[written last month. i wanted it to keep going because i liked it (so far) and i told myself to finish it but what with the break up and the new job and all, i don't *feel* like it anymore. but still, there a loads of good bits in it, if i do say so myself.]
Soon as I walk in, I have to duck because here come NEW AVENGERS VOLUME 7 flying at me.
She says, "Sorry, but the fucking Avengers is getting terrible!"
I say, as I pick up the book from the porch, "Is that all you've been doing all day, reading comics?"
"Yup. Jealous?"
I am and say so.
"You're home early. What, you got fired too?" she says because she's been out of work for six months and has stopped looking for a new job since the unemployment started rolling in. "Come on, change. We're going out."
"I just got home."
"Change. I'm going to change my underwear."
In my room I peel off my not a uniform/dress code slacks and polo and take off my shoes and socks. I look at myself in the full-length mirror hanging on my closet door. I need a tan. Maybe a wax. I take off my underpants. Or a serious trim? Those tattoos I got years ago, yes, they're expnading in very unflattering ways as my mid-section does. Am I loosing my hair? I must be the palest Hispanic person ever. When I suck in my gut, you can still see the lovehandles. On the floor next to my closet door is a p-air of boxers I know aren't mine. I haven't moved them since he threw them there a couple days ago. I pick them up and hold them to my face and inhale and they still smell like him. I put them on.
Later, at the bar we seem to end up when we're bored, she's on her phone talking to her boyfriend. He's some sort of musician and is on tour somewhere in the south. I wonder if the south is still The South? What kind of gigs do rappers line up in Scumbucket, Mississippi? For Tuesday afternoon there's a quite a bit of people here. It's not really a bar. More like a converted shack with a cooler of beer, a jukebox full of 1990's music, and too many stools. The city university is on spring break and these must be the kids who have nowhere else to be. You know, like home or a vacation or life. She's finally of her phone.
"I'm pretty sure he was getting a blow job while we were on the phone," she says.
I ask, "How can you tell?"
"You've seen enough porn to know what getting a blow job sounds like," she says but not at all angry nor surprised nor hurt. "He's out on tour, having a grand old time, meeting new folk and I'm stuck at home doing nothing (no offense). I'm going to get him to get a blood test done when he gets back. I don't need to get the clap from hist our groupies."
"That's just nasty. Getting a third hand venereal disease."
"Oh, as opposed to getting it first hand?" she says and we laugh. She finishes her beer and I finish mine and she goes to get us more.
I don't normally wear boxers. I wear briefs. Plain black or white briefs. He wears boxers. I'm not sure what it is when he takes off his pants, it's not like I have a weird underwear fetish, but when I see his boxers every time, it sort of melts me. Right now, however, I really wish I wasn't wearing them: I feel like my dick and balls are all over the place. I feel like I'm wearing a diaper underneath my jeans. Is this what women feel like when they're on their period and wear maxi pads? I keep wriggling and pawing at myself, I must look like I'm some sort of pervert out in public to get my jollies. How is it that these boxers can wedge themselves so far up my leg and ass that it feels like it could be a bad thong I'm wearing?
I look over at the bar and see some young black guy with long thin dreadlocks and terrible Buddy Holly-wannabe glasses and a black tee-shirt with the word OTIS on the front smile and trying to talk to her. She smiles back but doesn't seem to be saying anything. A beer in each hand, she turns to walk back to our table and the guy, get taps her on the shoulder and says something in her ear and still smiling turns to the guy and tell him to leave her the fuck alone. She sits across from me and hands me a bottle and says, "I think we're the two oldest people here." She looks around as if she thinks she can will everyone here away.
Later that night, I'm laying on top of my covers, naked, masturbating with my eyes closed and his boxers on my face and I'm inhaling as deeply as possible, thinking about the last time he was here. He's a little taller than me, and a little bit tougher looking than most guys I've ever been with. He was laying next to me here, just talking, laying on his stomach and I had my hand on his back, at the curve just above his ass, just feeling the finer hairs on my fingertips. I don't remember what I was saying but he was listening and asking questions, and with my hand working my dick furiously, it's not him naked or the sex we'd had that I'm thinking of, just him listening. Even when I jerk off, I jerk off in words.
In the morning I pick up the Avengers book and sit on the floor with my back to the couch and I start reading it. I'm sure I've read it before: months back they decided to reveal that for decades a bunch of superheroes were aliens in disguise, and they worked it out that they could bring tons of dead superheroes back because, well, they weren't themselves when they died, they were aliens. It's pure crap. Superheroes should stay dead when they die. I mean, what's the point of having tons of tension for months and huge hoopla around so and so dying if all comic book writers seem to be coming up with are stories to negate all the other ones? Continuity would be nice. She's right, Avengers suck.
First time I met her she's crying in her car in the parking lot of where I work, which is at an electronics store that's about to go under. On my lunch break, walking back to work from the sandwich shop at the other end of the lot, smoking a cigarette, and there's a black 2003 Civic with its hood a little crumpled and a primered quarter panel, there is a girl behind the wheel and she's crying. Oh, I do think that it's a little weird seeing someone crying in public without seeing a reason for it. But I often wonder whether or not these people, this girl, if they just got off a phone call that clearly went bad real quick. Did she just find out her husband was cheating on her with her sister? Did she just find out she's deathly ill? Did someone die and only now did she just find out? Did she fail all her classes? She lost her job, her kids? We all do such a great job out in the world, being little citizens who're mostly polite to each other, and mostly sane, and we go on thinking everyone else is as pleasant and happy as us. All it takes is a few tears to bring it all apart and start seeing each other as people.
