Blazed (26 page)

She stops for a moment.

And Beach House sings . . .

“I don't want to know, we don't need a sign to know better times . . .”

“He left me in the room after he came. I was naked and dizzy, and I threw up on the floor. That was the last time I drank, man. The last time I got high. I'm an emotional person. I feel things so much and I'm so hypersensitive. I was acting out and thinking I was hurting Ricky when really, I was just hurting myself by doing that. What he'd done had already happened. It was so foolish to think I could make myself whole again by sleeping with a stranger. I was so ashamed of what happened that I never even told him.”

“Damn,” I whisper. “Just damn . . .”

“But he broke my heart so bad. He used me and then broke me and I hate him, Jaime. I hate him so fucking much.”

“Better Times” fades into “Little Dreamer” by Future Islands and I say, “I'm so sorry that happened.”

“No,” she goes. “You never feel sorry for me. That's not cool. This isn't a pity party, I'm just telling you what happened.”

Sliding my fingers from her face to her neck and down her arms very slowly, I ask, “So why are you doing this with me?”

“Because I thought it was going to be easy. I thought we'd just kick it and fool around and it would be nice because I think you're so cute and so talented and so smart and I'm so attracted to you.”

“And I'm attracted to you.”

“But I wasn't planning on feeling like this, Jaime.”

“Like what?”

“So connected to you,” she says. “It's crazy but it's true. I feel emotionally attached to you in every way, and it sucks now because you are leaving and I've gone too far deep. It's like there's no way I'm not going to get dismantled if I keep digging deeper, but there's no way I'm not getting shredded if I turn back now. So I'd rather keep digging. I'd rather have this short time with you and go all in and get destroyed instead of bailing and being miserable and wondering if maybe something would've happened differently in the end.”

“Differently?” I say. “Differently how?”

“Like maybe you stay in San Francisco and live with your father.”

I turn my face from her and pull my hand away.

“I know it's stupid and I know it won't happen, but that's how I feel.”

“I could never do that to my mother.”

“I know. And that's one of the reasons you're such a fucking rad person. That kind of loyalty is amazing. It's incredible, Jaime. I just wish you'd stay.”

“Thank you,” I tell her.

“This is so nice.”

“It is.”

I look back at Dominique, and she lifts her head and we kiss.

“I just want you here. San Francisco and Dominique forever,” she whispers as Future Islands sings . . .

“And as we say good night, I hold you close and tight, no more raging suns, only waning ones . . .”

I RIDE THE TRAIN TO
brandon's house. It's not far from Dominique's. I wanted to cry when I was leaving her. She had tears in her eyes and didn't want me to go but understood that I had to.

This is our relationship right now.

Defined by her understanding that I'm always gonna be leaving.

Awesome.

The train climbs this small hill on Taraval and when it pops over the peak of it, the Pacific Ocean opens up right in front of my eyes.

It's fucking killer, too. I've never seen anything like it before. I can see the waves violently crashing and birds in the sky and it never ends. That's the best fucking part about this right now. How everything beautiful in front of me never ends.

I get off at the stop Eddie texted me and walk to the house.

I can hear them playing from the street and walk to the garage door and knock.

Nothing.

I knock again.

Still nothing.

So I text and then knock again and the garage door finally opens up.

I walk in.

“What up, homie,” says Eddie. He hands me a beer from a cooler.

“This is pretty sick,” I say. “Thanks.”

“You ready to get down, dude? Bring some of that Tiger Stitches shit to this mix?”

“Of course.” I open the beer and take a drink.

There's a Gretsch guitar on a stand plugged into an Orange amp.

“That's so fucking pretty,” I tell them, as I pick the Gretsch up and really feel it in my hands.

“Glad you appreciate it,” says Eddie. “And this. All of it. Everything.”

“I'm fucking stoked, dudes.”

“Awesome,” Brandon rips. “Welcome to the shitshow.”

I laugh.

And Eddie says, “This is the world done proper, homie. And never let anyone tell you differently.”

I put the strap over my shoulder and run my thumb down the strings.

“Fuck all those boring kids out there,” he says. “Fuck them and their math tests and their science projects and their school dances, man. This is the only world worth existing in.”

“Let's do this,” I say.

Brandon punches a button and the garage door begins to close.

Before it does, though, I turn around and look outside. Right across the street, I see this boy with reddish hair wearing a tank top and shorts even though it's pretty cold out.

He looks seven, maybe eight, and he's standing in the front yard of his house all by himself.

He's holding a ukulele in his hands and trying to play it, trying to figure it out, and he's all alone and he doesn't care. He's just trying to make some noise that sounds right and good.

“Let's fucking rock,” Eddie yells.

“Stop, drop, and rock 'n' roll!” rips Brandon.

And the boy looks over at us now and waves, right as the garage door closes all the way.

EDDIE DROPS ME OFF BACK
at my father's house around midnight. I'm super fucked up too and surprised he could even drive, cos I thought he was more fucked up than me.

That Black Books song “The Big Idea” is playing in his truck.

“So stoked we covered this song tonight,” he says.

“One of the best songs ever made.”

Eddie laughs and goes, “You're probably right, man. It's good. See you at five tomorrow. Let's shred a little bit and then head to the show.”

“Word, homie.”

“Tell Kristen I say hi too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, dude. She's such a fox, and her boyfriend's a twat.”

“That's for sure.”

“So you'll say something then?”

“Yeah, man. I definitely will.”

We fist bump and I go inside. All the lights are off.

I grab two Coronas from the fridge and go upstairs. When I flip the hallway lights on, I see this box sitting in front of my door.

