She got home to find me sipping syrah and watching television.
"How was work?"
She tossed her keys onto the small table by the window where we used to eat dinner together, stopped for a moment to glare at me, then went into the kitchen.
Almost immediately she was back, purposely standing in front of the TV, with a half-full garbage bag in her hand. She raised it shoulder-high and let it drop.
"What is this?"
"It's a garbage bag that could use more refuse before it makes sense to discard it."
"What did I ask you to do before I left this morning?"
"To empty the garbage from the kitchen. But when I saw what I was dealing with I thought we should throw away more garbage than the plastic that contains it."
We stared at each other.
"Sweetness, it's Double Jeopardy now and you're kind of in the way."
She pressed the Power button on the TV set.
I pressed the Power button on the remote.
She pulled the TV's cord from the electrical outlet.
"You had all day. I asked you to do only one thing."
"And I thought that one thing was ridiculous."
Her eyes were huge for her face and, terribly, all the more gorgeous and absorbing when she was in a fury...
"Get the fuck out of my house."
"I love you" -- I stood, stating a fact I had to reiterate so often it had come to insult both of us -- "I'll take the bag out."
"No. Get the fuck out of my house."
"I'M TAKING OUT THE GOD DAMNED TRASH JESUS GODDAMNED CHRIST!"
As I went for the bag she went for the telephone in the hall.
"And I'm calling my Dad. He'll be here in twenty minutes."
I knew she kept a loaded gun in the bedroom closet, the location of which she never told me in our months of living together.
"Fucking fine. Tell your Dad I said hello and that his fucking daughter needs to get back on her fucking meds."
"I'm dialing."
I yanked the door open and slammed it behind me.
The trash remained in the middle of the room.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Gun Control
And She Was
It had not been a good evening. She wanted to stay in the apartment, I desperately wanted to be the fuck out of there on a Friday night like a normal goddam twenty-five-year-old.
We lived together in Tacoma Park, an ex-urb so close to DC you would smell the Potomac if your stood in the right spot.
She gave in and decided to drive us to a bar she had been to on Connecticut Avenue.
"Why are you taking this way? We're going around half the freaking Beltway. ...We should've just parked and taken the Metro, like I said before."
"This is the only way I know how to go where we're going -- and we're already driving, so just be quiet."
I was getting the shakes. And I couldn't let her see that. ...The alcohol withdrawal drove an impatience that bordered on insanity...
Still, who the fuck drives slower than the speed limit?
I held my tongue and wrenched my hands all the way to The Four Provinces, a not-so Irish bar. It took us forty-five minutes to get there when it should have taken fifteen. ...Or would have, if I had driven.
But she drove because both of us knew I was going to get loaded... I physically needed to at that point.
She parked her Beetle on the street a few blocks away from the bar. We walked, picking our way along curbs and jaywalking across four-lane streets, never touching.
We got a table for two once we were inside. I immediately ordered a Guinness plus one because the place was so busy I knew it would be a while before we saw our waitress again.
"Did you know Guinness has less alcohol in it that Busch Light?"
Her stare answered: How could you possibly think I would care?
She stared off and twirled the stem of her wine glass in her fingers.
God I wished she would just get drunk so we could fucking forget about everything...
I finished my first glass in three gulps and held up a hand to the waitress for a third.
I finally felt not-sick.
I calmed. Everything around me stopped being an assault on my senses.
I sat back in my chair and looked at her: her thin top gathered by a string that was knotted loosely around her champagne-flute neck; her witch-black hair so long it almost touched the ground; her eyes large orbs of undisturbed water on a night full of clouds, glistening.
I had never told her that I loved her. I wanted to, then.
"What? Why are you looking at me like that? ...You can't be drunk already."
"No, I'm not. It's just...
"...You look good tonight.
"You always look good."
"I like the band that's playing."
"So do I."
I cupped the hand she had around the wine glass and bent over the table. I kissed her on one of her cheeks, which felt delicate as paper-thin glass to my lips. Then we pressed our heads together, side by side.
When I sat back both of us were smiling.
Done
Her breath had slowed...
Both of us were done.
For years we had messed around, but this was the first time we had had sex... And in a way that used every aspect of the right-angled couch that sprawled along her one-thousand-square-foot basement...
