Johnnie Walker Red

I hope this doesn't get to be a habit, but I could see how it could become one. Real easy.

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Written Saturday, December 23, 2006 at 3:04 am

Am I drunk?
How does one person define drunk?
I can still type, though with difficulty.
I can think and rant.
I can feel and hurt.
But who wants to hurt? Who wants to think that’s anything other than the default emotion you go to when there’s nothing else to say?
Am I drunk? I don’t know. I’m the last person to ask.
There are people who would know.
I feel tired. Real sleepy like, but energetic. Still lots of kinesis in me.
And that chick, that bitch, who won’t talk to me.
Who doesn’t call.
Shit.
Cause he told her not to, right? Cause she’s not allowed.
But also cause she doesn’t wanna.
Also cause sh’es mad that I have a passing interest iun schedule-friendly archaeology.
But I’m reeling, and finding it difficult to focus or to stay still.
And that might be drunk.
But the whiskey does me good. Makes me feel good.
Didn’t do much for the cigar.
A buck seventy and one big glass of Jjohnny Walker Red and I’m still thinking too much to make this anything worthwhile.
I might be drunk. I wouldn’t know.
And I think back to when we were happy and I fear
That I’ll never be that happy again;
Ad that I don’t even get the neat throwaway happiness of Bukowski,
I dno’t even get his leavings,
Save that I want them, save that I think I’ll prove to her
That I’m not the person she knows I am
Which I am
I bought presents today, three days before Christmas.
I went to Barnes and Noble
And was pointed towards We Got The Neuton Bomb
By an extremely attractive lady with a largish nose
Who I found stunning
And told her so
And asked if I could give her my number
And was told she was dating someone
But hell I tried, at least Itried
Which was morethan I would have done a week ago
Morre than I would have done before she gave this to me
And now my leg shimmies and the whiskey hits me in the back of the mouth
And I want to be so refined and brooding with my cigars and booze
And that bottle of wine on my shelf just wating for my attention
And that’s going to make things okay, right?
That’s goin to help.
He’s not as smart as me.
He’s not as good-looking.
Hell, I’d get a tattoo,
If anything deserved it.
My body doesn’tneed permanence, my rapid weight loss proved it
It needs cariety
Like me
God I wanted out when I was in
And, out, I want to be in again
As if that would make ime happy
And I wonder if, tomorrow,
I’ll read this nad not remember having wrote it.
But I bet that one big glass of whiskey
Isn’t enough
To make you gorget the first big regret-fes you’ve had in about a week.

Langosta

After so long with one person, you accumulate a lot of shit. I mean stuff, just things, that are all around you, all the time. Things that have grown beyond just something that reminds you of them, things that you need or are part of you now more than they were before. Things you can’t get rid of. Things you won’t.
Walking around my home, now, there are things all over the place that keep sparking off little memories, little narratives that run through my head too quick to really register in any respect apart from the quick twinge of pain. Especially with her, who defined her feelings through possessions, who defined love through what she could give and what she could get, there are too many things here to get away from. Were I to divest myself of all these many, many things, it would be bare in here. Stark and empty. I’m not sure that would be such a bad thing anymore.
There’s a little plush lobster on a table near my bed. His name is Pinche. I won him out of one of those arcade claw-grabby machines, which is already something amazing as the grip on those mechanical appendages can be likened to that of a seventy-year-old arthritic woman. Even then, I doubt Maude would have much difficulty picking up a stuffed teddy bear. I won it, retrieved it, one summer when we were spending time at the beach house my family rents out for a few weeks in August every year. There was a pavilion-type area nearby, and we’d gone there to spend time together, playing games and riding ferris wheels and all the things you do with someone you’re excited to be with but would really never bother doing by yourself. These are things to do and places to be when you’re with someone else, just to have something to do and somewhere to be together.
We played a rolling-ball-poker game, where you rolled handballs down a ramp to a grid of holes designated as playing cards, and tried to get the best poker hand you could. You won tickets the better the hand was. We played skiball, which I think exists only so that the five percent of the population who excels at skiball can impress people around them at least once in their lives. The game exists, for the rest of us, to humiliate while in front of a ramp and a series of hoops, a circumstance one is rarely afforded in this life.
And we took pictures in one of those photo booths. Like you do. We sat in the booth, took two pictures smiling, two pictures kissing. Like you do. We waited for ten minutes while they developed, and were rewarded with four grainy, black-and-white reproductions of our spontaneous affection. We divided the pictures between us, later, cutting them apart and each getting one regular, one amorous. We would show them to people. See how wild and in love we are? See how we couldn’t keep apart even long enough to take a picture? O, we tried, but eventually our love overcame us. See how we couldn’t keep from kissing each other there, in the sight of the camera and all of God’s arcade-going creations.
Like you do.
Glowing, we walked back to the house. We were about halfway there when I realized I didn’t have the little lobster with me anymore. We retraced our steps and found him, alone and cold, on the street near the rear entrance to the arcade. I felt terrible. Not just because I’d left behind such a helpless little thing, but because I’d left behind something that was of us. Something that had been born from our union. I know that seems overdramatic, that some stupid little plush animal shouldn’t have held such heavy and immediate significance to me, but it did. Once, when I got extremely sunburned, she called me her langosta, and when it faded to pink I became her camerone. I was always some kind of sea life or another, unless I was a bear from a popular bread line. Those little epitaphs stuck with me. What else can I say?
We picked him up and I tucked him securely into my pocket, making sure I wouldn’t lose him again. She fawned over the little crustacean, and I thought it was adorable. I still love the things that she loved, how they made her act. How they made her what I liked the most about her. To this day, when something happens to me that I know, were I to tell her about it, would make her coo and sigh and speak in that wasteful baby-language I resent the fact that I can’t tell her about it. I hate the fact that I won’t get to bask in her reaction, that I won’t get to experience that foolishness. There were plenty of things that started to annoy me about her as we neared the end, plenty of things that I just couldn’t stand anymore. I don’t think that was ever one of them.
The lobster came back with us, and survived the trip inland and into my home.
Next year, at the same arcade, she wanted to take pictures in the fucking photo booth, and I didn’t. She got mad, and stormed away. I didn’t see the point. We’d already done it, and I knew if we did it again we’d take two pictures smiling, two pictures kissing. And we would let ourselves think it was spontaneous, and flirty, and just how we were in our O-So-Loving lives. It would be false. It would be stupid. You shouldn’t do things just because they are the things you are supposed to do.
And now that lobster sits over there, its acrylic eyes staring at nothing at all, and it’s red, red plush carapace stands out amongst all the sundry curios I have accumulated over a lifetime of attributing too much meaning to too, too many things.

