A start to something new | I’d love input

by ms_anthrope

Posted to Stories on 2002-05-26 05:03:00

I.
He’d been wrong, of course.

Only beside everything that is right and true could one so beautiful be dubbed wrong, but alas, by comparison alone, he was. What we had, or hoped to have, or spoke of having between embracing one another in my too-large borrowed bed, it may not have been real. Someone to reach out and touch, someone to pant warm kisses onto my chin and blanket my ears with inquiry, “Subject or lover, dear?” and confession, “I am hardly Thoreau.” Someone. Real in my bedsheets and the carpet of my room, wherest we pushed the cork into a bottle of wine and listened to the moaning blues, willows weeping in the city beneath us, and perhaps in our own wearied eyes behind the gloss of wine and lust. He gave of himself his stories, on paper, checkspelled and evenly spaced, and I in return, my poems, crumpled onto napkins or typed on the back of flyers sans ‘e’ or ‘,’ because my underwood would not grant me the keystrokes. We gave eachother our evenings and early mornings, wandering street urchins in one another’s shoes, we considered walking to the bitter end, but the cliche was too great, and the bar was much further than the pub on my corner.

He carried his spirits in his coat pocket, his rolling papers in his shirt pocket, and his checkbook in his pants pocket. He paid me little attention, me in my entirety that is. Quite sleuth-like he would scout me out, and write the wrinkle of my pencil skirt in his mind, save it for his laptop later. So carefully he would pull with his eyes the way my face turned when I spoke, the way I pulled my neck back and pondered the ceiling, the way I painted the world that day, hanging from a cable in a cage, and me, too inexperienced an artist to white wash it all. Such close attention my detail was paid, but myself–overlooked.

Perhaps it was the military issue duffel on my back, but I recall all too well the gravity of my situation weighing me down as I hobbled my way up Market Street. Things had changed. That very morning I awoke to Billy Bragg crooning from the clock radio in my illegally rented sublet. I loved that. The thought of one day explaining it all to my children. Yes, Mother did live in a tiny one room sublease in an enormous city alone. Yes, Mother did have to sneak in and out of the bathroom at strange hours, and play her british music low, as not to rouse suspicion from all of the others, probably subleasing illegally as well. Yes, that was Mother. My room never got quite dark enough. The lights from the city peaked through the curtains, and on to my skin as I had at that time taken up sleeping in the nude. Satin sheets were always colder when I slept in them alone, and the room seemed somehow fuller with everyone else gone. I would spend entire afternoons laughing out my self-torture in cough-syrup sized doses.

I’d spent that particular morning at an existential pass, a cognitive crisis that had been frighteningly recurring: I thought it entirely possible that I didn’t exist. I’d no wet towels on the bathroom floor, and the name on the doorbell was not my own. I left no footprints where I walked, and I could only at times remember where I stood. I’d some vague recollection of riding in a stretch SUV, rented for the occasion of my sister’s funeral, the memory not sticky enough to last in standing water. Standing water. That is all I amounted to in my mind. A mind swimming with thoughts like one-night stands, never there in the morning to make breakfast. My thoughts momentary at best, always authentic and quickly dead, their carcases misplaced among whatever fleshy inside. And when I walked the streets each night, I cloaked myself in this black overcoat, adding myself to the void of such skies. I became only what contrasts. I was my face, my hands, pale and all too organic. Not abstract enough for perception and all other glories unanchored by simple existence. I was my smell–but my nostrils were sour and clogged. I was my taste–my tongue deadened from the smoke of a thousand cigarettes…all those nights breathing deep into my lungs to feel some sensation–something. I was my voice–but my ears couldn’t stop bleeding to hear me. I was my reflection–but my vision was blurring, and besides, there were never any true mirrors. I was my pale sponge hands–too afraid to reach in and touch myself, I was only what I know, and incapable of understanding how little that amounted to. My desires were as fleeting as the moment. My eyes would dart to catch everything to affirm that it was there, though it would not be in a moment’s time. My mind repeated forever to live in the now, like the self-help section of a Barnes and Noble bookseller’s, corporate and uncaring. I’d often shriek to myself, what happens when the now is over? Every stage I stepped onto forgot that I had made it shine, I’ve never made a dent in any word I’ve jotted down or typed. It was used the moment after, and lost to me. These–episodes–of mine were quite frequent in their visits, and I hesitate to include them in this story, except that they might convey an idea of my state of mind upon meeting him that morning.

