Of course, the most futile thing of all, she says, is life: in the end you die and don’t get to enjoy your legacy, whatever the fuck that means.
Only our first date and already I want to marry her.
April 13, 2012
Scream at the Earth
December 11, 2011
Everyday Is Monday
She lent me a book once, and I found a phone number written on a post-it inside, on page 172, and I called it and my ex answered.
September 11, 2011
Outlaw
In the days after, I have this nagging thought. It lasts until I die. Is that weird? I mean, a lot of times I think I’m the only person who’s ever had a certain thought, a particular feeling. And I just KNOW no one else ever has.
Which is total bullshit. Thinking at that point, days after we first slept together, that I was the only one to ever have the shallow feeling of…no, not regret…something else.
I should’ve known better.
So, this is the part in the story where I ruin it for you: I’m not dead. Not really. Me telling you these things about what’s happening now and years later and years before, this is me telling you how everything is. Because this is very much the way the universe works if you just learn to accept it.
I’m not sure what I mean by that.
But there are no surprises for me, and I never forget. When I was five I knew that I would die when I’m sixty, in a hospital bed. When I was four I knew I would know in a year when I would die. I remembered everything from when I first opened my eyes but it wasn’t until I grew that I could assemble these bits into something I could understand. Even my death. I was ten when I realized that the man with the blue paper cap and mask was my mother’s doctor.
When I was fifteen, I’m walking to across the street on the way home and I see myself when I am thirty and it’s disappointing to know everywhere you go, there are no surprises.
Think of it like memories, like thinking. That mind’s eye people talk about? That’s where I’d see everything that had already happened and what would happen. It wasn’t prescience but like memories, snippets of life - my life - that cannot be changed because everything is happening right now and always.
Imagine everything is on a page, from when you’re born to when you die, and you look at the page. You don’t read it left to right, top to bottom. You take it all in simultaneously because that’s just how it is. How once you learn how to read it’s impossible for you to not understand words, that’s how my life is to me. Things happen as they must and I go along for the ride.
Years ago, this uneasy feeling isn’t something new. But then, like now, like years from now, I will have this feeling after every time we have sex. After every time we go out and eat at restaurants and cafes. And it happens from this point forward and until I’m done and it will be always with him.
I should maybe think of why this is, but I never do because I know he and I will be together until the end. I wonder if this is what guilt is. What fear is.
September 6, 2011
Randomly On Purpose
I tell him during lunch how if he hates going to that restaurant downtown, we should just skip it. Tonight, he says, isn’t about what he likes but about what his boss likes. There’s that very modern point of view, I guess, and tell him I’d probably say the same thing to him if our roles were reversed. He says how much he’d rather just go home and read the rest of his book. I don’t mention anything about what happened this morning and neither does he. He stops a waitress walking by and asks for three more wedges of lemon for his lemonade.
The morning after we first slept together, once we were showered and dressed in the clothes from the day before (he offers me a tee-shirt but it has an iridescent dragon on it and say, “No, thanks.”), we walk from his apartment to a diner just off Vernon Street. It’s Sunday morning and he holds my hand on the blocks-long walk and he talks to me about something he’s doing at work. His job has something to do with magazine production, and then, years ago, I’m not interested in anything he has to say about it but feign my way through it, nodding along. In the diner, the food comes and he doesn’t wait for me to offer and takes a sip from my strawberry-lemonade.
A bit ago, at lunch, he’s telling me how his department’s about to absorbed by another. He’ll still have a job but five of his team won’t. He says he’s the one who’ll have to have those conversations. I ask him how he feels about that and he shrugs his shoulders in response, calls the waiter over with a snap of his fingers and asks for more lettuce for his veggie sandwich.
In the diner, it’s lunch hour on a weekend and suddenly there isn’t an empty spot in the place. The waitstaff are the epitome of efficiency if not courtesy. our waitress - early twenties - our age - and Hispanic - she comes over repeatedly to ask if everything’s okay, do we need anything else, what else are we going to have, can she get us more coffee, how about more lemonade. And she smiles at us. She knows we have the we just fucked for the first time look about us.