Don't Let Go

This is #10, which is a good start. I'm a little worried these things might start deteriorating in quality over time, but so far I think they're holding up, and I haven't run out of different things to talk about in each one yet, so that's working out for me. I'm thinking 100. If I can get that many, I can maybe get a book going. Maybe that would make a difference. Maybe that woud help.

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Don't Let Go

I’m just not all that brave. I’d been dancing around her for about a month or so, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask her anything. I can face down a lot of things, I can protect what’s mine, and fiercely… but that five feet of woman broke me down and didn’t let me work. She didn’t even know she was doing it.
It was her handshake that first did it. Sure, she was pretty. Prettiest one there, at the place we worked. But it was the handshake that really did it. I was introduced to her by our boss like she was nothing, like she was just another of the chicks who worked the weekend and who I, working during the week, wouldn’t be seeing a lot of. I came to hate that. She stuck out her hand, the only one who did, and that little thing gripped me perfect. Confident, sure. Perfect. She had me then, by the hand, at the very start. The first time I laid eyes on her. And I hadn’t been with a woman for a while, due to disinterest and lack of motivation. I hadn’t cared about being alone until then.
Like I said, though, we had opposing shifts. I’d hope each time going into work she’d be there that day, that I could watch her go about her day and admire her. Didn’t happen all that often, but when it did I latched on to her. In the very beginning, before I’d seen her more than three times around the office, maybe, she came walking by me at my post in her civvies, no uniform like I had on (she never had the chance to hate the way I dressed until she was already with me), and waved to me. Made my damn day, I can tell you that.
She was wearing a pink shirt and jeans. Her hair was longer then, but her bangs were still around. Summer came, and she started working during the week and after a while we started talking. I would confide in some shithead who worked there that I had a thing for her, that I thought her skin was perfect and she was just about the prettiest little thing I’d ever seen. He’d goad me on, but I never respected that guy, so I didn’t take his advice. I just needed something to talk to about her. She was really amazing, then, in the beginning.
We were talking, once, and she said she didn’t like hairy guys. I told her I was pretty hairy. We laughed about it. She felt my stomach, and shrieked saying she could feel the hair underneath. I mocked offense and walked away, though it wasn’t all mock. I went over to a couple other people who worked there, people I stand if I had to, and asked them about the hair issue. We talked for a bit, and suddenly she was there with us, having walked up as we were in the middle of the who-actually-dislikes-body-hair poll. She smiled at me and said,

“I don’t mean I wouldn’t go out with someone who had chest hair. Besides, that means we could sit in the tub and shave it together. It would be cute.”