Where was I, now? Ah, yes, under the weight of myself on Market Street. My morning’s destination was Phoenix, though I would not arrive there until some twenty hours later, but the start was to be made from the San Francisco Greyhound station. I wasn’t enthused about the trip, I was content at the time meandering about the city in my solitude and metadrama, but obligation called and I answered with child-like obedience. My sense of direction has always been lacking, and that day was no exception, so I was twirling in slow circles trying to smell the ocean and determine which way was west, so that I could thusly understand which was south and north, and hope to find my way to the station in due time. It was during this, my painfully confused twirling, that I felt a hand on my shoulder. It registered as quite familiar and I was surprised to turn and find that it belonged to Parker, so considered a stranger to me, though not in face. A friend of a friend and so on, we had met one day in a charming open-air coffee house, and had engaged in one brilliant phone conversation on September 12th, of the previous day’s infamy, and politics and theology and so on and so forth, the chosen topics of intellectual getting to know one another.

“Where you headed?” Gesturing toward my bag he flashed me a cocky grin I could only then discern as what I would from then on consider his trademark to be. His teeth were horrid and yet vaguely beautiful. His entire face reminded me of a mischevious seven year old that I had practiced my misanthropic demeanor with on a Pennsylvania train. I explained that I was headed to Phoenix, and desperately in search of the west, but that I had dissappointed myself and lost direction completely. For this I recieved another grin and his personal escort to the station.

“I’m visiting some friends and my mother in Arizona, quite honestly it is only the desert sky that I can stand there. I’ll surely end up in Baltimore by the end of a week, as it normally goes when fulfilling one obligation, might as well get a jump on the others.” The casuelness crept in and I was grateful to have the company on my wait at the station. My bus number was called from overhead, first in English, then in Spanish. Behind us a woman was battling with a vending machine, and between her pounding fists and the comotion of the then opened boarding gate, I gathered my bags and offered a goodbye. He handed me a Raymond Carver book for amusement during my travels, and bowed gracefully out of the line. I watched as he tried the hurdles of the lobby, the wrinkle of his brow as children slammed into his knees. He paused for a long moment, stuck behind a teenaged girl holding a screaming red-faced monster of an infant, and with a nod of resolution, stepped onto a bench, so that he was then two feet above the crowd, turned to me and cupped his hands to his mouth;

“Have a lovely trip, honey!”

I waved, playing his game, pretending I was a housewife, his housewife, and watched him brilliantly slide over the lobby benches to the door and down the escalator. I let the driver collect my ticket and check my bags, and set off.

I was fortunate to make it to an empty pair of seats. I set up residence for myself at the aisle, and my bag at the window, I’ve found that doing this usually ensures that no one will sit beside you, but just in case, I slipped on my headphones and opened the Carver book. I’d with me an entire traveling library, I’d intended to read one of my own. I have one bag set aside only for books when I travel. It is a pale blue bowling bag given to me by an old roommate from Baltimore. Victoria was then studying pastry art and wine preparation in South Carolina, but the bag, it was given much use.

I grinned–remnants of Parker’s grin, perhaps?–through the first few stories. This Carver fellow was a tremendous talent, and managed to naturally include cigarettes and booze in each story.


