Backwash

Ethically I think marriage is a cruel joke most of the time; aesthetically I think the idea of fucking my wife is hot. I've been thinking about it a lot lately.

My biggest asset and biggest problem in finding the right girl has been ex's. Mine and theirs. People hooked on ex's often fail to recognize in time that pyromaniacs don't suffice in meeting our needs. We require highly skilled arsonists. Tears have a nasty habit of making ex's soggy. We need pros to ensure they're all flammable.

The wife thing is a very complicated issue. Like I said, I just wanna get off on it and leave it at that but the world won't let me:

There was a sign on a bus stop I walked past informing me a huge number of sex slaves lived in North America. I stopped and read it over again. SEX SLAVES IN NORTH AMERICA! How could this be? RIGHT NOW! Right now? NOW! I felt awful. FEEL WORSE, BRIN! But I do already. MUCH MUCH MUCH worse!

I looked around at every house up and down the street and I knew they all had a basement, a potential SEX SLAVE DUNGEON!

YES, BRIN! NOW YOU UNDERSTAND! SUSPECT ALL!

I do! You've convinced me, Sex Slave Bus Sign. By your numbers I must know at least half a dozen sex slave owners already! But who are they?

UNCOVER THEM! HUNT THEM!

Then I looked up at the poster on the bus stop sign and saw a hooker standing on a street corner as a guy in a car rolled down his window to talk to her. I made sure this poster was part of the same ad. It was. I had a sinking feeling. This implied, if I understood it right, that all prostitutes constituted "sex slaves" as well. Not *some*. ALL.

THAT'S BECAUSE THEY DO, BRIN! ISN'T THAT OBVIOUS?

What if you asked one and they disagreed?

YOU'RE GOING TO TRUST A HOOKER'S OPINION?

Why not? You're supposed to be a fucking advocate here on their behalf!

TRUST THE SEX SLAVE BUS STOP SIGN! IT KNOWS ALL. THAT IS WHY WE PROVIDE NO SOURCE MATERIAL FOR OUR DATA. WHY SHOULD WE! IMPLICITLY TRUST IN OUR ASSESSMENT. WE *KNOW* SEX SLAVES. NO SEX SLAVE CAN HIDE FROM OUR GAZE. WE SPEND ALL OUR TIME AND ENERGY CASTING OUR OMNISCIENT GAZE AT SEX SLAVES. BUT IN A HELPFUL, POSITIVE WAY. THERE IS NOTHING CREEPY ABOUT THE SEX SLAVE BUS STOP SIGN!

Of course there isn't. But you didn't list the criteria by which a sex slave is measured.

HOW DARE YOU SEEK CLARIFICATION ON SUCH A SENSITIVE ISSUE!

I'm terribly sorry, but how DO you ascertain whether someone is a sex slave? Maybe it's when commerce enters the equation! That's why the prostitutes were lumped in. Okay, that seems reasonable enough. I'm with you so far SEX SLAVE BUS STOP SIGN. But then, I mean---don't take this the wrong way---but why stop with hookers? Porn-stars, strippers, actresses, waitresses and---what's their name again?---oh yeah, WIVES. If I'm following your logic and line of argument, any woman who married a guy for cash or security also qualifies as a sex slave, don't they?

OF COURSE THEY DO.

Don't make me think of a wife as a sex slave and me being their sex slave owner if I pay for dinner. Don't turn my wife into a repressed sex slave for liking me paying for dinner. Don't do that to us.

SHE IS.

The next day the sign was gone.

If going to a Radiohead concert is like meeting 20,000 of your girlfriend's ex's, then I wonder what it says as you bump into your ex's and the ex-movie trailers start rolling, that only a few of them feel as if they're in the theater watching along with you. You can almost look away from the screen and zero in on them and watch how they react to the moments you had with them and the moments you didn't. Close calls. White lies. Private stuff you left for them to discover alone. Watch the chorus lines of firsts and lasts with her dance by. Spooky musical chairs element to it.

I saw an ex the other day drive past me on the street. She didn't notice me. She never does. In the 9 years since we broke up only twice maybe we made eye contact. I got to meet her son the most recent time. She'd given him a name we'd proposed for our kid. Did the dad know this? I dunno.

But she never notices me when she drives. And she always drives. She always has what looks like a menacing expression playing on her face but that's not it. She's concentrating. She had a lot of secrets and I'm sure she has a lot more and even in her mind all those secrets are whispers. She's straining to listen to them sometimes and straining to ignore them other times.

She's the only ex who sits *next* to me in the theater watching her trailers. But she can't leave it at that. She smokes. And she blows that shit straight into my face. And if I wanna kiss her or run my hand along her thigh under all those dresses she used to wear she only smiles closed-lipped and whispers what she used to say in real life with this Belgian accent gentle as snow falling off a branch in the morning with no breeze, "Ne touchez pas."

You meet all of them where you meet everybody, some kind of train station feel to it. Tracks are everywhere. Crowds enter and leave. Somehow you pick each other out and start off in the middle. Some people have looked at their tickets and know where they're headed. Some don't have a clue. And the fun, at least for me, is figuring and feeling out if the conversation before the train ride is all there's going to be. Maybe she buys a new ticket and gets on your train. Maybe you buy a new ticket and get on hers. Maybe you sneak on. Maybe you both have the same ticket.

Sara says to me all the time, "I'm moving there but do I really know you?"

Dan says to me about getting engaged, "She'll never know what it was like for my parents to be together. She can't understand how they ever WERE together."

But I was there. I saw them. I understood them being together mainly because it never occurred to me think WHY they were together in the first place.

Months ago it's 4am and we're at Denny's, end of the night for the guy sitting across from me, start of my morning. A mob of drag queens harasses a stampede of frat boys outside our window. Our waitress looks like Bowser from Super Mario. I've come out here to ask one question:

"I wanna know what the most interesting thing is you found out about prostitutes by dating a Madam for a year."

"You wanna be grossed out?"

"No, I really don't. I wanna be surprised."

"Okay. How's this: 80% of the girls hired never fucked their clients. They'd be flown out to visit the guys working over at the oil rigs on weekends and most of them never turned a trick the whole time."

"So what'd they do?"

"Just talked to them. Married guys are the loneliest guys in the world. They'd fly them over just for someone to talk to. Companionship."

"How much they paying?"

"Huge money."

"For company?"

"For company."