When the bill comes, the waiter sets it in front of him. He sips his coffee and slides the little black tray over to me as I’m taking my wallet out. I slip a few bills on it without looking at the total: we’re so boring, I know how much lunch during a workday is for us. He stops the waiter again and asks for a to-go cup for his half-full cup of coffee. I sigh. The waiter looks at me and I know he’s thinking, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
At the diner, he pays. The din of the full restaurant is terribly comforting, as if everyone here is contributing to an incredibly wonderful morning-after atmosphere I didn’t know existed before. He pays with a credit card and I notice he leaves no tip. He puts away his card and doesn’t reach for the bills in his wallet and I ask him if he’s not going to tip this girl. He makes a face, looks around to make sure our waitress isn’t nearby and leans close to me and says she was terrible: she didn’t get me more lemonade. He says, “She *asked* you if you wanted more.” I say, sure. He looks at me as if I should know what he means. Instead I pull out my wallet and set a ten-dollar bill above the signed receipt. He asks if I’m sure and I say I am.
I walk him to his car he says I need to be ready to leave the house at six. I say I will. He says we can’t be late. I say we won’t. He means it, he says. I say I know. He kisses me on the cheek and gets in his car and drives off. I walk a block over to my office. The hot city breeze blows my tie in my face.
We walk back from the diner to his apartment and he’s convinced I’m ridiculous for having left money on the table for the waitress. He goes on and on as to why she didn’t deserve a cent. Remember Reservoir Dogs? Yes, he’s Mr. Pink. He invites me back inside when we reach his front door and says if I’m not doing anything today, we should watch a movie. I say I should get back and he hugs me and kisses me and says he had an amazing time. I say the same. He says, “Even if you gave that girl more money than she deserved.”
Back in the office I have an email from him telling me not to be late and be ready by six.
*full disclosure
September 3, 2011
Elliptical
When she turns twenty, Jasmin calls me. I don’t know it’s her at first because she giggles when I ask who it is. She asks me if I don’t remember her. She could be asking someone to repeat the punchline to a bad but funny joke, the way she sounds. Finally, we agree to meet for a drink.
Easy.
I like the way her pussy tastes and her hand pushes my face deeper into her. My face is wet and my tongue sore.
Hours ago, her hand comes to my crotch at the bar when she tells me a story I know but don’t tell her I know because already my jeans feel much too tight. She doesn’t say she wants to fuck because she doesn’t have to. Which is good. In the bar, I’m already hoping she has a condom because I don’t and I don’t need to go back to before. She reads my mind and asks me if I want to walk her home. I say sure and she pays for our drinks.
An hour ago, she wraps a hand around my dick and I wonder if she ever called my dick penis and my mouth and her mouth are open and our tongues aren’t so much wrestling as they are becoming reacquainted. My pants are around my thighs and she’s already naked. She says something I don’t hear and her cellphone rings and she glances at it and maybe she’s about to smile when she sees the screen and I push her head down with a hand and she doesn’t resist taking me in her mouth.
A couple of hours later, we’re smoking on her fire escape and she’s typing away into her phone and I’m wearing my jeans and sneakers. Finally, she says she’s glad I came back to her apartment and I say nothing. She says she’s not seeing anyone right now, her last relationship was a disaster and I wonder what that means. She reads my mind and tells me everything bad about whatever his name is and says how in the end, obviously, she’s better off on her own. She says, “You know?” in that way people say it when they want you to say something in agreement but I say nothing.
And hour ago, she’s moaning. Since the last time I saw her, Jasmin got a tattoo across her back and I can’t read it because I’m fucking her from behind and she shudders. I tell her I’m about to come and she says something unintelligible. She pushes hard back against my thrusts and I’m enjoying myself. I turn her onto her back sharply and I bury my face between her sweaty breasts and grab her by her shoulders and her nails rake my back and I come into the condom that’s wrapped around my dick that’s inside her wet pussy.
When I walk into the bar earlier, I see her at the bar. Black skirt and gray blouse, she looks like she’s just done with a work day and is unwinding. The bar is a restaurant bar but it’s dark enough and empty enough that I don’t want to runaway. I see her long black hair, not cascading nor falling down her back, but already disheveled after we used to fuck. That expression about butterflies in your stomach? Yes, well, that’s bullshit: it’s more like rabid dogs fighting in there when she looks up at me standing there after I say, “Hey.”