The bus pulled into Oakland, and was stormed by more of the Greyhound regulars–teenaged runaways, poor immigrant families with screaming children, old men in flannel shirts and mesh baseball caps–the archetypes. I was trying to furrow my brows at just the right pitch, so that they would convey a look of such engrossment, that noone would dare ask for the free seat. Failure. I made the mistake of glancing up to look at this terribly gone young girl. She found my eyes just in time, and relief came over her face. I had lost the seat. I moved to the window and allowed her the aisle. She introduced herself as Grace. She looked sickly and sad. I pinned her as a runnaway almost immediatly, and it didn’t take long for her to confirm my suspicions. Darkness already caught the windows of the bus, as Grace and I both slid down in our seats and passed her tiny flask between ourselves whilst exchanging tales of woe and personal tragedy. We both used hand gestures and crinkled our faces. We both took moments and moments of monologue. We both embellished.

“I’m leaving someone. It’s taken a while, and he’s angry, but I know he understands. How couldn’t he? I told him that I’m happy, I have been for so long, only it’s the lonely kind of happiness, the sort that makes my muscles ache, and my lips numb.”

“That doesn’t sound like the happiness I’ve known.”

“Have you known happiness?”

She’d caught me.

“No, I really haven’t. I’ve known what I’ve heard of it. Why are you leaving?”

“I’ve been torturing myself, to make myself feel. I’ve been pumping junk into my veins. Special K. That shit–well, I…I fucking take a needle, and pump it into myself, how? How did it start? I don’t know, I don’t know. He did it, so I did it, it followed and after awhile it was just natural for me. I felt dirty everytime, and this–” she held up her flask in an ironic toast to herself “–this is what keeps the whole filthy business sterile. Well I’m done. He hit me, too. More than once, hell more than a dozen times, but I never paid it any mind. I could feel it at least. The bruises on my face from him, the bruises in my arms from those fucking needles…it all meant that I was there. It was bliss. Or it could have been, but I had to go and get smart.–”

She gave herself another toast and passed the flask to me. She was a pretty young thing with long blonde hair that waved over a thin face, yellowed in some places, sunken and grey in others and with enormous brown eyes that begged for nothing in particular. Strikingly beautiful, but oh, so young. I took the flask and pushed some of the liquid back. I’m not sure what it was, but it was dark and it was strong, and it made my throat catch and hold it there, until I couldn’t take it any more…like Listerine mouth rinse, it was fabulous. Grace was headed to Santa Fe for an indefinite period of time. She had stayed there for a year as a child, and knew the names of some grade school friends who may be kind enough to take her in.

“The skies are what do it for me. I don’t remember much about living there, I was so young and it was for such a short time I was there, but I remember the skies. Pinks you couldn’t believe, colours, so many, the skies there are the best memories I have, it makes sense to go to them, then, doesn’t it?”
She turned those eyes to me for approval but she knew already that it was right, she didn’t need affirmation for a thing. The bus pulled up to some unnamed burger joint, and we piled off single-file like fire ants, or coal-workers. I laid claim to a picnic table outside, the night was fucking gorgeous and I marvelled at the wind as I pressed my lips around a cigarette. I started striking matches, one by one, and the wind caught each before it danced to the end of my cig. I went through an entire pack this way, and with nothing to show but a pile of stale matches and an unlit vice. Grace’s eyebrows went up as she leaned her face to mine, a small cigar in her mouth. I lit from her and flashed with intimacy, much needed at the time. There was something erotic about lighting from someone else’s smoke. She was sharing her self destruction with me, is there anything more private than self-deteroration? We climbed back onto the bus, and managed to sleep until Los Angelos, her head rested on my shoulder, her hair tickling the sides of my neck, somehow I was then a mother, and she, my child, beautiful and sleeping as we made our way down the coast, she really was an angel.