DH Lawrence had this line of thinking that a man only betrays because he's been given a *part*, and not the whole. And a woman only betrays because only the part has been taken from her, and not the whole.

I need to track down some more billboards and bus stop signs to sort this shit out.

Clocks In A Casino

I went to the fights Friday night. It was held inside a casino. The ceiling was made up to look like a starry night sky, presumably to balance off the feeling of being in a gutter looking up at it. Walking through all the tables and rows of slot machines felt like walking through a garden of weeds. For some reason it made me think about the irony of Nick Drake overdosing on anti-depressants. I don't know why. Pretty much the only thing worse than Las Vegas is places aspiring to be Las Vegas; places heavily populated by stereotypes and aspiring-stereotypes. Here's your paint-by-numbers scene: Security guards, roulette wheels spinning, dealers shuffling, slot arms jerking, cocktail waitress heels poking carpet, private poker rooms, 24 hour VIP parking, high roller tables, women dressed up, stacked chips, trays, Wayne Newton signed poster on the wall, fake tits brushing up against elbows connected to a bet doubling-down. I can't handle bets---I like dares.

A boxing student I teach bought me a ticket as a present. His dad was a family doctor who got in trouble a long time ago over some off-label stuff he was giving his patients and the medical board held a hearing about it that ruined his reputation even though he was completely exonerated. First he jumped off the side of a mountain but screwed up and didn't die but shattered his leg and permanently had a limp and a cane as a souvenir. A little while later he took some pills to commit suicide and succeeded when my boxing student was 29, the age I am now.

We watched eight fights in a row after the two national anthems were savagely gang-raped by some 3rd Rate Tone Deaf Scarlett Johansson Wanna-Be Popular Country Star's crumpled notes and sawed off-key embrace.

It was lousy boxing and I felt a little mopey and blue taking it in, but it was still kinda beautiful watching for the reason boxing always is: fighters are always far more afraid of being embarrassed than they are of being hurt. That always gets to me. And that other catch to the whole thing that the cowards and the heros both feel the same and it's just what they do that makes them different. That one does a number on me too. It's good to be a sucker sometimes, if you can afford to.

It made me miss my little gym in old Havana that's reduced to a little postage stamp to this letter.

Zapruder Film

"I'm beginning to feel that no author has the right to tear his characters apart if he doesn't know how, or feel that he knows how (poor sucker) to put them together again. I'm tired - my God, so tired - of leaving them all broken on the page with just 'The End' written underneath."

JD Salinger, 1943

I come back to that doozy all the time. I have a taste for stuff laid out all pure and complicated. Salinger has a way of way of molesting you with his wisdom and making everybody else's grope feel a little too vanilla for a while. I'm still trying to figure out where you leave them or where they leave you when you're broken and it's *not* on the page. Which makes sense. I've missed a million connecting flights since pretty early I found out fiction has to make sense where life doesn't. That's why on most levels I can tell my nephew Mathew that I'm five years old too and he has to think for a second, with an impressive little scowl, before he tells me I'm lying. I tell him to ask his dad and, sure enough, my story is backed up and poor Mathew is left scratching his blond little head. I'm waiting until he understands I'm not conning him to see what he makes of it.

My best friend got engaged the other day. I'd written a story about him a while back that I hadn't got around to finishing and sorta left it like a kite rattling around in a windstorm. Most of my kid stories feel like that---except usually some girl has a cozy grip on my string along with a pair of gleaming scissors in her other hand. This story does too, but not for my friend. Dan never missed any of his connecting flights I don't think. But a girl in this story did her best to try...

DH Lawrence was bonkers over the idea of love being a stench rotting in people's noses. A stench. Basically whether or not you mind kissing her armpit on a first-date (I wear "Secret" deodorant just in case).

There are plenty of old Hungarian folk songs my mother used to hum around the kitchen whose lyrics she left out because they all described love as a curse. Figures. If you asked for a jacket for Christmas from your Hungarian sweetheart they'd give you a vest and cut off your arms, "Dare's jee-or jaggat, Bweeny." So what is the stench? The back of everybody's baseball card? All the headlines and fine print wafting off somebody.

Which is to say, courtesy of one long-ass, belabored stutter, that's how this story happened on a few different levels. So as an engagement present I figured I'd dust this fucker off and give Dan its kite-string and a pair of scissors seeing that his lady swiped my soul-mate so that he could moonlight as a husband.

Zapruder Film


Before ninth grade math's first buzzer, the mute, top-of-the-class, allergic-to-eye-contact foreign exchange student handed me Steph's note without even slowing down her pencil. The note read: WHOS GONNA BE THE FIRST TO GET LAID IN OUR GRADE???

Of our two week note passing spree this was by *far* the grandest question posed. I glanced over with approval but Steph just stared straight ahead, chewed her gum (Carefree), blew a massive bubble toward the empty teacher's desk until it popped and splattered over her lips and one cheek. I was obsessed with her mouth. The kid in the desk in front of her looked back and she winked at them as her tongue went after the gum stuck to her cheek.

I tapped the exchange student's shoulder, leaned over her desk and flashed some dimple placing the note over her notebook's opened page. She pretended not to appreciate it. I waited until I saw her eyes move over the note. She read it twice and shook her head the second time.

Ok. So who's your horse? I asked.
Shhhh.
Class hasn't even started yet!
Shhhh!
Nobody shushes me the way you do.

Steph threw an eraser at me. Don't be mean to her, she mouthed.

Buzzer rang. Last few kids trickled in. Two girls who shared the same name crammed and grinded against each other through the door. One formerly chubby now conspicuously anorexic in baggy clothes that had once been a couple sizes too-tight. The other with a hearing-aid after a fight with a brain-tumor a few years before. Death was circling and was gonna take her a couple years later. She'd get a plaque next to a planted tree. They slid into their chairs and opened their books as a few kids around class silently observed and considered them for a second. I noticed a few doing it. They noticed me noticing. Steph threw a crumpled piece of paper that whacked me in the temple and I tried to get back on task trying to answer her question. I felt a little woozy. You had to keep your head down, there was a lot of crossfire around here.

We're secondary characters in a lot of people's lives. The brushstroke that sums us up usually isn't all that pretty. Cheap, tabloid headlines mostly. Cancer and anorexia were pretty heady words lit up on a kid's marquee, especially when things are so fucked up they can't hide it but still try to. It leaves an impression. People tended to resent stains at my school. Invisible janitors cleaned up all our shit and graffiti and vandalism.

