sharp-tongued and world-weary, she seems to see the idiocy that surrounds us, although you wouldn’t notice at first glance of her pointy shoes or her penchant for techno music. Like many women who know their way around a bar or kitchen, she is keen to tell the world that she’s a total bitch (which is usually an indication of a soft soul).

 

We had both worked nearly every Monday and Tuesday dinner shift together that spring, which were the aforementioned nights where the bosses weren’t around to corral our more lazy employees, leaving the two of us to hammer out the bulk of the work. We often planned cigarette breaks as we darted around each other to the hisses of fryers and the chirps of timers, wiping away sweat and gritting our teeth and cursing our co-workers, who were most likely out on the patio chatting with friends or slicing tomatoes in the back while discussing who slept with whom the previous night.

 

 

 “I need to get out of here,” she says, exhaling smoke with a sigh and running a hand through her long, dark hair. Having cleared the tail end of the dinner rush, we’re sitting on the top of one of the splintered picnic tables on the patio, a location and time normally reserved for conversation about her boyfriend or the incompetence of our co-workers. This catches me slightly off-guard, as conversations that start like this are the type that I’ve come to dread in recent years.

 

I have been working at Captain’s for a little over seven months now, nearly a year after graduating from college. My final year in school had been marred by the depression of The Girl moving away to Phoenix, which had led to a foregoing of studies and job searches and grad school applications, a stagnancy that I still haven’t managed to shake off. Everything since Her has just been another thing without Her in it, and Captain’s is one of those things. I don’t even think much of Her anymore, although Her ghost hangs over my days and has separated my history into before and after.

 

Still living in this town often feels like keeping on a searchlight of sorts; for a good while everywhere I went carried a reminder or specific memory of Her – where we saw a concert or where we kissed for the first time. But as time passed I began to forge a new identity here, a post-graduate, post-apocalyptic world that was devoid of any sentiment tied to Her.

 

“What are you still doing here?” she asks after a long silence, furrowing her brow and taking a drag of her cigarette before resting her elbow on her knee and perching it on her fingers in a vertical position.

 

The ‘why are you still here?’ questions have begun to grow by the week, shifting from a pleasant, getting-to-know you conversation starter to a sort of perplexed astonishment. I dodge them hastily with lies about fictitious job searches and grad school finances, and to me it feels like the only real falsehood I project to the world anymore. I don’t hit on girls, I’m void of any sort of ends to use my fellow man as a means (save the occasional grass dealer), and I don’t aspire to be anyone or anywhere other than where I am. But sometimes I feel the need to hide even that, because for reasons I can occasionally grasp, those traits are all perceived as rather unsettling.

 

“I don’t know,” I mumble, too weary to go on stage. “I like this job. I like the people I work with…I’m happy here.” She bites her thumbnail pensively with the same hand that cradles her cigarette, glancing at me as if she’s incredulous, but calculating whether she wishes to say so.

 

“What do you want to do when you leave here?” Usually I throw out some vague answer that I haven’t looked into in the slightest – teaching, the Peace Corp, grad school. The truth is I’ve never put thought into leaving here.

 

“I don’t know.” I let smoke trickle from my nostrils and stare out at the peach colored waning sun being swallowed by the town’s diminutive skyline. Jamileth waits for a continuation of my thought process that isn’t coming.

 

“Brad is annoying me,” she grunts with a roll of the eyes, swiping a stray hair from her eyes. Brad is Jam’s current boyfriend, seven years her senior and an employee of Captain’s for over a decade. She often complains about him over these cigarette breaks like he were an incorrigible child. I get along well with Brad, and usually deflect these complaints with a stock response, but today his supposed misdeeds have saved me from taking a look at myself in the mirror.

 

“Why’s that?”

 

“He’s always complaining about the way I leave the store at night.” Brad opens the store, while Jam usually closes. “He lists off what I did wrong all the time…it bugs the hell out of me. I should list the things he messes up when I come in.”

 

I suspect that their arguments aren’t rooted in Jam’s forgetting to dice tomatoes for the lunch rush, but rather in the time-sensitive nature of the relationship. In this town, romances are fleeting, because if they aren’t one has to make drastic decisions. Brad is aiming on landing a law enforcement job soon in Florida, and from what I can gather she’s been searching for some sign of a future between them. It seems that all of the relationships around me are filled with farcical complications meant to distract from a looming question that both parties are aware of but neither wishes to address.

