Straight, No Chaser

Double-whammy, the curse of bumping into Swimming Pool Girl again and an hour later sailing over the handlebars of my bike like a fucking human crossbow onto a busy street landing on my thumb. Permanently eliminating my prospects for a southpaw career in hitchhiking...

Out of the corner of my eye I saw her antique bike leaning against a parking meter. I'd never seen that bike before but I knew it was hers. The shark infested turquoise color of her bike matched the color of her eyes. I looked inside the window of the cafe:

She was darting around the joint like a video game fairy delivering little 10am potions to cure hangovers. Swimming Pool Girl always reminds me I need to write a story about a cat-burglar who tries to rob someone and ends up falling in love with who lives there. Swimming Pool Girl is a 110-pound feminine powder keg for writer's block. Ten seconds inside the door---five years since I last saw her---she mentions she's been constipated for the last five days. Nearly reason enough, she says, to take back up smoking.

I don't do well recovering from this information.

Swimming Pool Girl introduced me to Edith Piaf. Just as she's putting on the record, still wearing little gloves inexplicably: "You'll like her Brinny; she fell hard for a boxer."

She's very sneaky. Whatever you tell her about yourself she eats with the dirty utensils of her soul and it contaminates you. You start noticing stuff you don't want to notice. Rooms are a little hotter around her. Food tastes better. How can it be justified to spend a couple hours with a strange new girl inspecting and judging the merits of every set of revolving doors you can find downtown? But you do. And besides banging complete strangers and recounting it for your prurient obsessed pleasure, she's amassed an intimidating reading list. Oh yeah, and she can guess yours. And Brando sticking that wad of gum under the railing just before he died in Last Tango In Paris was her favorite thing she's ever seen too. Then she'll quote it:

"Torture the children until they tell their first lie."

Everyone who stares at her qualifies as prey. Her eyes always need more names on their mailing list for postcards. From a distance it looks like a holiday destination but when you get up close, all she is is a poisonous oasis. She has something I can't put my finger on, it's more greasy than slippery, but the closest I can get is that comparing her to other girls you've instantly wanted to fuck but knew you'd have to swallow a drugstore if you did---she's an antique where all the others felt like junk. Her slutty high-beam glares and the licked-damp shape of her mouth while she's glaring at you are run-down-porn-theater- cheap and yet if went for it they'd end up being VERY expensive.

If you're like me and you go for girls with penthouse balconies, she shows you what your missing not going for girls with portable dungeons.

Somehow she makes it enticing after the introductory too-close hug and her Venus Fly Trap kiss on the cheek.

I heard Swimming Pool Girl's been dating a guy she calls Dent Head. I ask her if they're still together.

"No, but we're going on a trip. What are you listening to while you write? I'll put it on the speakers."

"No."

She takes my ipod, the one I'll be fiddling with when I go over the handle bars in a couple hours from now trying to numb my commute.

I ask if I can put up a boxing poster in her cafe window and there's more of a pendulum -effect in her ass as she walks over to the cash register.

I met Swimming Pool Girl the day after the worst time I ever showed up late in my life. Just read an extra chapter in my book and that did the trick. Dusted my relationship of 4.5 years for keeps. Poof.

Twenty minutes late and a girlfriend of 4 years came home and found a letter on my computer screen sent from a Puerto Rican pen-pal girl I'd never even met. Small potatoes. Cause there were about 200 more sent over the course of 5 years. So she read all those too. She opened pictures of the Puerto Rican girl. Nothing vulgar. No nudity. But the poses were poses I'd clearly asked for. Requested. And they'd been delivered with precision and pleasure.

How do you compete with a fantasy?

Why bother.

"I don't love you anymore."

This for a girl with profoundly embedded abandonment issues.

No denial-ability available. She knows the score in its entirety. See clearly, be seen clearly. There's your measure. Every word of a relationship conducted entirely on the page. The whole progression of a fantasy that takes over and dominates the alleys of your mind laid bare. She'd cheated on me fucking a stranger once before. "Now I know I *really* love you." Well, shucks. So on the scales of justice, that asshole's dick cheese in her mouth or my saying in a letter to this Puerto Rican: "I probably thought about you 1000 times today"---which is worse?

I was paying it some thought when her jury tendered its verdict:
"Fuck you, Brin! Yours is *far* worse! You cared about her!"
"You fucked a random! You were gonna throw away our relationship on a random! THAT'S WORSE!" And like a stinking fucking Hungarian I'm grinning.
"It's not funny."

Swimming Pool Girl heard all about it when I saw her at the pool and went over to talk to her. And I just treated the whole problem the way I drank the first time I touched alcohol at 16, swallow as much you can and chase it with something else. Magic how the one cancels out the other. Magic. Pretty soon they both spoil the other and you can't go near either. I haven't touched Coke or Tequila since... or that ex-girlfriend.