(do not read this.)
I was sitting in Ringlers, nodding my head to the Public Enemy song the D.J. had brought into his set in that hard-edged, slightly-imperfect way that made me love hip-hop so much, my mind flashing back to 1988, Ames, Iowa, in a blue 1980 Dodge Omni my father had traded our bright red Oldsmobile Cutlass for, sitting in the Target parking lot waiting for my mother to come out of the fabric store. It was a fall memory; I remember wearing a thin coat and it being cloudy outside, but not the usual bitter, windy frigidness that squeezes Iowa from October to February; in any case, the momentary mental regression mattered little, because each of my senses slowed to an idle hum when, in one smooth moment, Heather took my right hand and guided it under the table, underneath the thin cotton of her skirt, and rested it on the inside her thigh.
I didn't want to be there, even then, fingertips pressed to her skin, warmer even than my own, soft and protected and pliant, sloping slightly downward as her left leg draped over my right knee. I felt myself falling asleep for the fifth time and nodded my head, the trebly Bomb Squad beat on Fight the Power somehow permeating my fugue and setting the tempo.
I kept a slightly off-time rhythm with my fingers, my left hand tapping the side of my face just in front of my ears and the tips of its' counterpart's fingers just barely brushing her skin, every groove of every whorl catching for an instant, holding fast for its' own infinity before letting go. I felt her breath catch slightly, just like it did when I touched her left breast for the first time the night before, fingers brushing the pierced nipple with a tenderness that surprised even me, and her breath and body siezed so severely I thought I'd done something wrong. There was no such jump this time, only a momentary halt in her sentence that made me smile despite my exhaustion and boredom.
It was delightfully simple for my fingers to travel the remaining distance to the source of most of the warmth, covered by a pair of cotton underwear I had glimpsed briefly when she'd stood to adjust the skirt, the waistband peeking through to see the light of night with the shameless coquettishness that had attracted me in the first place. I lingered for a moment, truthfully unsure as to what I wanted to do, fingers moving lightly as always, skirt gathered over my arm in a way everyone else at the table would have probably called attention to had they not been so drunk.
Drunk.
I laughed gently to myself, a habit so refined now that, when it occurs, it's only noticable to me, the rapid rise/fall of my body now just a momentary flex of muscle, my emotional reactions contained by what I want to be my extraordinary emotional control but is, in reality, just the sluggishness of too many months without hope.
She leaned to me, smiling thinly, and I nodded. I leaned closer and said "sorry."
"Don't be. I wouldn't have done that if it wasn't okay." The looseness of her voice told a familiar tale: drunk, ambiguously horny, but destined, as always, for a moment of clarity that would send me home after hours of frenzied kisses in hallways and on street corners. The anticipation hit me like a sheet of needles, but in my numbed state, all I could feel was the familiar tingle, like limbs falling asleep.
The only other guy at the table was talking; I'd been ignoring their conversation outright, not caring about the interchangable stories of interchangably drunk people doing hedonistically shallow things which, unlike the hedonistically shallow things I did, never strayed from the realm of "awesome" or "oh my god" that the tellers of said tales usually describe them as inhabiting. She and the two other girls at the table were fixated on whatever it was he was saying; there was little doubt in my mind that he'd slept with at least one of them, most likely the one whose thighs still warmed my fingers, probably simultaneous with the dyed redhead, the prettiest and tallest of the group who'd slept with more women than men. I secretly eyed her with a particular form of spite after she'd laughed disparagingly at Lindex's SuicideGirls hoodie, gushing with drunken confidence "that's that site where guys go when they want something a little bit creepy but a little bit cute." The warmth on my fingers went to a different place in that instant as I marveled at such a simplistic, thoughtless argument; I could tell that she was one of those girls who championed the idea of being different or being progressive until she ceased to be the most different or progressive in the room. Right then, hand between her friend's thighs, I wanted to lay into her for being such a fraud, a lipstick bi-chick who made out with her cute, straight-looking friends in public just for the spectacle, a woman who affected a sense of ennui when, really, she was an attention whore just like me.
I hated them all right then and there, I hated the guy for being bland and boring and forgettable and I hated the girls for loving him for it, I hated the skin beneath my fingers and the woman attached to it for playing games, for fusing herself to me until the end of the evening, I hated her for placing my hands on her body. Predictably, I also hated myself for letting it happen, all the while wondering if I were just as fucking deplorable.