Teacher charged into class wearing gym strip. This was not unusual. Nut-hugging shorts the most famous article of the ensemble. Always a little puzzling whether the result was a desired effect or just a generational thing. He pulled down a chalkboard, turned and faced it displaying a considerable wedgie to us, started writing instructions. There were still wild, unrestrained sounds in class. After a second he crushed the chalk against the board and paused, slowly looked over his shoulder, stared at the backs of a huddled group of girls giggling and moaning encircling the desk of a pony-tailed, lisp-ridden brunette smiling closed-lipped at the back of class. They were all smiling back there with whatever news was going around but the lispy-brunette was the only one with enough composure to have her mouth closed. Which meant, as far as I could tell, she was the one dishing.

Math teacher squared his shoulders to them, clasped both sides of his waist just over the elastic band of his nut-hugger trunks, cocked his eye brows as the big lead-up to his trademark...

A kid jumped in for the alley-oop, fully loaded with spot-on mannerisms and delivery: Uhhhh, ladies? UHHHH... shut-up. Yeah, shut-up.

Teacher glanced over at the kid. Not bad, he said.
Don't mention it.
Timing, tone, cadence, tempo. Nicely done.
You're a pillar in the math and physical education departments, sir.
I appreciate that. Girls, really. Girls. GIRLS. What the hell are we doing back there? You're a little young for a sewing circle aren't you?

They dispersed and went back to their seats but still had their attention glued to whatever they were talking about. Something had blown their circuits. Their aerials all seemed a little bent.

I only have you folks for an hour. TRY, at least PRETENDING, to pay attention. Sewing circle bullshit later.

We loved that he swore. It reminded us that the nut-huggers weren't a style so much as a shot across the bow.

After the teacher finished writing up our assignments and went back to his desk, Steph crushed and snapped off the tip of her pencil against her notebook. This was a tactic she employed only in extreme emergencies. The teacher heard it and looked over. I did too. Steph shrugged and went to the back of class where another girl went into her bag and dug around for a replacement.

A minute later a Laker's "Show Time"-era no-look pass with a note: LAST NOTE VOID. GUESS WHICH GIRL.

I looked over and Steph nodded gravely until we both smiled.

Other guys looked at her mouth when she smiled sometimes. Puberty was like getting cable and I was stuck on community television. I'd had a few dreams about kissing that mouth of hers and spent a lot of time wondering if it would feel the same if I ever had the chance in real life. I knew the other guys looked at her mouth and saw getting blown. I tried to see getting blown but it never worked. I had enough trouble seeing kissing her.

You're in love with me, Steph taunted.
Huh?
Why are you staring?
I dunno.
You're in love with me.
What makes you so sure?
You can't stop thinking about me.
Oh yeah?
Every girl you'll ever go with you'll compare to me.
You sure?
You're so in love with me.

The last time she said it was strange, like somebody had stepped on the peddles of a piano to draw out vibration. The eye contact had made the real communication something like this:

You're so in love with me.
Yeah, Steph. I'm afraid so.
You're in love with me?
I'm sorry.
You're in love with me.
What choice did I have?

It was the last time she'd ever joke about it. I'd become the punch-line and it didn't go over.

I wrote the name down. Nudged our reluctant messenger and placed the note on her desk and saw her pass it across the aisle. Watched Steph's grin as she read it. After a little while she shot me a look with her chlorinated swimming pool-blue eyes.

Our teacher got called on the PA to go the office. He said Fuck under his breath and several of us beamed with pride. Our champion. When he was two steps out the door Steph and I jumped up simultaneously and sprinted back to ground zero.

The lisping brunette already had on her headphones. She took out one of the buds on Steph's side. She had the hiccups (symptom of sex???).

Is it weely such a big deal? See-wee-ussly. It coulda happened, like, at the beginning of school. Weely.

Steph acknowledged this much was true. Turning it over, I did too. The girl in question arguably had the best ass in high school. This fact was lost on nobody. Her least of all. There was a certain prudence in her fucking at 14.

Was it good? I asked.
She didn't bother to remove the bud.

Steph was smiling and shaking her head.
Listen Steph, getting laid totally isn't a big deal at all.

That's when an amazing thing happened. Dan, who was seated in front of the lisping-brunette, turned around in his seat and leaned in. He had an easy look on his face, down-playing the obvious explosiveness of the subject matter.

Steph, it totally isn't. I mean, take Dan. He's a good looking, weely smart, like, super nice guy.
Totally. He has a nice ass, too.
I slapped the desk. He DOES?
Dan smirked at me.
Weely Dan, I'd totally have sex with you. I'm see-wee-us.

Only last week Dan had worn a pair of glasses that we all discovered weren't even prescription glasses. Why had he done this? he was asked repeatedly. Because I like wearing glasses, he answered.

Weely. See-wee-usly, Dan. Any time you want.

Steph and I exchanged glances at this offer. The entire classes' attention fell towards that table like dominoes. "Indecent Proposal" was out in theaters that year but it had nothing on this offer. Dan's virginity on an indecent proposal? Way bigger deal than a million bucks to bang Redford.

Any time you want to, Dan. Okay? You lemme know.
Dan couldn't make eye contact with her. He tried. No dice. He looked at me and Steph though.
Steph smiled and I was glued to her lips.

Teacher came back into the room:

Uhhhh, you guys back there? Uhhhh, what the hell are we doing? Can you get back to your desks so we can all pretend there's some remotely useful point to any of us sharing the same room here?

At recess, after the indecent proposal, Dan had an interesting question. He took his time finishing his President's Choice soda and half his ham sandwich with the crust pre-removed before he was ready to ask it.

You ever wonder if you're a bigger person for staying with one girl or you think going for as many as you can possibly get is bigger?
Depends.

I said this because my brother always answered big questions with "depends" and I was trying to try it on. Several girls at school had seen my brother---who was actually my *half*-brother---and me at a movie one weekend and the following Monday bitterly attacked me for not being as handsome as him as if I'd done it on purpose. What happened to *you*?

Depends?
Yeah, it depends.

By Dan's troubled expression I seemed to pull it off okay. But then I wasn't sure.

