HER NAME WAS DENISE
Dec. 23rd, 2003 01:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saltdawgAnd I met her at a Liege Street party. There were plenty of things that I could have done that night, but I was broke and I knew that going to the party meant that I would be able to stay at that house for the rest of the weekend and mooch all the free booze and food that I wanted. I was a fixture at that house because I grew up with a couple of the guys that lived there. I grew up with a couple of the guys, but their scene wasn’t really my type of scene. These guys were all about sports and their parties were packed with wrestling teams and basketball players and whatnot, and I really didn’t know how to even talk to those types of people. Well, it went beyond the mere fact that they were preoccupied with sports and talking about being a Physical education major. It went beyond because these were all the type of people that I never really understood in high school, and even in your second year of college, you really aren’t over high school quite yet. In High school, they were the ones with the letter jackets and the Iroc-Z's that their parents bought for them when they turned sixteen. The ones that actually thought it mattered which table someone sat at during lunch. The ones that, once they were in college, would have been in a Frat if there were frats at the college that they all went to.
But the guys I grew up with knew me, and we had played war together in the old shipyard across from Captain Jack Ogg’s place, we played hooky together and broke into abandoned tenements in our derelict neighborhood and started small fires in the cellars during the winter. They didn’t care that I that my parents sent me someplace other than public school, or that I eventually started to dress myself up in all black and motorcycle boots and wore mohechans. Because we grew up together, we knew each other before we knew anything about grooming ourselves for our own separate cultures that made us feel as if we “belonged”. And because we knew each other way back then, we really knew each other. Even after we learned how to “belong”.
My distaste for these parties didn’t really have anything to do with my own sense of not belonging to that particular herd. My distaste for these parties came from having to suffer through all the dull mockery of all the jocks and meatheads. The distaste that arose from being picked on, harassed and physically assaulted simply because, at those parties, I was the “other”. And I’m not saying that I behaved any better at the time at the my parties. The parties that the Sensei and I “hosted” were completely segregated when we lived at 42 Saint James. I mean everyone was welcome at that house, but there was a select that were actually allowed upstairs, allowed into the real party. At 42 St. James the jocks, the fraternity boys and the ‘poseurs’ were relegated to the frigid, linoleum and oak veneer first floor. The punks and the hipsters and the college radio station DJ’s would cram into SaltDog’s room and the Sensei’s room and play Wedding Present and Tom Waits record albums on our turn tables and talk about how hip we were (it was all in code, but when I think about it, that‘s all we were really saying…). I mean, it wasn’t like we had a red velvet rope guarding the stairs or anything, it was just that we didn’t even know those people. And most of those people came to that house only because they knew that it was always unlocked and open if someone needed a place to throw a party, not because they were our friends. For the most part, I’m sure they didn’t even know who was paying the rent in the first place. I’m sure they didn’t really care. I can’t even begin to count how many times I came home from my job (bagging groceries and shagging carriages) on a Saturday night to find the place filled with people I didn’t know. Not a housemate in sight. And all the people that had their good times on the first floor probably would have felt just as uncomfortable crammed into my tiny room as I did at those Liege Street parties. Not that we were overtly aggressive, but we were still at that stage where you start to develop that certain cynical hipster condescension that I have (I certainly hope I have) shed in the years since it peaked. And that that certain cynical hipster condescension could be just as cruel as the jock’s aggressive alpha male displays of keg stands and beer bongs and “chug, chug, Chug, CHUG!!!”, only we thought we weren’t really being that way because we weren’t being aggressive like them, we weren’t being violent like them, we thought we were oh so hip and oh so clever because we were simply cynical and passive aggressive.
My distaste for those jock parties wasn’t so overwhelming that it kept me away when the mood struck me to sink into that world for a night, weekend, or even a few days of skipped classes. It wasn’t so great that it prevented me from having a good time. I was, after all, a member of the inner circle of the Liege Street crew. And after all there was something so satisfying and dominant in it’s own right when a group of hockey players would gang up on me and then get ejected from the party because they weren’t fucking with the guy who was at the wrong party, but because they were simply fucking with the wrong guy. I had a certain distaste for those parties, but I still had a good time. I was with my hometown buddies, and I was well taken care of, and I suppose I enjoyed myself for the same reason that I had that distaste; I suppose in a way it was all because I was an oddity. An attraction. Not an attraction in the sense that my buddies were having me over so they could show off their friend with the funny haircut. But an oddity because I was who I was, where I was. And because of the oddity and misplaced presence I carried around with me clenched in between my hand and my beer, people noticed me. For good, or for ill. The ill being the jocks. The good was the chicks. I got to drift around that house telling tall tales and acting even more outrageously and forward than I could back on home turf, because there were no real social repercussions for any of my acts. I could indulge whatever sweet crazy drunken impulse I had at the moment. Behave with an impulsiveness and confidence birthed from the fact that my hometown buddies didn’t judge me. Confidence that came from the fact that I would go back down to my campus in a couple of days and never see those people again. Or, at least, not remember who they were if I did. And did I mention the girls? I got to talk to all those girls that I wouldn’t get caught dead talking to if I was back on my own campus. All those girls that I couldn’t talk to back on my own campus. All those girls with the French manicures and highlighted hair and pearl necklaces that their fathers gave them when they went away to college. I liked that part. At the Liege Street parties I was given permission to talk to that kind of girl that all us hipsters wanted a taste of. At least once.