I almost walk by and never again think about the girl crying in her car. But I hear music coming through the car's closed windows and she doesn't see me because she has her forehead on the wheel, sobbing away, I can see her shoulders shudder. I almost walk by but stop and knock on her window and she startles up and sees me and smiles and I smile and it's like her tears are gone.
Years later, it's morning and I've just now finishes re-reading the book she threw at the door and a couple more in the series (you know, to make sure it sucked all the way), and she sees me sitting there, nearly naked if not for his boxers. She comes out of her room, her afro all over on one side and her eyes are still a little puffy and she has her empty coffee mug in hand. She's wearing an old enormous tee-shirt that goes down mid thighs she cut up and now has no sleeves and a neckline that goes down to her stomach and her tits are half-exposed. She smiles and says, "Good morning," and goes to the kitchen and sets the coffee maker on.
Before, she lowers her window and asks me if she can help me with anything as she wipes away at her face.
"Are you okay?"
She says, "I'm fine. Sorry. Yeah, I was just sitting here..."
"Oh, I know. I'm sorry I shouldn't have bothered you, you know."
"No, it's okay. I must look like such a mess, huh? Crazy girl, crying in her car and you see me and probably think it's some terrible tragedy seeing a woman out in public like this."
I can't help it and say, "Well, pretty much, yeah."
"I'm fine. Thanks."
"Um...why are you crying?"
"It's so stupid."
"Tell me?"
"I was just driving over here to get some blank CDs and a new jump drive and this song comes on and I just couldn't help it."
"You're crying because a song came on your stereo."
"That's about it."
"A song."
"God, what a fucking spaz am I, right?"
"Which song?" I ask and her smile widens and hits play on her CD player and we listen to it in the parking lot of where I work.
She comes from the kitchen with fresh coffee for us both and sits on the couch next to me on the floor and asks me what I thought about the comics and we talk about that for a while. She thinks Luke Cage is being underused and now that he has a kid they're turning him into a cliche. I say what a cop out it is to reveal that there've been aliens in the Marvel Universe and that's the reason why so many things happened. We talk about the fucking Avengers for hours.
That first day, well, that night, she meets me outside when I get off work and asks me if I want to go to a house party somewhere in Inglewood. I say sure because why not and I get in her car and we're there in half an hour and we talk the whole way about the song and the album that made her cry earlier, and we talk about comic books, and she tells me about her boyfriend, and she asks me if I have one, and I tell her about working where I do, and she says she's been working at the same boutique since high school, and I ask about why her car looks the way it does, and she asks me how old I am, and I offer her a cigarette, and she says she doesn't know whose house we're going to, and I ask what her favorite movie is, and she asks me what I read besides comics, and we talk about what living in Lynwood (her) and living in Bellflower (me) is like, and we each say how much we'd much rather live somewhere that isn't Los Angeles, and she says she was just in Seattle for a on-tour visit to his boy friend, and I say I've not been out of town in years, and once we're off the freeway and up Hawthorne Boulevard and just off Washington Street, there's the house we're going to spend the night in, and there's people all over and they all look very sketchy in a high maintenance sort of way, and a group of girls watch as we park, all of them blonde and all of them appear to be suffering from a bad case of I'm-a-horrible-person-itis, and I say so, and she laughs, and I laugh, and she says, "Let's get the fuck out of here," and we do, and we end up talking all night in some Denny's in Culver City, and then, she drives me back just in time for my ten in the morning shift.
She's in the shower and I'm finally pulling on some jeans and a tee-shirt and we're going to the mall and try to see if we can re-live a moment of youth while exchanging those blouses she'd bought for her job even though her receipts are lost and she's worn two of them. She'll yell at the girl behind the counter, I know, until she gets her way, and when she does, we'll stop on the way home for some ice cream and probably go to the record store to look at all the music we want but can't afford, and she'll ask me what my favorite movie is.
I didn't say he should but after we had sex he saw my briefs on the floor and he put them on. He asked me whether they looked good on him and I think I sort of smiled and he didn't say anything but said he was going to wear them home.
Earlier, we were just walking through downtown Fullerton, peering into the closed shops and in the open tattoo parlors and in the overly-dramatic restaurants. Just a walk through a neighborhood neither one of us knew. Lots of college kids and Laz commented on this fact. Tough-looking Hispanic boys walking around in wife beaters holding hands with girls with way too much make up on; preppy south Orange County blond kids, looking more out of place than I think they think; no older folk, as if this town wasn't made for them. Laz says it's because of the university nearby, I say it's because this town is a hole. He laughs and his hand grazes mine and we cross the street when he sees a Batman symbol on a window and we must investigate.
A little later, we're sitting in traffic trying to get back to Bellflower. The radio is playing something I don't know and he's driving. I ask him what the music is and Laz says it's blah-blah-blah and he must see I've no idea what he's talking about and then he says if ever saw that generic comedy last summer that was number one for like month according to ticket sales, and I say I didn't. He looks at me like he's trying to figure out whether I'm making it up or not. I'm not, but that sort of stops that conversation. It takes us a half hour to move three miles. He's a frustrated, but when I told him just to take La Palma of Orangethorpe Avenue all the way down he said he'd rather do the freeway and here we are, again. He's gripping the steering wheel pretty hard.