I wanted to go to sleep, I wanted to just leave and go home and sleep by myself, just update, fumble around with the guitar, masturbate and crash on the couch and stare at the blurry shape my memory would remind me was the airplane-propeller ceiling fan until my brain grew tired of trying to sort out the disparate readings from my uncorrected eyeballs and shut down.
And then the coffee kicked in, the irrational shriek tore my logic to shreds, and I didn't move.
"If I order you a shot," she said, "will you drink it?" I'd lost count of how many cigarettes she'd smoked; I wondered why I couldn't taste it on her breath.
I shook my head, exhausted and disappointed that the question had come up so soon over the course of my knowing her, the inevitable expected but nonetheless not enjoyed.
"Please?" She asked, leaning in closer and shifting her legs so that they seemed even warmer, simultaneously adjusting the skirt around my hand.
"No, thank you."
"I'll do anything you want," she breathed with a sincerity that made me sigh. At the back of my head, Leeva's voice called out, pointing out that she could just want to make herself feel more comfortable around me, that she'd feel less-insecure if she could somehow get me compromised.
Reykjavik's response was far louder, accentuated by the overdriven breakbeat now playing over the P.A. "They lie," he said, "they always lie when they're drunk. They lied to me, they've lied to you, you don't exist to them, you're not even meat, you're just weak and powerless, a pathetic thing that can't even hook up right, and they'll exploit that, until you're nothing, just like me, a story to be told in regretful moments, an eccentricity kept close enough to cast aside when you ceased to be useful. You are a toy, not even in the indirect way they use to mask their fear of other guys, you're just some stupid thing they picked up on the side of the road and decided to play with."
I'm fucking lonely, Reykjavk. My own thoughts sounded almost like I'd spoken them aloud.
He laughed at me. "You're not lonely; you're just weak."
I nodded, in real life, as she gave up trying to pester me into drinking and decided it was time to migrate to the Boiler Room.
And suddenly I was there, the process of driving and walking instantaneous, my instincts sharp and explosive while my consciousness, horny, lonely and sleep-deprived, sputtered its way through the motions. The normally-familiar place felt empty and cold, and I didn't want to be there either.
She pulled me aside shortly after they arrived a few minutes after me, out to the street. She kissed me again, demanding but tender, and I could taste everything in her mouth, wondering why I was there when I knew what was going to happen.
"I want to go home with you tonight," she said, smiling girlishly and looking away from time to time.
Reykjavik went silent then, knowingly shaking his head and smiling, and I knew I had to play it out to the very end. "Are you sure?" I asked, eager nonetheless.
"Yeah," she nodded, "I just need to sober up first."
Even I recognized the trick at that point, but I played along as we went inside and did everything as we usually do, she and her girlfriends laughing and kissing and drinking and singing, me bopping back-and-forth between them and Lindex, who arrived shortly after we did. I was beginning to collapse, the caffeine doing litle to animate my brain, leaving my body in less-capable hands than I would have wanted.
Thrice, as I was singing or bouncing about, I noticed her kissing the other guy at the table, shamelessly and stupidly. I'd met the guy's wife four days before; she was gone somewhere, and his ring, if he even had one, had been absent from his hand all night.
At the end of the night, after going to the bathroom with the redhead, she pulled me outside again and kissed me. I had no abandon by then, returning the kiss with a suicidal reciprocity I'd forgotten I possessed, ready to seize the moment now upon me.
She looked away and gestured, sighing. Predictable, I thought harshly, and said my line. "What's wrong?"
"I'm frustrated."
A little sarcastic annoyance popped into my voice. I didn't repress it. "Why?"
"Because the girls are all drunk, and they're all staying at my place," she said, "so I can't go home with you, even though I really, really want to."
My hands never left my pockets. I flexed them for a second. "Call them a cab," I said aloud. Inside, I realized her body looked so much like Allison's, dangerously thin and kinetic. A glitch in my head imagined it curved over my body, eyes closed, mouth open in a frozen moment of something, before I blinked.
"I can't!" she exclaimed, "They're my friends, they're my girls, and they almost always come first.
I began to think of Green Dress then, number jotted down in Moleskine 1, wondering if she had anything to do the next day, and smiled at the ludicrous idea as it occurred to me that I could just as easily imagine her in front of me as well. "Well," I said, "you've made it abundantly clear that I can't persuade you to do anything you don't want to do."
"...but?" she asked, a bit too suspicious for my liking.
