Kosher

After college, I started looking into grad school. I was told that I should learn French, most of the work in my discipline having been done in that language, and since my job offered tuition reimbursement if I took a full load, I decided to enroll for another full semester at my old community college, just to keep myself busy and to get a couple languages under my belt. German, the other. Of course, this was the same school she now attended. I can’t say for sure if I didn’t look forward to that a little bit.
So we’d been apart for a while, at least a couple months, and we’d talk every now and then and it wasn’t sobbing, pleading conversation anymore. It was civil, at least. I mentioned I’d enrolled in classes, and I was worried about what would happen when we saw each other on campus. She asked which classes I enrolled in, and when I told her I was also signed up for a class on archaeology, she froze.

“I’m in that class too.”
“… Shit. Really?”
“There’s only one section.”

She lost her temper, accused me of knowing that she was going to be in the class, and the conversation ended with me being terse. Later, she’d call me and tell me that she shouldn’t have gotten mad about it, that we should be adult. Hell.

I was seeing a psychologist, and by sitting in a room and being encouraged to talk to myself for long periods of time, I was able to decide that I shouldn’t contact her anymore. Every time I talked to her, whatever had started to heal inside of me, whatever had started to scab and scar over, it bled fresh again. I remembered new and terrible things, things which wouldn’t let me sleep or stand up straight. Around December I stopped calling. She e-mailed me every now and then, and two weeks into January I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. After a while, once I realized it was hers, I was proud. She wished me a belated New Year’s, Christmas, everything.

“I just wanted to make sure everything was kosher.”

She told me about spending New Year’s Eve sick in her new guy’s bed. How his cousin sang her a song and played her the guitar which he was teaching her. I had spent it, though I didn’t tell her so, drinking wine and smoking cigars on a friend’s porch all night while the entirety of the party rotated outside and in, just to be around me. I was the life of that party, am the life of most parties, which would be much to her disappointment.
I was heading home to see a movie with my brother and, thankful for the excuse, I told her I had to go. It was nice not to be the one holding on for once, to be free. I said goodbye.
I got an e-mail from her of a Labrador with a tennis ball running alongside a yapping Chihuahua. She said it reminded her of us. Not just the size difference, but that she was always barking at me. I thought it was a sweet sentiment, and wrote her back saying as much. I didn’t talk to her again for another two weeks, first day of class.

About a week before class started, I really started to dread that Monday. I was going to have to face her, there wasn’t any way around that. The only thing that could happen was one of us bowing out and dropping the class, which I wasn’t about to do. As terrifying as the prospect was of seeing her, as terrifying as that pain was, I was not going to rearrange my life for fear. I wouldn’t be a man if I ran away from it, and yes it would be strange and possible painful, but I couldn’t just run away. I couldn’t bring myself to retreat.
That’s what I told myself, in my conscious mind. When I had to rationalize it, when I told my friends about my apprehension and they would suggest dropping the class or taking something else to replace the units, that’s what I would tell them. That I wasn’t about to get pushed around. Not me. Not Max Naylor. And yes, it was true to a large extent, especially the idea of having to find another class that interested me that would fit into my schedule. But, were I to be completely honest with myself, I wanted to have to see her. I liked the fact that we’d ended up in the same class, that we would have to spend three hours together every week. I looked forward to it. And I feared it as I fear death.
The week passed with ulcer-inducing anxiety, every day closer to Monday feeling like one less day I could be happy, which I wasn’t anyway I worried so much. I thought, This must be what death row feels like. Every day one day closer to death. Waiting for it to be over as much as you’re wishing it will never come. Time’s a tricky bitch, and can’t be shirked or cheated. The days tick away, the nights come and go, and all the bourbon you drink and all the cigars you inhale don’t stop the obstinate march toward your deadline, whatever you’ve decided your next deadline is.

I wanted to get there first. It was early in the morning, so the cards were already stacked against me, but I knew what was at stake, and I was committed to getting there before her, committed to making it her choice how she dealt with the other in the room. Where should she sit, would she say hello, would she be cold and indifferent? These were to be left squarely with her while I sat and awaited my education.
Both my alarm clocks went off at 8:00am. I had to be there at 9:35. After playing dueling snooze buttons for a while, as the setting had different timing for either alarm, I finally got up showered dressed collected sundry electronic devices and reading materials and headed out the door. It was about 9 and campus was, in bad traffic, up to an hour away.

Shit.