Before Fullerton, he shows up right after I get out of the shower and I've a towel wrapped around me. At my door, he cocks his head to the right when he sees me and smiles and says hello and he's a little too adorable for his own good. He's wearing black jeans and a plaid short sleeve and a pair of sneakers that look as if they were dug out of the trash. Maybe his jeans are a little too tight for him but look at those shoulders and that chest. I mean, really, who can say not to that? He comes in and hugs me and kisses me and follows me to my room as I change. While in the bathroom shaving, I catch his reflection in the mirror as he sits on my bed and he's looking at my ass. He sees me looking at him and says how nice I look nearly-naked.
After the freeway, we're sitting at a terrible chain diner that isn't as nice as Denny's and we're having coffee and pancakes as the sun begins to set somewhere. The old lady who's our waitress keeps coming back every five minutes to check on us and always smiles and there's no one else here. Laz says there's this thing coming up at the Hollywood Bowl, something about a cast performance of some movie musical, do I want to go? I say sure and we're both being ridiculous programming our cell phones with the information. Under the table, he's tall enough that his knees are touching mine. He doesn't spoon sugar in his coffee but adds milk. He says next time he'll listen to me about driving back from Orange County; it took us three hours to get back even though it's normally a fifteen minute jaunt. He says he feels pretty gross and can he take a shower at my house and of course I say sure.
Later, after his shower, we have sex. We fuck. Something. I'm seriously wondering whether or not I should tell you the details. I mean, who doesn't love the sex details, right? Especially when the sex is good (because it was). But maybe I've already said too much already and I'm not even certain I like you yet. I'm pretty certain you don't know whether or not you even want to keep reading to find out whether or not you like me. I'm thinking if I tell you too much about Laz and I being naked together that's crossing a weird line. Like talking to your mom about something and the conversation turns into her telling you about when she was younger and was hopped up on something and having a threesome with your dad and her sister. You know, awkward. But then, I really want to tell you how Laz makes me feel and what I like about him being naked under me. I want to tell you all the noises he makes when I do this and this and this to him. I really want to tell you about the orgasms. And I really want to tell you how much I enjoy feeling him hard and wet and rigid through his clothes. But you'll see me differently. I mean, we don't know each other that well to start, but maybe I've decided you haven't earned me telling you that bit. And me telling you that I don't think you don't get to hear about it makes me think you think I'm a jackass. Such a odd dilemma between strangers. I'll say this: we have sex, we fuck. Something.
Now, he's in my underwear, looking at himself on my bathroom mirror, trying to catch how his ass looks in them, what his crotch looks like (he adjusts several times). He says it feels as if someone has his hands on his ass, holding it. He looks at me as he finally pulls on his jeans (they are, indeed, a little tight for him) and asks me what we're doing this weekend and I remind him I have to work and he says if he can come Saturday once I'm off and maybe we can watch a movie or something. Honest, I'm not sure if I even want to but I tell him, sure, why not, it'll be fun. He buttons his shirt and ties his shoelaces and I ask him why he doesn't spend the night and he says he has work in the morning and it's a long-ass drive from here back down to Venice and I say, oh, okay, and he leans over me and kisses me on the forehead and he leaves me there, naked on my bed and his boxers on my floor.
Much later, we're at the mall having ice cream and she says, "So he leaves wearing your panties?"
We're walking along somewhere in Lakewood. She wants to go to a comics shop near the college and because I've nothing better to do, I come along. The shops along the street are filled with college-age kids. Everywhere, kids. But they're not and I'm thinking about that time in the bar and I'm feeling us being the oldest people here. But they're not kids, these are adults, and suddenly my cardigan and plaid shirt make me feel like a tourist. Or a guy in his thirties trying to look like a guy in his twenties.
Another time, about a year ago, not long after I first me Laz, he has to ask me about my name. He says it's so strange that someone my age is named Horatio.
I say, "Supposedly, my mom was against it. She wanted to name after my dad's dad. Jesus-something or other. But because my dad is my dad and got his way, and because strangely enough way back when he was in college, he read Hamlet and decided his first boy would be named Horatio."
He says, "that's so ridiculous!" He laughs a little because it is pretty absurd. "But not as ridiculous as how I got my name."
I ask him and he tells me he was named after a comic book character from the early 1990's.
On the street, we stop by some Thai place and she says, "Notice there are tons more Thai restaurants everywhere now? Before it was like a treat, you know. Something you couldn't have every day. Now, you'd think Thai food was like McDonald's."
She's not wrong but what I don't point out is that she's reading the menu looking for her saitan with peanut sauce and pad thai to take home for dinner the same way folk always know they're going to get a big mac every time they're in a McDonald's.
Then, Laz says, "So, my mom was big into comic books and she saw this book at some second hand book store, a softcover collection of old British comics from Blast Magazine. She sees it and reads it at the book store - she says she couldn't afford it then. She reads it and say's it wasn't that good, that the art was pretty amateurish but the story was better than she thought it would be. But really, she liked the guy's name in it, the main character, and she said she decided when she was pregnant she would name a boy after the guy in the story. This guy, he's immortal, right? and the one thing he wants to do is die but he can't. The way my mother says it it's kind of romantic in a way, this guy, everyone and everything he's known keep dying while he keeps on living, so what's the point, you know? To me it just kind of sounds fucked up. And she likes the name so when I was born - she didn't have the problem of a husband - so she names me Laz. In the comic book, the guy's name is Lazarus Churchyard but his friends call him Laz, and she likes that better than Lazarus, you know, and so there you are: my name, Laz Churchyard Dominguez."
