Sleepwalking

I heard a secret not too long ago about a couple I know who got married but didn't tell anybody. While I'm a little puzzled about the secretiveness surrounding it, the news was a pleasant surprise. I hate weddings, but I've always been fond of marriages where 1+1=3. This two halves make a whole business is a cheap, rotten lie. They're one of those couples you meet where you like both of them *more* as a result of each other. Perhaps I should say they ARE the couple you like more as a result of each other. From where I'm sitting that's a sneaky ass trick. But there it is: their partner is the best thing I like about both of them. Fuck me. Even if it makes you feel a little sloppy in the arena yourself, when your friends give that sorta thing to you, no matter how hard you try, you can never quite get the ribbon off the gift. But in this case what's special, at least for me, is I was there the first night they saw each other. Maybe you'll get a kick out of the story.

I've known the bride since I was five, but I met the groom on the same night, eight years ago, that she did. On that same night, for the first and only time, she made a pass at me. We've never spoken about it since.

I'd gotten a phone call from a friend asking if I wanted to play with fire that night. I like fire. He'd lined up twenty people to show up in the middle of the forest at a concrete covered over reservoir at midnight with 800 bucks worth of gasoline and various means of using it, along with a tripod and piles of film. I didn't know any of these people except the bride to be. While I have some balls one-on-one, I'm fairly gutless in groups. Everybody was gonna be high on different stuff except the guy who'd invited us, because he wanted to photograph everyone. Nobody was really sure why. Which was EXACTLY when I wanted to go.

The only drug that's ever interested me was acid. I liked it back then. I'd only done it a few times, but eight hours of turning everything into a wet painting appealed to me. This was before I had a first date with a girl on it and watched one of the more horrifyingly twisted things ever created, a film called "Rebel Without A Cause". In case you've ever wondered if the Antichrist exists I can put it to rest that he does indeed: his name is Sal Mineo playing a closeted teen in that movie. If a Hitler can be sewn from a failed pastoral painter, what the man who stabbed Sal Mineo to death saved us from cannot and SHOULD not ever be imagined.

I wasn't really sure how it was going to play out being there. Everybody was out swinging fire from a chain or juggling it in all these arty Hawaiian sorta ways, so I watched for a while. It had that spiritual and ritualized angle to it and the skills on display were fairly impressive. I don't really get my spirituality from Hawaiian luaus but it seems more honest than a lot of other places. But those new age junkie, fast food experience faces get to me at the best of times and there they were on a couple faces.

So I picked up a couple gas cans and Charlie Browned it over to a corner of the reservoir and began spelling my name over vast quantities of cement. My WHOLE name. FOUR names. WITH the fucking hyphen. Then, soul searchingly, in an act of etymological suicide, I crossed my name out. Once completed, I tried that movie trick of dropping my cigarette into the gasoline. And missed. On the second try that irresistible scratch sound of ignition and pure, almost clitoral, domino effect skimming across the ground.

The bride to be walked over. She's small and freckled with straight shiny red hair and was friends with all kinds of pretty girls in school because where they were beautiful she was interesting. The best they could do was be interested...

When we were kids I used to spend a lot of time watching her interact with beautiful girls. Those girls you look at and get handed over a whole wing of the Prado but no lunch included. Their beauty always took something, it didn't give much. Back then it broke your heart even worse because they didn't have a clue what their value was, all they cared about was the asking price. Casing stuff you wanna steal is a rotten habit if you don't know what to do with it. She'd be talking with them, watching them, and it was like watching sunsets stain the ocean. She could soak up beauty better than anyone I ever met. She had Hungarian blood like me, love and beauty are seen as curses to all Hungarians. But they orbited her more than she gravitated to them. They wanted each others' endorsement in a way. You could tell. I was trying for a backstage pass in my imagination. One time she'd told me that girls walked around naked in front of her a lot. She wasn't bragging or provoking with the disclosure. It wasn't matter of fact either. I could see them wanting to. I knew the pretty girls must have gotten a little something extra out of doing it in front of her. The tease of it, maybe the dare too, picking at the scab of her dirty little secret: maybe she'd trade-in being deep for being beautiful. Maybe she wasn't above superficiality at all, just a sore loser. Her body and features never went beyond sculpted cookie dough. Her eyes were arresting, blue had to stick it's finger in an electrical socket to get THAT blue. Maybe because she didn't have it, maybe other reasons too, but she understood beauty. Whereas the boys could smoke it, she mainline that shit. In the early days the pretty girls weren't going home with any of us, they went home with her.

So she's standing there beside me on the cement edge of the reservoir and we're both looking at my writing on fire, the flames like a thousand golden and drunken belly dancers hamming it up. I asked her what everyone else was doing and she grabbed my arm and turned me around. The moon looked like a tipped over container of Whiteout pooling in the night, then trickling off into clouds, stars just poked breathing holes in a shoebox, and all of it hanging off center and off key over the jagged cutout treeline of the forest and all those crates of black Magic Markers that must of been used up to fill in that stolen coloring book sky.

FLASH! Camera guy caught us from a distance and she handed me a bottle of some sorta snot colored liquid in the firelight.

I get really queasy having my picture taken. Probably explains why every photo of me looks a little different. My signature isn't too regular either. Nearly got denied my passport on account of not reliably demonstrating that I'm me. Which I felt sorta flattered about, to be honest. I mean, if it doesn't match, then what? Maybe I don't wanna be the same guy much of the time. Moving targets are harder to hit. Maybe the ID in my wallet isn't doing such a good job convincing me of this identity, ATMs are more forgiving.

