Last night...she said...

The little coffee dive: slouching in the sticky seats, drinking sticky drinks, talking the big show and looking up all the time to see who's come in.

Tonight it's almost empty. People eating at the cereal bar, no one watching the TV. Lawrence's flaxy hair and his handsome wide angle face. We're talking about movies, about making movies, and the old grass-green excitement coming up in me.

Then Jack calls. We'd made plans to hang out after dinner.

"Do you like beer?" he says.

"Whiskey."

I close my phone--Lawrence has this funny look on his face.

"You're blushing", he says.

And I have this stupid grin-"I guess I just showed you my cards, huh?"

I can never hide anything.

"So you're going over there," he says.

"Yeah. Wish me luck," I say, without knowing why.

I kiss him on top of his curly, beautiful hair-

It is a cold, brilliant night. I stop at the gas station. The attendant is hugely fat, carnival fat, and scary people in there leaning on the counter. One has a fishing pole, for some reason, even though its January in Kansas at nine o clock at night.

My face reflected in the glass door: still with the stupid grin, because here I am on my big adventure, I wrote to this guy I had a crush on way back in high school, and talking to him on the phone he's just like me, probably too much like me, but fuck it, yeah? We'll make an exemption for the stone cold fox.

I think about Jack's forehead and the way his hair used to fall across it, when we would sit under that tree. Autumn, and leaves on the ground, everything smelling rich and living underneath us, and I felt that it would be impossible to ever die. I wonder if his hair is still as long as it used to be.

I bang my music and drive like a drunken loon through the country, passing the old barn where I used to shovel horse shit in high school, where I'd ride horses alone at midnight through fields full of snakes and flowers. I remember there used to be a farm with black and white cows across the road but I don't see it now.

Then I'm there. It's a nice house. A really nice house, and a big shed with stuff in it, and fences all over the place. He said that they have cats and I look around but don't see any.
My car ticking. Do I call him or just go over and ring the doorbell? What's the protocol for this, this fucking crazy, ass-random thing which I am doing?

The house is dark. It's fucking freezing. Suddenly I start thinking about In Cold Blood and terrify myself. There's this blue plastic dolphin swinging in the window--surely this is the wrong house, and someone scary is going to come to the door and yell at me.

Yeah, so I call him and he doesn't answer.
Wow, well here I am. How fucking stupid is this?
Then he calls back.

"That's my mom's house," he says. "I'll come and get you--"

"No, no," I say. "I see you. I'm coming."

Their houses are separated by maybe 500, 600 feet, these great nice country houses in the middle of all these land and these fences. Around me the night is silent. He flips on his porch light.

And there he is.

We stand apart from each other just looking.

He looks the same, but older, taller, blue shadows under his eyes, and crazy, tangled hair floating around his coat collar--still long.

"Hi," he says.

He picks us cups out of the drying rack and starts to mix me a whiskey and water-

"Better let you pour," he says.

I dump in the whiskey.

"You too?"

"I have to go slow," he says, smiling. "Or I'll start saying crazy things, and you'll run away."

I am going to get in trouble tonight.

So we're drinking, and he shows me his house. The lower half is spread out with music equipment, a big drumset and other stuff I don't know about. Back porch with a sofa and a computer.

We kind of have to mill around because there's not really anywhere to sit. It's cold on the porch.

"Bachelor pad," he says. "You want to see the upstairs?"

ha ha. sure. why not.
Steep carpeted white stairs.
He's got it draped with fabrics, and there's a sloping roof, a wall of CDs. Books all over one side of the bed, which is a massive futon, almost like a Japanese mat, and covered in a black down comforter.

N. and I had a white down comforter, our bed on the floor.

And of course, there's nowhere to sit but the bed.

"Let me show you this script," I say.

He goes down to get it from the table. I have decided to lie on the ground with just my head on the bed. That seems okay.

"Let me play you some of the songs I was thinking about for it," he says.

So he's a metal guy, right, and I know nothing about metal--very little about any music, really, but what I listen to when I want music is more like sixties psych rock, prog rock, turkish funk.