But it doesn't depend for everybody.
No, I guess it doesn't. Shit.
What?
I thought maybe it did.
That's what scares me about what she offered me. I know I have to, you know, really like, RESOLVE this thing inside me before I go through with it. IF I go through with it. It's really bugging me.
A lot of people in here, when they break out into real life, are gonna get revenge. If they can't get laid to save their lives, I mean.
I know.
You just had a girl put it on the table and you didn't do shit. But maybe you did.
How?
You're not desperate. You aren't pretending to be somebody you're not. Maybe she realizes that.
I doubt it, Dan said.
Me too. But, my point is, if you go for one person your whole life and you do it because you're afraid about trying out sex or whatever with a LOT of people, you're still a fucking chicken. The same way as if you fuck a million girls because you're afraid of one girl breaking your heart.
I think I might like her. I mean like, I might wanna her to be my girlfriend.
WHAT?
I have a crush on her.
But are you gonna do it first? I asked him. You gonna sleep with her?
I dunno, Dan said. What kinda girl, like, publicly says she'll sleep with you? Especially right after she lost her virginity. What kinda girl is that?
One who's gonna shit out a LOT of kids very very very soon.
Who'd she sleep with anyway?
That kid who skipped a grade who always wears a hat.
Hmmm.
Can kids go bald at 14? Maybe he's trying to, like, hide it.
I dunno. Maybe.
She fucked a balding 14 year old?

We chewed our sandwiches solemnly and Dan broke out some Spitz sunflower seeds and handed me a handful that we cracked open for a while.

I don't even know her. How could she say something to me like that?
Guys would KILL to be in your shoes! I said. KILL.
But I've barely even said five words to her.
You can lose your virginity at 14, man. It doesn't even have to be with your girlfriend! In a way, you're doing your girlfriend a big favor.
How's that?
If you end up with a virgin you're going in all experienced and shit.
That's a good thing?
Girls dig that shit.
They do?
It's what Norman says. Make her first time special, man. What if you marry her? Everything might be hinging on the first time! You owe it to her.
Wait a minute, Dan said. He dated her before.
Who?
Norman.
I know. Last year.
Yeah.
He didn't sleep with her or anything.
I know. But still.
He won't give you shit about it.
No, he wouldn't do that.
You're right, you'll never hear the end of it.
Great.
You gotta do it for every guy who ever dreamed of getting an offer like yours.
I dunno.
You really are a tin man sometimes.
I really wish you wouldn't call me that anymore. I gotta go.

The buzzer rang outside the room, echoed down the hall. Mrs. S. left her desk and closed the door to the classroom, muzzling the effects of the buzzer. She turned back, rested a hand against the pencil sharpener, and slowly looked us over. We gathered an announcement was going to be made but Norman and I got up anyway and picked up our packs ready to go just to bug her. She pointed us back down to our chairs and we profusely thanked her for clarity on the issue until she denounced the, Effusive excessiveness of your use of superlatives in thanking me. Both of us assured her a more clean, declarative sentence couldn't be devised to address our egregious folly.

In her kicked field mousy-way, she glared at us with suspicion.

She knew every ten dollar word in the world and Norman had discovered why: she didn't have anything to say. Norman could sniff-out anybody's scam. He was that guy in everybody's nightmare who knows the score way before they do.

She took small slipper steps to the center of class and clasped her hands. Her Indian dress and scarf were matching pumpkin orange. The thick lensed glasses on her face hung from a golden chain wrapped around her soft, slightly melted candle-looking neck. The garishly bejeweled fingers and wrists sparkled under the fluorescent light.

I leaned over to Norman, Do you think she polishes them?
Are you a fucking retard? Of course she does. Nightly, man.
She has more gold than your Filipino barber.
She has more gold than all three guys who work at that barber shop combined and those fuckers have more gold than Fort Knox.

This was an exaggeration. But Carlito alone walked around with fifteen grand worth of bling on his person at ALL times. Amado and Perfecto (respectfully) were steadily gaining on him.

Mrs. S. hands broke away from their prayer-like gesture and she held one stateswoman-ly palm before us for a few moments before she spoke. Norman and I avoided eye contact while she did this. Everybody in the class leaned in because it was never easy following Mr. S. even if she had no accent. The verbiage was always a vicious curve ball, but her accent hit your mind's windshield like a monsoon so you just tried to stay with the yellow line and do the best you could.

Boys and girls, before you leave I have something I'd like to bring to your attention. One of our students is departing for a special program at a different school. It's a very special endeavor. The main reason that compels me to mention this, however, is how much---and I'm sure I speak for all of us when I say this---we're all going to miss Natalie.

Time seemed to stop for a moment. The class focus zeroed in on Natalie. She put her head down and blushed. I watched her eyes scanning, a torn off power wire writhing in her brain. You could tell she was touched by Mrs. S.'s gesture slightly more than she was embarrassed by the attention of us. I'd never seen Natalie have a spotlight placed on her before. I never thought about her besides when she happened to be in front of me, but I always thought she was pretty in a blan-way, like the kind of flowers that need a flowerbed of like-flowers to please you. Her prettiness had no sauce. No real flavor. In a year and a half I didn't know what her voice sounded like since she used it so sparingly. But there was something darker, too. It caught my attention less then than it did later on. Somewhere in whatever was troubling her, I think I had an inkling that despite being really smart and having this rich, complex internal life, behind everything was a very straight-forward desire to be completely objectified. Not really to be a bimbo or a whore, just to have the instant, arresting response that beauty gets. And deserves. Real beauty is an obscenity. It was something she would never have. It gave her the effect of an out of season Christmas tree left up in every room she entered. Her face was soft, usually fixed in expressionlessness, but you knew bitterness was going to take a chisel to it. Maybe a jackhammer.

Norman nudged me. Get a load of this, man.
What? I asked him.
He turned to the class:

*I* know why we'll all miss Natalie, Mrs. S.

You do? she replied.

Natalie tensed up as if she was facing a firing squad.

Sure I do. Because she's SOOOOOOO beautiful.

Instantly all of us in that room suddenly bystanders to the execution and participants in it too. But none of us had blanks as we stared at the carnage of Natalie's face. And Norman trained his large, famously heavy eye-lashed eyes directly on her too. His face had more in common with a sawed off shotgun that second than it did with the guy I knew from ten seconds earlier. What was the most chilling was just how deliberate his expression was, just the same as his voice in how he'd said it. You had to go a really long way into understanding a victim, having something delicate and innocent warped inside you, to find that button to push on another person. And he'd unleashed it like it was nothing---he tossed it into all our mouths like a Flintstone chewable vitamin.