"You look like a little kid Brinny. Don't make that face. You DO."

In my whole life, aside from family, only about 5 people have called me by that nickname. All words go in your ear and fill your brain except your name. It gets your heart. So why's she doing that? Leave it alone. Please stop staring at me when I'm vulnerable. Why does defenselessness bring out the mother in girls who in turn sorta wanna molest my little angelic kid? I'll pose it this way: if two girls get raped, the one who fantasized about it is worse off than the one who didn't. She feels responsible. So why am I wearing a leather jacket here? Is that a statement? Okay, okay, okay. Bad thoughts. Don't freak out. LSD is not necessarily an enlightening drug. Everything's fine. You're okay. Let's take a benign topic, Alex. Etiquette for 500. "That's the daily double! How much do you want to RISK?" Jesus Christ, don't fuck with me Trebek. Okay, I'll risk everything. "The duration of time one shakes hands for?" What is, until you make out the person's eye color? "Correct." Yeah, and her eyes are blue. Blue eyes see better in the dark. You know, so why's your wedding ring on that finger. Cause the Romans thought there was an artery running from your wedding finger to your heart. It protected it. ASK HER A SIMPLE, PLAIN, DECENT QUESTION...

"What's in the bottle?" I asked.
"The green fairy."
"Hey! Don't say something goofy like that shit. Fairies are pornstars in G-rated movies."
"Absinthe. Homemade."
I took a swig. "It's heinous."
"It tastes like ass but the wormwood might make this look nicer."

She'd fooled around with the guy taking pictures. I knew that from both of them. They'd told me separately too. They never spoke about it when they were together in front of me. So it was that cool kinda tension fiddling with their vibe. I love that stuff. I love getting two different takes on what lead up to a big thing, how it met the expectations or swooped somewhere else, where they think it's going, all the trapdoors and minefields. I get off on just about anybody falling in love. I want box seats. I sorta got they weren't sure but were enjoying finding out. That's a nice place to find anybody. They'd hooked up after his girlfriend wasn't sure about a full on commitment and recommended they see other people. But then, after seeing the effects, she changed her mind. Too late? Acid for me is like sneaking into a movie theater and swiping a balcony seat. These two and what was going on between them was the main peg the painting of that night hung on for me.

"You wanna see how he's doing?"
"Sure."

We started walking towards him while he was filming a guy in a trench coat, wasted out of his mind, hurling a chain over his head with a beach ball worth of flame attached at the end. Suddenly the guy saw us coming over and opened his arms wide as if to give us a hug. The fire came down crashing onto his head, sparks shot out, and he fell on the ground laughing with the fire creeping up to his cheek. There was smoke coming from his head. He was clowning around with the fire getting closer. He couldn't stop laughing until he started choking on it. It was a disturbing image out there in the open night. I went over and took his sleeve to pull him away but he slapped it away. "I'm fine." He clearly was not. I was deeply worried that physical contact had infected me with lifetimes worth of paranormal psychosis. Then the paranoia took hold of someone dying out here and ambulances or police or crazy neighbors or hobos living in the forest moving in with some kinda confrontational stampede. Our friend put down his camera and ran over and pulled the guy out of the fire and threw him on his back. After a second he rolled over and started crawling toward the fire again. It was clear the guy wanted to take a nap in it. Our photographer told us he'd taken Ketamine after finishing half the bottle of that vile homemade absinthe. He dragged the guy back to the tripod and pitched him over a pile of jackets.

Me and her watched him taking more pictures of people out there. Some were dancing in the moonlight. New people came up the trail and shook hands and joined in. Nobody was sinister. No Mr. Potato head creepy bullshit where accessories mask that everybody is pretty much the same. Everybody was easy to delineate up close and inviting. It was hard to pick who you wanted to walk up to and start talking with. And I liked the shapes of people if they were far away. Nobody really paid attention to the camera flashes. No camera faces or poses.

"He didn't take anything tonight?" I asked her.
"No," she smiled. "He wanted to see all this chaos sober."
"Jesus. Who the hell comes up with something like this? Organizes it?"
"That's what turns me on about him. He's totally in the moment."
"Hmmm," I looked at her and over at him. "Maybe that's it. I *see* it. I do. Maybe you're right. I can't quite put my finger on it. But you're right, he's right here isn't he?"

She left my question alone and turned to me. I kept looking at him taking pictures. I wasn't sure why she was staring at me exactly. Finally I looked down at her.

"I also think that's why you'd turn me on more than anybody."

I took a massive Neal Armstrong moon step backwards and mumbled something about flashlights and band aids and Uncle Tom's Cabin and she said "what?" and I shrugged and kept on and sped the hell up retreating over a slippery plank while ferociously pointing at a patch of some cement until with concern she hollered out about what I was pointing at and I shrugged again, shouted back, "Steinbeck probably! What about next week?" Moonwalked for a second to emphasize the point and finally dug into my pockets and scowled asking what I'd done with my matches. It was an ugly, egregiously cowardly, theatrically horrifying retreat.

Even though I was facing her during the retreat, I couldn't look at her the whole time. I kept her in the peripheral. But I saw her posture change and I felt awful. Then I saw her swivel and in a heartbeat she marched over to the guy passed out on the pile of jackets and grabbed his hand and hauled him into the forest. She lifted a branch and in they went for half an hour doing who knows what. They've been together ever since.

He turned out to speak 8 languages and is getting paid to go for his PHD at an Ivy league school right now.