I stood and let the silence stir everything gently before she decided to step into me and kiss me again. I couldn't even feign interest, but that didn't stop my mood from crashing when I saw Tiffany, Trip, and another friend approaching from down the street.
The look on Tiffany's face said more than she probably wanted.
Fuck-up echoed through my head, but it wasn't Reykjavik, it was just me, having to face consequences alone as always.
Trip shook his head. I would later discover that he and Tiffany had both called me, wanting to hang out. I didn't realize it, having not gone home between work and downtown. "Tiffany won a hundred bucks," he said.
"Jesus, congrats," I said lifelessly.
Tiffany replied cursorily as they walked into the bar, and I was alone again for real this time, with only my drunken company.
She nodded, and we went inside shortly thereafter, gathered her friends, and left.
As I was leaving, I followed Tiffany to the street. "I've had a bad day," I said.
She stopped and turned to look at me. "I'm sorry," she said.
"This isn't me," I said. "You can't believe that, but this isn't me, this isn't what I do. I'm really sorry."
She nodded. "It was a bit hard," she said, "watching you make out with her."
I shrugged, wondering if what I was about to say was really true. "That's not going to happen again," I tried to convince myself and her.
She smirked. I nodded, catching the meaning. "'Course, I am known for my weakness."
"We'll see," she replied simply. The hate resurfaced, and I wanted to tell her that there wasn't anything betwee us, that she was my friend, that she thought I was adorable and I thought she was beautiful but I'm too young for her, and we want different things, that what we had was great in that it made sure neither of us were alone but neither of us were really together, that what we had was special, but not unique. We didn't fucking know each other, not enough for that kind of drama.
She ended the moment by walking away. "Call me," she said. "You have my number."
****
It set in then, two-thirty in the morning, flying up the highway, listening to Maserati and savoring the night air, all the windows and moon roof open, cathartic even as I realized I'd done the same thing eight days before. It settled in a web over my brain, tendrils sinking down as far as my heart, whispering a truth I'd been trying to avoid for weeks, sussurating in my own voice, even as I said it aloud, heedless of the melodrama of it all.
"You're weak, Darryl, and you know you don't want this. You want to be dead. You still do. You can't think yourself out of this, although it's fun to watch you try, but in the end, you are where you belong, and where you deserve to be."
I was sitting in Ringlers, nodding my head to the Public Enemy song the D.J. had brought into his set in that hard-edged, slightly-imperfect way that made me love hip-hop so much, my mind flashing back to 1988, Ames, Iowa, in a blue 1980 Dodge Omni my father had traded our bright red Oldsmobile Cutlass for, sitting in the Target parking lot waiting for my mother to come out of the fabric store. It was a fall memory; I remember wearing a thin coat and it being cloudy outside, but not the usual bitter, windy frigidness that squeezes Iowa from October to February; in any case, the momentary mental regression mattered little, because each of my senses slowed to an idle hum when, in one smooth moment, Heather took my right hand and guided it under the table, underneath the thin cotton of her skirt, and rested it on the inside her thigh.
I didn't want to be there, even then, fingertips pressed to her skin, warmer even than my own, soft and protected and pliant, sloping slightly downward as her left leg draped over my right knee. I felt myself falling asleep for the fifth time and nodded my head, the trebly Bomb Squad beat on Fight the Power somehow permeating my fugue and setting the tempo.
I kept a slightly off-time rhythm with my fingers, my left hand tapping the side of my face just in front of my ears and the tips of its' counterpart's fingers just barely brushing her skin, every groove of every whorl catching for an instant, holding fast for its' own infinity before letting go. I felt her breath catch slightly, just like it did when I touched her left breast for the first time the night before, fingers brushing the pierced nipple with a tenderness that surprised even me, and her breath and body siezed so severely I thought I'd done something wrong. There was no such jump this time, only a momentary halt in her sentence that made me smile despite my exhaustion and boredom.
It was delightfully simple for my fingers to travel the remaining distance to the source of most of the warmth, covered by a pair of cotton underwear I had glimpsed briefly when she'd stood to adjust the skirt, the waistband peeking through to see the light of night with the shameless coquettishness that had attracted me in the first place. I lingered for a moment, truthfully unsure as to what I wanted to do, fingers moving lightly as always, skirt gathered over my arm in a way everyone else at the table would have probably called attention to had they not been so drunk.
Drunk.