I didn’t figure it out then. Fuck we’re thick, us boys.

Again, dancing. Shucking. Trying to get close to her and being too scared to do anything else about it. We had our picture taken together with a few other employees and one of the shift leads put his arm around her. I figured they were together. Later, she told me they weren’t. Well, that was good to hear.
Finally, there were four of us. She was there, a friend of hers (who she would later fall out with, fickle thing that she was) and shithead. We were talking about a movie that had come out recently. I said I’d like to see it, she said she’d like to see it too. Shithead almost asked her for me, right there, but I managed to intercept him before I would have had to deal with that little crippling indignity. I said,

“Would you want to go see it with me?”

She smiled, turned red, and laughingly talked about how it’s strange to ask people to go to movies with you at the office. Her friend laughed, and left, and shithead laughed, and left. After they were gone, we talked for a bit, her and me, and I explained myself, and she said she just didn’t want her friend to have been there when someone asked her. That it shouldn’t be everyone’s business. I said okay, and was walking away, catching up to shithead, when he asked me if she’d said yes.
I didn’t really know.
I walked back, and saw her light up when she caught sight of me. I felt great. I asked her again, in serious and alone this time, and she said yes. She told me to get her number off the office list.

I’d been told by a girl once to do that, and had been blown off. Therefore, in the back of my mind, there was the chance that she was fucking with me. That this whole thing was just her trying to get out of the embarrassment of having to say no. Just the same, I felt good. I liked her, a lot. I liked her from the first time I saw her.
And when I called the number, she answered. When I asked if she could hang out with me, she said she couldn’t that day, because of her family or something (that became a running theme with her, everything taking precedence). I asked about the next day, she said yes.

And we actually did go out that time. I was taking her to see a movie, and I pulled up to her house and couldn’t work the gate to get to her front door. I called her cell phone again, asked her how to work it, and she said she’d come out. In the car she explained that her parents didn’t want to meet anyone their daughter was dating because of some drama with her brother and his fiancé. At the time, I couldn’t take my eyes off her, it didn’t matter what she was saying. And I was trying to drive.
I took her to some retro restaurant (which, one more notch in the woodwork, eventually fell out of favor with her), took her to a movie, and drove around with her for a while talking about art and Marcel Duchamp and so many things you don’t find in so many people. So many things that I miss. So many things that I missed for a long time before we split, I guess.

We never did, by the way. Sit in the tub and shave my chest together. The scum would have been disgusting, anyhow.

If you asked her, she’d say that the start were those talks we had, or that awkward instigation around our co-workers. She might even say it was our first kiss, she held out long enough, or the car crash that really made her care about me. She might say it had all been motivated by one of these ridiculous, little things.

But it was that handshake. From the very start. I grabbed on and I never let go.

I still haven’t.