 

 

 For the duration of our break, she vents about his inability to take the cardboard out, but I understand that we’re really talking about how we’re both smarter than the lives we lead and the romantic choices we make, and we both know that as long as we keep smoking cigarettes and complaining about banalities neither one of us has to grow up or challenge ourselves.

 

I envy her for her ability to believe she will find a place to go and someone to go with.

 

                                               * * *

 

None of them know yet. They don’t know that they’re not going to marry the love of their life; they don’t know that ‘the real world’ isn’t going to make them feel any more like an adult; they may never know that money or a big city won’t make them happy. They haven’t realized that one day they’re going to wake up next to someone they married because of timing and go to an uninspiring job they took because of debts, and live a life of expectations that they rebelled against for so long. They haven’t realized that they’re walking right into their biggest fears willingly.

 

 But they go quietly – and it always feels like someone has died when I hear that they took the job they said they’d never take or marry the person who was no different than the assorted partners they’d stumble home with on the weekends. And perhaps that’s why I like it here so much – these people are still alive. They are yet to negotiate the settlements of their hopes and aspirations. Still undefined by careers or spouses or children, which is where I feel I will always be, so it sort of makes sense to get as much mileage out of the situation as I can before they all pass by me and I’m alone in my thinking that no job or city or friends or woman is ever going to save me.

 

I want to warn them all that they’re always going to feel this way. Cast your aspirations aside! What you truly want is right in front of you. Confusion, loneliness, self-doubt, a lack of identity – your spouse will not erase that; no amount of money will make it easier. Do not wait to live, or seek out a better living – the best time is now, when anything is possible, because as years go on your options will get picked clean.

 

I don’t know what’s sadder – that they submit themselves or that I refuse to.

 

Pinning one’s pursuit of happiness to an idealized reality is dangerous, and often leads one to look away from or resist what’s in front of them. But is it any more dangerous than my own disposition? Do I deny or resist any less?

 

Declaring hopelessness is not as bleak as it sounds – certainly there is an inherent sadness involved, but there is a natural element to it of sorts. Things are found rather than being forcibly molded. Sadness, pain and doubt can be accepted rather than masked. Hopelessness can lead to happiness, but perhaps this is a lesson I am learning all too soon. While I think it’s important for me to cast illusions aside and enjoy life in the rubble, I find something troubling about my guarded inability to give anything a chance. I can’t even find excitement – proper, gut-twisting excitement – in a spontaneous kiss from a beautiful girl who is relatively new to my life. There is something wrong with me.

 

There was an idea, once, of ascension. Of leaving this town for a place where relationships didn’t have a time-sensitive brick wall dictating their end, where people had figured themselves out properly and everything didn’t seem so transitional. And then one day everything just stopped. Since then it’s seemed like a bunch of waiting, not for a spark or a better condition, something akin to the parking lot after a concert. The show is over, the time crawls, you’re not moving and you just want to get out.

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How I Learn to Please Monday, May 19 2008

The sun has broken over the red brick path in the center of town, and it still remains early enough to be quaint; most everyone is still sleeping, and the only ones out are the coffee-and-walk senior citizens, a few one-night stands gone wrong, the sullen employees hosing down the bar patios, and the stray bleary-eyed student accompanied by visiting parents. Jackie leans against a light post outside of a Wendy’s, burrowing her hands under her armpits as she peers down the street with puckered lips and a squint. A slight ring of black eyeliner encircle bright blue eyes that look out of place on her dark complexion, which is splashed with a few patches of imperceptible freckles and framed by the two jagged slits of dark brown hair that swoop down from the sides of her bangs. Poking out from behind them is a pair of elf-like ears studded with modest diamonds. She’s barefoot, holding a pair of heels, and wearing a hooded Michigan sweatshirt over a sleek black dress that clings halfway down her thighs. In the morning light her preparation for the previous evening looks somewhat pitiable.

“Thanks for coming,” she whispers, wiggling her pink toes as she glances down at them. I shake a cigarette from my pack and hand it to her before she can ask.

“How was last night?”

“Terrible” she mumbles, her lips clamped as she lights it. Jackie has been smoking for eight years, but still handles a cigarette like a naïve middle-schooler. “I got raped.” Her bangs flutter upwards as she exhales. “Well, practically.” She says it as if getting raped were something akin to losing your friends at the bar or running up too high a tab.