He's trying to read the script and he puts on this music which is loud and great and completely inaccessible to me.

"This is my baby," he says.

His handpicked band. They headline metal tours.

I can't help myself--I start laughing. I'm drinking too much, and the music is so crazy, and it's so random that I'm out here, and in his bedroom, this guy, who I never knew very well but always kind of wanted to fuck, and he looks up and gives me this sweet, earnest grin.

"I just--if I can't understand the lyrics, it's hard for me. And it's so-fast. I think I need to graduate into this."

What did he play for me--he kept putting things on--My Dying Bride, Type O Negative, Theatres des Vampires. I loved Theatres des Vampires. He put on things he'd done himself, sounding a lot like theatres des vampires, at least to me. We edge further onto the bed, talking--after a while he stops even trying to look at the script.

I go back downstairs for a mug of hot water. When it's cold, I drink a lot of hot water, lots of tea, hot toddies. Funny to be around someone I really don't know at all, to have them looking at you and be figuring you out. Hmm, she likes tea. And you are looking at them, doing the same thing. He has no laces in his shoes. That is interesting.

All the time weighing these things. Is this something which I like?

I sit on the counter top and listen to the microwave hum. Out his windows the country is beautiful, ice white and shining under the moon. Little glints like mica in the grass.

He comes downstairs and finds me. Stands there on the other side of the table which divides the kitchen.

"The fireflies out here in the summer must be amazing."

He steps closer. "They are."

"You aren't keeping up."

He slugs some whiskey.

"Let's get trashed," I say.

"You know," he says. "I rarely drink. So if I say some things tonight-"

"Oh, come on. This is a bender. That's what you do."

Then we went outside for some reason.
Whisky, vodka, cigarettes, cheese. There are no stars, just the moon like something ripe, and I keep catching him watching my face, watching me breathe. I run my cold finger down his face-"I like your profile," I say.

Actually we were in the bed.

But before that happened we went into town for a while.

"Let's take you out," he says.

Driving there he says suddenly, "I need to tell you I have a girlfriend. --But it's been over between us for a long time."

Which sounds familiar.

"We don't make each other happy anymore," he says. "I mean, she's really hurt me and I don't connect to her anymore. Thing is, she's a little suicidal. I've been kind of a coward about ending it."

We're driving down a long straight gravel road with trees bowed on either side, water standing silver in the ditches. His whole body inclined to me from his seat. Smoking his cigarette meditatively-

"Can I have some of that?"

Our fingers touch. "Shouldn't smoke," he says. "I don't want to be a bad influence."

It feels good, like all my nerves opening up and then easing, everything easing.

"I think I am a little drunk now," I say to him. Flick my ash out the window and wonder what happens to it. Probably bursts into a million particles on the wind. A firecracker. The grey, grey night in his headlights.

"I really like you," he says. He looks at me.

"Well. I am a mess." I say.

We go to the Replay. They had a serrated plastic sheet hung over the door because it was cold outside, but it is just as cold inside.

He buys drinks and we slide into a wooden booth, where it is fucking cold, and we keep leaning closer together across the table until I can't stand it and go across the room to stand up on a chair under a heat lamp.

There's this really tall guy there, who knows Jack, and I start talking to him, after a while saying things like 'isn't it crazy, everything we've seen, everything we've experienced-that it fits inside your skull?' With my hands on my head, feeling my skull, and saying, 'isn't it crazy?'

Thinking of Jodorowsky-crazy that we have a heart, that we have blood, that we have a cock-it's all so fucking crazy.

And this guy just grinning at me like I'm a loon, because I am a loon indeed, and yeah man, he's saying, it's crazy. Our breath shows white in the air between us.

With Jack standing next to me, his beautiful porcelain face and the hollows under his eyes and cheeks, I want to touch him.

Some people yelling my name, and its these two girls I met on New Years, these awesome girls, and I'm so happy to see them and exchange numbers, because I've got this idea it'd be fun to go into KC and see a boxing match together, get drunk and see some blood and knuckles. Tara and this girl whose name I can't remember, petite beauty with close cropped gray hair even though she's only 26.

