I'm the kind of person people depend on. They need me for advice. They need me for moral support. They need me for validation or a kind word or a hug or a quarter for the bus stop or a cigarette. Perfect strangers stop me in line at the store or waiting at the bus stop to tell me their deepest secrets. I look trustworthy, or exude some aura of trustworthiness.
I'm the kind of person people take for granted. If I disappear for a few days, instead of calling me to find out where I am, people wait until I get back to ask what I've been up to. Nobody seems to appreciate me until I'm not around, or wonder where I am until I've been gone for a while.
I want to be the kind of person who enters a room and commands it. I want to be the kind of person people throw surprise parties for. I want to be the kind of person people appreciate when I'm around. I want to be a legend. I want to be present, real, and accounted for. I want to the advice I get to be as good as the advice I give. I want to be. Instead of missing me, I want you to find me.
It had been a rough spring. I'd been working hard trying to salvage the mess that had been made, working from the inside, with my enemy, and also against him, in secret. My friends certainly didn't understand what I was trying to do, nor the hell I'd been through: nerves strong enough to make me vomit on a regular basis, hair falling out, grey cast to my complexion. I've never been good at keeping secrets, especially when it comes to how I feel about people, and secrets being kept on this level -- no matter how passionately I felt about the reasons why -- were doing me in. And I was doing it all for them. Instead of being appreciative, they called me traitor.
On a night when they were being less judgemental, we were all at a show. Versus was on stage, and they talked a little bit about something and then segued into "River", their tribute to Mr. Phoenix, who had died not that long ago. The song and my situation filled me to bursting, I couldn't take anymore. Tears began falling, and soon it was impossible to conceal them.
"Aw, baby what's wrong?" Brown said sarcastically.
"She misses us, you asshole. We've treated her like shit," said Lisa, showing a heretofore undisplayed ability to read other people.
It was too much. I ran. Out of the ballroom, past the tables, past the bar, past the front door, where Sean was sitting idle: nobody else was coming in the door this late at night. I was too distraught to notice him following me as I ran up the stairs and into the ladies' room. As I had my breakdown in front of the mirror, he burst through the door and grabbed me in a bear hug.
"Who do I need to beat up this time?" he said.
I lost it. Tears turned into giant belly laughs, and soon we were both on the beer-soaked landing of the women's room, holding each other and laughing.
"You followed me in there to ask me that?" I asked. "And wait a minute. What do you mean by this time?"
He gave me one of his sincere looks and said, "One of these days, you'll realize exactly how amazing and cool you are. And how cool I'm not. You'll look back on all of this and you'll understand."
I'm looking back now, Sean. And on one level you were right. I have grown into myself, and I realize now that I'm a much better and cooler person than I ever thought I was. But to this day, I still count you as the coolest person I've ever met.
It's hot, and the party is crowded. There are at least 25 people in the living room. The huge 70s style paper globe lantern in the corner casts a reddish glow over everything, accenting the orange in my hair and the orange of my courdouroy dress. I am sitting on the sofa, and people around me are talking, but I'm in my own space. I'm high. I mean, really high. I am thinking that it's possible I've never been this high before, and judging by the size of the joint that Randy's been passing around for the last half hour, I'm probably right.
Earlier at the after-party I'd had three or four glasses of red wine Tim had smuggled to me past security. This is the after-after-party, now. We're prone to having them. Nobody ever wants to go home after a big event, especially not one as big as this one. I'm still mulling over what Jeff said earlier, when he introduced me to Ken:
"She's not my friend. She's just a girl I work with."
I'm thinking: I listened to him bitch about his entire life for the past six months, empathized with him when he told me his tales of dating woe, smiled and nodded at him despite my annoyances and I'm just a girl he works with? That stung.
There's music playing somewhere. I can't really make it out, but it's got to be one of three songs: Stereolab's "Jenny Ondioline", or My Bloody Valentine's "Soon", or Beat Happening's "Teenage Caveman". Or possibly it's something by Sonic Youth, or more likely, Pavement, considering the house's tenants. Those are the only things I ever remember hearing in this house, where I've spent so much of my time in the last year.
Suddenly, something draws my attention up and to the left. It's Glenn. The guitarist in one of the bands from the festival. He's trying to get past me and over to the empty space of couch on the other side, but there's literally no room left in the living room for him to get up and walk around me.
"Do you mind? Can I just...?" he asks, miming climbing over me.
"Sure, no problem," I smile.
He climbs into my lap. He's drunk. Everyone here is drunk. He leans over and kisses me on the cheek, hesitating on my lap before sliding into the spot next to me.
"Thanks doll," he says. A trace of his Kentucky accent leaks through.
While all this is going on, Peter, the lead singer in his band, approaches from the kitchen, playing leapfrog over the heads of my colleagues still passing the joint around on the living room floor.
"What's this then?" he says, as Glenn slides into the empty seat. Apparently not one to waste time on formalities, he takes Glenn's place on my lap.
"Hi." he says. "I'm Peter."
"I know," I say. "I helped book your band."