“What does ‘practically’ mean?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” She slides her arms around my pathetically slender hips and places her chin on my shoulder. “Can we not just talk about it?”

On Saturday morning the sidewalks around the houses off-campus are usually strewn with broken bottles and vomit, so I carry her on my back for the last two blocks back to her place, no small task given that I only outweigh her by about fifteen pounds. ‘Faster!’ she cackles, digging her knees into my ribs and tightening her grip on my neck. This is as affectionate as she’s ever been in public with me. Normally she won’t even hold my hand unless she’s drunk or her friends aren’t around.

I met Jackie during our sophomore year on a night she had walked into a bar to find a girl with a tattoo on the small of her back licking her then-boyfriend’s ear near the pool tables. She led her friend out the door by the hand and marched to a party she knew of across campus. She fucked two people there, in the same bathroom, two hours apart. I was the latter, and the fifth person she’d ever been with. I’d imagine she’s approaching the twenties now.

Somehow, I always seem to end up with her, or girls like her. There’s a myriad of reasons as to how this can happen: too many drinks, a lack of new music, the thrill of slumming, the notion of possibly being a muse of some sort, the stimulating conversation, the possession of drugs, pity in a few cases; sometimes I serve as nothing more than a break from the norm. We all stray from types every now and again.

I’m brooding and I’m heartfelt and I’m capable of giving the idea that actual caring exists beyond a mutual appreciation of beauty (not normally found amongst a crowd of suitors that sings “Born in the U.S.A.” with a patriotic sentiment). And she’s right to think that I care. And because I care, I’m not usually a part of all of what are considered the more glamorous aspects.

The Saturday nights of balancing on heels in slit dresses, flashing hollow laughs and smiles; none of that is reserved for me. I get the Thursday evenings in bars, the quiet evenings in, the hooded sweatshirts and jeans. I don’t normally get to animalistic groping in the bar bathroom by way of fifteen minutes of light conversation, I don’t get to drunkenly toss her over my shoulder like a dominated Neanderthal as everyone laughs dotingly, and someone makes a reference about sex. Instead I get to clean up the mess. I get solemn shifts to the bedroom signaled by way of hour-long, occasionally tear-filled conversation. And maybe she is spoiled and selfish and petty…but then again, if we were to fly over a gold miner from Uzbekistan and let him observe your life for a day, what do you suspect he would conclude?

“Do you have any pot?” she asks as her heels hit the concrete of her front porch with a thud. My back crackles like bubble wrap as I let her go.

“Back at my place.”

“I can borrow Anna’s car.”

Jackie wants to get high with me as often as she wants to sleep with me, which is about once every other half moon. The posing of the question is more of a direct statement that she’s ready, as she assumes that I am willing at any time (she is correct). She dashes in to change and grab the keys and twenty minutes later we’re cruising the narrow strip of road wedged between inert cornfields in an immaculately clean silver Honda that still smells like a new car, despite the fact that it has thirty-six thousand miles on it.

A gaudy sparkling disco ball hangs from the rearview mirror, along with a beaded necklace and a tassel from her friend Anna’s high school graduation. The backseat is littered with a pile of sweatshirts, some clothing catalogs, and a pair of cork platform shoes. There are three CD’s in the center console – Garth Brooks, Christina Aguilera and a mix titled ‘Slutty Songs’, but Jackie had asked me to grab 10,000 Maniacs from my room. Her mother used to listen to Natalie Merchant while she made dinner.

She wants to hear the one with the one with the ‘who-who-who’s’, and as she bobs her head along to it dreamily while taking a pull from the joint I smile at the irony in the fact that she’s singing along to Natalie’s warning against the spoiling of children.

“Play the one with the banjo next” she says, coughing as she hands the joint over to me.

“A lot of them have banjo in it.”

“The one about the boy named Jack.”

“That’s about Jack Kerouac.”

She just smiles and sings along with the ‘who-who-who’s’, pouting her lips theatrically and floating her hand out the window. I want to be her, the sun shining on my highlights, riding around with someone who adored me, singing along to breezy music with flamboyance a few hours after I’ve been (practically) raped.

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All We Are is All Alone Monday, May 19 2008

We went from bar to bar – rickety service elevators in meat-packing districts opening to purple velvet, fish tanks, designated make-out rooms, red lighting, drinks by the bottle. They paid for everything and introduced me to their ‘fag hags’, one of whom was Ellen. She had black hair that looked red in certain light, marble blue eyes and wore a black cocktail dress with a long coat that looked like something a businessman would wear. She had a fierce intellect, a wealthy family and a studio apartment on Bedford. Why she held my hand in the dead of winter outside the Christopher St. station, looked into my eyes longingly and kissed me, I’ll never know.

