Hawaii Interstate Highway (redux)

"I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure." ---Marquis de Sade

Stop shaking your head. Gimme a chance to explain...

Long distance relationships open like pop-up books. Her pop-up book is in Manhattan.

I like stealing stuff---if I like you. I case every woman who catches my eye trying to see what they're hiding. You can't give your phone number without giving something of yourself. Every little hair on a woman, even the peach fuzz, is a fuse.

I watch some guys staring at their girls like kids staring at a candy store window. Which gets me wondering, along with the girl in most cases, is he making that sweet expression at *her* or to himself in the reflection? So the girl looks over at me and sees the crowbar in my eyes. I can't hide it. Fortunately it's not WHAT you do but WHO you do it with. I find my markets.

But every time it feels the same when it clicks with somebody. I pick the lock and break into their life and instead of trying to steal everything, I end up wanting to move in.

I'm in full-on burglary-mode when all of a sudden I find myself liking the way you crookedly hang that painting, the way your bookshelves lean, where you dogeared pages or underlined stuff, your pajamas, that you're a pack-rat for every letter an ex sent you and you're amused I burned everything I had with my first kiss, your sticker books and photo albums, that you kept a lock of your hair from when you were six and now your hair's a different color, how you had a street portrait artist embellish your likeness when you were going through an ugly phase and everybody pretended you were that pretty, you were entirely frigid with one boy and put out on the first date with another and you don't know why the difference, that I thought my first girl was the one until we popped each others cherry and I knew she wasn't, that you want a dad and your cute little boy at the same time out of a husband---oh yeah---AND the guy you'd risk all that for to cheat with, you want to have your blueprints for the rest of your life approved of, you want your history to be a rumor that YOU spread, you want me to cast my net at you swinging over and over and never get more than half your butterflies, you want to be my private petting zoo, you want me to pry you down from your ivory tower over the intercom, I want a muse who fucks like a whore, you want to be able to hurt me and build me up, you want me to trudge through your sewers and step out onto your penthouse balconies, you want to take your top down in conversation and have my breeze run through your hair, I want you to kiss the stretch marks and cellulite on my brain, you want me to contemplate every guy who ever wanted to get into your pants, you want jealousy, you want me to be loyal but only because you're amused that I'm a born serial-cheater, you want the church of your heart to have the choir on fire and neither of us willing to piss on them cause our sex life is a cookie jar, you want to get our plans on wheels, you want somebody with no plans, you want Monopoly on weeknights and Risk on weekends, you want somebody who can fight but also listen, a caveman with a daunting reading list, you want every smart person you know to feel castrated next to goofy imaginative things we've come up with, you want Dan Starling as our neighbor, you want me to be fucked-up but lucid, you want our kid as the final jury on us, you want relativity here and there but stuff that comparison can't touch other places, you want love letters and suicide notes and me to pretend with a straight face like I know what the fucking difference is most of the time, you want your melody to feel like a symphony, I want my note to feel like a melody cause we're both wondering how many inches it takes to reach your heart, I want crop circles waking up next to you, your revolving door eyes that never get any my toothpaste back in the tube, you want to be my God and have me as your bible, I want you with telescopes and microscopes and a club and a cave and no viable heat source but me, you want me to accept that you have an abiding, unadulterated crush on Adrian Brody despite the fact that both our mothers are Hungarian, you want to be an Asian girlfriend for a guy whose never had an Asian girl look at him twice, you want to be my fire escape---more architecture than utility---my heart as your personal scrapbook, and Brinny you can still fall in love 10,000 times but it doesn't have to be with 10,000 different girls it can be with me, over and over, like some karma on spin cycle and no tag-backs, and we can be off-key, dirty utensil conversation trying to get at each other, and every soliloquy can be one long stutter, you want nobody keeping score and I want EVERYTHING TO COUNT and why the hell am I inventorying all this shit, oh yeah it's Thanksgiving and that's your dad across the room and is it supposed to be lost on me that he's sorta shy and bold in a fairly demonstratively obvious ode to picking me as your fella and if I get your headlines you can use my fine print as toilet paper cause since I was 19 I could swing a rejection letter with both hands behind my back which I don't mind so much when I'm holding your hand because being with you, long distance or coital, reminds me riding a bike with no hands, excited and cozy, and this whole fucking thing and all those other people stinking in our nostrils don't have to matter so much, nor my book of wet matches, I don't feel like such a pinned insect anymore, my garbage and maladjusted apparatus wasn't flammable until I met you, be my pyromaniac and I'll be your kleptomaniac, we'll get the hang of it, this is a piece of chipped paint off my Davega Bicycle, we can be cigarette butt train wrecks in each others ashtray, you can sign letters in lowercase so I'll imagine you on your knees and try to map out more ways to sweep you off your feet, now you're making me a little nervous for not having wiped this thing's nose, I only told you I could read palms as an excuse to hold your hand, everything else was drinking through a fucking bent straw as soon as I saw you... so do we have a deal?

