Fun fact: This woman, in addition to the peculiar opinion that introduces the piece, used to like to play “confession” during sex. It wasn’t in any way a kinky game. In flagrante delicto one night, she asked me what the worst thing I’d ever done was and, not feeling particularly soul-searchy at that moment, I made something up. Which is when she told that she’d cheated on her ex, gotten pregnant, broken up with him before she realized it, convinced him the kid was his, and made him pay for the abortion. This was relatively early in the relationship. And I dated her anyways. I need a more rigorous screening process, I think.
The eventual craziness of our relationship is the sort of thing that can happen when you fall more in love with a set of circumstances instead of a person. But, despite everything, I did love this woman, in my way, and I hope she’s now happy with someone more suitable.
Drunk under the dim crimson bulb in that tavern, it didn’t matter a bit that, on our first date, you stated plainly over our shots of Jameson that all men are basically rapists, and sex was a favor given by women, almost altruistic, of such magnitude that no one with a dick could ever really get it; didn’t matter a bit ‘cos I was already all-in and, hell, the way you made your case while holding my hand—as if I were being, if not given permission, then forgiven in advance my sins—the claim even seemed reasonable.
A month before, an important screw suddenly come loose, my retinue had raced gracefully to my left flank—slick as a school of fish, as if we’d practiced the maneuver—to shield me from traffic as I attempted, barely in control of the borrowed bicycle, its handlebars beginning to spin, to stay steady and safely coast off the road; we met when I leapt from the machine and brought it with one hand to a halt, just before running roughshod over the pod of relatively oblivious, drunken summertime smokers standing curbside by a bar—I believe you said, “Hell of an entrance,” Camel clutched between bicuspids, before you produced and proffered a crescent wrench and Leatherman (which should have impressed me, that level of perpetual preparation which I would soon come to understand as standard for you, but I was too stricken by the shape of your lips and the diastemic smile they tried to hide). When next we met, within the week, we shared a singular sweet and sadly ephemeral moment: The air was close in the café and it was standing room only for the throng of dripping hipsters driven indoors by a freak downpour; the space was strangely silent until the bistro’s disc system started spinning Weezer’s “The Good Life” and, at the chorus, when your staring eyes from a table or two away successfully summoned mine, all of us in the room—usually “too cool,” but taken aback by this favorite tune it seemed we’d every one of us forgotten—suddenly burst into doleful song, en masse, crooning in unison, enthusiastically, ”I don’t wanna be an old man anymore/ It’s been a year or two since I’ve been out on the floor/ Shakin’ booty, makin’ sweet love all the night/ It’s time I got back to the Good Life.”
So before the rapist remark, I was already in love with you: Our encounters were the closest my life had ever come to kismet, magic—a thing in which I was desperate to believe.
Before the rapist remark that evening, we commiserated with whiskey drinks over myriad misfortunes and misadventures: Your time with the spike, mine with white lines, and how we’d both scared ourselves sick, then straight; missing mothers, wandering fathers, and life without a safety net; shame over some days hating our friends for their parents; feeling fat after years of chemical thinness; feeling alone although swamped by a surfeit of friendly faces—misunderstood by these many well-wishers, who admittedly couldn’t be vilified for not “getting” us; being the sort of soul who would probably never feel “gotten,” even if someone happened to “get” us (an unfortunate immunity of sorts: a natural resistance to interiority); guilt over absolutely everything, guilt which only got worse when we considered the wide world; how the things we wished we could fix about our time as little kids were not the things which, in the end, crippled us—I said I’d every year pined for a surprise party, you said you were too self-conscious about being a tomboy to read the X-Men comic books you’d wanted to.