"Yeah, I recognized you. With the hair," he says, and runs his hands through my sherbet-orange locks. "It's awsome. How'd you get it that way?"
"Industrial hair-dye accident," I quip.
"I imagine that happens a lot. So anyway, what's your name, doll? Are you a promoter?"
"No, I'm just a DJ. I work at the station."
"Just a DJ?" Glenn asks from my right.
"Just a DJ."
"Do you play our records on your show?"
"I do, in fact."
"Then you're not -just- a DJ. You're the coolest DJ," says Peter, and leans in and gives me a kiss.
Everything after that is kind of hazy.
We had this joke, he and I. A joke from before we'd ever met each other, when we were just words on a screen. A joke about how I'd startled him and broken his tea infuser.
Things hadn't been going well for a while. He was still pretty broken up about things with his ex, and he still had a crush on a friend of his he was trying to work through. I went up to visit, for what turned out to be the last time. And I brought him a tea infuser, to end the joke.
"This was really sweet of you. But I'm afraid this is our last weekend together."
"I'm OK with that," I said, mostly because it hadn't sunk in.
After all, we still had time together. We had a whole weekend. It was easy to deny what he'd said when we were in bed later, spent and shaking.
"You know, it's cool that you're OK with it. You're really cool."
"Yeah, I know. I'm the coolest," I responded. There was no time nor place for rebuttal. There was no time to nurse my broken heart. We still had a weekend.
Later, after we separated for a while, I went to a party, where I was meeting him. I didn't know anyone else but the people I'd come with. Alexis greeted me at the door:
"You should hang on to him. He's a good boy."
I didn't bother to tell her that there was nothing left to hang on to.
Later -- much later -- he showed up with his crush. I'd had a lot to drink by this point, waiting for him to arrive, trying to mingle with strangers. Trying to explain to Matthew that we'd broken up just hours before.
"You aren't allowed to be jealous of Meg, because she and I aren't boinking," he said. Was I allowed to be jealous because she had his heart and I never would?
"I'm sorry I had to end things just when we were falling in love."
We walked back to his place from downtown. It was long, and we were drunk. I had to pee. We passed the Black Angel; touched her for luck. I had no idea if we were going in the right direction. I had to trust him to lead me home.
An hour or so after we fell asleep, I woke, brain spinning from my drink. I ran downstairs to the working bathroom, and threw up for what seemed like hours. The simplest explanation was that I was drunksick and vomiting up the toxins inside me. But it seemed as though I was also throwing up my hurt, my anger, my frustration over all the past four months, flushing it away so that it couldn't touch me until later.
Our last time together was slow, langorous. It seemed to last six hours or more. When I finally stood up, my head was pounding and my stomach burned like fire. I couldn't shake the clouds in my head. I could barely move without feeling nauseated. But I'd managed to love him the best way I could for the very last time, despite my hangover.
I didn't cry until much much later. I was too numb for that for a very long time.
Tonight, nearly ten years later, he said:
"I finally got over breaking your heart."
"Yeah, you did."
"Eventually. I was apologetic for a couple years."
"Apologetic to me?"
"Yes. I remember apologizing every six months or so."
"Yes, I remember."
"It's OK. I got over breaking your heart."
"So did I, fortunately."
"I'm glad too...You're more fun now that you're not all worked up over me."
"You're totally pressing your luck, there, bucko."
"Goodnight."
And somehow I never brought up the tea infuser. And it's been almost ten years. And it can still make me cry when I think about it.
Note: Last year for National Novel Writing Month, I wrote a novel about Bunny Day, a stripper with a Cassandra complex, and her junkie cop boyfriend, trying to catch a particularly gruesome serial killer. Tonight I reread it and didn't hate it nearly as much as I thought I would. In fact, it charmed me quite a bit for something so large written in under 30 days. Charmed me enough to continue the franchise. So today's snippet is an excerpt from a new Bunny/Harlan story. Prepare your bladder for imminent release, and cheesy noir goodness.
Monique's sitting in her high-backed office chair, head tilted at a precarious angle to secure the phone between her chin and shoulder. She's got a startled expression on her face as she makes reassuring "mm-hmms" and "i sees" at the mouthpiece, scribbling notes furiously on a yellow legal pad with her right hand. Bunny leans over to make sure she's got Mo's attention and makes a questioning face at Monique like "what's this all about"? Monique stares back at Bunny, eyes wide, stops scribbling for a moment, and makes a corkscrew gesture at her temple. Clearly, the caller on the other end is completely loco.
Bunny paces across the tiles, her platform sandals clunking with every step. Harlan keeps telling her that she'd be better off with sensible shoes, but over her years at the Arrow, she'd grown used to wearing the heels and she feels short, stubby and insecure without them. They're the one remnant of her stripper lifestyle she can't seem to shake. She pours herself another cup of coffee and waits for inspiration to strike. When she'd agreed to take this job helping Harlan, she hadn't thought that most of her days would be spent poring over the details (both mundane and sordid) of cases involving estranged wives, cuckolded husbands, missing jewlery and insurance fraud. She's expecting something more like the case of the Angel Killer, but so far the work has been garden-variety private investigations--interesting and challenging, but nothing to write home about.