And it was at one of these parties, feeling misplaced and reckless, that I first saw her
She was small and dark and had her hair cut short, almost like a boys. She was small and dark and had a striking resemblance to one of my teenage crushes that I never quite got over. She was small and dark and was obviously as misplaced and awkward at that party as I was.
I arrived at that party because I was broke and hungry and wanted to get away from something or another and get drunk. She arrived at that particular party because she lived in a dorm with a bunch of those pearl necklace wearing, would have/should have been sorority girls who followed the sports teams from party to party. She lived with them in a dorm in one of those “suite” type arrangements, where the college tries to simulate apartment living without all the added excitement of cable television bills and discussions about who left the heat turned up so high. Without arguments over who ate who's leftovers and who’s turn it was to forget to take out the garbage. She lived with all these girls and even though she was attractive, she didn’t have the manicure, or the blonde streaks, or the stories about being prom queen. She was, in a cliché, a shrinking violet. Shrunken by the contrast of the way she was with the way they were. Shrunken by what she saw as imperfections with her appearance. With her sense of self. Shrunken by all the things that I recognized from looking in the mirror, all the things that made me immediately forget the bright shiny novelty of former prom queens in lieu of her. And once I had a couple (more) under my belt, I set out to talk to her.
I’m sure I don’t have the faintest idea of what it was that I said to her at first. I am sure that it came off as awkward and wrong. Even though I had my practice trying to talk to those manicured girls, I know I never got it right. And besides, even to this day I haven’t gotten it right at all. I know that people who don’t know me, well, save for the drunk, the crazy, and the kindred, often times don’t know what it is exactly that I’m getting at when I approach them. Most people who don’t know me react with whatever defenses they have handy to fend me off. Because they’ve never been where I’m coming from. Because I never learned the language of polite little half-truths and subtle come-ons that come so naturally to the good looking and the charismatic. Never learned because the good looking and the charismatic grow up with adults speaking to them in that language. I don’t think I ever picked up that language because nobody ever bothered to speak to me like that. They save it for themselves. For their own kind. I’m just kind of blunt and brutal with my introductions and how-do-you-do investigations. I often find myself, to this day, trying to draw someone out by asking: so what is your deal? And of course, what I am trying to say is: What turns you on? What are you interested in? What’s your Passion? And despite what I say and what I mean, I guess most people simply hear me mumbling: What the hell is wrong with you?
I don’t have the faintest idea of what it was that I said to her at first, but I know that it scared the hell out of her. The “conversation” probably lasted all of five minutes, and she skulked away for the head or for another red plastic cup of beer or something. And after that? After that there was no eye contact, no acknowledgement . And I knew what that meant. I know what that meant and I laid off. I laid off because I knew how it felt to be followed around a party by someone who creeped you out. So I went on my way, doing whatever it was that I did in between Jell-O shots and pushing my way to the front of the line for the keg. In fact, if I remember correctly, I spent much of the rest of that particular party out on the second-floor porch smoking cigarettes and performing a personal monologue for the rotating waves of smokers. A monologue that probably was about Freemasonic conspiracy and how Jello Biafra really got a raw deal and If I were king for a day I’d send everybody in the world a bouquet of daisies. Mindless drunken babbling. The kind of babbling that gets lower and more personal as it goes on. The kind that eventually drives a guy, a guy like me, to want to weep because all of a sudden I realize, just like the feeling of ‘coming to’ in the middle of a blackout, I realize that they aren’t listening to me. Nobody has been listening to me. Nobody’s been listening and I really thought I was covering some ground, you know? I thought I was Connecting. I was talking the kind of drunk talk that makes a guy like me want to go down into the cellar to be by himself. Because it’s late November and baby, it’s cold out there, and: if I’m going to be all alone, I might as well be someplace where I can feel alone.
Besides, maybe I could find a place to curl up and go to sleep. Maybe there was some laundry I could lay down on, next to the dryer running for some warmth. It was late and I had been drinking long before the party started, and there was no sign that the couch, my couch, would be available for a while. I went down the cellar because that was usually where I ended up when those parties started to bore me, or I got sad. Or both. Which is to say, pretty much at the end of every party I went to at Liege St.