Ten days later, I parked on a sunny city sidestreet for no reason other than it was a place I could wait, standing-by without spending a cent, in case a friend quit his shift early, in case you got the shots you wanted and could pack up your camera and bail, or—worst case—I could stay here, just sit smoking ’til six (when everyone’s workday was supposed to end), running the AC, at least away from my uncooled home even if here I was still a titch uncomfortable, sweat-stuck to the leather seat of my sedan; so I set up my cell phone on the steering wheel and waited to see its screen flash green (meaning Incoming Call) as I sang along to the one CD with which I’d come, one I didn’t particularly love, but which I spun nonetheless three complete times (with several extra repetitions for Jennifer Charles’ on “Crude Sunlight”) as I waited impatiently for six-fifteen (a little after quitting time, so as not to seem pathetic, desperate), when I started phoning friends in the hope that someone would want to catch a birthday cup of coffee with me; at first, no one answered, then one by one the six kids I’d been counting on called back and all of them, a recently single crew, had dates—even you eventually called to tell me your shoot was delayed to begin with and was now running late, so we’d have to skip dinner and just get a drink ’round nine or ten. When I finally found a friend willing to get together, he already had plans with his bike shop buddies, but said he’d be pleased if I tagged along with or met them at that Mexican place with great beer—neither of which did I like, but I was hungry, and dinner with this busy kid and his entourage of unknowns was the next step up from dining alone; besides, the shitty situation was my own fucking fault for quashing conversations about my birthday: because, based on experiential evidence, August 16th inexorably turned out lousy, I always pretended and even made an earnest effort to have no expectations of the day—since my mother had kicked the bucket and become nothing more than dust and crumbled bone inside a hideous salmon-colored marble block, the general level of malaise surrounding my natal had been exacerbated to the point that I’d begun to claim to hate the day, that any mention that could be made of the sixteenth’s significance was better left unsaid—but on my way to get Tex-Mex with a group of strangers I already hated, I had to fight the dual urges to swerve into the oncoming lane or put cigarettes out on my leg.
In retrospect, because of all the noncommittal nonchalance and the coincidence of six simultaneous dates, I should have seen the slapdash shebang coming, but you and I were still in the awkwardest stage of relationship maturation (post-sex and public hand-holding, pre-the “What Exactly Are We?” conversation), so I certainly didn’t expect you to engineer something so curiously kind as a surprise party, based on a maudlin offhand muttering made weeks back, ’round one a.m., while we both would’ve blown .2 on a cop’s breathalyzer: Legs of sitting skate punks dangled between balusters, above them stood breakdancers with their hands on the second-floor balustrade, wristband-clad, feet packed into black checkered Vans, and when everyone yelled after my friend and I entered his house, they all dropped small yellow balloons. My family has always been small (we maxed out at eight and then someone had to die to make way for the next baby), so I had never seen that many people in one place, gathered for no reason but me, and even though they were mostly your friends, even though there were no presents, no decorations besides those few balloons, no ice cream or cake, once the lights came on and the first and final burst of ballyhoo was finished (post-holler, there was an immediate stampede down the staircase and toward a tower of 40-ouncers and canned Pabst), I wanted to take you away and into the basement to make love on the washer/dryer or cushion-topped cement ironing block, or maybe go out and get a second better dinner with you—candle-lit, vegetarian, with a whiskey pit-stop to follow—and leave your friends to fight over the iPod (Interpol or genuine Joy Division?), drink their Brass Monkeys and sixers of Blue Ribbon, and keep checking in windowpane reflections the rakish tilt of their straight-brimmed mesh Red Sox hats—it was, after all, the gesture of assembling them that meant.
We hit the faux grass-carpeted front porch for a smoke and you actually apologized when I tried without crying to say thanks—you only knew a few of my friends and tracking them down had been a bitch; you didn’t know my sisters, couldn’t figure my phone’s directory to dig up their digits, and weren’t sure anyways if family would be down with the drinking that would soon ensue; you really did have a late shoot that day, an unfortunate accident, otherwise there would have been cake (Carvel with extra crunchy bits); and if you weren’t broke, you’d have bought me a physical present but, you explained, “This is the only thing I remember you ever saying you wanted that you didn’t already have or couldn’t get for yourself”—I kissed your lips (plush upper, anatidaean in a way, a philtrum that seemed like a scale skatepark halfpipe: some men can’t chat without going cross-eyed at cleavage, but I couldn’t talk to you without watching your mouth) for love and just to shut you up, and told you that this was sufficient, that even just being there with me was plenty of present (you’d even remembered to don the track jacket in which I’d once, another late night, said you looked sexy) since I’d never had a girlfriend on a birthday before, a fact at which you laughed and said, “You’ve been missing out, dude: This is what women do with holidays, the good ones anyways, we try and fill the holes in your heart.”