I say I’m going to go and she says, “Okay,” and I get dressed and she’s naked and walks me to her door and asks can she call me later. I don’t know what that’s going to mean, but turns out she won’t ever call me again after tonight, and I say sure, she can call me. She smiles. I walk back to my house and realize I didn’t put on my boxers and left them behind. Damn it.
Years later, I think about telling him about Jasmin but I never do. None of it. I don’t tell him about the pregnancy scare with a then-teenager. And I don’t ever tell him I fucked her a day before he fucked me for the first time.
August 14, 2011
In 1999
Sitting on his couch and he brings me a beer. He’s talking to someone on the telephone, the receiver cradled between his shoulder and ear. He opens the twist-off bottle and hands it to me and I take a sip. He sits next to me. Whoever he’s talking to, it must be family (he’s going on about a birthday party for “Nan”). He’s naked and I take another sip.
I flicks on the remote and the television comes on. He hits another button and he mutes it, and sets the remote between us and I wonder if that means anything. On the television screen is an orgy scene, one girl and half a dozen naked men. The girl, on her knees, she looks like someone’s wife and isn’t attractive. The men on the screen, inexplicably, are. They queue to take turns fucking her ass and/or her mouth. It’s about as titillating as it sounds, but with one hand on his cock and the other rubbing my shoulder, he’s still talking on the phone.
After every man on the screen has had a turn at the girl, he slides over, closer to me, listening to the other person speak through the phone, and he takes a hand under my shirt and begin pinching a nipple. I set the beer bottle on the floor near my feet, and lean back. His other hand comes to my belt and clumsily undoes it. He mouths something to me I don’t understand but think he wants me to take off my shirt and I do. He smiles and mouths the same thing. He touches my bare chest and his hands aren’t rough.
He says into the phone things like, “Well, okay then…” and, “It’s getting late…” and maybe I don’t want him to stop his conversation. I keep checking my watch; I told him I needed to be gone by five and it’s nearly four-thirty now. The woman on the television has been replaced by a very young looking boy and the men all smile to each other, each of them naked and hairy and their erections in their hands. It’s like knowing a car accident is definitely going to happen and stopping to watch it unfold. He grabs me by my jeans’ belt loops and stands me before him, his face flushed for some reason.
I’m having second thoughts when he’s pulling down my pants and boxers and begins fondling me. Pinching here and there, planting kisses, sniffing me. Her turns me over and says into the phone that he’s not going to make it tomorrow somewhere. His hands aren’t rough but they’re not gentle when spreads my legs apart, my right begins to cramp immediately. He says into the phone he has to go, can he call back in a few minutes. For a moment, I think this will be everything. My dick responds to his touch despite the distance between us. I think how it is I’m here, right now, in this position, naked, a strange man’s hands all over me. Not how I got here, not in the real sense of the words, but how the decision to be here passed my brain as a good idea. These aren’t second thoughts.
He breathes deep and sighs and I hear the distinct click of the telephone. On the television screen, the boy is being double penetrated and has come on his face. He says, “Ready?”
During and after, he says all these things at various intervals:
“Fuck.”
“Just what I need.”
“You’re so tight.”
“Baby.”
He’s as bad as the porno still playing as I put on my sneakers and lace them up.
He’s sweaty and his chest hair is matted to his slick skin and he looks oily. Twenty minutes ago he hangs up the phone, now he’s picking up again, inviting me to some Chinese food. “It’ll be here in a few minutes,” he says. I say I have to go. He smiles. As he’s dialing, he wanders off into his bedroom. On the television screen, the men from the orgy scenes from before are all jerking each other off and I wonder where they find the strength. They’re someone’s sons, I think, and I feel guilty. He comes back and sees me watching the screen.
I can come over again whenever I want, he says. He says he’s sorry our time was cut so short. He says he likes me. He says maybe we can go away for a weekend. His wallet is in his hands, the phone back on his shoulder. He digs out a twenty and says into the phone, “Can I have the number three and number ten for delivery, please?” and I see a picture of his two kids and his wife in his wallet. I say sure and glance back at the screen and two men come at the same time and everyone else just look disappointed. I say thanks and leave him, walks out, close the door behind me, and I think this isn’t the worse way to begin hooking up with married men over the internet.
It’s 1999.