So I took a leak and a pitcher of beer and went down cellar. I went down cellar because my eyes were starting to leak and I wanted to be alone, and when I got to the bottom of the unlit steps, I tripped. I tripped over her. She had gone down into the cellar because her eyes were leaking and she wanted to be alone and I tripped over her. It wasn’t the kind of tripping that makes you fall down in a heap. Certainly not the kind of tripping that makes a seasoned drunk spill more than a little of his pitcher of beer and take a couple of stumble-steps on the (not too sure if it’s uneven cement or if it's hard packed dirt) floor. I tripped and spilled a little beer on her and I think I may have even hurt her a little. And I don’t know why she didn’t hear my clomping down the steps in my motorcycle boots, but she let out a tiny shriek with the foot to the ribs and the cold beer in her hair and on her shoulder.
And there I stood, when the stumbling was over. I stood there with the pitcher and concern; mumbling and slurring all kinds of apologies. But after the shriek and a quick I’m OK from her I could hear her sobbing just like I was prepared to do. I don’t remember the exact words, but I remember the gist. of what we said to each other next. Well, I do remember certain words. Verbatim. She told me all about how she was a shrinking violet and felt inferior to her roommates and how none of the good looking boys would pay her any attention. (hey! I was trying to pay you my. attention earlier…) And we went down that conversational path that all good sappy, weepy drunks know so well, sharing our self loathing and trying to re-assure each other that our particular self loathing is more pathetic and oh-so-much-more legitimate than the other’s. We walked down that path together and started to realize that we were actually sparking off of each other. And either shortly before or shortly after, she reached the place where the gloves come all the way off because you don’t care anymore and you can tell an almost perfect stranger about the great big thing that’s really crushing you. The thing that is so much bigger than all the other cobblestones that have been tossed back and forth between red, pulsing, beer-soaked hearts.
This is what I remember. This is what she said: “I mean I’m almost through my first semester in college and I’m still a virgin. I just want to get it over with. I just want to do it with some guy, any guy.” And I’d be lying if I said my heart didn’t skip a beat when she said that. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t immediately think that just because she was telling me, it meant that I’d be that guy. But I’d also be lying if I said that I didn’t try to guide her in that direction. Well, not intentionally, at least. I just kind of talked about how it shouldn’t be just any guy, that she should wait for the right person. For the right moment, because I had. Because I had so many opportunities when I was a teenager (hell, I was a teenager…) but I had waited for that perfect girl, and how after going to that black-tie affair at Rhodes-on-the-Patuxet…Uhh, about how it was perfect. . How it was perfect and even though the relationship had recently ended, and ended quite miserably, I would always cherish the memory of that girl. Of that night. Not because I finally “scored with a chick,” but because it was what it was. And even though the words I was saying were telling her to wait for the right guy, the right time and place; I suppose what I was secretly telling her was that I was that guy. And then after I kept trying to talkmyself her out of doing what we both knew we'd be doing a few times more, she grabbed me and kissed me and we were all over each other on the stairs for a few minutes before she got up and took my hand and said that it was time to go.
We had to leave because she didn’t want to lose her virginity in the dirty basement of Liege Street. Neither did I. She took my hand and we went out for the twenty minute walk to her dorm. And in between kicking up swirling clouds of leaves, breathing frost and smooching, I continued my half hearted protest. I told her that I couldn’t be her boyfriend. It's nothing against you, I can't be anybody's boyfriend right now. I told her that I had just gotten out of that first fully sexual relationship, and that it had ended badly and I wasn’t prepared for another quite so soon. I was damaged. Not right now. I told her all these things and she assured me that she didn’t expect anything out of me except that I had to get out of her dorm without any of her roommates seeing me in the morning. She told me that afterwards she was going to pretend that we had never met and just carry the secret of her busted hymen around in her back pocket and never take it out for anyone. Ever. And she was drunk and horny when she was saying all these things, and I was drunk and horny when I was believing them.
I had to sneak into the dorm because I didn’t have any ID. She popped open that laundry room door that all the kids knew about, that they all used to sneak beer and boys through. I had to wait in the elevator while she made sure her suite was clear of the other girls. And I had to rush to get into her room before the coast wasn’t quite so clear anymore.
After that, there wasn’t any rushing. There wasn't any fumbling and frantic tearing of clothes in order to finish it up and catch some shut eye. We went slowly. we took our time. we were gentle with each other. I made her promise to tell me to stop if she changed her mind. I made her promise to tell me to stop if it hurt. And as I savored and drank all those tiny never-been-touched-like-that-shivers as if they were flowing out of something divine, she promised me all these things in muffled little mmmuhumms…
The next morning she woke me up early. A couple of hours after she fell asleep on my chest. Or rather, after I fell asleep with her laying on my chest, tracing things in my hair. I thought she woke me up to kick me the hell out. But it wasn't that, it was because, well, because she just learned how to do something new and wanted to try it out again. I ended up getting rushed out blinking and blinded by the sun after all the other girls went out for brunch around noon. But not before we lay around in her narrow bed, smothered in pink crushed velvet and plush animals. Fuzzy glow and naked honesty. And I certainly didn't get snuck out before we faced what we had just done in the glare of sobriety that was so much brighter than the blinding sun that was hovering in wait for me. That glare of sobriety compounded with the honesty that comes after the orgasms stop curling your toes. Again, she promised me that she didn’t expect anything from me, she didn't want my number, and wouldn't give me hers. That she’d probably never go to that house ever again, and that: But, thank you, it was just what I wanted it to be.