Of course, when he finishes his story, I laugh and he kisses me while calling me a horrible man.
There's no longer a comic book store where she thought there was one. It's a juice bar, filled with people (it's just after one in the afternoon) and I'm a little disappointed too. At the mall earlier, after our ice cream, I wondered after she mentioned the shop, if I could find a copy of that thirty-year old comic. Can I order it? But now, no, I can't find it here.
She says, "Well, we walked all this way, want a smoothie?"
Before the name conversation, months, I see Laz in Westwood, coming out of a movie theater as my sister and I are walking back to her car from dinner. I don't immediately think he's the most adorable thing on the planet the way I would in the future, but I hear his name from a girl whose arms are around his waist and she's smiling and he's smiling and this girl, she says, "Stop it, Laz!" and I knew then it was what I would name my kid if I ever had one. I didn't see him again for almost a year.
We sit after we get our smoothies. They're good. And neither one of us is saying anything, just enjoying the air conditioned air after the walk and the man who was standing behind us at the counter is getting loud enough that we can hear what he's saying to the very pretty brown girl behind the counter.
The girl behind the counter says, “But we don't sell those here, that's why.”
The customer says, “I just don't see why you can't just put this iced coffee in that blender behind you and turn it on for a few seconds?” He's holding a large clear plastic up from some generic coffee shop. Of course we're listening in.
“Uh, because we're not allowed to put milk in the blender is why.”
“God, just fucking do it. It's not like it's a big deal.”
“If it's isn't such a big deal why are you making a big deal about me not blending your milky coffee in our blender? There's a Starbucks two blocks up, go there.”
Ah, but if his glare could dismantle this little girl. He says, “Let me talk to the owner.”
“She's not here,” she says noticing the five-deep line this little asshole's helped create. “Now, I'm done talking to you and I'm going to help the young man behind you.”
He looks and five people behind him, none of them are on his side. He looks at the girl behind the counter of the juice bar and maybe he's about to curse at her but he doesn't and stomps out.
She sighs. The next customer, a pretty teenage-looking boy smiles at her. “What can I do for you?” He has beautiful fake green eyes.
Years ago, he invited me to his apartment for a beer. This is after we spent some time talking about the ridiculousness of the comics I was reading outside of a Starbucks after class. So long ago and still it's as if it's happening right now. Everything seems to always be happening at the same time in my head. Everything. Then. Now. Now, in his apartment that he shares with three other guys (only two bedrooms, one of them sleeps on the couch) and I look around and there's a futon in the main room facing a huge television set with all of the video game systems hooked up to it but no cable box. Shelves everywhere with records – vinyl – and CD's and DVD's and comic books seem to cover every available wall space. He sees me looking around and says none of it is his. Like he's embarrassed. Why did I come here?
We go to Target, after the mall, because we need some things for the house. The closest store is also a half block away from where I work and it's Thursday and I need to pick up my paycheck. We walk in and she grabs a shopping cart the size of my first car.
"Do we really need that?" I say.
"Maybe," she says, "let's see if we can fill it up."
We walk down the main aisle toward where the clothing departments are. There's a rack that looks like a broken and hobbled old skeleton with colorful swim suits and bikinis hanging off it. She stops and picks out a one-piece and holds it against me. She looks at me as if she's seriously considering getting me this and that I would seriously consider it wearing it at some point.
She says, "I like this color on you." She's serious. She drops it in our cart and we move on to where the lingerie is and she says, "I need a new bra."
We're both naked, our clothes lying on the floor, he's on top of me on the futon. He smiles down at me and his brown brown eyes don't say much other than he's about to fuck me. And I know this and I'm a little scared. But my excitement more than makes up for it. He's maybe five, eight years older than I am and I don't even know why I care about that right now, and he shifts his weight and I can feel his erect penis next to mine, wet and hot and I can maybe feel my heartbeat in it. It's all I can do to not come. He kisses me the way a car crash happens: perfunctory metal on metal scraping. There's more lust than anything else and I nearly laugh, his tongue in my mouth, when I remember my mother's sister saying I was cute now that I lost the last of the baby fat over the summer. He pulls my hair and my head tilts back and he nibbles on my neck.
In the lingerie department, she puts on bras over her shirt and whenever she does that I'm reminded she has big boobs. I always forget. None of the bras fit and all I'm thinking of is how if she wasn't here, I'd look like a perverted old man, holding these bras, lost, where I don't belong.
Afterward, in the futon, he gets up and walks to his kitchen and comes back with a glass of water for me and he asks me if I'm okay. I'm sweating and sore and exhilarated and he sits next to me and I make the mistake of asking him when I can come over again. Of course he laughs. He digs in his pants and brings out a pack of cigarettes and lights one and asks me if I want another and I'm more confused than anything else, suddenly. He's quiet for a long time and I watch him smoke, the sinew of his muscles on his skinny back look like snakes slithering underneath velvet. He gets up and pulls on his briefs, purple, maybe lavender, and not expensive and says I should get on home.
