R/T/M (8 page)

      They wouldn’t fucking let it go, so I finally relented and said, “Sean Connery.   But just cuddling.”

      Of course, being the over-dramatic nutbags they were they took that and ran with it.

      I finally had enough and broke it down for them.

   
  “Look.   The idea of having someone’s cock in my mouth doesn’t make my mouth water.   I don’t get turned on by imagining the business end of my dick in any guy’s mouth.   I’m not really big on anal sex and that goes double for guys.   And I know I don’t want any guy fucking me in the ass, so I guess that pretty much wraps that up.   Doesn’t it?”

     That served to shut them up and I’ve stuck with that line ever since.

     So I knew I wasn’t gay, but women just seemed like more trouble than they were worth.

     A little bit of happiness and when you least expected it… BANG!

     They’d drop you like a lump of hot dogshit.

     Then you’d find out that they’d been fucking your friends or some other dude.

     Why bother?

     I jerked off five times a day and I knew what I liked.

     I could get myself off in five minutes flat.

     I never had to buy anyone dinner and I never had to say, “I love you.”.

     That was good enough for me.

     I was friends with the room-mate of my ex-girlfriend who tried to kill herself.

     We’d hang out.   I didn’t think anything of it.

     I was bitter.

     I guess jerking off five times a day while swimming in a sea of girls that want nothing to do with you will do that to you.

     I was going through that whole philosophical freefall that trips up some college students.

     Bumper sticker nihilism.

     Taking art classes and film classes and Eastern philosophy classes.

     Searching for meaning.

     Defining themselves.

     Questioning authority.

     Rejecting everything.

     The last thing I needed in my life was a woman.

     I didn’t have any room in my life.

     I was so full of myself.

     As I said, I didn’t think anything of it.

     We’d spend a lot of time buddying around.

     Going to poetry readings at cafés, but at that time it was called “spoken word”.

     Don’t judge.   I know.

     Lame shallow pretension masquerading as depth and sophistication.

     Bullshit armor a foot thick.

     Clove cigarettes and black clothes.

     “Whatever.”

     She had a boyfriend.   Then another.   Because I wasn’t thinking about her as a woman we became close friends.   And since we were close friends and boy and girl we fell in love with each other.   At least that’s what I thought at the time.

     One of the most intense memories of my life.   We’re listening to classical music, Beethoven, and kissing.   The overture for the ninth symphony comes up, and scoring romantic scenes with the overture for the ninth is such a cliché that we both open our eyes and when our eyes meet we both break out laughing and without saying anything we both agreed to quit making out until the overture is over.

     She wasn’t the prettiest girl I ever dated.   She didn’t have the nicest body.   Her breasts
pancaked against her chest when they weren’t being held together in a bra and her vaginal lips had a weird bluish tint.   But I realized that the best of all possible worlds was being in love with your best friend.

     She dropped me.

     Like I said, she had a boyfriend.   I was better looking but he was a nice guy.

     She wasn’t going to break up with him and I was still
sleeping with any girl that was willing.

     I figured that if she had her boyfriend then I should have my girlfriends.

     Petty resentment-laden bullshit.

     Things just kind of unwound.

     I took it pretty hard.

     How hard?

     Everything I did reminded me of her.

     We were so in tune without making any effort to get in tune that we liked all of the same things.

     So in a surprisingly brief period of time, everything I enjoyed in life had turned bitter and rotten.

     Stale and unprofitable.

     I’d send her letters and gifts in the mail.

     Eventually she told me to cut the shit.

     I wasn’t crazy enough to keep it up so that she’d have to take out a restraining order on me.

     But I was close.

     I figured if she wasn’t having it, she wasn’t having it, but maybe some day she’d change her mind and realize how perfect we were for each other.

     I couldn’t sleep so I’d drive by her house at night.

     I wouldn’t stop, but I’d see her car in the driveway and I’d be overwhelmed with emotion and I’d have to pull over into the parking lot of the restaurant at the end of the street and push the heels of my hands into my eyes, making black stars bloom until the desperate longing subsided enough for me to drive away like I had committed some crime and was driving the getaway car.

     I thought about her every day for five years and every other day for the next five years after that.

     I spent a year asexually.

     Girls were just humans with higher voices and nicer hair and curvier bodies and a wider variety of clothing options.

     It’s not that girls didn’t flirt with me, but I just shut them down cold.

     I wanted no part of their coy bullshit.

     I went all astronaut / 1950s television detective.

     It was all
, “Yes miss.” and “Yes ma’am.”.

     And every night of that year I was in such emotional turmoil that I would try to cry myself to sleep, but I couldn’t cry, so I just laid in the darkness, looking into the darkness, keening like a wounded animal, not sleeping until exhaustion overwhelmed me.

     I lost weight.

     I didn’t eat because I was never hungry.