Back out in the blinding sun and crunchy November air I started to take the long way back to Liege Street. I took the long way back because I knew I was going to get hit in the face with a brick of guilt at any moment for being this horrible lecherous no-strings-attached monster. Fucking selfish bastid! I knew what we had agreed on. The terms of engagement had been clear, both drunk and otherwise. She liked me enough to be just some guy but not enough to want me around in her own world. She wasn’t even going to go to Liege Street ever again. She had promised.
But I knew all along, even when I was drunk, that she didn’t know what she was talking about. Not yet, no matter how many times I tried to explain how it is, err, was for me at least... I knew that if she believed those things when she said them, she was believing lies she didn‘t yet know she was telling. I knew because, for the most part anyways, you always fall in love with the first person you sleep with. And if not that, the very least of my sins was that she’d neverforgive forget me. Or my name.
Taking the long way home to Liege Street, I found a purse outside of a closed pizza shop. It was purple leather and filled with cash and didn’t have any ID to speak of. It was an old woman’s purse. it was plain. The lipstick was that harsh santa-claus red that only strippers and old women wear. The perfume was called An Evening in Paris, and the wallet was bare, except for the hundred or so dollars that I could have really used right then.
See, I had just gotten a five day tag a couple of days before, and the Gremlin needed new tires to pass inspection, I needed food and I think it was probably my turn to pay the cable bill, or something, that month. The wallet was bare of any identification, and I knew that it was some old woman’s purple leather purse. Deep into the excavation, I discovered the final and definitive proof: There was a bulging change purse, held closed with a pink rubber band.
There was one thing, the only thing that I could find in there with a name, with an address, was a freshly printed church bulletin from that very morning. That old woman who dropped her purple leather purse had gone to mass at the Catholic church way out by North Providence on Mineral Spring Ave. She was saying the rosary while that poor innocent and I were having that last go-around. That old woman was lighting votive candles for the blessed mother while we were finalizing all the negotiations.
I found all this out, about the purse, the old woman, the next block down, behind a dumpster. I hid to hide my shame as if I had actually snatched it off the poor little old Polish Catholic woman's arm. As if I had stolen it from her. And even though I had immediately, instinctually, taken the money out of the wallet and stuck it in my grubby little pocket, I still held on to the purse. I shoved it up inside my black leather jacket and altered course for the shortest route back to Liege Street. And even though I kept blindly counting the number of bills in the roll and rubbing them between sticky fingers and sweaty palm, While I was doing the walking I wasn't really thinking about how most guys would brag about a night like the one I just had, instead, I was thinking about all the problems I could solve for myself that thick wad of found money.
But even while I was thinking about my luck and not thinking about what I knew full on well I wasn't thinking about...I knew I was only going to Liege Street to pick up the Gremlin. I had a rectory to drive to. There was a priest that I had to talk to. I had something to give him. I had to. I had to redeem myself. Somehow.
Because even though I knew her name the night before, and even that morning when I whispered and asked her if she really wanted to do it again with just some guy (giggles…), I even silently repeated her first and last name to myself as I slid those thirty pieces of silver out of my pocket, I’ve never been any good with names and I knew I wouldn't remember her name for very long. A week or two, month tops. Never mind fourteen years later, bucking 8’ seas just inside the Gulf stream, 25 miles offshore of Stuart, Florida.
But the guys I grew up with knew me, and we had played war together in the old shipyard across from Captain Jack Ogg’s place, we played hooky together and broke into abandoned tenements in our derelict neighborhood and started small fires in the cellars during the winter. They didn’t care that I that my parents sent me someplace other than public school, or that I eventually started to dress myself up in all black and motorcycle boots and wore mohechans. Because we grew up together, we knew each other before we knew anything about grooming ourselves for our own separate cultures that made us feel as if we “belonged”. And because we knew each other way back then, we really knew each other. Even after we learned how to “belong”.