We're in the haircare aisle, and she's looking for another couple of hair picks and I'm looking for nothing. While she looks, I look over her shoulder. I see a lavender-handled hairbrush. It's pretty big and it's not the size of it that makes me reach out and grab it off the rack (there are several just like it behind it), but the color. It's unmistakable. Color memory, is that a thing that exists the way odor memory exists, transporting you to very specific time and place at the same time? I remember the very first time I saw this color. Every time I see it, I'm reminded.
Long after I walk and take bus home, after I shower and maybe there's some residual pain, I'm laying on my bed, under the covers thinking about him, whatever his name was or is, wherever he is now. Then, I'm thinking I will run into him next time and I'll want him to take me home again because I think I like him. What I know now that I didn't know then, of course. But in my bed and I'm sixteen, I touch my body everywhere he touched it, I'm trying to imagine what his touch would be feel the second time around.
We fill the cart with everything from towels to movies to baby clothes as we walk through the store. Everything is a story, a what if or a wouldn't it be nice. And it's fun making up the stories as we go because, well, why wouldn't we, right? So we leave the full cart somewhere near the greeting cards and she takes what she needs and I take what I need from it and go through the checkstand and she pays for everything and as the young girl running the register rings up the hairbrush she says to me if I forgot I shave my head and the cashier, she smiles, and I let's get out of here. And in the parking lot she asks me more about the stupid hairbrush neither of us will use and I tell my best friend a story I've not hold her before.
Where I work is a chain electronics store. Company's in it's final legs, everywhere you read in the financial pages, it says how much the economy is STILL in the shitter, almost always, you'll read something about the company I work for. It's projected it'll close by the end of next quarter.
She says as she lights a smoke, “I'll wait for you out here?”
I go inside.
After that first night out, I didn't see her until a week later. Across town, where I used to live, is where I normally get my comic books and that day, a week later, I walk in and, you know, browse. I sit in the corner, a stack from my pull box next to me, the girl at the register, I don't know her, but she was friendly enough. They keep firing everyone here and getting someone knew every few weeks. I'm flipping through the new Tara McPherson art book when she walks in. I see her but she doesn't see me just yet: Bree.
At the customer returns counter, I'm behind the counter, reading through a copy of the following week's schedule, just to make sure I'm off Sunday and I am. In the back office, as I'm waiting for my manager to give me my paycheck, one of my co-workers, Mike, he walks up and says something to me about the girl he saw me walking here with when he was outside smoking. He asks me who she is and what her deal is. I tell him to leave me alone. He laugh, calls me a fag, and says he'll see me later. My manager appears with my paycheck and he asks me who IS my friend smoking outside.
Bree sees me after I hear her ask whether or not they have the new Darth Vader one-shot.
“Hey!”
I say hello back and she sits next to me and starts flipping through the books next me.
“You know what I never liked about this new take on the Justice League?” she says, “it's how they tried for nearly a year to have the team without Batman.”
“Batman.”
“Yeah. I mean, come on, you can't have the JLA without him. It always turns out that they need him because someone comes along they supposedly can't beat, and who's the one who winds up making up the strategy for it? Batman.”
“I remember for that whole first year it was them versus really retarded supervillans like Mirror Master and – who was that guy? fucking Glorious Godfrey?”
“I know!”
“Well, when did they bring him back, like, number 14?”
“Man,” she says, “I though you knew what you were talking about! It was number 17. Remember? It was when the Joker returns.” She smiles. We become friends.
Walk back and she's sitting on the curb, typing with both hands into her phone, laughing about something she's writing. I sit next to her. I ask her for a smoke and she hands me her purse with one hand while the other keeps typing away. I get a smoke and she closes her phone and she says, “You wanna go get a beer?”
“How about some food?”
“Yeah, that too?”
“Let's go,” I say and we walk to the car.
Near Seal Beach, we're in a surf taco shack off Pacific Coast Highway, having bad American burritos and lemonade. She's typing into her open cell phone and I am reading through Facebook on mine. One of the great errors we made that is now regular behavior is sitting across from someone at a table, elbows on either side of our plates, not talking, not looking at each other, not doing much of anything in the prescense of another person, but we'd much rather look into LCD screens and see what other people, most we don't even know, are doing.
She says, “You know, it's so dumb how we're more worried – no, not worried, but, I don't know, interested in what other people do than what we're doing right now.”
“I was just thinking that.”
“Weird. How did that happen, I wonder?”
“I think it's always happened. I mean, it's probably why when you see a couple at a restaurant and they're not talking, that was their version of what we're doing now.”
Bree says, “Just imagine until it gets even more so. Man, what're we going to be doing, having lunch at a restaurant by ourselves and instead of a, say, napkin dispenser, there's going to be a computer at every table.”
“Like an office?”
“Like an office.”
“Notice neither one of us has put our phones down?” I say. And we both laugh and the waiter guy with a bad attitude shows up, asking us if we want anything else. Not need but want.
I met her current boyfriend a few times. I never really got a good sense of who he is but he's an okay guy. I mean, he's polite, kind of short, a bit attractive, and his music, if I was to guess from the few tracks I have listened to, is pretty bland. Weeks before the current tour, we're somewhere near the LACMA, off Beverly, a twenty-four hour hispter dinner joint. He's here, sitting next to Bree, I'm here, Laz on his way. The other three places are occupied by his friends, Evan, Marcus, and Melissa. I'm going to describe them:
Bree's boyfriend: aside from what I already said, he looks like a compressed version of Denzel Washington in the matter of looks: the potential of a handsome man. He's dressed in terrible loose-fitting jeans and a black tee-shirt with a blue and white skull logo on it. He doesn't have dreadlocks but a ratty mess that claim to have been dreadlocks at one point, now it looks like a demolished bird's nest. His white and blue sneakers are impeccable.