June 9, 2011
Exquisite Corpse? anyone?
write a line or phrase - or some bathroom graffitti and I’ll arc weld it into a story
?
“Jade would never fuck me. He said I’m too dirty. He said I remind him of his third ex-wife. He reminds me of my first.”
June 3, 2011
may, 2011
1. no, i won’t look you in the eye…, 2. …so get going then…, 3. …i’m done with you…, 4. …get your things…, 5. …my mistake was asking you to wait…, 6. …but not anymore…, 7. …tomorrow’ll be another bright and shiny morning…, 8. …go get some sleep…, 9. …let’s just stop…, 10. …please go home…, 11. …don’t call it a break…, 12. …and smile…, 13. …the next one won’t be so bad…, 14. …might even be better…, 15. …less of an asshole…, 16. …maybe prettier…, 17. …maybe…, 18. …she’ll treat you better…, 19. …but i doubt it…, 20. …he’ll be smarter…, 21. …you’re all about flash…, 22. …and it makes me think…, 23. …i’m a little worn, rough…, 24. …an antagonist…, 25. …but trust me…, 26. …could be worse…, 27. …what if we were the same?…, 28. …glad i’m not like you…, 29. …soon as you leave…, 30. …you’ll be better off…, 31. …and i’ll be happy.
May 30, 2011
October Seventeenth
Strange how someone you think you know slowly reveals himself to being a slut.
Everywhere we went, he’d stop and say hello to this woman, and that. In the coffee shop in Los Feliz, at the Metro station in Long Beach, at the Casbah in San Diego: always a woman, always a hug and a smile, always a few minutes of conversation, and not once an introduction. But every time after - after all the little pleasantries were over - he would take my hand and smile and tell me that this woman, and that woman, everywhere we went, was someone he used to sleep with.
And, every time he told me, and I remembered what each of these women looked like, what they sounded like, how they looked at me standing there, I thought, “I need to get out of this.” But I didn’t.
Years later, I ran into him out in the street, holding a middle-aged man’s hand. This was in North Hollywood, at some dive bar. And he came up and hugged me, chatted me, asked me how I was doing. But he didn’t introduce me to the man who was looking at me, thinking, “I need to get out of this.”
[full disclosure.]
May 26, 2011
not going to lie: i’m okay with my computer finally dying. eh, it was on life support for over a year…
…but i came up with an awesome line to put into this story and now i can’t edit it in!
it’s saved in my phone.
maybe i’ll write longhand again. i used to before the internet became television.
anyway, this is post 2600 and, yes, you just read it.
May 13, 2011
M is for Maladjusted
Tori Amos, Blueprint, Cibo Matto, Descendents, Fear Factory, Gang of Four, High On Fire, The International Noise Conspiracy, Jane’s Addiction, Karate, Lucero, Mastodon, Nine Inch Nails, Organic, Placebo, Quasimodo, RJD2, Suede, Tool, U2, Voltaire, Wu Tang Clan, Xiu Xiu, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Z-Trip.
May 3, 2011
Named Names
“I’ve never been in that bathroom alone,” he says and my first instinct is to call him a fucking slut. I don’t, but it stays with me for the rest of the evening. It’s kind of hard to shake something like that when it’s said to you with a smile, a wistful tone, and possibly an air of pride. We keep making our way through the porn shop.
Whatever it is we’re doing, I think, perhaps isn’t the best thing for either of us. Wait, no. It’s not the best thing for me. I know this. I realize it. I’m fully aware of it right now. He looks at me as I look absentmindedly at a wall of whips I’ve absolutely no interest in. From the corner of my eye, I know he’s looking at me because what he said got a reaction from me that I can’t control. He says after way too damn long, “Wanna get out of here? How about a drink?”
Out in the street, it’s Saturday night and there are groups of guys everywhere, the odd lesbian couple every now and then. Where do they keep the lesbians in West Hollywood? Are they not allowed in this boys’ town? He doesn’t say much which is good because I don’t feel like talking. But a car full of guys pulls alongside for a moment, everyone calls out his name, he says, “HIIII!” and the car peels out. I ask him who that was, all he says is, “Just some old friends,” just as his phone goes off with a text message he reads and laughs at.