My distaste for these parties didn’t really have anything to do with my own sense of not belonging to that particular herd. My distaste for these parties came from having to suffer through all the dull mockery of all the jocks and meatheads. The distaste that arose from being picked on, harassed and physically assaulted simply because, at those parties, I was the “other”. And I’m not saying that I behaved any better at the time at the my parties. The parties that the Sensei and I “hosted” were completely segregated when we lived at 42 Saint James. I mean everyone was welcome at that house, but there was a select that were actually allowed upstairs, allowed into the real party. At 42 St. James the jocks, the fraternity boys and the ‘poseurs’ were relegated to the frigid, linoleum and oak veneer first floor. The punks and the hipsters and the college radio station DJ’s would cram into SaltDog’s room and the Sensei’s room and play Wedding Present and Tom Waits record albums on our turn tables and talk about how hip we were (it was all in code, but when I think about it, that‘s all we were really saying…). I mean, it wasn’t like we had a red velvet rope guarding the stairs or anything, it was just that we didn’t even know those people. And most of those people came to that house only because they knew that it was always unlocked and open if someone needed a place to throw a party, not because they were our friends. For the most part, I’m sure they didn’t even know who was paying the rent in the first place. I’m sure they didn’t really care. I can’t even begin to count how many times I came home from my job (bagging groceries and shagging carriages) on a Saturday night to find the place filled with people I didn’t know. Not a housemate in sight. And all the people that had their good times on the first floor probably would have felt just as uncomfortable crammed into my tiny room as I did at those Liege Street parties. Not that we were overtly aggressive, but we were still at that stage where you start to develop that certain cynical hipster condescension that I have (I certainly hope I have) shed in the years since it peaked. And that that certain cynical hipster condescension could be just as cruel as the jock’s aggressive alpha male displays of keg stands and beer bongs and “chug, chug, Chug, CHUG!!!”, only we thought we weren’t really being that way because we weren’t being aggressive like them, we weren’t being violent like them, we thought we were oh so hip and oh so clever because we were simply cynical and passive aggressive.
My distaste for those jock parties wasn’t so overwhelming that it kept me away when the mood struck me to sink into that world for a night, weekend, or even a few days of skipped classes. It wasn’t so great that it prevented me from having a good time. I was, after all, a member of the inner circle of the Liege Street crew. And after all there was something so satisfying and dominant in it’s own right when a group of hockey players would gang up on me and then get ejected from the party because they weren’t fucking with the guy who was at the wrong party, but because they were simply fucking with the wrong guy. I had a certain distaste for those parties, but I still had a good time. I was with my hometown buddies, and I was well taken care of, and I suppose I enjoyed myself for the same reason that I had that distaste; I suppose in a way it was all because I was an oddity. An attraction. Not an attraction in the sense that my buddies were having me over so they could show off their friend with the funny haircut. But an oddity because I was who I was, where I was. And because of the oddity and misplaced presence I carried around with me clenched in between my hand and my beer, people noticed me. For good, or for ill. The ill being the jocks. The good was the chicks. I got to drift around that house telling tall tales and acting even more outrageously and forward than I could back on home turf, because there were no real social repercussions for any of my acts. I could indulge whatever sweet crazy drunken impulse I had at the moment. Behave with an impulsiveness and confidence birthed from the fact that my hometown buddies didn’t judge me. Confidence that came from the fact that I would go back down to my campus in a couple of days and never see those people again. Or, at least, not remember who they were if I did. And did I mention the girls? I got to talk to all those girls that I wouldn’t get caught dead talking to if I was back on my own campus. All those girls that I couldn’t talk to back on my own campus. All those girls with the French manicures and highlighted hair and pearl necklaces that their fathers gave them when they went away to college. I liked that part. At the Liege Street parties I was given permission to talk to that kind of girl that all us hipsters wanted a taste of. At least once.
And it was at one of these parties, feeling misplaced and reckless, that I first saw her
She was small and dark and had her hair cut short, almost like a boys. She was small and dark and had a striking resemblance to one of my teenage crushes that I never quite got over. She was small and dark and was obviously as misplaced and awkward at that party as I was.
I arrived at that party because I was broke and hungry and wanted to get away from something or another and get drunk. She arrived at that particular party because she lived in a dorm with a bunch of those pearl necklace wearing, would have/should have been sorority girls who followed the sports teams from party to party. She lived with them in a dorm in one of those “suite” type arrangements, where the college tries to simulate apartment living without all the added excitement of cable television bills and discussions about who left the heat turned up so high. Without arguments over who ate who's leftovers and who’s turn it was to forget to take out the garbage. She lived with all these girls and even though she was attractive, she didn’t have the manicure, or the blonde streaks, or the stories about being prom queen. She was, in a cliché, a shrinking violet. Shrunken by the contrast of the way she was with the way they were. Shrunken by what she saw as imperfections with her appearance. With her sense of self. Shrunken by all the things that I recognized from looking in the mirror, all the things that made me immediately forget the bright shiny novelty of former prom queens in lieu of her. And once I had a couple (more) under my belt, I set out to talk to her.
I’m sure I don’t have the faintest idea of what it was that I said to her at first. I am sure that it came off as awkward and wrong. Even though I had my practice trying to talk to those manicured girls, I know I never got it right. And besides, even to this day I haven’t gotten it right at all. I know that people who don’t know me, well, save for the drunk, the crazy, and the kindred, often times don’t know what it is exactly that I’m getting at when I approach them. Most people who don’t know me react with whatever defenses they have handy to fend me off. Because they’ve never been where I’m coming from. Because I never learned the language of polite little half-truths and subtle come-ons that come so naturally to the good looking and the charismatic. Never learned because the good looking and the charismatic grow up with adults speaking to them in that language. I don’t think I ever picked up that language because nobody ever bothered to speak to me like that. They save it for themselves. For their own kind. I’m just kind of blunt and brutal with my introductions and how-do-you-do investigations. I often find myself, to this day, trying to draw someone out by asking: so what is your deal? And of course, what I am trying to say is: What turns you on? What are you interested in? What’s your Passion? And despite what I say and what I mean, I guess most people simply hear me mumbling: What the hell is wrong with you?