II.
For sake of time and interest I really should skip ahead here. The short of it all is that Grace and I went our seperate ways at the Phoenix station, where I was stolen away by Mackaye, a lad that I held dear as a friend, but as a lover he made me giggle with his inexperience. I’d no lust for him at all. He taxied me to his apartment where I showered the desert sweat and Greyhound grime from my skin. After I had dried and dressed, he paid careful attention to styling my hair. He was in that way, you understand, so preoccupied with appearance. It was a futile effort, for no sooner was he done then I was sprawled onto his bed. Half-sail then out—my eyes wavered to the whining records scraping through the turntables in the front room. Brief grey flashes of a little bed and breakfast–south of France–spreading jam over stale toast. Everything. Him. Pulling my shoes off–he abandoned the mix to play with my feet. I mumbled my inaudible protests. Boy. Touching. Feet. Still, he pulled until a storm of talcom powder erupted from my sole, then he moved to the left foot. He climbed over me and tugged my chin to his…not a kiss…we never were as casual as all of that. Fingers rubbed over eyebrows. Perfect. I tried to keep my eyes closed…just one candid look and it would have all be over. One look at a fraction of an inch’s distance…and we’d both been done for. A flicker of a lash and I was caught. His chin was throbbing and rough, everytime he pushed his teeth into my bottom lip I could feel the flesh of my own chin ripping under his unshaven face. I dug my revenge with fingernails into his back. Pretty soon we’d be a warzone.
I had two days of Mackaye, and I was grateful for it to be over. He was clumsy and young, and knew nothing of the world, and took his emotion in doses of antidepressant, thrice a day and he was sufficiently stifled, but no longer razor-weilding. Mackaye was a bore. I made it then, as anticipated, back east and arrived in Baltimore with hope of harbor waltzing and love reminised. Simon. Such a sweet series of memories he had given me, but I was poison to him. We sat down to coffee the evening I arrived. He was again homeless, and we were having the same conversation we’d been having for years. The topic was weathered, and had lost all meaning over the years, but it was a process we engaged in whenever I returned to Baltimore, and whenever I left again.
||I want to stop. I want to stop chasing after vagabonds who wrote poetry in the backseats of fast cars fifty years before I was born. Beautiful people more famous for their friendships than their literature. I want to stop chasing answers to these questions plauguing my every action, my every inaction. My every breath, I question. I want to stop chasing all of this pseudo-intellectual bullshit that means everything to me. I want you to catch me.|| (This wasn’t actually true, mind you.)
|||You don’t want me to catch you. You want me to catch up with you. You still want my homelessness, you still want my songs, you still want to sleep on city benches with me. What you’re proposing is no more than a relocation of a goddamned bench, that’s your romance. I’m only what’s tangible. You want the story. ‘They stuck needles in their arms and claimed to know God. They got kicked out of Ivy League Schools and drove from New York, to San Francisco and back repeatedly because their lives were so miserable they had no material over which to meander during their psychedelic relgious escapades. They shot their wives and fucked eachother and occasionally picked up a pen to jot it all down.’ You want to live their story.||| (This was Simon’s way of debasing me, whilst at the very same time, making fun of my literature choices, though he himself had a battered copy of Satori in Paris/Pic on the very table we were seated at.)
||You’re right. I’m shallow.|| (Read as: You’re right, I should never have left you, I’m a terrible person for it.)
|||Shallow? How in the hell do you come to that conclusion?||| (Read as: I forgive you, though you are crazy for leaving.)
||Women. I fucking hate my gender. You know the kind of woman who resides in shopping malls? Who spends three hours on her hair in the morning? Who fusses over her make-up until she looks like the cover of Cosmo or whatever in the hell magazines are out there to lower the esteem of the fairer sex? That kind of women, so preoccupied with an aesthetic notion of what she should look like–well at least she’s practicing authenticity.|| (My coy way of evading any emotional discussion, and steering the conversation into a lighter air.)
|||How can you even compare yourself to women like that? They’ve no concept of life.||| ( I love you.)
||No, they have a perfect grasp of life as it should be. Christ, I throw my meeger belongings in the car and move 3000 miles across the country because of a bookstore and a nomadic whim, and they are still at home, perfectly happy. They are content with their lives because|| (I fucked up and mentioned my move, please, interupt me.)
|||Because they are shallow. They are only content because they don’t know any better.||| (Come back.)
||Not true. Well, no. It is true. You’re right, they don’t know any better. That’s what I want. I don’t want this elitist narcissism that makes everyone look idiotic. I want to be one of the idiots! I want blue eyeshadow and pearls and magazines instead of books!! Shelves upon shelves of Good Housekeeping and Redbook and Cosmopolitan–things would be so splendid then!|| (Punch-line. Let’s roll up this conversation, leave these coffeemugs half-full and go have a fuck.)
A time ago, I convinced myself that Simon never existed, that he was a figment of me, someone I had created to appease my desperate lack of intimacy. Every night spent talking together at diners, I was only talking to myself, or thinking to myself. He was never there as anything more than a materialization of all of the mistakes I had never made, the slum part of a life I had never led, as everything that could have gone wrong with me but never did. He was of my mind. I convinced myself of this whilst sitting in a diner with him, and looking up from my book to realize I was sitting at a table alone, the cup that had been his then closer to me, and the waitress asking me–me–if I wanted it refilled, as though it were mine all along. He had only been out to smoke at the time.