Evan is the most good looking of everyone here and incredibly nice. He's biracial, you can tell, and his hair is cropped very thinly, and is in a black polo and regular fitting jeans and black sneakers. He smiles and it reminds me of Blair Underwood when more people than just me knew who he was. He's incredibly polite and know what he's talking about. Very confident. Something clicks in my head when he and I are talking about the ridiculous proliferation of free online-only record releases. The bad thing about him is his shirt's collar is turned up. On purpose.
Marcus and Melissa are together. They're married. He's been living in California since he was thirteen but still has the trace of an English accent and has the whitest skin I've ever seen. So perfect too. He's white and has freckles and green eyes but brown hair. He's cute in an Eric Stolz kind of way, crossed with Julienne Moore. He meets us after he's done with work over at the Flynt Publications building and I fight my urge to ask him if he works on Hustler. Melissa is Evan's sister and very pretty. She doesn't wear a wedding band and has a short afro and is very curvy. Very sexy. She too meets us after her job at a law office in West Hollywood.
I tend to describe people by my ideas of what movie stars look like.
Near Seal Beach, the waiter leaves after we ask for more lemonade and the check. After he huffs and rolls his eyes as he walks away.
I say, “Did you see that asshole?”
“Who cares? Dude's just a dick.”
“I'm a dick too, but not at work.”
“Oh, I think you probably are. Dealing with jerks like us, asking for more service from the waiter.”
“Probably, you're right.”
“I don't really want to go home. It's so nice out. Do you have plans?”
I don't.
She says, “Want to go to Hollywood?”
“Sure. What's out there?”
“It's not here.”
Before, after the dinner, Laz walks me to my car and says how Bree's friends are pretty nice cool people and I say so too. We make vague plans to come back here some other time. He asks me if I want to meet him at his house and I say sure, he smiles. I ask him what he thought of Bree's boyfriend and he smiles and maybe is thinking whether or not he should tell me what he really thinks or a polite non-committal answer. I tell him to be honest.
Laz says, “I don't get why your girl is seeing that guy. He's not at all attractive, his music is terrible (yes, I had to listen to it before coming here, that's why I was late), and what's with his hair? She's much to pretty and nice for that guy.”
I point out both of them didn't talk much.
“I didn't want to talk to him. There's something off about that guy. Watch, you'll see I'm right.”
Bree and I get up to go and I pay the check with exact change. The waiter is walking in our direction, giving us a perfunctory smile and an emotionless thank you. I don't say anything to him, and we walk out, but I look back to see him pick up the money and check just to see his face get even more dour.
We're crossing Sunset when a gray SUV runs a red light and slams into a white Mercedez. All metal and rubber and scares the shit out of us.
Another time, before, but I can't remember when, Laz and I are walking down Fairfax after parking and it's the middle of the night and we're maybe hungry and whether he is or I am, Canter's is the only place that's open. No traffic. Very little. People just lingering about ever couple of blocks or so. In the distance I can hear a siren and I think it's a firetruck. We get to the diner and get seated and the waiter is a middle-aged Hispanic guy with a thick accent and we each order coffee. He's so sleepy.
On Sunset, the accident isn't as bad as it sounded. No one is hurt but the Mercedez seems like is irreplaceable. The driver is a young woman, pretty, maybe on her way to a reception because her dress is too dressy and she's completely calm. The woman driving the SUV looks like what you think a woman driving a SUV looks like: frumpy but trying to look like she's maybe fifteen, twenty years younger. She's hysterical and is sitting on the curb in front of the Pink Dot. We stand and watch, there are other people, some taking pictures with their phones and Bree says how great it is no one is hurt. There's already the honking from the intersection. I hear the siren of a police car coming.
We eat mostly in silence. A spattering of conversation about the movie and it's maybe three in the morning but I can't see the clock on the wall from where we're sitting. Long drive home. It will be the longest drive home in history, I think.
Once police and paramedics arrive we keep walking toward the old Tower Records used to be. That's the direction we're heading because I don't know why. We stop by Book Soup and keep on walking. There was a signing announcement at the front of the store. Some pornstar was going to be there to read from her autobiography at seven. Neither one of us bought anything. We're just filling time, so we walk. Bree says they reopened the old record store but it's some new company and wants to check it out. She says she read it was more like the old Virgin stores.
Afterward, we walk back the five blocks to his car. He lights up a cigarette, probably so he won't have to talk to me. And I try to hold his and when he takes mine in his, I might as well be gripping wet noodles. A homeless woman looks at us and says nothing. He smokes and I breathe I breathe it in as we walk. He sighs a lot.
There's no longer an old Tower Records building. There is a hole in the ground and two big heavy yellow metal machines on huge wheels and lots of rent-a-fence. I ask Bree what's supposed to be here but she doesn't know. She's not disappointed, and neither am I. Traffic slows more and more as the queue at the accident grows longer and longer.