Eat Him By His Own Light

Some material you come at a little stuffy, so I'll apologize in advance for the seductive baritone and clumsy pauses to wipe my runny nose...

This foamy fog that won't lift, day after day, turns the whole town into a soggy bowl of cereal. At night it turns streetlights into penny flavored snow cones. Turns everybody halfway down the street into a ghost from some Gogol Russian night in Saint Petersburg. I like it at night. Have Chopin in your ears humming homesick about Poland into shivering cold while he's lost or abandoned on some ferry waiting for home to find him. Makes it easy to think about people who play the same notes on your own life. Pretty soon you're walking somewhere else with different versions of yourself and different versions of the people you knew. Maybe back when you fit as friends, even though now you can see and feel the places where you wouldn't fit not too far off, even if it took you a little longer to accept it at the time.

I was thinking about this kid the other day while I was walking alone by the beach late at night. He was someone I used to miss being apart from but don't now. The catch is, when I fall asleep he keeps showing up in my dreams as that version of himself I used to miss. He reminds me how to miss him. Which adds its own brand of fog to my situation. Or maybe he's the same and I'm a different version. He never used to show up in dreams while we were friends.

He's always sad when I see him. Dreams are funny because everybody and everything in them gets exactly what its about except you. By the time it makes sense you wake up.

By the beach I was thinking about when he had a cast over his shattered hand that nobody bothered to sign. I turn back a few pages in his story to where he shattered his hand. I never saw it happen, but I'd heard it. Lots of us did. A whole gym full of people.

He'd had the last shot in a basketball game when he was maybe 14. His father was in the stands watching with a clipboard keeping track of statistics because his son was small and bigger kids played more than him even though he probably had more skill. His father kept track of numbers in order to provide seething evidence of injustice in his boy not playing.

That night his boy was given the last shot with a couple seconds on the clock. I was only a few feet away from the team huddle where the decision was arrived at. I wasn't even good enough to ride the bench. I hadn't made the team at all that year (or any other). Probably not even close. But I saw a couple kids in the huddle protest who ended up gaining the final shot. Down by two points, they needed a three. He was the best pure shooter on the team. I watched his face after the coach told everybody who was getting the ball. I could feel it was one of those moments in his life that might change everything. I remember wondering deep down which one he was more drawn to. Could he *deal* with being a winner. That whole angle on his life. I wasn't sure.

They went into their formations on the court and I saw the ball passed to him. Everything slowed down. The crowd hushed. The guy defending him could feel who the ball was going to. But before he caught it he looked up at the hoop and mishandled receiving the ball. There was still time to get the shot off. In a panic he reached down for it but fumbled it again and the defender grabbed for it and they both fell over. Buzzer rang. Big moan from the crowd. Coach threw up his hands. Game over.

I remember him looking over up into the stands just as I did and seeing the frustration on his father's livid face.

I looked back at the kid, the trauma on his face. For some kind of hideously misplaced refuge, he grabbed his ankle, clutched it in agony just as another boy who had desperately wanted the final shot strutted by smirking, "Broke your ankle, huh?" This particular kid never saw a guy on the ground he didn't want to kick.

Then I think he was crying holding his ankle. Everyone left him alone and headed back to the locker room. The stands emptied. As he got to his feet he tested out the ankle and grimaced. The harder he tried not to cry the worse it got. I watched him limp over to the locker room and not two seconds after he was in there a metallic thud rang out. He'd punched the locker so hard he shattered his hand. Now he'd have a momento over his arm commemorating this awful day. Everybody could ask, "How'd you get *that*?"