A few blocks over at some sketchy but nice bar, we sit at a table while the music playing clears the dance area. Everyone melts back to their little groups and he asks me what’s wrong. But before I can even say a thing, some blond middle age guy comes over and they share a hug and begin nattering away like old friends. I’ve no idea who this guy is. I’ve no idea why an entire minute passes by and all I get instead of an introduction is some darting glances from this man, while the man I’m with keeps on talking. I get up and walk over to the bar for a drink I don’t think I want.
Later, much later, we’re walking back to my house. We’re both feeling rather awkward. He says earlier the man who came up to him in the bar, he was some one he used to have sex with. Earlier still, he says two of the guys in the car were also people he used to have sex with. He says the text message he got earlier was from someone who saw us walking by and wanted to say hi, and that they used to have sex as well.
He asks me a few houses away from mine if this bothers me because it shouldn’t: it’s all in the past and he’s different now. He was a little lost before, he says, and I hope he’s not about to go into some weird born again type thing. He says he used to be a little messed up when he was younger. He says I shouldn’t think more about it. He says I’m sure I’ve fucked lots of people he doesn’t know about. I say, yes, he’s right. “So, I don’t get why your acting like this then.”
I say, “I wish you just wouldn’t tell me shit like this. I don’t want to know anything about it. I don’t care to know. The idea of you being in some porn shop bathroom while you’re getting fucked by a different guy each time, can you not see how that makes you look to me? But, you know what? I shouldn’t pass judgment, right? I didn’t know you before. I know you now, here - ” he nods,
At my door, we’re both silent. It’s okay. There’s nothing he can say, nor that I can say to cut the tension. I know he wants to come in. I don’t want him to. He looks at me and I look away. He asks if I’ll be okay, if we’ll be okay. I don’t say anything. It isn’t cold out tonight. He wants to come inside, I know he does. But I walk in and close the door and I hear him call out my name, one of too damn many he knows.
[for this writing prompt via Visionaria.]
May 1, 2011
Outside
I reach under me, my sweaty and slick stomach, feel my way down me, down to my crotch and between my legs, and the sun is out and coming through the open window, and I read under me as he’s fucking me; I’m propped up against the bed, bent at the waist, his hands on my hips, and I reach and feel the whole length of him sliding in and out of me. His sweat is cold as it drips on my back.
I can see the woman across the street, in her balcony in the building opposite mine, when I open my eyes. She was so nice to me when she introduced herself when she moved in last week. She’s so pretty. She’s hanging ferns on the hooks she was installing yesterday.
He’s quiet but every now and then, that invocation for godmygodyoufeelsogoodfuckI’mgoingtocomegod.
He slides in and out of me at a steady clip and it’s not that it doesn’t feel good but I’m just not here. This is an obligation fuck because he did me the favor of asking and I was too damn lazy to say no. To afraid to be alone.
His hands are not rough: they feel like a woman’s hands. His name, I forget it for a moment. He pushes me onto my stomach and I grip the bed firmly. I don’t close my eyes. He doesn’t say anything about me being quiet. Really, they never do. His pants are still around his ankles, his belt jangling with the rhythm.
I look at the woman across the street, hanging her potted ferns, in her tee-shirt and shorts, and I’m not sad but wonder what she’s thinking right now, what she’s looking forward to after her chore is over? Is she thinking of her husband, is she thinking of their kid? What does she do for a living? It’s Friday mid-day and I wonder if this is what she wants to be doing on a nice afternoon like this, tending to some new plants in solitude.
He falls on top of me and buries his head in my nape, his hips never lose a beat, one of his hands finds one of my gripping the bed and he entwines his fingers in mine, his other hand finds its way to my crotch and I’m hard despite myself. His hands are not rough.
Of course he moans when he comes inside me; I feel him tighten, as if he’s flexing every muscle in his body at the same time, but he doesn’t linger: he slides out of me and quickly begins to pull up his pants. His shirt and tie are in my living room. He’s wearing terribly ill-fitting boxers and says, ‘Shit, I gotta go. Call you later,’ and he leaves. I’m glad he’s gone and I sit naked and wet in a chair near my window and I open it and take a cigarette from my nightstand and light up. I never wonder what he’s thinking about because it’s probably nothing interesting. I don’t know. I don’t hate nor dislike him. But, when across the street, in the balcony, I see him kissing his wife as she finishes with her plants, I wonder why that isn’t me.