She ran five miles and threw up her lunch and spent fifteen minutes fidgeting under an incubator and read glossy magazines with models on the cover and put on glittery, sparkling war-paint and bunched her brightly colored toes over thin, curved planks and bit her lip as she stared into the funhouse mirror of her mind. And she most certainly didn’t do it for a guy like me.

These slip-ups were apt to happen back in school, but this wasn’t just any girl, it was a Manhattan girl, who was taking a semester off from Brown, who traveled with her sister to London and Greece at seventeen, who lived in a brownstone, who fucked lawyers for clothes and vacations. Girls from my hometown keep pens from hotels in Toronto to remind them of weekend trips. But when I looked into her eyes I noticed that Manhattan girls are the same as Ohio girls; they only have fancier costumes and better opportunity.

She pointed out the apartment they used for all the exterior shots on Friends, which was on her street, and I looked up at it as we walked by, flakes of snow breezing through the glow of the streetlight. It was that moment, the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album cover, that solidified my status as an adult, as truly existing in the world. Here I was, walking through the Village (was I? I was pretty sure I was) with a beautiful woman, having spent the night stumbling around lower Manhattan with wealthy trendsetters, a week away from starting work on a nationally televised late night show and what’s more adult, more cool than that? And yet on another level, it seemed nothing had changed.

I had always thought that when I got to this level of adulthood, of ‘someday’, that things would somehow be different. But everything was all too familiar. Her breath was stale and beer soaked and she had cocaine-sprinkled mucus caked around the rims of her nostrils and our lips mashed together as we tried to kiss-and-walk and it was just as sweaty and smelly and confusing and nerve-racking as it’s always been. I didn’t feel what I’d expected cool and adult to feel like, which was in control, or in love, or assured of purpose. I still felt like nothing more than a scared shitless kid lying awake in the apartment of a girl who was mysterious and flitting and went to an Ivy League school and was bi-coastal, and who despite all that seemed like nothing more than an equally scared shitless kid with a more desirable lifestyle. It felt like nothing new.

Whenever one is gazing around at the living quarters of a stranger they plan to or have gone to bed with, there is always a moment – sometimes as brief as a millisecond – where the little David Byrne voice pops into their head and says ‘How did I get here?’, and I hear it as I am looking at a picture on her nightstand of her and her brother?/boyfriend?/friend? at the bottom of a ski slope. She is wearing a puffy North Carolina blue coat and she has an orange tan that match the lens of her goggles. I hear a car honk in the distance.

We are adversaries, I thought to myself, watching her sleep. That’s all we know, people like us, isn’t it? Adversarial romance. Pushing you against a wall and going into make-out rooms and batting eyelashes and carefully selecting words packed with meaning set to incite their receiver and trading stares that are anything but honest. We are afraid of each other, and we have to be. Because if I hang around with you strange, new people long enough, I will become just another guy and my Midwestern mystique will become Midwestern simplicity and you will become another girl and your sultry mystique will appear to be nothing more than a pathetic need for attention, and only then will we be able to give each other honest looks and words, and there’s no quicker way to kill romance for people like us than to have that kind of honesty. I could love you, I thought, as she smiled in her sleep, but you’re only looking for those who want you. Or perhaps that’s what we were all looking for. I determine that the skier is a boyfriend and drift off to sleep.

I slip out a little after nine with an excuse that is met with sleepy murmurs and head on foot to Big Cup, the only place I know to go, my head buzzing in the gray Manhattan morning. Back at school, this is known as the ‘walk of shame’, where you are leered at by the walking seniors and visiting parents as you burp up beer from the night before and trip over your shoelaces. Here, nobody gives a fuck. I stop on my way there and puke in a garbage can, and I don’t think anyone notices.

“Welcome to New York!” Louis says with a wink, eyeing my previous day’s wrinkled clothes and unintentionally tousled hair. The thought occurs to me that he’s still not aware that I’m straight. He just laughs when I ask if Todd or any of the others have been by. A skinny black guy with pirate earrings and stoplight red pants says with a hand wave that none of them will be up for at least another two hours. On the train home a homeless man recites bad poetry. I give him four dollars.

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