I don’t have the faintest idea of what it was that I said to her at first, but I know that it scared the hell out of her. The “conversation” probably lasted all of five minutes, and she skulked away for the head or for another red plastic cup of beer or something. And after that? After that there was no eye contact, no acknowledgement . And I knew what that meant. I know what that meant and I laid off. I laid off because I knew how it felt to be followed around a party by someone who creeped you out. So I went on my way, doing whatever it was that I did in between Jell-O shots and pushing my way to the front of the line for the keg. In fact, if I remember correctly, I spent much of the rest of that particular party out on the second-floor porch smoking cigarettes and performing a personal monologue for the rotating waves of smokers. A monologue that probably was about Freemasonic conspiracy and how Jello Biafra really got a raw deal and If I were king for a day I’d send everybody in the world a bouquet of daisies. Mindless drunken babbling. The kind of babbling that gets lower and more personal as it goes on. The kind that eventually drives a guy, a guy like me, to want to weep because all of a sudden I realize, just like the feeling of ‘coming to’ in the middle of a blackout, I realize that they aren’t listening to me. Nobody has been listening to me. Nobody’s been listening and I really thought I was covering some ground, you know? I thought I was Connecting. I was talking the kind of drunk talk that makes a guy like me want to go down into the cellar to be by himself. Because it’s late November and baby, it’s cold out there, and: if I’m going to be all alone, I might as well be someplace where I can feel alone.
Besides, maybe I could find a place to curl up and go to sleep. Maybe there was some laundry I could lay down on, next to the dryer running for some warmth. It was late and I had been drinking long before the party started, and there was no sign that the couch, my couch, would be available for a while. I went down the cellar because that was usually where I ended up when those parties started to bore me, or I got sad. Or both. Which is to say, pretty much at the end of every party I went to at Liege St.
So I took a leak and a pitcher of beer and went down cellar. I went down cellar because my eyes were starting to leak and I wanted to be alone, and when I got to the bottom of the unlit steps, I tripped. I tripped over her. She had gone down into the cellar because her eyes were leaking and she wanted to be alone and I tripped over her. It wasn’t the kind of tripping that makes you fall down in a heap. Certainly not the kind of tripping that makes a seasoned drunk spill more than a little of his pitcher of beer and take a couple of stumble-steps on the (not too sure if it’s uneven cement or if it's hard packed dirt) floor. I tripped and spilled a little beer on her and I think I may have even hurt her a little. And I don’t know why she didn’t hear my clomping down the steps in my motorcycle boots, but she let out a tiny shriek with the foot to the ribs and the cold beer in her hair and on her shoulder.
And there I stood, when the stumbling was over. I stood there with the pitcher and concern; mumbling and slurring all kinds of apologies. But after the shriek and a quick I’m OK from her I could hear her sobbing just like I was prepared to do. I don’t remember the exact words, but I remember the gist. of what we said to each other next. Well, I do remember certain words. Verbatim. She told me all about how she was a shrinking violet and felt inferior to her roommates and how none of the good looking boys would pay her any attention. (hey! I was trying to pay you my. attention earlier…) And we went down that conversational path that all good sappy, weepy drunks know so well, sharing our self loathing and trying to re-assure each other that our particular self loathing is more pathetic and oh-so-much-more legitimate than the other’s. We walked down that path together and started to realize that we were actually sparking off of each other. And either shortly before or shortly after, she reached the place where the gloves come all the way off because you don’t care anymore and you can tell an almost perfect stranger about the great big thing that’s really crushing you. The thing that is so much bigger than all the other cobblestones that have been tossed back and forth between red, pulsing, beer-soaked hearts.