Unplanned

The third time we ever made love, the condom broke. It was really rough going for a while there, then all of a sudden it felt great, slick and hot, and by the time we were finished we had no idea what had happened. The latex stretched around my cock like a collar. I’d come inside her. This was not good.
This was death.
I always said that we should be careful, that we should take precautions, and the idea had been for me to wear protection and for her to get on the pill, but nothing doing. There is little that could stem the need to procreate when the means are right there in front of you, waiting and aching, begging for it. Little you can do when faced with that. So, at the time, she wasn’t using anything, and that thin membrane of theoretical safety was all that was keeping us from rendering my seed of destruction. When the damn thing broke, all bets were off.
I’d wanted to go with her to the clinic, to be with her for support. I never actually did, which might have been as much her machinations as my general lack of interest. Not in her, but in the mechanics of our fucking. It was the fucking itself that I relished, that I languidly luxuriated in. So, she went to the clinic and got what they call a morning-after pill. It prevents you from getting pregnant if there was a chance you may have been inseminated. She took the pill, and called me and we talked for a bit. I wanted to make sure she was OK, just to know that she wasn’t having some Catholic existential crisis. She seemed fine, so I let her go and said goodbye. I didn’t take my cell phone with me when I went out, I just left. Out the door and into the world.
That night, when I got home, four missed calls were waiting for me, all from her. I called her right away, worried, and she was ill. Apparently, the morning-after pill is not a Get Out Of Jail Free card. It wrecks your insides, and she was in pain. On top of that, she told me she couldn’t count on me anymore, that I hadn’t been there for her when she called. That she thought if she could hear my voice, she’d feel better, and that I let her down. Just like that. Forget your phone, you’re fucked.
I tried to talk her down as best I could, pacing around in my garage. She was in real pain. All kinds of pain, or both, anyway. Even then, I was never wrong, and I kept telling her, over and over again, “I just forgot my phone! That’s it! THAT’S IT!” Like a woman even gives a shit why they’re mad at you. If a woman’s in pain, in any way, she will find a way to make you responsible for it, and no amount of reasoning will convince her of otherwise. I didn’t realize then that the only way to win is to buy into their reality. Accept the fact that you should never forget your phone, because the act is an immediate discounting of any reliability. This is bitter, but there you go. Truthfully, I was right, as always, and too stupid to think otherwise, and wouldn’t give a girl who’d just tried to medicinally keep herself from becoming impregnated by me a little slack. A little tenderness. A little buying-in.
She got on the pill, after that. The pill. One time, waiting for her outside her house I saw her dad watering the lawn outside their fence. I’d never met her parents, and wanted to break the ice since we’d been going out for a while, and it’s what you do when you’re half-a-man. I started walking up toward him, this was Valentine’s Day, I remember, and was almost up to him, him looking right at me, when she came out of the fence and steered me away, back to the car. Apparently, he’d recently seen her little pill-box. Dated and organized. Singular-purposed. She got me lingerie, which she said she’d wear for me. When we ended up using it, eventually, I didn’t even take off her panties. Just slid them to one side and tried to ignore the friction on one lengthwise half of my cock because, hell, that was some shit right there.
She was medicated thusly for a while, and at some point stopped. Her reasons were many, as they always were, but she was afraid of ovarian cancer, which it can apparently cause, and I guess the things made her periods crazy strong. Like debilitating. So she stopped, and we kept on going right at the same pace, but for real serious about the condoms now. There were times when, in the heat of the moment, I’d just get in her and go to work. There were times she’d give me head, and always swallowed. There were times I’d start out bareback and manage to miraculously gather up enough self-control to stop and put on a condom mid-fuck. That was the hardest. There were times when I’d come somewhere other than inside her. Those weren’t necessarily the best, but they stand out.
She’d been acting strange for a while, and the idea had crossed my mind but I’ve never learned to trust my intuition, as uncannily correct as it’s always been. Then I was gone for a bit, and when I came back she was upset, and after a long night of picking a fight over the phone, she came out with it. She’d seen a doctor, who’d told her that an egg had become fertilized in her fallopian tube, and couldn’t be allowed to be carried to term, as the egg’s placement wouldn’t let it develop correctly. It was a sickness. A condition that needed to be cured. She’d taken some medication, and it had flushed her system. Down the drain.

So that was my first child.

And she was fighting with me, now, because she was late. Again. Real late. And we were going at it pretty hard and mean, screaming and all that like I always tried to stem but would never really succeed at. We drove to Rite-Aid and fought, calmer, in the parking lot. It was the single trashiest thing I’d ever done. I told her we could maybe make it work, that people do it. That I’d take care of her. I meant it.
We went inside. She wanted me to stay in the car, but I wouldn’t. She found the test in some aisle and took it to the register. She told me she didn’t want to be there, for the clerk to look at her. I took the package from her and bought it myself. She was waiting in the car, and I drove us to my house. She went into the bathroom, and I paced outside because that’d what you do when things like this happen.
She came out, it was negative. There wasn’t any kid.
We held each other in the hallway, and cried. I said,

“I wanted it to be true.”

She said,

“I know. Me too.”

Die Slow Over the Months

The last few months together with her were rough. I wasn't happy with myself, and she wasn't happy with me, which made me unhappy with her. Nowadays, she'd say she never felt pretty, that she didn't feel good about herself, but I doubt she ever lost her feelings of pride, her sweet little vanity. I never begrudged her vanity. If anyone had it justified, it was her.
I argue with myself about how long we kept it going after it was dead. We each tried to end it so many times, that by the end it had stopped affecting me. It was only when things were okay, when we weren't fighting and she said she wanted out, that I ever took her seriously about it. The first time she wanted to leave me, I taught her a bad lesson. As soon as she said she thought she wanted out, laying on my bed, I got so scared of losing her I immediately recanted everything I was saying, every mean thing. I apologied, begged her to stay, did all that things that would show her that, from now on, if she wanted me to fall into line all she had to do was bust out the "I don't want to be with you anymore" line, and I'd snap to. The last time she tried it before things were over, I didn't even blink. She stormed out of my truck and was going to walk home to Santa Ana, I suppose. Suffice to say, she wasn't following me into the house (we were really good, especially near the end, at getting a good disagreement going during the ride between me picking her up and going to wherever we were going). I let her go. I said,
"If you want to start acting like an adult, feel free to come back in."
I didn't turn to follow her, I wasn't going to chase her like every other time she pulled the same stunt. Every. Other. Time. And as soon as that trick didn't work anymore, as soon as I refused to tag along after her, begging her for attention and approval, for sense and civility, she left. I don't think she had any control over me past that. Certainly everything else I did proved that.
Was it three months before it ended that I'd lost interest? When did I start thinking about leaving? When did I decide to stop thinking about it?
We went biking one night, me desperately trying to find something she wanted to do without her telling me. That was part of the game that was our relationship, trying to figure out what was going to make that woman happy. We made it about four blocks away from the house and started arguing about something. I don't remember what, which says more than if I remembered what it had been about. Anyway, we were screaming in a crowded neighborhood relatively late at night. She was on a shitty bike, and so was I, and I started to head back, with her still berating me the whole way, and me saying,