Ms. S. broke the silence. She *is* beautiful, Norman.
Norman smiled. He enjoyed this topic of discussion.
Man, I said to him, you're gonna have worse karma than fucking Yoko Ono if you keep this up.
I'm just getting started... I think you *are* beautiful, Natalie. I don't know why everyone here doesn't belieeeeeve me. Do you?

Lunch hour was almost over. She was in the hallway just outside class leaning against her locker. I was sorta sad she'd never be able to joke about me being in love with her anymore. I laid off and just looked at her for a second.

Some girls just have a holiday in their eyes. At least, that's the best I can come up with to explain the nagging quality Steph had that a lot of people got hung up on. Because there wasn't anything particularly special in the color, they had the same light blue as Connecticut Avenue on a Monopoly board. Other girls had Boardwalk or Park Place-blue, but pretty soon people started passing them over for cheaper real estate. You wouldn't have to take your shoes off if you stepped into her front door. The furniture in the living room wouldn't be about impressing you so much as making you comfortable. The other prettier girls hearts might've felt like casinos or pawnshops---Steph's was a petting-zoo.

What kind of impression did she make entering a room? Not much. No entry-wound. Garden variety entrance. She never seemed interested in being the center of attention. She preferred being a member of the audience in welcoming somebody. From that setting she was a little more handy at distinguishing herself. She was sneaky about it. She perfected the art of sucker-punch compliments. And it went a long way. You'd bump into her being in a lousy mood and she'd lick her suction cup dart compliment and fire it at you and it could stick for the whole week. She had some kind of directory on where we lived emotionally and she let us know it with compliments. Everywhere else she was low-key.

But she exited a room differently than other girls and it stayed with you more and longer than even the really expensive ones. It felt like she disappeared every time. Nobody else could do that. She's the only girl I ever saw leaving a room who didn't have some kind of bumpersticker on her fender about what it meant.

Then she saw me. Then she remembered what I was worried about her remembering. She took a second before she said anything. She smiled and came over.

Do you want to give me a call tonight to talk about Dan's situation?
I don't have your number.
I'll give it to you. Lemme write it on your hand.

That night Dan slept over at my mother's house. We were in my room with a bunch of Dan's paintings on the walls. A portrait of my mother hanging over his head while he stared at the rug with the discouraged look he always made when he had to make a decision someone had put him up to.

I'll make you a deal, he said.
YOU'RE GONNA FUCK HER??? I can't believe you're gonna fuck her!
No. But if you agree to never call me Tin Man ever again I'm going to ask her to be my girlfriend.

And that's what he proceeded to do.

I picked up the phone after Dan fell asleep.

Is Steph there please?
Do you know what time it is?
It's an emergency. Some Danish woman is waving a butcher knife outside my house screaming Soren! Soren! Soren!
I heard a hand go over the phone and a muffled, Mom, just let me get it! behind it.
Hello?
He asked her out.
Asked her out?
Yeah.
WHY?
He had a crush on her.
Then why didn't he fuck her?
I guess because he wanted her to be his girlfriend.
Guys fuck their girlfriends, Brin.
Thanks for the heads up.
They do.
I know.
He should fuck her and *then* ask her out.
Steph, you're a sick maniac. What kind of---
What did she say?
She said she wasn't looking for a boyfriend. She just wanted something a little more *casual* right now.
That's what she said?
Yeah.
She'd fuck him but not be his girlfriend?
Yeah.
See-wee-us-ly?
Weely and twooly.
How'd Dan take it?
I dunno. But we recorded it on my mother's answering machine.
WHAT?
We recorded it. I wanted to hear it and he was too shy to talk with her on the phone with me in the room so he agreed.
Okay, fucking J. Edgar Hoover.
Hey, I wanted to hear it go down!
You've preserved that shit, right? That's like the Zapruder film, Brin. Dan turned down losing his vee so that he could be with her as a boyfriend! That's the most romantic thing I ever heard.
I know.
I wanna hear it. Can I come over tomorrow to listen to the tape?

Intermission. The rest of my life went forward...

If you want to.
Of course I want to.

Intermission.

Okay.
Is your hot brother gonna be there?
Jesus fuck. I can't help I don't anything like him, okay? We have different dads. I think he---
I'm just bugging you. I think you're cuter...

Intermission.

Why did she say no?
What did Dan say after she said no?
You'll have to come over to find out.
You're in---
No I'm not.
Yeah you are.

Of course I was.

Steph did come over the next day and listen to the tape. And then we listened to it again from the beginning with Dan's trembling voice making small talk before arriving at the business and the conversation going down like an animal in quicksand.

After that day we talked every night on the phone for a couple months. Mostly we talked from Norman's basement which was where I slept over most nights. Then I'd talk with Norman about strategy and tactics to get Steph. I'd done such a good job selling Norman on the idea that Steph was the most amazing girl in school that he started calling her too. And he was a lot better at than me. Then she ended up being his first girlfriend by mid-ninth grade. Then he bragged to me she'd blown him during the commercial break of 90210. Then she'd dumped him. Five years later, out of the blue, I bumped into her one afternoon a few weeks shy of my 19th birthday and she invited me to see her new apartment and a week later I did finally get around to kissing her.

Chop Suey

Starbucks Girl asks me in the parking lot, "You've been long distance with her for like a year, right? Are you ever scared that one day she'll regret flying to be with you? I mean, leaving her home behind. If it doesn't work out..."

Everything---or at least most stuff---is a version of something else. I guess that's unsettling for a lot of people. Maybe it's why so many people qualify the word "unique" when they try to describe stuff, as if it's a matter of degree. *Remarkably*-, *slightly*-, *eerily*-, *overwhelmingly*-, *refreshingly*-unique. There's one of something or there's not. It is or it isn't. Unicycles have one wheel or they don't.

I'm a version of my girl's ex. She teases me about it. An ex she was in love with, or a version of her was. I think that's what people really mean when they say, "I *thought* I was in love with him." Maybe not even that, maybe more. It's a hunch. But I'm a version of him. She told me so but I knew it already. I knew him before I knew her. She said we each have a side of the same coin. What that coin is for her I don't fully understand. Maybe it's suspended in a flip, blurred into a kind of mist like airplane propellers. Maybe there are more sides to it than she thinks. Maybe it's one of those rigged coins with the same thing on both sides. I dunno. But it's there. We both had a mom from Budapest, his library of a thousand books was 98% my library, we both have ID in our wallets that never did much to convince us of our own identity---you know---fishing gets weird when you look back on it and it seems worth wondering who really catches who.