Bunny flips through some surveillance photographs on her desk, looking for some evidence she might have missed on the first go round, and catches herself rubbing her temples a little. Yeah, there's a headache there. A little one building--probably nothing she can't handle, but ever since the events surrounding the Angel Killer and her aneurysm, she gets a little nervous when she feels one coming on. So far, nothing's struck her so violently and nothing strange has happened, but she knows it's only a matter of time.
Bunny's cell phone rings, cutely belting out "Stormy Weather", and she answers it before it can get to the chorus.
"Bunnylove Detective Agency. Bunny speaking. How can I he--"
"Hey, it's me," Harlan's voice comes through as if he were in the next room.
"Hey, lover. What's the news?"
"Just calling to see if you'd like to join me for dinner at Chez Panisse. Say around...8ish?"
"Ooh, fancy. What's the occasion, sugarbutt?"
"It's just been a while since we had a romantic evening alone, and I thought we could use one. You gonna argue with that?"
"Nope. This is me, shutting up. How'd you manage to get reservations?"
"I pulled some strings. You with me or not?"
"With, definitely. I'll just take a cab over when Mo and I are done he--"
"Bunny?" Monique's voice comes rocketing through Bunny's reverie like a shot.
"I'll meet you there, Harlan. Sounds like something strange is afoot. Love you."
"Love you back, baby. See you at 8."
Bunny hangs up the phone and dashes back into the lobby where Monique sits at her desk, all the color drained from her face, slackjawed and nearly drooling with terror.
"What's up, Mo?" Bunny asks, but she thinks she already knows.
Monique doesn't answer, just presses play on the recorder attached to the main office phone. A low, threatening voice begins speaking, filtered by tape hiss and telephone distortion.
"It's started again," the voice says. "Eugene was weak. His flesh was not pure enough to hold the beauty within the beast. The time has come to bathe in the blood of the lamb. And you aren't ready, Bunny Day."
Suddenly, her headache can't come fast enough.
How can we go back to the way things were when we can't even agree on how they were in the first place? There was the way you saw things, and there was the way I saw things and they never intersected, no matter how much we'd like to believe that we were once joined.
I can't even recall what it felt like to have your lips on mine, or to have your hand entwined in my hair. I can only recall the vagaries of misunderstanding--the hours spent deciphering something you said down to its component parts. I can only remember what it felt like to read those four words, over and over: "I am not ready."
I could have asked you if you honestly believed that you would never be. Instead I chose to pore over what you said obsessively, as if I could find nuances in your written word that would answer that question for me.
On the morning of the apocalypse I:
Got up
Took a shower
Brushed my teeth
Ate an apple
and went back to bed.
Things had been slow at work and there was nothing for me to do around the house so I figured bed would be the best possible place to be when the apocalypse came. I flipped on the TV and watched the whole world dissolve into panic as the firestorm got closer.
None of this seemed to bother me nearly as much as it should have. The air still seemed ripe with possibilities and there was so much hope floating around, despite the circumstances. The sun was so pregnant with it that it seemed to laugh in defiance at the giant balls of fire that were even then beginning to rain down upon the earth.
I got up from the bed and sat in the rocking chair, wrapped in a blanket, with the fan blowing my hair in whirling patterns as it oscillated back and forth in its tiny arc. I closed my eyes and imagined you there, with your hands on me in that way you always put your hands on me, the warmth of you surrounding me in the way it always did. I imagined your words as I bit your earlobe, biting down too hard. There was surprisingly little blood, but as the first of the liquid balls of fire slammed into my building, I could still taste its coppery song.
I promised myself I'd take over the world before the year 2000. I promised myself I'd live free or die trying. I promised myself I'd overcome my limitations as a human being, promised myself I'd get the better of my reticent nature. Promised myself to do things I always wanted so I'd never have to regret doing things I hadn't done.
Promised I'd write. Promised I'd call. Promised I'd never give up trying, no matter how hard it got. Promised I'd love you forever. Promised that we'd be best friends, forever. Promised you that the most important thing is our friendship, and that the other stuff didn't matter. Promised myself that too.
I promised I'd learn about who I am and what I want. Promised I'd finish the dishes before they got gross. Promised I'd pull my weight, promised my fare share. Promised I'd do better this time, really. Promised not to fight. Promised not to falter. Promised I'd remember to take care of it in the morning. Promised not to lie.
I promised to write all this down. Promised to take better notes. Promised to pay more attention. Promised to look at the details as well as the big picture. Promised I'd have that done on time. Promised to be there, and not to flake. Promised to make a sincere effort.
I promised to be sincere. I promised to be honest and open and loving. I promised not to shut you out. I promised not to be coy or send mixed messages. Promised to be warm. Promised not to take my bad mood out on you. Promised that I owned my own feelings. Promised that I was not responsible for the feelings of others, but I should accept and consider them while making my promises.
I promised myself to ask myself if promises were meant to be broken.