He opens my door and closes it when I'm in and he flicks his cigarette away, exhaling very loudly, and when he sits behind the wheel, it's as if a cloud of cigarette smoke fills the car. He revs up and takes off and goes two blocks before he notices he forgot to switch on the headlights. He turns on his stereo and some DJ comes on talking about “obvious jazz influences” and “arrythmic time signatures” and “influenced by Bauhaus and Sisters of Mercy, and more recent artists like !!! and – believe it or not – Vampire Weekend”. He doesn't change the station but raises the volume. All the way up Melrose to the 101, all I hear is the radio and his breathing. He looks so sleepy but it's not just fatigue. He's angry. He runs the last red light before the on-ramp, and it feels like car's about go airborne.
We don't walk back the way we came but walk down San Vicente to Santa Monica and there, a group of protestors are chanting something and are carrying signs I don't bother to read. A throng of people, all wearing the same white and blue tee-shirt with a cross on the back, all of them probably gay, blocking the sidewalk. There are no police and I don't really want to know what's happened that brought them out here: reactionary protest. Bree says we should maybe head back. And we do.
Up the 91, nearly home, he reaches over to hold my hand. We don't say anything until this moment when he says he's sorry about the jewelry store earlier. I say it's okay and he says it isn't. I say we can talk about it tomorrow, we both just need to get home. He says fine, and I lean over to kiss him on the cheek as he pulls onto the off-ramp, and he turns his head a little. He doesn't even slow at the yield sign and a car sideswipes us onto the sidewalk. I scream. He says, “Motherfucker!” and the car comes to a stop just seconds later, and I see the car that hit us driving off into the distance. Laz turns to me and asks me if I'm okay, am I hurt, am I okay. And I say I am and I undo my seatbelt and I look at his face and there're tears in his eyes. He's breathing very heavily. I tell him I'm okay.
We walk back and there is no longer and accident scene. As if it had never happened.
Bree says, “Wow, it's like they even swept up the broken glass and everything.”
“How do they do that that fast?”
“I don't know,” she says.
“So weird how minutes ago there was chaos and smoke and now there is nothing. No one driving through the intersection has an idea what happened.”
“Here to go."
We break up, my ex and I, and I'm visiting my older brother and his family in Seattle. Years ago, we're sitting outside his house, drinking beers, looking out into the neighborhood and looks like any other neighborhood anywhere else, and it's only a little boring. My older brother's been married for years and his wife is currently pregnant with their third child. He and I are drinking beers and talking about our father, where he is and how he's doing, and that's he's coming back into the country next summer. I ask my brother whether our dad asked about me and he says he didn't. Not as if I was expecting anything else, really.
I got into Seattle very last minute because I just didn't want to be home, obviously. There wasn't anything there for me after my ex say's he's moving in with some man he met somewhere in Long Beach whom he loves. He said he was sorry and he didn't mean for anything to happen where he'd hurt me and he didn't want me to hate him but it was a done deal and he was sorry. I listened, of course I did. I didn't say much when he was done. He stood there, at his door, he didn't even let me in. He was wearing the shorts I'd bought him the month before. Yes, I listened. And then I punched him in the face and took off the ring he'd given men not long after we started dating and throw it at his crumpled, crying, stupid face, and left. I haven't seen him since but that was only two weeks before arriving at Sea-Tac.
My older brother says, “Has he tried calling you? I mean have you talked to him?”
“He's tried, you know, but I've not answered and I don't really wanna talk to him.”
“Maybe you should.”
“Nah. He's a fucking liar, and he hurt me.”
“That's pretty petty.”
“Oh, I know,” I say. “I'm okay with that.” I laugh. “I'm having that sort of moment when I'm okay being a bad person.”
“You're too damn stubborn for your own good, you know that?”
“Am I? Probably.”
“This passive-aggressive bullshit of yours, I don't know how you do it, man. You're kind of smart and when your feelings are hurt you turn into this metal robot.”
“As opposed to a wooden robot?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know.”
His cell phone rings and he talks to his wife for a few minutes. On the table before us, his pack of smokes and I take one and take a good long drag and I hate I'm thinking about how wonderful he was to me when he was there, present and fully, even when he'd be off at work and I was off at work and he'd send me inappropriate texts while he was in a meeting. He clicks off his phone.
He says, “So, I have a question.”
“Okay.”
“Don't get all offended and try to punch me in the face, okay (I mean, you know I'll kick your ass, right?)?”
I laugh, “What?”
“Okay: so who fucked who when you were together?”
“Are you really asking me this?”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“I'm just curious.”
“Why?”
“Why're you avoiding the question?”
“This is so idiotic.”
“Well...?”
Now, on the drive back from Hollywood, my older brother texts me he and his family will be in town, somewhere in Orange County so they'll be able to take the kids to Disneyland. Can we get together, dinner, maybe. He and his wife want to me Bree and Laz. I text him back sure, yes.
I say, “He's the bottom most of the time, if that's what you mean.”
“So he fucks you too?”
“Yes, but not often.”
“You like it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, with girls, you know they like it.”
“Oh? How do you know?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I?”
He rolls over and it's morning, and I'm facing his back now, the sun coming in from his windows. Not another ex, not really, but we were sleeping together. We slept together. Whatever. He rolls over, his back to me, he has an intricately ridiculous tattoo covering his back, and when I first asked him about it, he sort of smiled and said it was one of the few things he regretted in life, getting this enormous tattoo that he's had unfinished for years. By the time I met him, he said when we first began speaking to each other, he was adamant about finishing it, but by the time I slept with with him last, two years later, he never mentioned it again.