[there was this tweet by ms melissa grant the other week, and there is this by ms cupcake, and now there is this bit of mine.]
March 31, 2011
“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
- Rainier Maria Rilke (via theremina)
There are five things about my life I remember, and think always will.
I remember in kindergarten, I don’t know, close to when I first started, there was this boy who didn’t like me. I don’t remember his name, nor do I remember what he looked like aside from the fact he had longish shaggy brown hair and was pale. He had freckles. Anyway, it’s not that I remember everything but there are things. You know what I mean, you know how it goes. At some point on this day, I guess we were horsing around and he became really upset and angry and he chased me about until I couldn’t run across the grounds for very much longer and I tripped and fell. He was on top of me, straddling me and punching me in my sides. He was so angry. And I laughed in his doughy face. He punched and punched and I couldn’t muster the energy to punch back - it wasn’t as if I was being injured; we were barely children - and I laughed and laughed and laughed. I laughed in the way you laugh when you think you might pee on yourself. I laughed the way you laugh when you can’t stop. And he became angrier until he began to cry because I laughed instead of roaring in pain. He got off me, finally, and walked off sniffling and wiping away his tears. And I laughed some more. This is when I learned not to be afraid.
In the fourth grade, our teacher stopped coming and we were split up amongst all the other fourth grade classes. It was a little shocking because it meant that I wouldn’t see my friends every day in class. We would have different recess periods. I was a little upset. The class I was sent to was in the other side of the building and when my other four class mates and I walked in, the kids from class were so strange looking. And they were all looking at us standing by the door as we were assigned seats. When I got mine, I tried not to make any eye contact with anyone. I’m not sure why. I settled in and saw on the desk next to me a book we didn’t use. This wasn’t good. I dropped my pencil case as I took it out of my backpack and someone at the next desk over reached down and picked it up for me and I said thanks and looked up at the prettiest green eyes I’ve ever seen. She had long strawberry blonde hair and looked like she was white and was so pretty. She smiled at me and said, “You’re welcome,” and she asked me my name, and she said my new teacher wasn’t that bad, and she asked me what I brought for lunch, and that was how I had to learn to talk to girls.
I was in my twenties (I think. Probably, closer to thirty than not. I can’t recall.) and I was on the train back to Los Angeles from San Diego. I had, maybe five dollars in my pocket and hoped it was enough to get me home from downtown. My head hurt and my lip was cut and my clothes reeked of booze and smoke. My backpack on my lap, a paperback in my hands, but I couldn’t concentrate enough to read it. Just a few hours previous I was let out of jail after two days. Something about disorderly conduct and public intoxication and minor private property damage. I felt like I was wearing my shame as a thin film all over my body. It was terrible, and even now, every time I think about it, I feel a little embarrassed and rather guilty. When the train pulled into Union Station, this is when I began learning from my mistakes.
I don’t remember when I first realized I wanted her to marry me. Is that weird? I mean, I think I sort of knew, but if I were to put a date on when I decided that I wanted her to say yet, I’d be lost. After three years, you get used to someone being around all the time. It’s who you call every moment you can, and who does the same, just because. It’s knowing that I want to do X because she wants to without feeling a sense of duty. I can’t really explain. Can you? I’d think not. We were somewhere in Seattle because we wanted to take a trip somewhere. I don’t remember how we settled for Seattle. We were walking back to the hotel. She wanted a shower and a drink. We walked past a little huddle of office ladies smoking, each of them with a Starbucks cup in her hand. She laughed and I laughed after we past. She said, “My god, did you see? They were all wearing the same outfit, just different shoes? Maybe you have to look like a has-been Florence Henderson to work there.” And I thought for a moment, right then: I want her and I to laugh together without saying a word forever. I stopped her and asked her if she would marry me. She looked at me and said yes right then. I mumbled something about not having a ring. She said she didn’t care, and she kissed me. This was when I learned to be happy.