"I wish it wasn't so cold--what I want to do is walk with you and talk with you," I say to Jack. He smiles and takes my arm.

We switch to Henry's Upstairs. Jammed with people. Standing in line at the bar these three drunk dudes saying something to us, screaming over the noise, this not-english gibberish, and we just smile and nod. He asks me if I want to go. I'd sort of like to see what happens.

We find a little table and I try to orient myself so we aren't touching, since after all now there is a girlfriend. He takes my drink and tries it, turning the glass first so that his lips will touch the place mine had met.

"You know, I had this thing for you all high school," he said. "But I was fucking scared."

I try his beer and don't like it.

"Did you write to me just because you want me for this part?" he says.

"Yes," I say.

I'm not lying, either. I've just been doing exactly what I feel like doing and letting the pieces fall--true to god I didn't think about it, I don't want to be with anybody. I just wanted my character to kiss a character she'd have chemistry with. No one will believe this but it is true.

"I don't believe you," he says.

"Oh well."

He puts his hands on his knees-"I have to go to the bathroom immediately."

I laugh and he leaves--and then this blonde kid slides into his chair.

"What are you looking at?" the kid asks me. I'd been looking at this painting on the wall.

"Uh, that."

"Have you seen this one?" He shows me one around the corner that's a bunch of painted squares. We go back and sit down.

"You know, that seat is taken."

"It wasn't when I came in."

"Hm."

A big guy walks past.

"Is that him? Nope, not your type."

"What do you want?" I ask.

He doesn't answer so I needle him-"how old are you?"

"Twenty-two," he says, with this smug frat asshole expression. I want to smack him.

"Twenty-two, and you don't know what you want. How does that happen?"

He reaches out to try to touch my hair and I jerk back. "Why do you dye your hair red?" he says.

"Go away."

He just looks at me.
Jack comes back from his piss and stands there. He's not sure if this is a guy I know.

The asshole looks up at Jack with this sullen expression, this spoiled rich asshole of a face, and he wants to fight. So I stand up, and Jack follows me, and we leave.

There are people who know him everywhere. It takes a long time to get out.

But then we're in the jeep, and after a while we're back in his room. It's a little cold.

"Can I get under the blanket?"

Drinking, smoking, music, talking forever and the night is endless. I want to press up against him so badly, I want to crawl on top of him and lick his face and his tongue-oh, to like a guy, to hop into his bed and just look at him, I love that. After seven years, to be so free, I love it, I feel like a child. Can we cuddle? Is that allowed?

But I stay on my side of the bed.

"God," he says-"I feel--elated. Do you have that?"

I start to say something but don't. He presses it.

"Ask me in a couple weeks, okay? Figure things out with your girl and ask me then."

"Oh, fuck, that's not fair. You have to tell me. I've said everything!"

My lips are sealed. Oh, but I want to kiss him. His smile. You beautiful boy. You've no idea.

It's five in the morning. His phone rings.

"That's her," he says. Resigned. I think about myself, my instincts, a couple months back. Calling.

He takes the phone downstairs. I must have fallen asleep, because suddenly he's there crouching behind me.

"She's coming over," he says, with a white face. "She wants to meet you."

"What?"

"I told her you were coming over tonight to talk about this part, and she wasn't happy. Then I didn't call. So she wants to meet you."

"No--Jack, you don't know what I've just been through. Fuck-this is exactly how it happened with N. and I."

"Look, we'll just go downstairs and we'll say we were drinking and you were too drunk to drive home, so you were gonna sleep on the couch. I don't want you to leave."

"Ah-" I am pretty drunk. Actually, I am well wasted. "Listen, would you get me my backpack from my car? I have something I need to take at six."

He goes and I sit up. The room isn't spinning exactly. More like swirling. I have to leave.

Downstairs all he has are tortillas and a sack of cheese cubes. My backpack slung over his shoulder, he walks me outside--I'm trying to down this dry tortilla.