I laughed gently to myself, a habit so refined now that, when it occurs, it's only noticable to me, the rapid rise/fall of my body now just a momentary flex of muscle, my emotional reactions contained by what I want to be my extraordinary emotional control but is, in reality, just the sluggishness of too many months without hope.
She leaned to me, smiling thinly, and I nodded. I leaned closer and said "sorry."
"Don't be. I wouldn't have done that if it wasn't okay." The looseness of her voice told a familiar tale: drunk, ambiguously horny, but destined, as always, for a moment of clarity that would send me home after hours of frenzied kisses in hallways and on street corners. The anticipation hit me like a sheet of needles, but in my numbed state, all I could feel was the familiar tingle, like limbs falling asleep.
The only other guy at the table was talking; I'd been ignoring their conversation outright, not caring about the interchangable stories of interchangably drunk people doing hedonistically shallow things which, unlike the hedonistically shallow things I did, never strayed from the realm of "awesome" or "oh my god" that the tellers of said tales usually describe them as inhabiting. She and the two other girls at the table were fixated on whatever it was he was saying; there was little doubt in my mind that he'd slept with at least one of them, most likely the one whose thighs still warmed my fingers, probably simultaneous with the dyed redhead, the prettiest and tallest of the group who'd slept with more women than men. I secretly eyed her with a particular form of spite after she'd laughed disparagingly at Lindex's SuicideGirls hoodie, gushing with drunken confidence "that's that site where guys go when they want something a little bit creepy but a little bit cute." The warmth on my fingers went to a different place in that instant as I marveled at such a simplistic, thoughtless argument; I could tell that she was one of those girls who championed the idea of being different or being progressive until she ceased to be the most different or progressive in the room. Right then, hand between her friend's thighs, I wanted to lay into her for being such a fraud, a lipstick bi-chick who made out with her cute, straight-looking friends in public just for the spectacle, a woman who affected a sense of ennui when, really, she was an attention whore just like me.
I hated them all right then and there, I hated the guy for being bland and boring and forgettable and I hated the girls for loving him for it, I hated the skin beneath my fingers and the woman attached to it for playing games, for fusing herself to me until the end of the evening, I hated her for placing my hands on her body. Predictably, I also hated myself for letting it happen, all the while wondering if I were just as fucking deplorable.
I wanted to go to sleep, I wanted to just leave and go home and sleep by myself, just update, fumble around with the guitar, masturbate and crash on the couch and stare at the blurry shape my memory would remind me was the airplane-propeller ceiling fan until my brain grew tired of trying to sort out the disparate readings from my uncorrected eyeballs and shut down.
And then the coffee kicked in, the irrational shriek tore my logic to shreds, and I didn't move.
"If I order you a shot," she said, "will you drink it?" I'd lost count of how many cigarettes she'd smoked; I wondered why I couldn't taste it on her breath.
I shook my head, exhausted and disappointed that the question had come up so soon over the course of my knowing her, the inevitable expected but nonetheless not enjoyed.
"Please?" She asked, leaning in closer and shifting her legs so that they seemed even warmer, simultaneously adjusting the skirt around my hand.
"No, thank you."
"I'll do anything you want," she breathed with a sincerity that made me sigh. At the back of my head, Leeva's voice called out, pointing out that she could just want to make herself feel more comfortable around me, that she'd feel less-insecure if she could somehow get me compromised.
Reykjavik's response was far louder, accentuated by the overdriven breakbeat now playing over the P.A. "They lie," he said, "they always lie when they're drunk. They lied to me, they've lied to you, you don't exist to them, you're not even meat, you're just weak and powerless, a pathetic thing that can't even hook up right, and they'll exploit that, until you're nothing, just like me, a story to be told in regretful moments, an eccentricity kept close enough to cast aside when you ceased to be useful. You are a toy, not even in the indirect way they use to mask their fear of other guys, you're just some stupid thing they picked up on the side of the road and decided to play with."
I'm fucking lonely, Reykjavk. My own thoughts sounded almost like I'd spoken them aloud.
He laughed at me. "You're not lonely; you're just weak."
I nodded, in real life, as she gave up trying to pester me into drinking and decided it was time to migrate to the Boiler Room.
And suddenly I was there, the process of driving and walking instantaneous, my instincts sharp and explosive while my consciousness, horny, lonely and sleep-deprived, sputtered its way through the motions. The normally-familiar place felt empty and cold, and I didn't want to be there either.
She pulled me aside shortly after they arrived a few minutes after me, out to the street. She kissed me again, demanding but tender, and I could taste everything in her mouth, wondering why I was there when I knew what was going to happen.