|||We have a fucked up relationship.||| (This as we are in bed together, light streaming in through the blinds, and oh, it didn’t matter anymore at that point, I was to leave that day.) I was not feeling ‘charmed’. Baltimore City…to me, was a very foreign and isolating place. I called it home long ago. When dad dealt drugs and I picked up dirty needles in the park, proudly parading them over to mom, before she slapped my fingers, and took them away. Needles. That town. That town was never home…only a temporary idling place that forever remained so…so…dull. So dull, in fact that I couldn’t properly use another word in its description. What is it that I missed whilst I was in California? I would like to have missed the people, but honestly, that wasn’t it. It must have been the discontent. I missed feeling sorry for myself. I missed hiding from my raging potential, I missed burning nights away at the Papermoon…snorting at all the artsy MICA kids, who not two years prior were living out of Mommy’s house and bank account, attending mundane little high schools, with mundane little friends, and mundane little aspirations. I missed that superiority. How dirty and pretentious I felt, sitting there alone, tea and pen in hand, just as goddamned fucking artsy…oh, oh, but I was ‘authentic’, I was real. I was everything all at once, and nothing that they were. Fuck them. I used to stare at how the factory smoke poured out at five am. On that pier that I went to damn near every night. That blue the sky turned, that factory over the harbor. The smoke stopped being profound at some point. I made that all up anyway. It was smoke. It was not beautiful. I refused to look at it like that. A brick wall became just a wall, no longer a fatalistic representation of humanity. I made all of that up. I decided on that trip that the world, well the world was as seen. Nothing more than the paper on the package. Certainly not profound or beautiful.
This misanthropic vibe kept with me during the course of my travels back to California. That was an entire plane trip, once delayed in Detroit before arriving at Sky Harbor, and the Greyhound between Phoenix and San Francisco which was completely uneventful. Aside from my success is conquering the very back row of three seats for hours of slumber. Oh, and the epiphany of the LA bus station. The powder blue of it all was unnerving…as though LA had become Hallmark’s newborn baby boy headquarters–but had never gotten around to officially proclaiming it on those fancy california italicized license plates. So I sat amidst the unbearable monotonne with black coffee (foam cup), a habit that I’d picked up somehow over the previous year.
“Door eleven goes to San Francisco. I could hop the bus and get there earlier–spray the attendant with a handful of powdered creamer and bleached sugar packets. He’d know then. He’d know that I wasn’t fucking around and he’d understand. He wouldn’t dare try to stop me. Until somewhere around Gilroy when a passenger paid to that bus would get on, clothign reeking to the skies. They’d kick me off until the next bus and I’d rot in a greasy pit of garlic.
No, no I better stick around LA for now…I can’t let that kind of jig go down. I’ve got my coffee, black and toxic and my soy crisps, light and airy. I’ve got it all and I’ll top it off with a Djarum black–right here in the terminal. Kill off some of these children. Oh, they’ll surely asphyxiate after a few curious moments. As they blink their little wild eyes I’ll lean back and take another slow drag and remind them that soy crisps are made from non-genetically modified organisms. They’d giggle blue and curl out their little sausage fingers for proof. I’d slip a few crisps in and crunch, gobble, wham! They can breathe again.” So not an epiphany, but a disturbing revelation of sorts. No children were harmed in the making of these thoughts, but they were my true thoughts, surprising to myself.