This is what I remember. This is what she said: “I mean I’m almost through my first semester in college and I’m still a virgin. I just want to get it over with. I just want to do it with some guy, any guy.” And I’d be lying if I said my heart didn’t skip a beat when she said that. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t immediately think that just because she was telling me, it meant that I’d be that guy. But I’d also be lying if I said that I didn’t try to guide her in that direction. Well, not intentionally, at least. I just kind of talked about how it shouldn’t be just any guy, that she should wait for the right person. For the right moment, because I had. Because I had so many opportunities when I was a teenager (hell, I was a teenager…) but I had waited for that perfect girl, and how after going to that black-tie affair at Rhodes-on-the-Patuxet…Uhh, about how it was perfect. . How it was perfect and even though the relationship had recently ended, and ended quite miserably, I would always cherish the memory of that girl. Of that night. Not because I finally “scored with a chick,” but because it was what it was. And even though the words I was saying were telling her to wait for the right guy, the right time and place; I suppose what I was secretly telling her was that I was that guy. And then after I kept trying to talk
We had to leave because she didn’t want to lose her virginity in the dirty basement of Liege Street. Neither did I. She took my hand and we went out for the twenty minute walk to her dorm. And in between kicking up swirling clouds of leaves, breathing frost and smooching, I continued my half hearted protest. I told her that I couldn’t be her boyfriend. It's nothing against you, I can't be anybody's boyfriend right now. I told her that I had just gotten out of that first fully sexual relationship, and that it had ended badly and I wasn’t prepared for another quite so soon. I was damaged. Not right now. I told her all these things and she assured me that she didn’t expect anything out of me except that I had to get out of her dorm without any of her roommates seeing me in the morning. She told me that afterwards she was going to pretend that we had never met and just carry the secret of her busted hymen around in her back pocket and never take it out for anyone. Ever. And she was drunk and horny when she was saying all these things, and I was drunk and horny when I was believing them.
I had to sneak into the dorm because I didn’t have any ID. She popped open that laundry room door that all the kids knew about, that they all used to sneak beer and boys through. I had to wait in the elevator while she made sure her suite was clear of the other girls. And I had to rush to get into her room before the coast wasn’t quite so clear anymore.
After that, there wasn’t any rushing. There wasn't any fumbling and frantic tearing of clothes in order to finish it up and catch some shut eye. We went slowly. we took our time. we were gentle with each other. I made her promise to tell me to stop if she changed her mind. I made her promise to tell me to stop if it hurt. And as I savored and drank all those tiny never-been-touched-like-that-shivers as if they were flowing out of something divine, she promised me all these things in muffled little mmmuhumms…
The next morning she woke me up early. A couple of hours after she fell asleep on my chest. Or rather, after I fell asleep with her laying on my chest, tracing things in my hair. I thought she woke me up to kick me the hell out. But it wasn't that, it was because, well, because she just learned how to do something new and wanted to try it out again. I ended up getting rushed out blinking and blinded by the sun after all the other girls went out for brunch around noon. But not before we lay around in her narrow bed, smothered in pink crushed velvet and plush animals. Fuzzy glow and naked honesty. And I certainly didn't get snuck out before we faced what we had just done in the glare of sobriety that was so much brighter than the blinding sun that was hovering in wait for me. That glare of sobriety compounded with the honesty that comes after the orgasms stop curling your toes. Again, she promised me that she didn’t expect anything from me, she didn't want my number, and wouldn't give me hers. That she’d probably never go to that house ever again, and that: But, thank you, it was just what I wanted it to be.
Back out in the blinding sun and crunchy November air I started to take the long way back to Liege Street. I took the long way back because I knew I was going to get hit in the face with a brick of guilt at any moment for being this horrible lecherous no-strings-attached monster. Fucking selfish bastid! I knew what we had agreed on. The terms of engagement had been clear, both drunk and otherwise. She liked me enough to be just some guy but not enough to want me around in her own world. She wasn’t even going to go to Liege Street ever again. She had promised.
But I knew all along, even when I was drunk, that she didn’t know what she was talking about. Not yet, no matter how many times I tried to explain how it is, err, was for me at least... I knew that if she believed those things when she said them, she was believing lies she didn‘t yet know she was telling. I knew because, for the most part anyways, you always fall in love with the first person you sleep with. And if not that, the very least of my sins was that she’d never
Taking the long way home to Liege Street, I found a purse outside of a closed pizza shop. It was purple leather and filled with cash and didn’t have any ID to speak of. It was an old woman’s purse. it was plain. The lipstick was that harsh santa-claus red that only strippers and old women wear. The perfume was called An Evening in Paris, and the wallet was bare, except for the hundred or so dollars that I could have really used right then.
See, I had just gotten a five day tag a couple of days before, and the Gremlin needed new tires to pass inspection, I needed food and I think it was probably my turn to pay the cable bill, or something, that month. The wallet was bare of any identification, and I knew that it was some old woman’s purple leather purse. Deep into the excavation, I discovered the final and definitive proof: There was a bulging change purse, held closed with a pink rubber band.
There was one thing, the only thing that I could find in there with a name, with an address, was a freshly printed church bulletin from that very morning. That old woman who dropped her purple leather purse had gone to mass at the Catholic church way out by North Providence on Mineral Spring Ave. She was saying the rosary while that poor innocent and I were having that last go-around. That old woman was lighting votive candles for the blessed mother while we were finalizing all the negotiations.
I found all this out, about the purse, the old woman, the next block down, behind a dumpster. I hid to hide my shame as if I had actually snatched it off the poor little old Polish Catholic woman's arm. As if I had stolen it from her. And even though I had immediately, instinctually, taken the money out of the wallet and stuck it in my grubby little pocket, I still held on to the purse. I shoved it up inside my black leather jacket and altered course for the shortest route back to Liege Street. And even though I kept blindly counting the number of bills in the roll and rubbing them between sticky fingers and sweaty palm, While I was doing the walking I wasn't really thinking about how most guys would brag about a night like the one I just had, instead, I was thinking about all the problems I could solve for myself that thick wad of found money.
