Tuesday, November 01, 2005

nostalgiac

1. When I met her she had a million feet of shock red hair all unrolled like carpet. She was twenty or thirty years ahead of herself, quicker than most and completely unsure. I would later find her to have a temperament that put Buddhists to shame. It was all I could do to fix her up with a string of unstable men to thank her.

2 He was one of the most beautiful men I’d ever seen, so much so that he would have to shun men’s clothes for women. He would drink himself in circles and everything was a mantra, alternating between slut and prude. We drank and sang and aged ourselves immensely, passing out on the floor hoping the roaches would not find our mouths.

3. I thought I couldn’t stand him for at least a month, and shared a lease before I called him my friend. Seperately, we left blood on every surface, holes in every wall, and trekked through every alley at every hour of the day. I’d never met a man with such a zeal for white women with downhome smiles and ridiculous breasts. He toasted the present with every drink and hugged you soft a thousand times a night. He cried openly when he left, and kissed us all on our cheeks, and didn’t say a word about where he’d been when he came back.

4. I’d known him since baby teeth as a face in the crowd and he’d always find his way to my couch, perhaps he was always…tired. We pranked churched punked and broke neighborhood cadillacs and we let him stay. His friends were all idiots and they stayed too until every room was a circus inside of a bong and the entire essence of what we all were was sucked up hollow by some fucker in a beard, cuz there was always some fucker with a beard at the end of the bong. He should have wheels on his feet and stop sitting down, he is perpetually burning himself out of life and hibernating in the painful fashion of the phoenix.

5-6. They showed up together and I couldn’t imagine living with either one. They were teenagers and junkies, as far as I was concerned, who showed up in a flurry of half-bad tattoos on the laps of men who weren’t worth their weight in anything.

I was not ready for her, perhaps. Or she was not ready for me. Fate forced our hands and we ended up at the bottom of a bottle in a bed on the floor with dayglo bullets melting down the walls. Our room together was an overheated cage where we humped and fought and yelled rape and snarled for our freedom. We drank cough syrup mint juleps til our eyes became green and licked powders til our tongues had dried and tired of each other. We stole hearts and clothes and bottles we couldn’t afford in an immature game of one-upsmanship. I pushed her away and begged her to come back. She ran away cuckold and begged the door open. We burnt each other away in oil drums on the porch, and came to our senses with the changing leaves.


Then there was her friend, younger with bigger eyes, still dripping from the gene pool and far brighter then the look on her face. I used to confuse the words aloof and demure for one another. Something like that. Her hands were ochre and green, but the rest of her was the color of trophies and secretly prized by all of our friends. Her universe is a ball of yarn, forever unraveling and balling up, until things grow from her tears and she is smiling like the sun again. She is the most wonderful human ever, older than she could ever act and smarter than she will ever sound, forever understanding, and lacking the machinations that make nearly all other people lacking in comparison.


7. Burnt by the same woman and healed by the same clocks, we clinked our glasses. He was a mammal to be sure, with bright eyes and bushy tail. He was wrapped in the kings fabrics even, strapped to an automatons schedule, dying slow deaths and forever bleeding ink. Every woman wanted to be with him and my eyes flashed green fire, but he only gave the crazy ones the time of day. He spent his time with the rest flirting and spooning, spooning and flirting, biding his time til the next crazy one to draw the objections of his friends. Like all people who possess special pens and worthless paper, he was addicted to heartbreak. He was a mammal to be sure.


8. He came in on a whim, on the face of Dali’s clock, melting in the desert sun. Perhaps the world’s most selfish storyteller. His world overlapped our own but they were not the same. He’d given himself to dancing and drinking and the playing of games. He was forever pining, but rarely affecting the change it seemed he needed. He lit up like a nuke though, when he got started, but didn't know how to stop. If everything stays bottled, he will make an interesting geyser when he explodes. Though I enjoyed spending time with him and I know the same is true inversely, I don’t know if we ever connected in any real way over our year.


9. (Not pictured.) People couldn’t tell if we were boyfriends or brothers and never guessed neither, we fit so well together. Two brown people with shared vices, making underaged asses of ourselves on stages across the Red Line. I have never hated a friend more than I had hated him, and I have never hated the woman that one of my friends loved more than I hated her. They had shovels for lower lips and dug themselves deeper and deeper trying to avoid conflict. I love them again, but my time with them made me tired, and most of the time it just isn’t worth the trainride and commitment.

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