I pick it up and go inside my room, locking the door behind me, then sit down on the bed and open one of the beers.

I take a huge drink.

The box is unmarked and taped shut. I take one of my keys and stab it into the tape and rip it open.

Inside are two manila envelopes packed so full they can't even close all the way. There's a Post-it note stuck to one of them.

I take it off and read it.

My heart slides into the pit of my stomach now. Face turns white. I can feel it. Feel the fucking color leaving it once again.

The note is from my father and it says . . .

Since you have no interest in listening to anything I have to say or spending any time with me, I thought you could read about what I've wanted and tried to tell you all these years.

I pick up the envelope and reach into it, pulling out at least thirty smaller envelopes. All of them are addressed to me in Joliet, and all of them have been opened at least once and then sealed back shut and marked
return to sender
.

There have to be at least sixty or seventy envelopes here. I take three from different years and open them. Inside each one is a letter or a card or both. And
the letters are long, too. Like five, six pages handwritten front and back by my father. The dates on the letters range from me being five years old to last year. I read the postscript on one of them, and it says to make sure I use the money wisely but to enjoy it a little bit too.

P.S. There are no checks in any of these.

P.S. There's no way I can deal with this right now.

I'm not reading another word.

Stuffing the letters back into the box, I stand up and dig the tinfoil out of my bag and rip a piece off.

I drop a blue on it and go.

Then open my notebook and start cribbing. And it just flows and it flows and it flows right out of me. Two pages, done in ten minutes, and after I read it three times and make two small changes, I turn my webcam on and hit record . . .

“For months we played nothing but the silent treatment game, long, cruel winter days spent justifying all of our wrongs and glorifying everything we thought we'd done right even if all of those things were just simple choices that anyone with a lick of common sense would do . . . Some nights she'd snore in her sleep and wake me up and I'd lean back against the cool wooden headboard and stare at her, knowing that there was nothing she was capable of doing that would ever stop me from loving her . . . For weeks I worked on a love letter for her in private, and for weeks I couldn't come up with good enough words and sentences that conveyed the way I really felt . . . It was maddening, it made me sick and furious, until I stepped back one day and stared out of the cabin window and watched the sick orange
and brown leaves of autumn fall off the tree branches and float so passively and mercifully to their death . . . it was then that I realized not every emotion can be captured with words, not every scene can be described to perfection, and not every feeling is meant to be manipulated and used for your own selfish purposes . . . she was sixteen once and she worked at the town's swimming pool as a lifeguard, and she looked better in a bathing suit than any of the other girls that summer, or the summers before, or the summers after . . . little did anyone know that when she was ten, she nearly drowned in a lake and for two years she wouldn't go near water, not even the familiarity and comfort of the shower in the only house she'd ever lived in could give her the peace of mind to get wet again . . . it wasn't until Joey Harrison pushed her into the swimming pool during gym class and she didn't die, when she realized how silly fear can be and how our minds are capable of taking away the simple pleasure and fun of even the most innocent things . . . Not long ago I was at a show and this band refused to play any of the songs they were known for because they hated the idea of repeating the past, being stuck in a moment that was created five years earlier, and the crowd booed and the guitar player walked off the stage, and I appreciated the place they were coming from even though the only reason they were still able to play shows was because of everything they'd done before that . . . it's a funny thing when life works that way . . . holding you hostage to history while demanding you evolve and remake yourself in order to survive . . . In Lexington I met this group of teenage cowboys who talked about raiding their town on horseback someday, then riding off into the mountains with their bounty and starting their
own civilization . . . what's not to love about the imagination, what's not to love about dreamers, what is there to love about cynics, what is there to love about the dull, the shallow, and the defeated . . . not long ago I sat on a stoop in the middle of a rainstorm and wrote furiously in a notebook, cribbing my whole life story in the hopes that all the water that hit the pages would wash my life away . . . this is where we are, I guess . . . twisting in the wind . . . digging for our purpose, searching for a meaning, desperately reaching for anything, anyone, who can prescribe us definition and narrow our existence down to whatever two lines best describe the way they feel about us . . . You have to try really hard to be bored in life . . . and I wonder sometimes why a person who tries that hard to be bored can't put that much effort into anything else . . . I don't believe in the notions of fate or chance . . . I don't believe in people who say they don't know what they wanna do or don't know what they're good at . . . I judge people based on their own opinions of their own self-worth, and I also judge the people who base their self-worth from the opinions of other people . . . and I judge them cruelly . . . hopefully one day, we'll all make good on the promises we made to ourselves . . . and hopefully one day, we'll all understand that every moment has the potential to be the catalyst to the future we daydream for hours about each day and wish for . . . two days ago I finished her love letter . . . it was on the third anniversary of the day we broke up . . . nothing I wrote could've changed our history . . . I only finished it to see all the things I never appreciated about her and took for granted . . . none of this will ever be easy . . . This life will never, ever be easy, and that's what I love the most about it . . .”

When I'm done, I hit the foil again and log onto all my social media sites and post the fucking video. By the time I've finished posting on the last one, the first three have over seventy likes already.

Fuck all these adults who can't keep their stories straight or the lies hidden.

The kids are doing all right, ya know.

All of us kids, we're doing pretty fucking good for ourselves, and you ancient people are dying.

You suck too.

“HERE'S WHAT WE'RE GONNA DO,
homie. You with me? Cos this is important. This is the future we're talking about right now. The future and it's gonna be fierce and lovely and wonderful. Like so fucking wonderful. You ready?” Kristen asks.