"I know you think you're going to be able to take this all back when you calm down, but not this time. Not this fucking time. I'm not going to get over this."

Then she was really laying into me. I called her a cunt. I spat at her. I would have done anything to shut her up.
On the care ride back to her house, wanting her to get the hell away from me, wanting it to be over, I didn't say anything at all. After being on the freeway for a little bit, her it comes:

"Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. Do you forgive me?"

And before she even gets to the last word:

"FUCK YOU. I TOLD YOU THIS WAS IT. I TOLD YOU THERE WAS NO GOING BACK, AND I MEANT IT. NOT THIS FUCKING TIME. FUCK YOU!"

She didn't say anything after that. We rode to her house, and when I stopped to let her out she started her textbook last stand. She never tried to work anything out when it would have mattered. When it would have meant anything. I got the silent treatment until we were at her house, and then the tears would start, and the arguing about who was right and why we shouldn't be fighting anymore, then the driving around the block so her parents wouldn't see us fighting outside, or so that she didn't have to worry about it, or some other thing. It was always the same thing, and I always did it the same, because I loved her.
But I dropped her off, I told her to get out of the car and I didn't look back. I was really done. She'd just gone too far. Been cruel and careless, and I'd had enough.
And she says it was six months from the end, a year from it, that she started to feel like she wanted out. She says we were done long before we were done, that she didn't want me for the longest time before she ever actually did anything about it. She says that she just didn't like me anymore, now that it doesn't matter if I felt that way or not. Now that I don't care anymore. Now that's she's killed that in me. Hell, I should have figured that just from her fucking.
So she called me, of course, and we hung up on each other over and over again, of course. Same old rigamarole. Going through the motions. This time, though, I was going to stick to my guns. I was going to get out, because I just couldn't take it anymore.
And she kept calling. And I asked why.

"Because I neeeeed you."

The "need" was a long, sobbing sound. I hear it in my head now, months later, just as clearly as I did then. It was the most pleading, desperate thing I had ever heard. I think that's what changed my mind. I think that's what made me come back, what made me finally cave under my own resolve. I asked her a few times during the conversation to give me some time to think, which she did. In the end, we made up, like always. The wheels kept spinning, the plane would level off momentarily, and the plummet towards the slow death that awaited me would be postponed for a little while longer.
Maybe it was only a month or so before the breakup that I felt like I wanted out. Maybe only a couple of weeks, but then the job made things better. I really wanted to see her that week, wanted to start rebuilding.
She didn't neeeeed me. I don't know if she ever did. She didn't want to be with me then anymore than she did when she ended it.
She just wanted to be the one to pull the trigger.