But even while I was thinking about my luck and not thinking about what I knew full on well I wasn't thinking about...I knew I was only going to Liege Street to pick up the Gremlin. I had a rectory to drive to. There was a priest that I had to talk to. I had something to give him. I had to. I had to redeem myself. Somehow.
Because even though I knew her name the night before, and even that morning when I whispered and asked her if she really wanted to do it again with just some guy (giggles…), I even silently repeated her first and last name to myself as I slid those thirty pieces of silver out of my pocket, I’ve never been any good with names and I knew I wouldn't remember her name for very long. A week or two, month tops. Never mind fourteen years later, bucking 8’ seas just inside the Gulf stream, 25 miles offshore of Stuart, Florida.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-12-22 10:48 pm (UTC)That was a good fucking story!
no subject
Date: 2003-12-22 10:48 pm (UTC)(woops, pun not intended)
no subject
Date: 2003-12-22 11:22 pm (UTC)and poignant.
and other things too, i'm sure.
other things
Date: 2003-12-23 03:04 pm (UTC)Fuckin' aye! where were you when the nuns were teaching me about MORALITY?
Re: other things
Date: 2003-12-23 05:48 pm (UTC)Re: other things
Date: 2003-12-24 01:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-23 05:26 am (UTC)i don't want to pass any judgement, because i have no right to. but at the same time i want to remind you that you have my respect. and the first shout.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-23 03:09 pm (UTC)first ROUND is on me.
(I don't get your anti-clockwise speech patterns some times. Please let me know if'n I'm being contrarian when you're in my corner. Fuck. I know you are in my corner, buit don't forget how easily I can forget. Concussions. Booze. Ecteratea. &
So forth.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-23 03:36 pm (UTC)you pay for the first drinks :)
done and done
Yeah, I dig it.
Date: 2003-12-23 07:06 am (UTC)I know about the out of placeness thing at the parties, though mine is a bit different because I usually have every guy in the place come to hit on me at least once or twice.
But like I was saying.... I'm often at places where I'm the youngest person there, and usually it is by several years. I'm also smarter than everyone there, and I often mumble to myself how "the world is my television" and get drunk alone (even though I'm in a crowd) with a certain detached amusement.
And I'm big on the drunken monologues. I've found that I can put more liquor and beer into this hundred twenty pound body than most men twice my weight, and still be on my feet and (at least semi-)coherent. I'm naturally pretty quiet, but when I get a
fewdozen drinks into me I think I'm talk radio or something and babble like hell. It doesn't help that I usually have a bunch of sycophants around. And they don't care what I say because they're just checkin' me out. So yeah, I dig.Lemmee keep reading....
Wow, your stories do take some twists and turns. ~KMK
no subject
Date: 2003-12-23 11:05 am (UTC)Gotta go put on my harsh Santa Claus red lipstick now. :)
xoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo
You know:
Date: 2003-12-23 02:40 pm (UTC)In fact, (depending on the person), santa-red can be really sexy.
Dig?
(bring on the Catholic School Skirts!!!!)
Re: You know:
Date: 2003-12-23 11:43 pm (UTC)I really liked your piece, sweetie. Thanks for the good read. :)
xoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxxooxox
no subject
Date: 2003-12-23 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-23 12:48 pm (UTC)I'm keeping this one to all to myself. ~KMK
Fuckin' AYE!
Date: 2003-12-23 02:56 pm (UTC)Actually!~
Date: 2003-12-23 02:59 pm (UTC)Oh, WAIT! You're http://www.livejournal.com/users/jourdannex/...
Yeah, I'm drunk right now, but I'll believe you...
(Reply to this) (Parent)
must be all that red white and blue ice cream you ate in 1976
Date: 2003-12-23 02:12 pm (UTC)You LUSH!
Date: 2003-12-23 03:01 pm (UTC)"just like a bitch"
Date: 2003-12-24 03:00 pm (UTC)I PREFER CHAS BUKOWSKI "THROBBIN PURPLE"
Date: 2003-12-24 03:09 pm (UTC)Even socrates needs a little pussy between draughts of hemlock from literary saboteurs.Last night that kid you hadda chide fer not knowing lincoln from george w bush back in 2001 assualted me in the bowels of the beatnik league. He claims I dont work there cause unlike him, I dont get paid. Oh well in 300 years we will both have buildings covered with ivy dedicated to our artistry und exumplary demeanor.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-23 04:57 pm (UTC)sweet thought...
Date: 2003-12-23 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-23 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-24 11:25 am (UTC)MORE RED WHITE AND BLUE ICE CREAM
Date: 2003-12-25 05:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-25 06:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-25 01:14 pm (UTC)