     There was only one thing in the whole world that I wanted and since I couldn’t have it I didn’t want anything.

     I smoked cigarettes like it was my job.

     Smoking causes cancer?    Good.

     How long does it take?   How many cigarettes do I have to smoke?

     I was looking for a reason to kill myself.

     Just to end the endless suffering.

     Being diagnosed with cancer seemed as good a reason as any.

     This went on for years.

     I was a terrible person to be in a relationship with.

    Maybe just a terrible person in general.

     I was one hundred percent confrontational one hundred percent of the time.

     I was not afraid of death, so I was not afraid of anything.

     A man without fear is a fool, but he is also invulnerable.

     Everyone is immortal until they die.

     That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

     Except, of course, the thing which kills you, which just fucking kills you.

     If I kill a mosquito, sucking the blood from me, I feel no remorse.

     Mosquitoes don’t go to heaven.

     Why should humans be any different?

     Who decide that humans were a superior species to mosquitoes?

     All we are is smart monkeys.   Tool-using monkeys with big fucking brains.

     But not big enough to get over racism and homophobia and religious differences.

     Just big enough to realize ourselves as a part of, yet simultaneously separate from our environment.

     Just big enough to realize that there is the self, and there is the not-self.

     Just big enough to outsmart ourselves.

     Nothing is permanent.

     Matter can neither be created nor destroyed.

     On a long enough timeline nothing matters.

     On a long enough timeline any event becomes insignificant in relation to the whole.

     The light from some of the stars which seem to shine at night comes from stars which died before the beginning of human history.

     What’s so great about being alive?

     Ten years after I ran into her again.

     She was bartending at the lightweight pseudo-fetish club that I went to every Wednesday.

     She made eye contact and waved at me and I beelined right over to her, ignoring the blonde girl in the lingerie that I had just broken up with who was trying to give me a ration of shit.   I was talking with her and it was like I was alive again and all of the despair in my life drained away.   The blonde came up behind me and was poking me in the shoulder saying, “That was rude!”, but I brushed her hand off me and then slapped it off me and shot her a look that made her turn on her heel and stomp off in a fuss.

     Whatever.   She’d be back.   Stupid cooze.

     Whenever the girl I had loved so intensely came around she’d smile and we’d talk.

     She was working, so we only had a couple sentences at a time.

     I asked if we could hang out.   If I could call her.   Not like boyfriend and girlfriend, but it would mean so much to me if we could just hang out every now and then.   I would have done anything to get her to agree to be in my life in any way.

     She said she had a boyfriend.  She said he was, “spiffy”.

     I said it didn’t matter.   He could come along!

     It wasn’t working.   She gradually resumed the expression she had when she told me to stop sending her stuff in the mail.

     I said, “Fine.”, and I took a card from my wallet.

     “This is my card.   I thought about you every day for five years and every other day for five years after that.   There’s nothing I can do that will change your mind either way, but if you ever decided to call, it would mean the world to me.”   I put the card down on the bar and picked up my beer and walked to the other side of the club.

     I didn’t sleep for a couple days after that.  When I finally passed out, I slept for, like, twelve hours.

     When I woke up I felt better.

     I had said what I had wanted to tell her for ten years and now my love for her was hers to deal with.

     Let her lose some fucking sleep for a change.

     I had the blonde in the lingerie over and I fucked her like a porn star until she begged me to stop because she was so sore that when she came it hurt.

     I may never be able to love someone that intensely ever again, but I wasn’t going to let that ruin my life.

     I hadn’t killed myself and it was time to live.

     But in those few days something about me had changed.

     Metamorphosis is a cliché, but I’d like to hear your suggestions.

     I knew that my heart had been broken and would never heal.

     I knew that I could feel lust and compassion and sympathy but I would never love another woman.

     I knew intuitively that you only get one shot at something that burned that brightly and seemed like it could last forever.

     So there you go.

     Even someone as alien and abnormal and fucked up as I have become can love.

     It doesn’t excuse my actions, but maybe it explains them.

     It took a girl almost literally throwing herself at me to break my year of self-imposed celibacy.

     I’m in the dining hall and my friend Joe comes up with this redhead.

     She looks a little heavyset but she’s got blue eyes and a nice face.

     But remember I’m Mister Hate right now so I don’t make a fuss over her.

     We talk a while and she invites me to go to a Beltane celebration.

     I figure, what the fuck, so I agree to go.

     She picks me up and we go out to this Beltane celebration.

     It’s out in the country on some old farm.

     There’s a bunch of people in renaissance garb and cloaks.   You know tights and poet shirts with big poofy sleeves and v-collars with a rawhide lace across them.   And everyone had long stringy hair.

     It was a fucking joke.

     The only cool person was this old dude that everyone said was a druid priest.   But he was really drunk and I didn’t really get a chance to talk with him because he was surrounded by crazy looking people in cloaks.