I think that's when I started talking to him in the hopes of becoming his friend.

I wasn't a loser's advocate or anything; back then you were an underdog or a whore in my emotional scorecard. Lots of the people who don't become artists by profession do way better jobs of it with their own life. They can't help it. You *have* to be an artist to fuck things up colorfully. *Primary* colorfully. I knew an artist when I saw one. Now nobody could ever look at his life without this Mona Lisa-moment hanging on some wall of his eyes.

Damaged Goods

"So do you love her?"

What throws me is how some of them smile as they frisk you with the question. Maybe because naive people like to pretend they're cynical a lot of the time. That they can peg pretty much every human being as either an underdog or a whore, as if those were the only categories anybody can fall into.

After I put my head down and tongue the inside of my cheek what I'm really doing is trying to work out if damaged-goods-hearts maybe have that same magic vending machine candy has. Candy tastes better when it falls. More flavor. Achieving maximum flavor potential; ask anybody whose tried it.

Thing is, if you fall for somebody sometimes the effect it produces actually deactivates everything the person you fell for feels for you. No tag-backs. Maybe the most rotten bit of luck out there is when the ugliest thing about you is what you look like loving somebody. Other times, it's best thing you got going on. Maybe she's the best thing people like about you.

"What the fuck, Brin? You have to think about it?"

I close my eyes and Union Square pops up on split-screen. I'm fishing out my own "linger yet a while, thou art so fair"-moment with her. Reinfecting myself with the same dread I had fumbling and scrambling around for a ticket I couldn't locate just to get on the subway. She's staring at me through the gate; she's on the other side waiting for me. She walks over to the fence and rattles the bars at me while I go through all my pockets again but I can't find the fucking ticket. She's late for work on Madison Avenue and I'm late for my first day on the job in Brooklyn. It's a mosh pit of morning commute cluster fuck. Please God, give me my fucking ticket. Why have you forsaken me with no damned change in my pocket. Don't you know the kind of fuse this girl has?

"C'mon!" She says. "I can't be late again."

I know that but some asshole bumps into me and nearly knocks me over and when I stand up straight everything slows down and I stop looking for my ticket and stare at her. She's dressed up to work in an office just below Central Park while I'm dressed up to smash reinforced concrete.

This voice, the one Steinbeck I think called the "low voice" starts talking in my head and it's the only thing I can hear:

"Sara, if you leave. If you leave me here---like *this*---this vulnerable, make sure you know we'll never see each other again."

Then I said to her, "Just go. I'll find it. I know you gotta go."

But that "low voice" confiscated Yankee Stadium's PA system and said,

"Look at my face right now, because if you *don't* go and you stay and you help me out of this right now, then I'm with you. And you could be gang raped by the Detroit Pistons in a hot air balloon over the Tour de France and it won't define you and I'll still be with you. Nothing bad you could ever do or anything bad that could befall you (even that colorful previous example I cited) will ever define you after THIS act of kindness right now. It might seem a trivial context or an insignificant gesture---it's not. This is a supreme kindness."

She didn't say or do anything for a few seconds.

Then she came around the gate and helped me find the ticket and then find the train and then kissed me before I headed down the stairs. I turned around and caught her turning around and ever since I've been a human-bullseye for this girl.

* * *

"Are you *in* love with her?"

So I smile and shrug like I always do.

Taxidermy Redeemable Coupons

Lately, for the last few months at least, ten seconds after they---friends, family, strangers, ex's---ask me about her, they ask me the same question: "you in love with her?"

And every time they ask I clam up and put my face down. Even if I'm on the phone with that Cuban girl who had my number in a wrenching way (nasty grip) and she can't see me:

"Brinicio, you don't think I can hear you blush over the phone?"

Harpooned from across the continent.

Sometimes I'd give anything to be misunderstood. I could never understand the people who complain about being misunderstood. What's so bad about it? There've been times I woulda killed someone to have a few misunderstood get-out-of-jail-free cards. Standing on some street corner somewhere with broken glass in all my pockets and staring at a girl. You feel like your punctured little soul has a cast on it that nobody will even bother to vandalize let alone sign.

Any asshole gets me, understands me, knows the score. They always have. They always will. Nobodies ever asked me, "What are you thinking?" They don't have to.