But take Starbucks Girl. Blond, blue-green eyes as if someone where perpetually squeezing a Palmolive bottle into a swimming pool, tall, cute in all the sneaky devious ways that give cuteness an edge over beauty in that deliciously valuable way: it gives something where the other takes. Starbucks Girl's smile parts the unique spread of clouds in all her customers. I'm just like all the other lugs. After I feel it happen, I watch it happen all the time. She picks all the locks with her repertoire of personalized smiles. They know her shift because they need her fix. They pretend to read newspapers or wait for their coffee or tea to cool. But mostly they enjoy proximity to her. Sometimes I notice she has a crush on one and the other regulars or strangers notice it too (usually all of us at the same fucking time) and nobody ever feels jealous. I don't know why stolen fruit tastes better than bought fruit, but it does. Her fruit seems to be in how she welcomes everybody in the way they'd most like to be welcomed---with bias, extreme prejudice in their favor.

Her face is nearly the same as my first kiss, first girl I laid next to, first hand I held, first fuck, first cheat, first cheated on, first reconcile, first revenge fuck, first thousand breakups, first final breakup---Starbucks Girl is all those things but as an amnesiac to them. I get Suzy back as she was when I met her. Every little private thing like being behind a waterfall. But I get me the way I was meeting her too. It's always tricky wondering which you fall for more: how you see them or how they see you. Whether it's them in front of you or them fitting your coordinates of a girlfriend. That's why some people are so angry when they breakup and others aren't. If you really see them you don't feel betrayed if it doesn't work out. If you never bothered to, you wanna blame them for everything.

I take off my hoody and lay it over some gravel in the parking lot and she sits down on it and leans back into the sun. She looks expensive. A beached mermaid. Since I asked her about it before, she talks about the night she lost her virginity to her boyfriend who was also virgin. I had that with my version of Starbucks Girl too, but it was lousy. It felt like when kids brought in Gobots for Show and Tell because their parents couldn't afford Transformers. I've never heard anybody describe their first time as fun but it doesn't surprise me when she says her first time was hot. I want to ask her to tell me it over again the same way I like to read over something a bunch of times. I want both versions of Starbucks Girl to have the fun first time.

"At the beach?"
But she doesn't take the bait.
"So what happens if she comes here and it's really nice and you guys get married and have kids or something?"
"I dunno."
"Don't you sorta have to have a contingency plan for it going one way or the other?"
"Not really. She's the only girl I've ever been with where I can't feel that stuff. It doesn't hang over anything or nag me or anything. I can't see anything. I just kinda look forward to it."
"Do I get to meet her?"
"Of course you do. Intimately. You'll be a member of the harem."

Gnossienne

I was working in a little run-down bookstore one night when this brunette I didn't know walked in and up to the cash register and asked how old I was and what time I got off. I told her twenty to the first question and that it depended on why she was asking for the second. She invited me to a movie. She hadn't even said which. I liked that. When it became clear she wasn't going to, I threw out the only customer in the store and closed down the bookstore by way of accepting the invitation.

While I was pulling down the iron curtain over the entrance, she told me she had to swing by her apartment next door to get her purse. She asked if I wanted to see her apartment. I followed her inside, up the stairs, through a hallway, past her door. Her smell kept playing bumper cars with the smell of the lobby, the rug in the hallway, her kitchen. I stopped at the fridge and she went into her bedroom and closed the door.

There were photos of a boy stuck by magnets to the fridge. He had a lazy eye and in most of the photographs he was holding a cat. In two he was holding the cat in the living room of the apartment I was in. I like cats. I like other men who like cats. I like girls who masquerade as girls because secretly or not-so secretly they *are* cats. I had a sinking feeling looking over these intimate pictures of the boy with his cat. My cat was living with a girl who'd left me and kept the cat. Tiamoo had declined my tentative separation agreement with the girl of dividing him up between us, with her keeping the asshole and me the remainder. That wasn't funny Brin. Tiamoo seemed to think so.

The brunette came out of the bedroom and approached me in front of the fridge. I didn't look at her.

"He's just gonna be a sec."
"Who?"
"Him." She pointed at the boy with the cat. "I woke him up."
"Your roomate?"
"My boyfriend."
"You said we were coming up here to get your purse."
"I know."
"Where's the cat?"
"Died."
"How's the boyfriend getting over it?"
"Working a lot."
"What kinda work?"
"DJ-ing. Too much E though. He's impotent."
"Say what?"

Boyfriend exits the room.

"Hi there," he says.
"Hi."
She smiles.
"You work at the bookstore next door, right?"
"Kinda."
"I've seen you in there."
"Once a week. There's a poetry reading night thing I help out with for the owner."
"How's that?"
"Catastrophic mostly."
She continues smiling. He notices her smiling and turns back to me, extending his hand.
"It's nice to meet you. What's your name?"
I reach for his hand and shake it and look over at the girl watching me.
"You have small hands."
Very observant. And you're impotent, DJ limp-dick. And anytime now can someone tell me what the baker's fuck is going on with you and your girlfriend, man?
"Does he have small hands, John?"
"Yeah. Look at them." He grabs my hand and displays it to his girlfriend. "What, are you Hungarian or something?"
"How's that?"
"It's a trait. I'm Hungarian too. Look at my hands."
So I do for a second, not entirely sure why.
"John, we have to hurry to catch the movie."
"Yeah. Let's go."

They walk ahead of me up the street. He has his arm over her shoulder and she pries it off and as compensation agrees to hold his hand. He lets go of her hand to light a cigarette and offers me one. After I tell him I don't smoke he lights his and puts his arm over her shoulder. She takes the cigarette from his lips, flicks it into the street and removes his arm while I watch the cigarette hit the side of a car zooming by and toss up sparks like a miniature roman-candle that another car plows into. She takes his hand and he releases in order to go for another cigarette.

I look up at the power wires and telephone poles rolling under the sky like sheet music. Look down cozy side streets with the trees lining the street and in the moonlight pick out the ones that have bird nests in them. At a crosswalk a Cadillac Escalade waits for us to cross. I can't see into the tinted window to make out the driver's seat so I glare at the license plate to see if it's my ex. I don't remember her license plate number. I try and remember. I realize if it *is* her she must feel sorry for me trying to read her license plate. My ego can handle being pitied, however, her feeling sorry for me significantly reduces my chances of a possible revenge fuck and as we've been the one-night-stand-revenge-fuck that lasted four years any chance of resuscitating us is going down the drain. What a doozy that reality is. Shucks.