In a hospital just a few years ago, it was the whole thing: machines beeping ad wheezing along with my breathing and my heart, tubes up and in me. It wasn’t that terrible, but I couldn’t do anything. Of course I was scared, who wouldn’t be? I remember the wife and kids looked so sad every time they came. They tried not to be - they smiled even though I knew and they knew there was very little to smile about. They would talk to me as if I could answer back. They talked to me as if I was just laying in my own bed on Sunday morning. And I wanted them to stop all of that. Maybe they didn’t think I could understand what they were saying. Maybe they thought that I wanted to be treated the same way as always, when all I wanted was to yell at them, “I’m stuck in a fucking hospital bed: everything is not the same as always!” But I couldn’t. No one ever said anything to me about how I was slowly dying. Slowly, yes, but definitely dying. It’s not as if it’s any big surprise: you can feel life leaving you, even if it is in little terrible and painful stages. And even thought my family and doctor were infuriatingly frustrating, I looked back and thought, “Shit, I don’t want to die, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Wish I could tell them all to live well and enjoy their life, and maybe even think of me from time to time.” I would say, “I’m okay. I will be fine, and so will you. I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again, but if I do, it has to be somewhere better than here.” That’s when I learned there is somewhere better than here.
[so. that’s roughly 25000 words, give or take. i’m glad it’s over, but i’m beat. thinking on the fly isn’t one of my strong suits. but, most of it was fun, some of it i hate, and some of it i love. frankly, if i remember correctly, i thought this was fun because of you all who fill this little space of the internet for me. so, thanks. lost a few of you along the way, but that’s okay: as always, it’s the story that matters. and if you read along with me, you get a special place in interweb heaven (is there an interweb heaven? it’s 2011, you’d think someone would’ve made one up by now if not.). anyway, thanks again, and good night.]
March 31, 2011
ANNAKIM
paper magazine
hollywood
i hate hollywood but that’s where kim wanted to go and here we are. she looks ridiculous in that hat and those sunglasses but she’s convinced that’s how they dress here.
have i said i hate it here? because i do.
we take the subway to universal city and there are more tourists there than you can imagine, fat and fanny packed and smelly. can the midwest give off a particular odor? i’m not sure, i’ve never been there. but i think i can spot midwesterners from miles away: they wear hats, baseball or cowboy.
we go into santa monica and this place feels like it’s filled beyond capacity. so many people in the street and so many people looking for parking. looking for parking is a profession here. fake tits are the new hood ornaments, and if i see more illegible tattoos, i might want to cut somebody.
i’m not always this cheery, so, you know, whatever.
we walk along the ocean in venice and i light a cigarette clumsily while holding on to my sneakers in hone hand, a lighter in the other. i’m the only idiot out here wearing jeans and a black tee-shirt. she’s shoved her green wicker shoes in her handbag that’s bigger than my gym bag. her shoes aren’t really made out of wicker; i only say that because she paid too much for them and was late on her rent that month. a red truck with red buoys and two blond lifeguards drive next to me and tell me i have to put out my cigarette or i’ll get a ticket. i do and they drive off in a wake of sand. kim laughs.
drive back to hollywood and she wants a picture in front of the kodak theater, and in front of the capital records building, and in from of amoeba records, and in front the ktla building, and along the walk of fame, and in front of the cineramadome, and in front of the viper room, and in front of the el capitan, and so on…
she finds tinker bell’s star in front of a stripper supply store.
(is this what these places are called? i’m not sure. it makes it sound as if all these garters and bustiers and stockings and boas and thongs are in a home depot for strippers. what would you call them this place?)
kim’s raised her voice telling me to take her picture and she crouches down by the tinker bell star. i make sure kim’s out of focus and take the picture. she wants me to take a couple more, so i do, cutting her off more and more each time.
we walk until we’re at a place called real food daily and i’m drenched in sweat. i don’t look through the menu and kim’s saying something about something. the waitress comes by as i’m looking at the pictures from today in the camera. i order a coffee and cream. the waitress says something that sounds like she said they don’t have cream nor milk and i say sure and she’s off. kim’s phone rings and she flips it open with a snap of her wrist and begins talking.
i look at one of the tinker bell star pictures and think it isn’t so bad here if you imagine that tinker bell got a star after she died after she could no longer get work and turn to making porn. i think tinker bell, the porn star, would’ve liked to get ass fucked hard from behind while a pot bellied hairy man pulled on her wings, fairy dust spilling everywhere.
tinker bell the porn star makes hollywood less loathsome.
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