That Kind of Woman

She’s the one who turned me on to Post Office, then she lent me her copy of Ham on Rye. I think the one I still have might be hers. After that, I was stuck. I got as much as I could, I read like a wildfire, and I found someone I really related to. I think that’s what got to her most of all, how much I related to him, rather than being fascinated or disgusted by him as everyone else seemed to be.
Other people seemed to want to watch him burn. They felt his fire and they wanted to be around to watch him wither under its heat. He mesmerized them, not dying after vomiting blood for a week. Drawing these women with the power of his soul, and nothing else to speak of. Drinking, whoring, smoking, gambling. Shit job after shit job designed to such the art out of your skull through your eyes, and he just kept right on going. Over seventy years of that, and he never quite. There’s a neo-primitivist boxer on his gravestone, gloves up, ready for more. I don’t think you can imagine a better symbol for his life.
He spoke to me, often. In what he said and in what he thought. I remember hearing his voice for the first time, laying in bed with her and seeing the light flicker across her body, always at her best when she had an excuse not to talk. How fragile it sounded then, and how shocked I was that such pain and anger, such an oppressed soul should all be expressed through such a beautiful, lisping, gentle voice. Even his scream was something of a paradox. You never really bought into it.
I had hear about him from my father and his drunken, sociopathic friend. Evidently, he’d known the Great Writer, and would regale my dad with stories about his readings in Long Beach for hours on end. I knew all about Bukowski, I knew his history and I knew about his works, but had never read any of it, had never had the inclination to. My dad would tell me, repeatedly, about this story where a woman turns a man into a six-inch dildo, a story he said was called “The Six-Inch Prick.” Reading through The Most Beautiful Girl in Town I was a page or two into the story, actually titled “Six Inches” before I realized I was reading that very story I’d heard described, hastily and through an excited, embarrassed, be-moustached smile time and time again. It was good.
But she’s the one who showed him to me. She’s the one who gave me the book, who would talk about him with me. I remember being shocked that such a pretty little thing could find beauty in his ugliness, but I guess that was part of his majesty. Part of his talent. He was beautiful, which I don’t think he ever really understood. But we saw it, and we’d talk about it, myself animatedly in my frenzy. He’d said so many things, in his writings, that I’d tried to say throughout my life but had never been able to give words to. He lived a life without direction, without purpose, bumping from one bullshit job to the next and never worrying about his “potential.” Never worrying about his “prospects.” He lived as he lived, nothing more. He had his manners.
He should have been a king.
I wonder if she ever drew the connection, between what I was doing and him. I wonder, had I been him with all his manners and his ways, if that would have been enough to keep her around. I became inundated with his philosophy, with our philosophy, then. I dared the world to judge me for being out of work. For not realizing my potential. I stood in the face of critics and naggers, I stood and I took it and I think it affected me more than it ever would have affected him. I just care more than he did. I let it get to me more.
And, finally, it was too much for her. All that loneliness, all that lack of purpose, all that unmotivated motivation I had shunned and tried to see if I could live without, it caught up with me, and when she had the chance she took it and ran. And had I never lost the stupid job, had I always been a hard-working, get up early, attend and deliver, interest and action kind of guy, would she have stayed? Would we have gotten that stupid house and that stupid dog? Would she have been mine? Or is it just that if someone can leave you, if there’s any chance of them leaving you at all, they eventually will, because no two people can stand to be around each other forever. No two people can deal with each other for quite that long, not without deluding themselves or at least one of them being exceptionally stupid.
And she was never stupid, just short-sighted. Just foolish. Just naïve.
I read The Most Beautiful Girl in Town, a collection of his short-stories, the first of his works I’d read out of her sight. I saw there, in there, things that I hadn’t seen when I was with her. I saw the pieces he’d tried to put together, to make sense of. I saw the healing that the prose had given him.
And, finally, I saw that it had never been enough.
In the end, the only way out is to get out. In the end, you have to gut it out and sit tight and wait for the storm to pass. Ain’t no kind of writing or poetry or song or substance that’s going to make the wind blow any less or the rain fall any slower or your heart keep together any more than it was already gonna. You’re stuck with what you have, and man I have it.
It was because of my actions that I lost her. She was a good woman, for the kind of woman that she was. I guess I just wasn't up to trying to keep that kind of woman around.
He would have understood.

Asleep She's Amazing

I was looking through some of my old stuff, and in a large document where I keep all my poetry sequestered, quarantined if you will, from the rest of my writings I found this. I wrote it about a year ago, when we were still together. Probably around February, when I got my new terrible job. I don't have a lot of this stuff laying around, I don't think, so I have no idea what I'm going to do from now on when it's late and I have to work the next day and can't think of anything to write about. I want to write, my stomach wants me to write, and every now and then when something she used to do for me runs through my head or when I think of what she would say about some innocuous little chunk of my life I give some sad sack sigh that wracks my bones. All that, and I just can't get any words out.

---

Asleep she’s amazing.
Her eyes can’t stare
Her brow doesn’t buckle in disapproval
Her eyebrows don’t rise,
With her questions
With that accusation, that attack
Asleep she’s amazing
Can’t pull away, can’t turn her head
She only smiles her little smile, just at the borders of her lips
She only breathes in bursts
Asleep she’s quiet
Asleep she’s perfection in skin and silence
I can touch her face
Like you’re meant to
Without her questioning, or my questioning
Or her doubts
Or my anger
I can touch her face
Because it looks so soft
And she can’t tell me not to
Asleep she’s amazing
Her face and her body
The blue light of the television
Colors her
And mutes imperfections
She looks so soft
Asleep she’s amazing
Because she doesn’t talk

Shorn

I'm thinking one a day. I hate to impose a quote on myself like this, as I know how I'm going to feel when I eventually, inevitably miss one, and the absenteeism spirals out of wedlock, or control, or whatever... but I'm thinking it's nice. I feel like I have a lot to write about, and I feel like I'm getting a lot of work done. I feel good, and better, and who knows? Maybe one day, I'll want to write about something that isn't her.

