A boyfriend
I would’ve followed anywhere when I was younger brought me to visit friends of
his. Some shithole old boarding house on
some upside road in a tired gray town called YadaYadaOburg. It was the kind of place up from a Main Street
where cops hung out and played basketball at the old brick school. Down from that was a dive bar; the kind of
lost place where an old living room couch sat on the front stoop for the
patrons to practice intoxicated pontification when they found themselves
between small time drug exchanges and beer.
Measly earnings, warm beer & the promise of prescription pills for
cash. On the ground there was a moat of
glass shards, thrown in angry words or dropped in drunken stupors. It was slowly being ground down to sparkly
glass dust, mostly by work boots in a never ending pilgrimage to the carved up
slab of wood where one could slap their hands down and throw their life away at
the same time. Broken glass, Broken
People, Broken Place.
So we stopped at the Broken Glass
Bar first then we walked up the side street.
It was night and it was summer. I
tried many times since then to find the house and drive by it, as if in some
remarkable way I could see it and give weight to my memory. But days and years have piled up on that
vision, that structure, and it slowly has become flat and faded.
The house was old, but it must’ve
surely been a beauty in its time. But
now the windowsills and walls had taken on a cartoon-like feel, having been
painted, painted, painted. The sharp
edges blurred and the original craftsman woodwork, suffocated by layers of
cheap latex, had been rendered non-descript.
There were bedsheets that had been cut to size and roughly threaded
through with dowels to cover the windows.
The occasional breeze made them puff slightly like old sick lungs. Much to my boyfriend’s chagrin, I wouldn’t go
in.
There was a screen door to a side
porch and I told Chris I would wait in there.
I sat on an outdoor chewed up wicker settee. A big lanky guy came through the door that
led into the dark cave of what I would imagine was the living room. I only got a quick glimpse of a round coffee
table strewn with God knows what and burning stubby candle. I briefly imagined the candle knocked over by
a careless party goer and then the house a burning torch on the side of a hill.
The guy was a friend of my boyfriends.
(A bunch of people crashed and lived in that dump, but there were two
Brians – hence the monikers Brian #1 & Brian #2.) Brian #2 sat by me.
He was high and I knew I shouldn’t
have been there. I wasn’t raised
slovenly. The porch light was a yellow
bulb that flies kept boxing with. I
could hear their faint taps and buzzes, yet they kept on going. Mindless.
The yellow bulb would intermittently flicker like some makeshift light
show. Brian #2’s thinness and his long
hair made him look oddly like Jesus in the soft light – save the cutoff jeans
and the track marks on his arm that he didn’t even try to hide. But when the light would go flicker out the
Jesus Doppelgangers eyes looked like coal and his face grew harsh shadows. It turned him into a whispering Satan-like creature. A spiritual illusion sitting next to me.
He started by telling me I was
beautiful. I wanted to go home to my
people. He was mumbling soft words about
summer and the sky. I looked down at the
wood floor of the long narrow long porch.
The edges and corners were dark and strewn with pebble like dashes of
unmistakable rodent shit. I got stuck on
that. Couldn’t you get sick from
excrement? Isn’t that how they described
the great plague? Dirty old
buildings…mice and rats in the walls…carrying with them invitations of the Great
Death? The only salvation for that time?
Delivered in fleas and shit? Often while studying this I thought the rodents
knew their intent, wanted the city back and infiltrated accordingly… I folded
my hands. Yes, I thought, it could make
you sick – Though it hadn’t made Brian #2 sick, he was already sick, he was already
dead.
He told me again I was beautiful,
that my hair looked like a wood carving.
He told me heroin was beautiful and asked if I would like to kiss the
sky with him? The time had come for me
to be explicitly rude. I got up. I said
nothing. I walked toward the broken screen door. I had an overwhelming urge to scrub my hands
and taste toothpaste on my smooth good teeth.
When I turned my back I was
scared. I thought he would lunge,
brandishing a syringe like they did in the movies, and jamb it in my neck and I
would be lost and swirling in this rat shit mansion for the next 5 years of my
life. In retrospect I realized he was
far too high to move. He was impaired –
kind of like the stretches of insomnia I suffer; Asleep but Awake. Awake but
Asleep.
I heard the door slap with my exit
and I walked into the dark. I never went
back – I never saw Brian #2 again. And I
recall that all I could think that night was; what a waste, what a fucking
waste on a breezy night where one should be by the lake on the hill that sat
like a sentinel overlooking the town and tasting the night air and being alive.
EPILOGE
So when you sit there a prisoner and
tell me I know not of such things – you are wrong. I have seen and turned away from much in my
life, turned away - Thank God. And it is
YOU I thought of tonight as I wrote this; A blond Jewish princess in
exile. A maiden that can’t even eat oats
in peace. It is YOU I prayed for tonight
to learn to walk down the road in the dark steadily away from the demons and
not pay them energy, for they will only use that energy to grab you and to hold
you as long as they can…The rest of your life if you let them.