But I'm not used to this role. One reason I liked getting girls to cheat with me was for the satisfaction of turning their partner into my number one, crackerjack publicity firm. Hurt people like to hurt people. Pretty basic concept. Especially when, aside from all the acting out insecure bullshit, there are so many girls out there who make it so tempting.

What are the things you're *not* supposed to do? One of the first is: You shouldn't talk about your ex's. Terrible idea. This is basic common sense. Accepted wisdom. Fairly intuitive to anyone.

Depends.

This is certainly true if your ex-stories are dull, or cliche, or a low-rent invitation for somebody to join a lousy, heartbreakingly predictable narrative. Most people don't appreciate trophy cases or the practice of taxidermy in general.

I went to this career thing the other day (after I dropped out of my own school of thought and decided, aw well, fuck it) and one of the questions they asked our huge group was, with a poster on the wall proclaiming, YOU'RE OFF DRUGS AND SOBER AND WANT TO ENTER THE JOB FORCE, "What is 'time' to you?" Even before the pause was impregnated a guy who put up his hand, he had that bloated, career-polygamist look about him, and he said, "Time is what everybody loses over and over for their entire lives."

Solemn nods of furtive appreciation and agreement.

I'm sure his future 19 wives could appreciate the logic of where he was coming from. Seemed mostly true to me, but not for EVERYBODY.

Artists don't lose time. The good ones get to redeem their garbage like coupons. That's why artists are so annoying.

That might be why I go after women using my ex's as my main weapon and douse it with the gasoline of their history.

When I was five and saw all the kids in kindergarten on the first day I sized everybody up the best I could about who was most powerful. Naturally my eyes gravitated to Amber Murphy, Prettiest Girl (not just in the classroom; in the WORLD). Winnie Cooper for every guy before we knew Winnie Cooper. Next. The biggest, strongest kid. The meanest kid. The funniest kid. The cutest, most charming kid. The future street kid with junk halo glare in his eyes. The sweetest girl. The best guy with put-downs. The richest kid. The smartest (this is a weird category because most really smart people secretly feel the dumbest, which means they're actually the easiest to manipulate emotionally and thus are fairly weak in the power ranking pecking order). The fastest running kid. The puzzling future lesbian girls. The sphinx-like queer boys already getting along with girls from the get-go. The most satisfying victim. The cheerer-ons. The joiners. The loners. The people stuck in roles they don't want to play.

After a week I had everybody lined up. But I'd missed one of them. A glaring omission.

He was a quiet kid, good looking, minded his own business---then it was paint class one day. And at the end of class the entire school STOPPED after he handed in his project. Everybody paid attention. That painting was commended by our principal and used to represent the school hallways along with the 7th grader artists' work, even though Dan Starling was five years old.

Somehow a pulled-out-of-his-ass portrait of an elephant had everybody eating out of the palm of his hands. And by the time it was taken down he didn't even want it. So it was auctioned off and fell into my greedy little hands and I gave it to my mom and she was ASTOUNDED by my artistic achievement and I never ever ever ever told her (there's a fair chance she still has it 24 years later).

* * *

"Do you love her?"

I used to go out of my way to sell this stuff. Because forgers understand authenticity a lot better than authenticity usually does. It's their job to. An honest guy doesn't have much need for understanding a dishonest guy. He can just hire one. Like casinos do hiring reformed crooks to catch active ones. Or banks hiring ex-bank robbers to catch new ones.

"Do you love her?"

Why do we pretend if I said yes or no or maybe you'd understand what I mean?

Or do you already know and asking me and my putting my head down bashfully is really the answer you were looking for the whole time?

"So do you, Brin?"

Out-Of-Tune Madrid Ragtime

I haven't been home for the holidays in a while. Since about 18 I've gone out of my way to duck them as much as possible. Mainly to duck my family. If there aren't any jokes because the truth is always the best joke: I can't really handle the misguided expectation of warmth and it's more awkward than any motivation a white guy finds while he's on a dance floor trying to impress a black girl. Yeah, so borrow, max a credit card, wash and rinse some dinky-ass script in LA for a guy more interested in getting into your pants than making a movie, get on a vineyard for a few months---do whatever---and make enough dough to fuck off where nobody knows you... where after fifty tries they still can't pronounce your name right and wonder why you're so happy about it.