It was supposed to be bad... Everyone we knew told us it would be. But it was like seeing the Fourth of July from the Point (which I would do much later and find analogous) in San Diego: fireworks everywhere... Unable to see it all, everything happening too quickly... The moment over before it began...
Ten years later more than made up for it.
I called her, drunk; I had had a dream in which she was killed.
It was 4 a.m. She picked up on the second ring:
“Calvin! I’ve been trying to reach you for two weeks!”
“Why? Are you OK? You’re not hurt are you?”
“No... I had this weird dream.”
“I had one too. Just now.”
“Are you OK?”
“Good, now.
“So how have you been in the ten years since we last talked to each other?”
It Could [Have] Be[en] Sweet
Stereotypically, I developed a huge crush on her because she pushed me away for so long and that crush went away as soon as we slept together.
So many idiots make the mistake of waiting to sleep together. Get it fucking the fuck out of the way. The first time is horrible. You hardly even want to be naked with the person.
And christ, being told that sex was to be "something special between us" -- at our age (thirty-ish) -- was just laughable.
At thirty you damn-well-better know that all sex is is two people getting off together. Trying to make it something else corrupts the act itself and the people who buy into the idea that it's more than what it is.
...After a full month we were finally fucking and it was awkward and bad, despite the athleticism involved. I came three times, trying my best to remember each picture in the Kama Sutra.
It was nothing but a goddam performance piece... She was too loud to be believed... Then, anyway. If it had been weeks ago I would have bought it. I would have loved it. I would have joined in. ...At that time her wailing, and my belief in its contrivance, almost made me limp. I practically had to close my eyes and think of England...
All this despite the fact I had nothing but admiration for her only minutes ago. She was too like me for me to not love her (which is the more honest way of saying that we had a lot in common and I loved her because). We had already started communicating just by looking certain ways at each other.
...Naturally, after we finally had sex, that fascination with one another turned into the love one has for a sibling. And the third time we were screwing it was almost as weird as having sex with a goddam relative (I'll point out, here, that I come from a family of all [hetero] boys and unattractive cousins).
I began to think of how we were missing Aqua Teen,* and became sure she was thinking the same thing. So I pinned her knees by her ears and came within minutes, playing "Common People"** in my head to drown out the screaming of my name.
Then we lay on the bed, naked, sweaty, exhausted, the room stinking of vaginal and seminal fluid. I grabbed the remote from the floor.
The box flickered on and I was relieved to discover I had caught the last few minutes of Aqua Teen.
She curled herself around me, sighed loudly into my ear "Mmm god aren't you so glad we waited!"
She held me everywhere with all her limbs and kissed me on my face, neck and chest while I watched television, using her pillow to prop up my head.
Within thirty minutes she had put her clothes on and we lay next to each other, not touching, staring at and laughing at the television together.
*Aqua Teen Hunger Force (number one in the hood, G): see Adult Swim listings, Cartoon Channel after-hours
**Pulp
Monday, May 12, 2008
Waiting for Godot
She doesn't notice I'm drunk or that I continue to get more so.
Her: "My ex is stalking me..."
Her, later:
"I think he's gotten over it..."
Me: "The last thing you want is for him to get over it. The last thing you want is for anyone to get over anything. You need power over everyone. That power turns the crank that juts out of your back."
(I don't know if I just came up with that or if I'm reiterating it.)
Later, me:
"The fact remains that if he showed up at your door and said he'd really try this time, you'd take him back. You love the fat, small-dicked fucker because he's broken... And it isn't that you want to fix him: You love playing with the pieces."
"You think I'm incapable of loving someone who isn't fucked up?"
"You know you are."
The conversation goes on until I find myself sinking too far into self-loathing.
...I need her.
I must love playing with the pieces...
And I must be shattered for her to listen to me...
The realization scares me as it did the first time and I beg off the phone quickly with a limp excuse.
We'll talk when the bottle of Stoli gets to the proper level.
Maybe the next time I call she'll have some other guy. And then I'll hear about all the ways in which he's inadequate, and mesmerizing because.
Then maybe her ex will begin stalking her in an obvious manner, out of jealousy.
Then maybe they'll get back together.