---

Shorn

She shaved. Down there. Not often enough to be all-the-time flesh, our intimacies often interrupted by her worrying about the level of pubic growth, but she still made the effort. She gave her reasons as having been in swimming, and having grown used to the practice because of it. The need for a swimsuit-suitable bikini line. The greater hygiene of it, I suppose. When we first started dating and I’d try to put my hand down the front of her pants, before she’d stop me I’d feel the smoothness, or feel the delicate and velveteen stubble. I’d feel it, and I’d want it. I’d fight for it, going back over and over again, being stopped before I could make it anywhere too far below her bellybutton, too far to turn back. I’d feel like a letch, like a pervert, but I’d keep going back. I’d keep hopping that fence and heading for the border, knowing I’d get gunned down long before I reached the promised land.
She was never comfortable showing me her pussy. She’d never spread her legs in front of me. Only when I’d get on top of her, only then would she open herself to me, close and to the hilt. If I pulled back even for a second, for any reason, they’d slam shut again, immediately. Even when I ate her out, I’d pull back to see where I was going, to get a better lay of the land, and SNAP. Gone again, hidden between those thighs and the cleft of that ass that would bury a man alive. That ass that would haunt your dreams.
There was something raw about it, her pussy. There was something that hinted at a kind of primal state. As if it was the pussy from which all other pussies were birthed. Nothing old or unpleasant about it, just some quality that denoted it as masterful, as unflagging and powerful. It had a vitality, not the mewling and whimpering pussy of Gennie or the sneering, challenging aperture Lindsay sported, always so close, always so engaged, but always threatening and hateful. No, neither of those, but there for me, all the same. It was staring and red and vital, and you thought it might swallow you when you were in there. You thought you might die.
There would be times, afterward, where she’d get in close to me, snuggle up like she loved me, and say,

“When you do it like that, it just makes me want to do it again.”

Well, fuck. Once was enough for me. I think the record was three. Three in one night. The most we ever did in one day would be difficult to calculate, as we had our share of afternoon quickies and good mornings, but never entered them into the final tally. Just now, thinking about her passion-swollen pussy and the whiskey still fire in my throat and belly, I’m starting to realize that I’m not going to be able to feel the same about her. That she’d give that to someone else, that she would so quickly forget everything we’d given each other, everything we’d own of each other’s… I don’t know I’m enough of a man to forgive it.
But I’m enough of a man to need a real job, and enough of a man to start editing a film that I don’t have faith in. Just throw the shit together, put the shots one after another and you’ll have a movie. Who cares if it’s embarrassing? Who cares if it’s not perfect? Who cares if it’s not what you set out to do?

Well, I do.

Near the end, she stopped touching me, and we hadn’t fucked in a month. When I tried to talk to her about it, she said,

“Oh, honey! I’m sorry!”

Like she didn’t even realize.

Once I wanted it pretty bad, and I was laying down in bed and she was on my computer doing God knows what. Whatever she did those last few months so she wouldn’t have the acute displeasure of having to pay attention to me. I wanted it, and she didn’t feel like it, so I started to beat off. Right there. I asked her to come over and kiss me, at least. She did, and I got close. Then she started to go back to the computer, and I asked her to keep kissing me just for a second longer. She did, and I came, and it was alright. Then she said,

“There. Wasn’t that nice?”

She never masturbated. Not that she told me, though she could have lied. I never saw her touch herself, though she’s probably buck wild now that she has this buttoned-down self-imposed propriety to live down. Date a bad boy, fuck all the time, get as bad and dirty and low-down as you can get because of all that repression. All that built up emotion that “they” wouldn’t let you get out. But she never touched herself. I didn’t get that. How can you be afraid of something that’s a part of you? A couple of times I beat her off. I’d lay next to her and kiss her, my hand working, using spit and her own moistness for lubrication, rubbing and patting and stroking and stirring, heating up the pot to boiling. She came that day. She came quite a few times, but not always. I was amazed at how little a thing that seemed to be with her.
She complained about my fucking, at one point. She said I was too rushed, too rough. After that, I corrected myself. There were times when I’d ask her to be more open, be more confident or trusting around me. She never did. She hardly ever even took initiative. She hardly ever even moved.
God damn it, I love these girls with their big, brown eyes and their soulful minds and their innocence, but I wish just one of them really knew how to fuck a man.