We walk for a few more blocks toward the Hollywood Theater. They carry on their private conversation a few paces in front of me while I shove my hands into my pockets and investigate why exactly I've been invited to share this evening with an unknown couple.

We arrive late and I follow them up the stairs to the darkness of the balcony where we sit in the front row with her between us. He holds her hand and she removes some wine gums from her purse. She unwraps them, takes out a handful, holds them up and inspects the colors against the glare of the opening screen credits, selects her favorites and offers the rejected articles first to her boyfriend, and, finally, all the blacks to me. When I decline she gives them to me anyway.

I have no memory what that film was. When I wasn't obsessing over the couple I was with I leaned over the railing and looked at all the other couples there that night. First-time couples and regular couples and lesbian couples and falling apart couples and aging couples straining to hear anything and fat couples with greasy butterfingers eating each other's popcorn and interracial couples and maybe Suzy with some old dirty Greek looking fucker in the 4th row whose probably fucked her in front of Tiamoo on the couch for all I know...

The next thing I remember was her boyfriend leaning over and whispering something in the brunette's ear. She nodded as he gathered his coat and turned for the aisle and headed up the stairs for the exit. Some light splashed into the theater and got swallowed up as the door closed.

I leaned over to the brunette and whispered, "Did he, ummm, *leave*?"
"Yup."

I awaited her clarification on this seemingly important point. When it became clear I wasn't going to get any I nudged her arm.

"Why did he leave?"

"I dunno." She tossed another wine gum in her mouth and sucked on it for a few seconds before tucking it in against her cheek. "He wasn't feeling well."
"You're not going to go with him?"
"The movie's not over."
This was unquestionably true. "Yeah, but are you sure he's okay?"
"He's just not feeling well. It's fine. He just went home."

That was all she said for the last half of the movie. When it was over she put on her coat and weaved through the crowd to get outside the theater. She moved so fast I'd figured she'd taken off to get back home to her boyfriend. But she was standing outside waiting for me.

"I'd like to have a drink. There's a bar on the corner."
"What about your boyfriend?" WHAT ABOUT DJ LIMP-DICK!
"He'll be fine. I need a drink."

She knew the bartender when she got inside the place. He started the drink before she'd sat down in the corner. I sat across from her and looked at the menu when she reached for it and slowly palmed it to the table. I tried to keep a straight face while she glared at me.

"How old are *you*?" I asked her.
"I want to ask you question."
"Okay."
"What do you want out this?"
I gave that one a second because I was pretty sure even the bartender had heard her pose the question. He'd stopped poring something.
"You know what I want. I wanna get you out of your relationship."
She smiled. 

"I'm thirty, Brin."

Girl Peeled Off A Cigar Box

I was waiting in an empty bar to meet a Cuban for the first time over here yesterday. There might be two in the whole city. I had to meet one. I figured he'd be easy enough to spot: fourteen layers of clothing and shivering in pretty mild weather.

Some sunlight splashed through the windows into the bar, hanging in the air like suspended lemon-aid. The waitress kept calling me "sugar" out of spite because I'd ordered a bottle of wine and been drinking it out of the bottle like a schmuck. When I'm meeting someone for the first time---and it doesn't matter who it is---I get nervous and have to improvise with something goofy. Snatch a wheel chair at the arrivals section of the airport or steal the girls driver's license and keep it in my pocket over the course of dinner and slip it back into her bag before the night's over. You don't even have to tell her. Maybe it goes well and from whatever she's told you about herself somehow you know a little less. To get even you ask to read her palm as an excuse to touch her hand and tell her something's been missing and she plays along and asks what and you cough over the plastic to see how she responds.

For a long time I'd had some plans to meet a different Cuban over here, the one who really did look like a girl peeled off a cigar box. She was just my exact, perfect type: WAY out of my league.

For someone whose gone back and forth to Cuba for the last 10 years, I've only kissed one girl from there and it wasn't even on her home soil. Any filthy tourist will tell you, it's not shooting fish in a barrel over there, it's LOOKING at fish in a barrel. Which is not to say it's ALL economics either. Girls over there aren't doing their best emotional interpretation of a casino over there the way they do over here. They're deviously innocent in the same way all the best, most liked kids books by kids are the same ones most banned by adults and teachers. It never happened for me. I didn't have the guts to accept an offer without anything being said.

I was trying to come up with a way to account for this. Not for myself. I like the idea of being a few cards short of a full deck whenever I feel like playing solitaire. I wanted to have some explanation for the guy meeting me in that bar. Most Cuban men would fuck a lamppost. It's about the only thing in existence they're not philosophical about.

So what the hell are you gonna say then?

You could try something a little clumsy like: Reality is for people who can't handle their dreams and dreams are for people who can't handle reality.

Yeah, but chances are he's sat through about forty-thousand hours of Castro speeches over the course of his childhood and not all that interested in yours.

You could tell him about that first day you had in Havana stumbling onto a fruit stand on Calle Neptuno surrounded by pretty girls and getting this strange craving for papaya and asking if they had any and all eyes at once burning you to a crisp since "papaya" in Cuban is slang for pussy. And the fruit stand guy laughing his ass off because he was the only one who knew you didn't know.

Nah. He's going to want to know about that other girl you met over there. The one who lives in Playa in Havana. The one he probably fucked and just for amusement wants to see if you did too. If you talk about her you're going to have to explain about the other one peeled off the cigar box. This isn't someone to discuss her with. Because all he's going to do is tell you how many men she's slept with just to make all her men jealous since this is the Cubana's unofficial national sport and, what's worse, you're knowledge of her is going to confirm the stereotype. And be honest, partly that sorta stuff made you fall for her---they only keep a secret if everyone already knows.

So distract him.