Don't tell anybody and get over to Madrid and stay out all night Christmas Eve until that strange hour when the Chinese step out into the copper street light haze and huddle on hundreds of street corners across town clutching dozens of shopping bags full of to-go food for cheap. Chance being stuck over a toilet for 10 hours and go sight-seeing through the nighttime streets that get started around 3am and the Romanian prostitutes lining the outside fence at the big parks with ponds you can take a girl to and rent a row-boat with. Walk until the Chinese have abandoned the street corners and get off the Gran Via and head down to Puerta del Sol along a path where all the North Africans are waiting for you peddling movies and music and scarves and sunglasses on blankets that if a whistle echoes down a corridor that Policia are approaching are packed up by the hundreds, swept up as quick as dominoes tip over, and two seconds later a thriving black market economy is a ghost echo of footsteps haunting 80 different directions weaved into all the other squeaky Windex scrubbed reflections on storefront windows of urgent men casting hectic glances at their fake designer watches.

Stick with that until a handful of kids break dancing in a troupe grabs your attention doing Michael back when Mike was single-handedly sinking the war on drugs with a moonwalk.

Nurse your hangover or buy something else and get down near that statue of a bear reaching up into the tree who looks just like you going for a first kiss, just as shy and deliberate and off-key pilfering some girl's museum gift shop while she's a little amused that you offered to read her palm because obviously you can't read palms and just wanted an excuse to touch her and give her the cracked-windshield-Brando-brow-action that only worked because its failure was kinda sweet. Spend Christmas morning on bench with a coffee and paper bagged cheap cognac and a few of those faintly sweet tasting Fortuna cigarettes and give Don Quixote another half-assed try in Spanish until a tourist bus rolls in and the Gypsies move in like a kicked over ant nest and set up their coordinated strikes. Discern which nationality and why affords the most pleasure in being robbed?

Continue this practice after having been rolled your first week over there by a smooth Arab pair. You shoulda seen the girl with him. I couldn't take my eyes off her while he's going on about my jeans. "Where in the fuck do you FIND a pair of jeans like that, man? You're Italian?" I just kept nodding to his girlfriend while the guy reached over and admired my belt, followed by my pockets. Was this how all Arabs demonstrated their admiration for the craftsmanship of Italian tailored jeans?

Possibly.

So you head over to the little casinos surrounded by the upper crust Romanian prostitutes, not so done-up but noticeably more blond because a lot of the older Middle Eastern businessmen like them that way. You've figured out a trick at the casinos with this standard machine they offer---a frightening one when you apply it's message to anybody who emotionally fits the bill---where a rake is pushing coins off a cliff and you have to throw in more coins hoping it knocks some off. That brings in about 20-25 Euros first thing in the morning since drunks don't play attention to odds at night and they don't recalibrate the machines.

And then Christmas night or New Years get back to Sol, ground zero of the city, and watch the drunken maniacs try to climb up onto Alphonso and grab the king's huge shnoz while everybody cheers.

I guess the main trouble with being at home around Christmas is that one of the saddest Christmas stories I know is about a couple little kids living in the projects in a thimble-sized apartment with their on-welfare-single-mom, who woke up Christmas morning only to find their apartment had been burglarized and all the presents under the tree stolen and their mom had to account for it. These little kids were my big brothers before I was born, before my dad met my mom and her kids and stepped in.

So whatever grievances one might have directed toward *this* particular holiday go well beyond small potatoes given the participants involved.

This was the first Christmas I didn't have that nagging itch to take off. Somebody swiped it from me and I'm inclined to believe the culprit left on a plane for Manhattan but is rumored to be returning in the near future. But even with the snow around, it wasn't a good idea to bring it up and engage in some sorta pissing contest with that Norman Rockwell from Hell scene.

The Regretful Unrequited Lovelife of Lesbian Trolls

You see that corridor-looking gallery with little windows up there on the Art Deco arch? On the far side, 15 feet above the traffic, there's a ladder under it with a padlock on the hatch to get inside. Since 1934, when the Burrard Street Bridge was constructed, many rumors and legends have circulated over possible occupants living in this gallery.