III.
I spent my first days back in San Francisco at a standstill. At a place where no amount of well-meaning friends or idiotologists could figure out why I was still standing there, in such a place. Walls followed me wherever I wandered–bare and white. The air, tight and hot, and I stood in the middle of it, unable to leave or to describe why I remained.
I sensed something that I wanted to care about so much…something that I wanted to just infuriate the hell out of me, but I couldn’t manage to muster the energy to feel that way, or even to really understand what that something was. I returned to work, building scenery for a musical. Under the house, 9/16″ socket wrench in right hand, oversized crescent in the left, I pulled apart everything above my head. Funny, that. Me, below, tugging apart all of the hardware that was holding everything together. One quick move and everything would have tumbled atop me, the aluminum ladder holding my feet would have been crushed like a soda can, I, I would have been an organic mess mixed in with a pile of splintered wood and metal shavings. Everything might have come crashing down from above me. I wanted to feel it. I wanted to know it. Though I didn’t really care at all. Apathy–to a crippling degree.
A number of days upon my return, Parker and I were to meet at the same cafe we had originally met at for coffee and doubtless conversation. I arrived first and took it upon myself to thumb through a Nabokov book I had bought at an outdoor sale that very afternoon, a fabulous concoction that held my interest remakably. I was so very enthralled I did not see him walk past me, and to the counter where he ordered his poison paper cup. I did not, in fact notice his presense until he was seated in front of me, rolling a cigarette and remarking on the book, which he had yet to read. I read him aloud an excerpt, about lateral nests and jewel encrusted eggs, and promptly explained Nabokov’s theories on thematic design. This topic kept us occupied for quite a time, as did a number others that were breeched. Through conversation and basic courtesies extended (How is so and so and the what have you) I came to find out that Parker and his girl lover of sometime were no longer seeing one another. She was very young and I had only met her once. An eager blonde thing that seemed intelligent for her age but far too bubbly and appeasing for my tastes. The conversation lasted until the cafe workers began to take inside their chairs, we had no intention of talking so long, and the thrill in my guts when I realized the time was like a tiny rollercoaster of pleasantry. We bid one another adieu and agreed between ourselves that yes, we really must do it again sometime. I walked back to my studio with far less apathy then I had been dealing with since my return.
I’m sure everyone waxes philosophical in their bedrooms, alone each night. In fact, I could probably garner evidence of this if ever I should need it. Within moments of returning to my room, I had in my lap a dictionary and was looking up words I already knew the meanings to, words I had spotted on the walls of the cafe bathroom. The smell of cloves still on my fingertips, I placed the dictionary back on the shelf and picked out a yellow paperback picasso gallery. Prints of Wm. S. Burroughs fluttered down like leaves and I turned the pages and focused on meditation (contemplation) and the absurdly long fingernails of a blind man and his lover. I was listening to Pulp and wondering when things would be different again. I needed change. I considered maybe moving the furniture again or writing a novel without vowels…but the idea was far too obscure and I wasn’t nearly brilliant enough to pull through it. So instead, I practiced my girl things in secret. Though every suggestion of it to Simon had been in jest, that night I decided to paint half of my face with thick make-up and leave the other half bare. I had until nine to kill, and I made use of the time with careful strokes of eyeliner and thick coats of mascara. I took pictures of each half of my face, and thought about the way I’d want my ideal lover to be. I warned you. Girl things. His lips would press into his ciga

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