"I want to go home with you tonight," she said, smiling girlishly and looking away from time to time.
Reykjavik went silent then, knowingly shaking his head and smiling, and I knew I had to play it out to the very end. "Are you sure?" I asked, eager nonetheless.
"Yeah," she nodded, "I just need to sober up first."
Even I recognized the trick at that point, but I played along as we went inside and did everything as we usually do, she and her girlfriends laughing and kissing and drinking and singing, me bopping back-and-forth between them and Lindex, who arrived shortly after we did. I was beginning to collapse, the caffeine doing litle to animate my brain, leaving my body in less-capable hands than I would have wanted.
Thrice, as I was singing or bouncing about, I noticed her kissing the other guy at the table, shamelessly and stupidly. I'd met the guy's wife four days before; she was gone somewhere, and his ring, if he even had one, had been absent from his hand all night.
At the end of the night, after going to the bathroom with the redhead, she pulled me outside again and kissed me. I had no abandon by then, returning the kiss with a suicidal reciprocity I'd forgotten I possessed, ready to seize the moment now upon me.
She looked away and gestured, sighing. Predictable, I thought harshly, and said my line. "What's wrong?"
"I'm frustrated."
A little sarcastic annoyance popped into my voice. I didn't repress it. "Why?"
"Because the girls are all drunk, and they're all staying at my place," she said, "so I can't go home with you, even though I really, really want to."
My hands never left my pockets. I flexed them for a second. "Call them a cab," I said aloud. Inside, I realized her body looked so much like Allison's, dangerously thin and kinetic. A glitch in my head imagined it curved over my body, eyes closed, mouth open in a frozen moment of something, before I blinked.
"I can't!" she exclaimed, "They're my friends, they're my girls, and they almost always come first.
I began to think of Green Dress then, number jotted down in Moleskine 1, wondering if she had anything to do the next day, and smiled at the ludicrous idea as it occurred to me that I could just as easily imagine her in front of me as well. "Well," I said, "you've made it abundantly clear that I can't persuade you to do anything you don't want to do."
"...but?" she asked, a bit too suspicious for my liking.
I stood and let the silence stir everything gently before she decided to step into me and kiss me again. I couldn't even feign interest, but that didn't stop my mood from crashing when I saw Tiffany, Trip, and another friend approaching from down the street.
The look on Tiffany's face said more than she probably wanted.
Fuck-up echoed through my head, but it wasn't Reykjavik, it was just me, having to face consequences alone as always.
Trip shook his head. I would later discover that he and Tiffany had both called me, wanting to hang out. I didn't realize it, having not gone home between work and downtown. "Tiffany won a hundred bucks," he said.
"Jesus, congrats," I said lifelessly.
Tiffany replied cursorily as they walked into the bar, and I was alone again for real this time, with only my drunken company.
She nodded, and we went inside shortly thereafter, gathered her friends, and left.
As I was leaving, I followed Tiffany to the street. "I've had a bad day," I said.
She stopped and turned to look at me. "I'm sorry," she said.
"This isn't me," I said. "You can't believe that, but this isn't me, this isn't what I do. I'm really sorry."
She nodded. "It was a bit hard," she said, "watching you make out with her."
I shrugged, wondering if what I was about to say was really true. "That's not going to happen again," I tried to convince myself and her.
She smirked. I nodded, catching the meaning. "'Course, I am known for my weakness."
"We'll see," she replied simply. The hate resurfaced, and I wanted to tell her that there wasn't anything betwee us, that she was my friend, that she thought I was adorable and I thought she was beautiful but I'm too young for her, and we want different things, that what we had was great in that it made sure neither of us were alone but neither of us were really together, that what we had was special, but not unique. We didn't fucking know each other, not enough for that kind of drama.
She ended the moment by walking away. "Call me," she said. "You have my number."
****
It set in then, two-thirty in the morning, flying up the highway, listening to Maserati and savoring the night air, all the windows and moon roof open, cathartic even as I realized I'd done the same thing eight days before. It settled in a web over my brain, tendrils sinking down as far as my heart, whispering a truth I'd been trying to avoid for weeks, sussurating in my own voice, even as I said it aloud, heedless of the melodrama of it all.
"You're weak, Darryl, and you know you don't want this. You want to be dead. You still do. You can't think yourself out of this, although it's fun to watch you try, but in the end, you are where you belong, and where you deserve to be."