We're still on the road, Bree at the wheel, punching things into her phone while she keeps an occasional eye on the road. It's getting to be later than we thought and the idea of driving to and back from Hollywood was probably the wrong one. Her ipod is playing on random through her car's speakers and there's that Catpower song I love and maybe it's not so random because the song before was Ryan Adams's cover of Wonderwall and I want to ask her if this is a playlist. She keeps typing into her phone, traffic or no.
He rolls over, it's morning. Over his shoulder, the sunlight refracts and I've various rays of color hitting me in the face, not unpleasantly, and I hear his breathing. I feel him move slightly, myoclonic twitches from whatever he's dreaming, and this isn't the last time we sleep together but after my break up nearly a year before, it feels as if whenever I sleep with someone it will be the last time I'll sleep with that person. He isn't like that and I don't know why for month's I will sleep with him. He will kiss me in a mechanical pornographic movie sort of way – a precursor to him letting me be fucked. When he said he didn't want anything serious but fucking, I jumped at the chance because fucking is better than still pining over someone who still emails you or calls you once a week. He hurt me and now I'm hurting him and I think about last year when my older brother called me petty out on his porch.
Bree says there's a party somewhere in South Gate, do we want to go. And because I don't know why I say, yes, we do want to be there.
I turn onto my back and hear him sleep. The sun doesn't move. At that point maybe I'm thinking that I don't really dislike him, not really. I definitely don't like him. Whether he's the good thing about a bad situation, I can't say. He's sleeping while I've been awake the entire night since he pulled off the final condom and said he needed to take a shit and did and came into bed reeking of come and amyl nitrate and sweat. My sweat. And I listen to him fall asleep and I'm thinking how much I want to return all of these phone calls and emails and it hurts so much to think that I won't do it because it would mean defeat and, naturally, I think this is the most childish thing about me and I'll probably be this way for the rest of my life. I'm twenty-three, sleeping next to him, the sun in my face.
We're the first ones to show up to the house in South Gate. This is how bored we are. We arrive and open beers and there's us two and Brittany, girl whose house we're in. Even her boyrfriend isn't here. She's playing something over the stereo that reminds me of old goth music from junior high school and I ask Brittany where she went to school after high school. Brittany isn't a friend the way that Bree is my friend. She's someone we know the way you get to know the girl behind the counter at the coffee shop: routine. She and Bree worked together for about a second in a second-hand store when we were in college and Bree says she just never deleted Brittany's number from her cell phone's memory. That's how I know her. At a party off campus, then, I'm told Brittany and I made out. I don't remember that. Brittany tried to hold my hand once at a hip-hop show a year after that. This music is terrible.
Naked, I get up and sit on the toilet, waiting for something to happen. I don't close the door. Through the hallway connecting the living room and the bedrooms (his apartment is huge and has three of them), I hear noise, rustling. He's getting up.
Brittany sees me eyeing her book shelves and says most of the comics are her boyfriend's, whatever this one's name is. She has had a lot of them in the time I've known she exists. It's what I hear. Gossip. If that's the case, I say, than your boyfriend has impeccable taste. I say this because he has an original printing of Box Office Poison and Blankets. She says she doesn't read them. She doesn't get them. Brittany, she says she used to read X-Men when she was a kid and there was an X-Men cartoon show. Bree on the brown leather couch, her legs underneath her, is talking to someone on the phone, and Brittany's stereo changes from terrible music to Chuck Ragan's first record.
After a shower, finally he emerges from his bathroom, and I'm putting my clothes back on. He says he wants to go out for breakfast and do I want to come and I say thanks, but no, I ought to get home. He stands in his bathroom doorway, naked but for the towel wrapped around his waist, steam pouring from behind him. He's muscular in the same what linebackers are muscular which is tangentially. I love his chest. He crosses his very impressive arms across the aforementioned equally impressive chest and looks at me and smirks. I look at him and I think I try to smile. It's not the last time he and I will sleep together, I know this now, I didn't then, and now, here, thinking about it, it should have been, not because he was a bad person, but I was running away and I think, even then, that was what would help me more than anything else, running away into brutally meaningless fucking (not sex), instead of answering something as small and wonderful as an email that asked how I was doing and said that I was missed and that I should call him back. I didn't. I never returned any of those calls or emails.
Brittany's party, two whole hours after Bree and I arrived, is actually entertaining and fun and I'm dancing with a girl with blonde dreadlocks who said she wanted to make out with me but settled for a dance.
In my car, after I leave his apartment, I turn up the music as loud as I can stand it and peel out and never take my foot off the accelerator once I'm on the freeway. It won't be the last time he and I will sleep together, I know this now, but I didn't then, and I'm thinking about what the sunlight looked like coming through his window, over his shoulder, and how inert it made me feel. Running away.
At the party, I see him. The man with the tattooed back, whose bed I was in for a long time. He sees me. We're both older but he sees me and smiles. I smile back. It isn't shock but what a tiny universe we live in. He comes in alone and I'm still dancing with the dreadlocked girl and he sees me and recognition: years have passed since last I saw him and I see nothing of me then when he appears. I don't feel the me from before now, here, dancing, a bit sweaty. He smiles at me and I wonder why I ever though he was a good escape. One of those things to regret for the rest of my life. I dance and dance and dance and dance.
No comments:
Post a Comment