My Last Few Ruined Christmases

Christmastime. The year before had been a banner birth of Christ. She’d gotten me a Playstation 2, the small kind, which was a hell of a thing to get someone you’ve only been dating for five months. I remember thinking that my gift was really puny in comparison, she blew me out of the water.

There was a time, a few years before, when I was trying to hold my then-girlfriend up with her legs wrapped around me and get down in the same room that I was now receiving an extremely expensive piece of electronic equipment.

This Christmas, she would get me shirts for my “new job,” which was a sparsely-scheduled instructor position. Shirts and a tie. I felt so grown-up, and in a bad way. She offset that by getting me a little mechanical bull. Not a miniature riding kind, but a small robotic bull that, when you’d make a loud noise, would play a song and walk around, it’s little robot legs working in syncopation, its little head bowed obstinately, horns marching steadily forward, as if it could take out any dresser or housepet that got in its way. That helped bring the boy back into me.

So she got me the system, back then, and she got me a game I’d been wanting to play, not much one for videogames but into this thing anyway. She barely saw me for a month after that, I was playing the game so much. On the day that I reached the last level, having woken up early in the morning and picked up the controller out of compulsion, I called in late for work so I could get to the end. Later, she’d say that my always being late was something she came to resent in me.

Hell, I’m always late. It’s not like I try to be, I just am. People who are on time just don’t get it.

Now we’re supposed to be friends again, and Christmas is coming up. Before we split, I was planning on making something for her, and I still have all the components for it, but I’m not sure if she’d accept it. I’m not sure we’re getting gifts, even.

I want to show her I’m not the dirtbag she thinks I am, and she puts so much value in material things, she’s so very, very American, that I could do it come Christmas, if we were still on terms that would allow some commercial kind of interaction. I want her to see me how I am, and how she used to. I want her to see this thing she’s in is a temporary thing, it has to be, because she belongs with me. I want to get her that fucking ring.

She came to my family dinners, these last few holiday seasons, and I took her there not because I was dating her, but because I wanted my family to like my partner. My partner. The person I was going to spend my life with. This is getting mopey. I wanted to marry the girl, and I wanted my family to like the girl I would marry. It’s as simple as that. It should mean something to me that she never wanted me to meet her family, that even when I volunteered to do so, she still stopped it from happening. It should mean something to me that she’s already introduced this slimy motherfucker to everyone, and that they all like him, and that they hate me now more than ever, and that of course they hate me they have to hate me it’s the only way it makes sense. Is it because I’m white? I get the feeling if I was brown, none of this would have been such a big issue.

In the days leading up to that second Christmas together, we’d been fighting a lot, and she kept holding those presents hostage, saying she’d throw them away or take them back. It was all I could do not to tell her that she could go the fuck ahead, that things things things don’t mean anything to me. Of course, I didn’t want her to do any of that, because I desperately love presents. I went to her house after a bad one, to try and patch things up, and she brought out all my presents in bags, in glossy shopping bags, big smile on her face and that warmth, that wonderful warmth she had with her always. I got upset, and said that it was because I didn’t have anything to give her, but mostly it was because I was guilty for not having even gone shopping for her gift yet.
We started fighting again. I think I grabbed her at one point, by the coat. I drove her a few blocks toward my house, turned around to take her back home, then we drove around the block so we could fight in the car. She got mad and jumped out, started throwing the bags across the sidewalk and onto a lawn. Huge arcs from the truck to the grass, red and green shiny paper, sailing through the air as cruel as anything. I could hear things impacting, getting damaged. It made me depressed. I stopped her from throwing out the last bag, selfishly aware that I didn’t want her to break any potentially fragile things that should be mine, and she started to walk back to the house. I tried to stand in her way, to talk to her, and she slapped me.
I never take that. I walked back to the car, her begging me to stop and talk to her. I almost drove off, I think, without saying anything, but didn’t. We got in the car and I took her back to her house, she needed to drop off something before we left again, or check in at home. Something. I waited for her outside her house, waited for her to come back, even though I knew that she didn’t like me doing that, right in line of sight. It always upset her parents. It really never seemed like I was making any headway with them.

I think, sometimes, about what I’m going to say to them someday, the parents. Will they even listen to me if I try to explain that I’m sorry for who I was, and what I did? That I love their daughter and that my efforts from now on will only be toward her happiness, and that all this fighting and screaming and broken things things things was a fluke, a mistake, a horrible vicious circle that was allowed to spiral unchecked and out of control? Would they even listen?

Would they, come Christmas, be at my house?

I’ve done this, I’ve made myself this, so we could be together correctly. So we would make sense together, and this Christmas I knew what I was going to get her. I knew that I was going to get her. I was going to really do something.

I didn’t know that Christmas was my last chance.