It was strange heading back to that place. Flying down the freeway, trying to make up for lost time, I remembered being late for class, stuck in standstill congestion, and hopping into the carpool lane all on my lonesome, consciously thinking every time that the carpool lane was merely the “laws of men” and trying to think it loud enough to bury the guilt.
I hadn’t been back to the old campus in three years and the structures had all changed, buildings had sprouted and had been razed but I knew where I was going, so no big deal. I parked, the lot a madhouse, and began the long walk to the classroom. I drank Snapple and listened to music on my hand-me-down ipod and thought about what I was going to do. I thought a lot about how I must look, so early in the morning. I wanted to be pretty. I wanted to show her what she was missing. Like you do. I thought I saw her in the parking lot, but I wasn’t sure. It was ten minutes to class, and I just wanted to make it there before her.
I would have smoked if I didn’t care about smelling good.
I threw the bottle in a dumpster and, in turning, felt my stomach lurch into my throat. She was walking in from the parking lot, hair breezing in her stride and a shirt I’d never seen her wear before. I turned and walked. I was going to make it there before her. I’d won. I would sit down, then she’d come in, see me, and have to decide what the social standard was going to be. God, I am not good at being human.
I found the class easily enough, briefly remembering having taken an Ethics class in the same room years and years before. I surveyed the room, and sat down in an empty aisle with two people sitting in chairs in front of me on either side. I got comfortable, took out a book, got ready to relax while she decided what the next move was going to be. I hate games, and I wasn’t playing this one to be coy. I was avoiding having to make that choice, having to be that brave, or that cowardly. I wanted out of the equation. I glanced down and saw the Coach tennis shoes I had seen so many times before on the girl sitting in front of me, to my right. My eyes moved up, saw the curve of the hip, first, then the jacket and the hair. The complexion. The girl outside had been far away, and I’d not been wearing my glasses.

Fuck.

So I’d sat directly behind her, and one row over. I could have reached out and touched her. I could have said hello, at least. Instead, I sat there, and looked away while, out of the corner of my eye I saw her look back at me, give a start, then turn back around. Well, that was it. We weren’t saying hello. She took out her phone and opened it, and for a moment I saw digital picture of them cheek-to-cheek on the screen. And I thought, in all honesty, You know what? He’s not so pretty.
The professor called roll, we both responded to our names and didn’t react to each other’s. The class proceeded and, while I found it fascinating, I couldn’t stop thinking about her being there. Seeing her again. Was she thinking the same thing? Was she having as much trouble breathing as I was? I looked over at her from time to time, I tried to see if her left hand, the one visible to me, had been the one scarred so terribly during a fight with her mother, if it had finally faded over time which she’d always feared it wouldn’t and which I’d always assured her it would. Anyway, it was the right. She was wearing a ring I’d never seen. I felt tired and underwater,

Class ended, and as we were getting up to leave, we met eyes.

“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“How’re you doing?”
“Good.”

We started to walk out.

“So, that was weird.”
“Yeah.”

We walked for a while, and she seemed extremely uncomfortable. She didn’t say much. I asked if she was on the same kind of schedule as last year, and she said yes. There was an awkward pause.

“Is it going to be weird all semester?”
“I think so.”

Then we walked away from each other. I didn’t say goodbye. It might have been because to say goodbye would belie a familiarity that is not presupposed in whatever relationship there now exists between us. That saying goodbye would intone an engagement with each other that isn’t assumed anymore.
It might have been because, even now, I just can’t say goodbye.

I had to take care of something at the records office. NYU had contacted me letting me know that they didn’t have my transcripts from the very institution I was now attending again. The old records office had been shut down in the time I’d been away, and where the abandoned library had once stood was now a new state-of-the-art administration building, inside which I could request the transcripts. I filled out the paperwork and stood in the line, the system still familiar even if the surroundings had changed.
At the counter, the teller asked me what my discipline in the arts was.

“Critical studies. Film.”

She asked if I had looked into Loyola Marymount. I said I hadn’t. She said I should. I told her I wanted to go to the east coast, that I’d spent some time up there, in New York, and that I loved it out there, that I wanted to go to school up there. She didn’t smile once the entire time she was making small talk.

“Well, for a change of pace.”

I went to where I knew a men’s room to be, and was relieved to find it was still there. I decided, in the mirror, that I looked good, and left worrying that I was losing too much hair. I walked out to my car, wanting to see her again, wanting to talk to her. Wanting a chance.

There was always Wednesday.

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.