It's still black outside. We stop and hug, and this huge black and white cat comes up to us. He looks just like the tomcat N. kept.

I sit in the wet grass and hold the cat in my lap. Jack looks down at us.

"That's Tom," he says. He sits--"I want you to stay."

Sitting in the grass with this cat like my Calvin, suddenly I'm not there and I don't give a fuck about anyone or anything, I'm that drunk, and bell-lucid. And there are stars, there are stars, there are stars.

"Stay with me," he says.

'Listen,' I wish I'd said. 'This is what you do. You hold her, you tell her the truth-you love her. You don't make her happy. You can't make her happy. And you're not happy. So it's over. And then don't talk for a couple months, so that she can build her own thing and feel okay by herself. Don't drag it out.'

This is what I wish I'd said but instead what we do is hold each other wordlessly, my hands inside his big black jacket like wings around us, and he tries to kiss me.

"Be good," is what I said. His lips along my temples.

Deer crossing the road, their eyes like lamps in my headlights. I hit a construction sign. It's okay. It's all okay and great.

He calls me--"I want to see you soon," he says. "I need to see you," he says, what N. must have said, and does say to her, and Jack will be my rebound, and I will be his, and isn't it silly, how all of it, it's just musical chairs.

"There she is," he says. "Here goes."

I miss my old cat. I miss the fireflies. I miss my landlord, and the Watkins, and the trees drooping softly over that place I used to live, with my N. in bed sleeping, his careworn face, face I loved like a father, a brother, my everything lover-you were everything to me and now it is nothing.

And this is right and it is okay. Because now there is nothing in the world from stopping me in becoming. But I do feel strange and disconnected. I am a kite without a string.

I make it home and pass out. Wake up and scribble for a while in bed with Topo curled up buzzing next to me. Intense desire for a fish filet from McDonalds, with yellow cheese.

Pizza

One time I had this job working at a pizza buffet. There were all these hot guys who worked there.

I was in junior high, and they were out getting wasted in fields on the weekends, singing songs with girls who stayed out all night. They seemed so free.

There was this one guy with curly blonde hair. He had a big smile and deep-set eyes. He liked to hug me before I went home, walking across the golf course alone at night, thinking about everything I would do when I was their age.

He would hold me a little too long, blonde, and I would breathe in his deodorant and his shampoo and the metallic stink of his sweat.

I love boys. I want to beat them and lick them all over like a mama cat.

These ones were protective of me like a kid sister, and sometimes when one of them would cross the line another one would step in and shake his head at his friend like, buddy, no. It was so fucking frustrating. I wanted them to take me out.

Anything, then, to be out of that house, my house of a closed up throat, with people I'd been looking at my whole life and they still didn't couldn't understand me.

I remember this girl who came in to see the blonde boy. She had these long and golden, deer-like legs. She walked like someone from California. Her ankles were heartbreakingly thin, erotically smooth and even.

I stared at her, and she gave me a meaningless smile because I was a kid and she was the kind of girl who smiled at everyone, everything, without meaning. Then she jumped up into the blonde guy.

It was like a photoshoot for Seventeen. The sun shot through the window between them, and I felt a stabbing pain in my chest because I would never be blonde and caramel like them.

I slunk into the kitchen, where Elliot was washing the dishes. He looked at me, and I mumbled something.

"Do you have an accent?" he says.

"No."

"I think you sound kind of Swedish. We think you sound kind of Swedish."

"Huh."

"Like, that Swedish lilt, you know."

"Do you think Josh's girlfriend is pretty?" I said. I shoved the tray of dishes into the machine for him.

"They all look like that, in high school. It's not special," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Just that. She's not special." He turned away from me, concentrating on something, and I left, feeling unsatisfied. When I went home I stood in front of the mirror and lifted up my jeans. I looked at my legs. I'd never noticed my ankles before.

They were snow white, and startlingly beautiful.

A couple years later I saw Elliot working at my video store, and I pretended I didn't know him. I don't remember why.
Then, one day we pretended to recognize each other. "Oh! -it's you!" It was really stupid.