Get him talking about the city. Boxing or baseball. Tony Montana. Or those chilling pet cemetery animals wandering down the alleys and scavenging for left-overs at restaurants. Get him talking about the tourist blonds famous for being warm at night and amnesiacs in the daylight. Get him going about the pickpockets. All those crews of Artful Dodgers working on the street with others up on the rooftops following the action next to all those wonky TV antennas piled on there like prehistoric discarded toothpicks. Or his family. The generational stuff. Something cute like the Guarapo stands all over the place with the stout women who grab a stock of sugar cane and take a run at lancing it into the cogs of a giant clunky machine that resembles the inside of a clock and produces this juice that the slaves used to drink and that everybody, of all ages, no matter who the surrounding company, sweetly encourages *you* to drink should you ever find yourself climbing over a girl.

That girl peeled off a cigar box is visiting a dad she didn't know she had, and the rest of his family too. And for a month you talked to her on the phone every night and the subject to be avoided was her more and more likely pregnancy back in that hotel room. After she (and her mother, for that matter) didn't believe that you went a couple months waiting for her in Havana and she never showed up so you flew back to see her and piled the sheets from the bed in the corner so the Russian maid could collect them because you were pretty sure she hadn't waited for you and it only took another four or five months to have her confirm it even though she lied through her teeth denying it in that hotel room. But somehow it didn't make a difference either way and you didn't even bother to pretend that it did. She was pregnant for real soon enough and not by you. But you got to have the four-hour post abortion phone call until you got her smiling again enough to sing something the way she used to. Some old song she used to listen to a million times on a record player when she was a kid. And even though it'd been hanging there for the whole conversation she asked anyway, "Are joo really in loov weeth la Nuevo York Chinita? Weeth a Chai-neez woo-mahn?"

He knocked on the window in fourteen layers of clothing and shades slapping the glass at me, "OYE! Brinicio, here we go... "

Valentine

She bought a one-way plane ticket over here around midnight. She bought it on the same week, same day, same *hour* that a couple, same age as us---who it turns out might've got engaged the same day--- got smoked by an SUV that blew through a crosswalk.

The 18 year old drunken kid behind the wheel had stolen the SUV and brought along two younger girls in the back seat. Maybe he was trying to impress them by driving fast. I dunno. I do know that after killing that couple, he ran off and tried to swim across the icy-cold inlet to the opposite shore but a police dog nabbed him before he could get away.

Yesterday I went over to where that couple died. There was a little shrine against one side of a tunnel underneath a bridge.

There were some people milling around trying to find the spot because the story had been front page in the newspapers. They were giddy and confused but also ready to be upset. There are a few crosswalks to choose from pretty close by. The actual location is a bit tucked away. I was alone for a minute and lit up a cigarette after I found a poem by Rilke taped onto the wall of the tunnel and in no time a throng of other tourists piled in.

On Hearing of A Death

We lack all knowledge of this parting. Death
does not deal with us. We have no reason
to show death admiration, love or hate;
his mask of feigned tragic lament gives us

a false impression. The world's stage is still
filled with roles which we play. While we worry
that our performances may not please,
death also performs, although to no applause.

But as you left us, there broke upon this stage
a glimpse of reality, shown through the slight
opening through which you disappeared: green,
evergreen, bathed in sunlight, actual woods.

We keep on playing, still anxious, our difficult roles
declaiming, accompanied by matching gestures
as required. But your presence so suddenly
removed from our midst and from our play, at times

overcomes us like a sense of that other
reality: yours, that we are so overwhelmed
and play our actual lives instead of the performance,
forgetting altogether the applause.

Other people poking around to find the spot saw us and came over. It was them looking for it with a combination of disorientation and slight panic that reminded me of something I've never written about or really talked about either. I mean, what that crosswalk and my girlfriend's one-way plane ticket have in common I'm not too sure. A lot of it is a big emphasis on a *beginning*, a start, a first page, first sight, taking a chance.

Five years ago I took a girl to Madrid and we arrived the day after the bombing of the Atocha train station. It's not Grand Central or Penn Station, but it's an awfully nice place to see and has its own charm. I had a reservation for us at a little pension about 4 blocks from the blast. I'd picked that pension because it was sandwiched between the train station and the Prado. I boxed in Madrid daily and had to pass through Atocha every day to get there and on the way back I'd meet up with Jackie and we'd see El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Salvador Dalí at the Prado or the Reina Sofia where little boys and girls demonstrate some of the differences between boys and girls with their approach to dealing with pigeons (girls nice, boys evil).

After the horror of the explosion, one of the most bizarre, disturbing things before the ambulances got there was the lack of silence. Hundreds of dinky melodies rang out and clashed for hours that everyone was afraid to deal with. Imagine a decked out Christmas tree except that every ornament is a cellphone: that's how Atocha chimed from all corners as families desperately tried to see if their loved ones were unlucky.

I get spooked when somebody dies meaninglessly. I guess that's why I was a little comforted when more and more details came out about that pair who died at the crosswalk. They felt like supposition to sell papers but still, it was obscenely difficult not to wonder:

She'd found out about the ring but kept it from him to not spoil the surprise. Did he pop the question at dinner that night? Her friends said she'd been looking through bridal magazines. What'd they talk about at dinner? Did they ever talk about how they'd want to die? Did he not leave a very good tip and she suddenly took in, FUCK, I'M GONNA MARRY A CHEAPSKATE! Maybe she even told him as a joke. Did they ever wonder about the possibility of dying at the same time at a happy moment in their lives and sorta hanging up their lives for everyone they cared about on the peg of never spending another moment apart. How violently beautiful is that? Boy, hit-and-run---who'd see that one coming? Probably nobody who knew them. Maybe those two little girls in the back seat for about a split second.

I was so happy when my girl bought a ticket over here to start a life with me I just stared at the confirmation for 20 minutes without it really sinking in. I never said so, but I felt like we had some stacked odds working against us. This long distance thing for the last year is rotten stuff. Penpals with the odd bi-monthly conjugal visit isn't much of a dream situation. And it's clumsy to admit I wouldn't have remembered the day she bought that ticket without what happened to this couple who never get any tomorrows together in the way I hopefully will. Maybe one day some little brat will ask me about when mommy first came over here and even though I'll lie through my teeth and talk about my seven failed Russian mail-order bride-marriages before I'm slapped by anyone within earshot (and they'll hit hard); it was February 10th, on a *choose*day, we both slipped on some kind of banana peel taking a crack on something and I wouldn't have known or especially cared if it weren't for some piece of shit kid who plowed into them. Not fate, just someone who'll have to do or accomplish god knows what to have anything other than this senseless act define him for the rest of his life. Some punk with a chip on his shoulder trades it in for a fucking millstone.

See why I sent this to you and not her?