When I was a little boy I had a crazy old woman of 60 for a babysitter named Rosie. She dressed like Mrs. Roper from Three's Company. During the interview for the babysitter job, she'd told my mother that she'd been in a car accident and lost all five of her children and her husband and to deal with the trauma had undergone a lobotomy procedure. Exactly why a woman like this sounded like a pleasant candidate to have around me for four hours a day I don't know. After my dad explained what a lobotomy entailed I was always fascinated trying to snoop around for enchanting indications of it during the time I spent with Rosie. No dice. I didn't know what she was like *before* so it was impossible to compare.

We played a lot of cards. She incessantly cheated. She went outside and smoked a lot of cigarettes while I watched her out my window. Occasionally she'd take me to the zoo or the aquarium. I always hated the zoo but I loved the aquarium, except for those terrifying Beluga whales swimming in Chemotherapy-blue lighting.

One time we walked over the Burrard Street Bridge and she pointed up at that gallery.

"Ooop! Didja see her? Look!"
"See what?"
"The troll in the window. There she is!"
"Trolls don't come in 'shes'."
"Where do they come from then?"
"I don't see anything."
"Ooop! There she was again. You missed her just so you could argue with me. You're gonna throw your life away and end up a lawyer just like your dad."
"Where? I don't see anything. Trolls live *under* bridges."
"Not this one."
"I don't see anything."
"She's camera shy."
"What kind of troll lives *above* a bridge?"
"A lesbian troll, Brinny."
"What???"

An embittered, folk-singer-fat, lesbian troll as it turned out, Rosie informed me. One who'd unfortunately fallen in love with a pretty heterosexual human girl.

"Rosie, are you serious?"
"Yes. This poor troll suffered from unrequited, inter-species love with a human girl."
"What's 'unrequited' mean?"
"It means loving somebody who doesn't love you."
"But she's a troll."
"So?"
"Okay. Maybe a troll can fall for a human but how can a girl fall for another girl?"
"How can a *boy* fall for a girl?"
"They just do."
"Maybe a girl can. For the same reasons."
"No they can't."
"Says who?"
"I dunno. Trolls don't fall in love with other trolls and start troll families."
"Oh no?"
"No."
"Then where do trolls come from, genius? Don't they need mommies and daddies?"
"I dunno."
"*This* troll didn't want a conventional family. She fell in love. You can't always control who you fall in love with."
"Rosie, I asked my dad about the operation you had."
"Did you now?"
"Yeah."
"And what did the lawyer who married the gypsy tarot-card-reading mother have to say about it?"
"Did they really take out a chunk of your brain?"
"Yes they did."
"Do you think the something they took out of your brain is what makes you think girls can fall for other girls?"
"Setting aside that a female troll could fall for a human female."
"That too, yeah."
"Maybe you can do me a favor and check. I'll lean over so you just dig around what's left of my hair till you find the flap and take a peek at my nuts and bolts."
"Ok, ok, ok. What happened to this troll."
"Well, she was so upset that she locked herself up in this gallery and took up gardening."
"Why gardening?"
"Because she wanted revenge and needed some exercise, that's why."
"How?"
"She wanted to convince the human girl that she loved her more than a human boy ever could."
"What does gardening on top of a bridge have to do with that?"
"Everything."
"I don't get it."
"While she was up there, the troll invented two magical species of dandelions. One black and one white."
"Why dandelions?"
"Why not?"
"What's magical about them?"
"One works with the ocean and the other with the sky."
"How?"
"You know how dandelion blossoms turn into spores at the end of summer and end up looking like old woman's hair? Like mine? Just when they're perfect to blow apart."
"Sure."
"This troll rigged these Magical Dandelions so that when the white-daytime ones hit the ocean and got carried off to the horizon by summer time they'd transform into sailboats by the hundreds."
"What about the black ones?"
"You know around dusk when all those thousands of crows fly east across the whole city to find a good spot to watch the sunset?"
"Yeah."
"That's where they come from."
"From a lesbian troll blowing apart a black dandelion that magically transforms when it touches the sky?"
"You betcha. If seeds can be planted in the ground why can't they be planted in the ocean or the sky?"
"I dunno."
"And now you do."
"But what about the girl she does all this for?"
"She got old."
"Does she know all this stuff about where crows and sailboats come from?"
"Yes."
"What happened to her?"
"She was so ashamed and sad over it she did hurtful things to herself. Then they put her in an institution. Then they gave her a lobotomy."
"Like you!"
"She is me."