|
Home
|
|
Written by Gary Ferrar
|
I’m angry. Kids roam around campus at night with Ginsbergian glasses, looking like they want answers. Trying to start up the beat again, are they? Well it’s not a look, you know. I watch them slowly make their way towards my Civic, over the horizon of my dashboard, these people who think that as long as you can see it – even feel it, hear it, touch it, smell it – that it’s there, that people will respect it. How can I tell them that it’s not about perception? How can I explain a true Kerouacian cowlick (as opposed to these carefully shaped, street-lit shams) isn’t there with hair gel? It comes from sleepless nights, crouched in a corner with dilated pupils, fearing what’s inside of yourself. A seagull cries above, from the top of a telephone pole.
“Dude, that seagull’s fuckin’ loud,” one of them says. I’d like to lean out my window and tell them that it was also a trumpet solo and a person crying and an alarm clock, that their artsy glasses imply that they should already know those things the professors don’t teach, but I’m breaking up with this girl in my car and I have to pretend to be thinking about that, when I really just want to be on a balcony in the Avenir Hǒtel in Paris. The red light district. Just watching the prostitutes below me, and thinking “Shit, I’m in France.”
“So what do we do now?” raising a bottle of Coke to her lips, she says. The Coke hangs there, suspended like the apple in Magritte’s Son of Man. I wait; making sure it was a defense mechanism and not actual thirst that caused the bottle to rise. It’s a glass bottle, which I didn’t even think they made anymore. I don’t know where Heather gets all that legit stuff from, but she has somehow attached herself to its insides. Her mother died in October last year and poof, all of her objects suddenly had history.
Our friendship had ended that night after the funeral, among her objects and the gravestones, in sorrow and in lust. But even then, as we found ourselves palpating each other in the shadowed cemetery in some mutual quest for solace, I was just falling in love with the objects she had surrounded herself with. Our consummation was just the start of an endless trail of Mongolian scarves and antique tea cups. Yet I distinctly remember thinking, “Here was a real girl, with real things, and real sadness.” And I was dizzy with the authenticity of it all. Lying there, in the grass, panting, she had whispered that she liked the danger of possibly being caught by a ghost. I didn’t laugh. I remember, I didn’t even smile. I was naked and there was dew all over everything. She was straddled on top of me and all I could do was watch as she bit her lip and transformed our friendship into Eros before my eyes.
The Coke bottle’s still up there. She can hold it as long as she’d like, pretending not to face the moment, but the condensation -clinging to the label- is slowly stripped off by gravity and occasionally drips into her lap making dark circles on her denim skirt. I watch one bead as it travels down the C of the label, tracing the contour of the bottle and then drops; thinking to myself: you couldn’t hold that one up, could you?
She may have heard my thought because the bottle was suddenly put back in the cup holder. She unbuckled her seatbelt, got out of the car and walked around it twice, tied her shoe on the front right tire, then got back in and re-buckled her seatbelt.
“I really don’t know. I just know I’m not happy,” I say, shuffling my feet in their little automotive compartment, shifting the snow mat around. The Beat kids have drifted away and their echoed shouts, saturated with red wine because that’s what they think they should drink, sound somewhat convincing because of the distance. To these people alcohol and pot are more than entertainment. Drunk or high is the norm they should naturally revert to – it’s their state of suspension - when they don’t have any responsibilities to perform, which is most of the time. I’ve never been high in my life because I’m afraid that before I know it, I’ll be one of them. I’m afraid I’ll like living like that.
I’m not very critical because, of those few men I respect, many are the same way. Reefer-smoking jazz great Louis Armstrong titled one of his records Muggles as a tribute to his favorite herb. Open up any autobiography from Charles Darwin to Johnny Carson and they all reminisce about their college days -and many others- spent getting plastered. Johnny Carson once said he was a responsible drinker; he only drank in places that had walls. Maybe I am the one who is out of the loop, missing the libation of success. Somehow it got them places.
I hear a smash. The coke bottle is missing. It went out the window with a half-hearted lob. See, that’s what happens. I don’t pay attention and glass breaks. The guys who walked by with the tight pants, they make their living off of not paying attention and don’t get any crap for it. It’s what they pride themselves on, what they write about. I once read a piece by one of those guys:
I don’t care about anything. Even this.
That’s the garbage they expect to make a living on, raise a family on. Red wine and bad poetry. They think that that’s what it’s all about just because right now it’s getting them laid. And here I am, getting laid, and not liking it because my future is racing away from me, toward the horizon, like some hyper speed plate tectonics.
“I’m going to be lost without you.” She moves her hands to her stomach the way my mother did when my sister was inside her. If there was actually something in there I would cock my head, like a bird that suddenly notices the bars all around it. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. ‘I’m going to be lost without you’ really means ‘I wont have anyone to waste my life with’.
“Heather, we can still talk to each other.” And why did you throw your bottle out the window? Because it was an artsy thing to do? Because it seemed like an unclassifiable and unscripted action? That’s what you live for, right? I think to myself that, if it hadn’t been for me, that bottle would still be alive. It could still help liquids defying gravity by standing vertical instead of just flattening out in a puddle. That bottle had power and I screwed it all up. Goodbye to the last glass cola bottle on Earth. I’m just wasted on tiredness now because it’s three in the morning and I want to be in my bed but I can’t move the car until Heather wanders out in to the night and fades away into the streetlights.
“This just sucks. I don’t understand why you’re doing this. I try really hard to be a good girlfriend. Can I do anything better?” Teal good-luck ring. Israeli hookah. Socks from an authentic Nazi uniform.
“I hate that I love you. Doesn’t that make sense?” I had a hard time getting that out. It was the point of no return. I’m really not like these people. My glasses are big because it’s easier to see things. I don’t carry condoms around with me, like candy. I don’t know what color my boxers are right now. I like not having that pressure.
“I’m gonna have no one left. It’s gonna be hard to have no one,” she says as her hand reaches down for a cigarette in her pocket. She forgot that they’re not there because she’s trying to quit. The hand comes back to her lap.
“I know. It’s gonna be hard for me too.” I can’t check the clock without turning the car on but it’s probably around 3:30 now. I don’t even know what’s going on anymore.
“Well, do you wanna just fuck then?”
“Excuse me?” I thought we had almost reached the end of the night.
“We don’t have class tomorrow. And after tonight I’m not gonna wait around for you to change your mind. I’m gonna move on and find someone else. So this is it.”
‘Do or die’ is the way that people live these days. As if extreme emotions are insurance against not really being alive. After her mom died, I bought into that for a bit. We always ran around saying “Ok, I’m all in,” because anything less wasn’t living. We thought in terms of ‘do or die’. But that’s over, so totally over.
“How about I just drive you across the turnpike back to your dorm and we call it a night?” The tears start now. Mascara and sadness and illogic, all dripping down her face. Tear ducts must not have much logic if all it takes to get them pumping is the prospect of one night with no sex. I didn’t see that coming.
So that’s the release. Everything we’ve said has finally become real. I’ve been in a cockpit for hours, flipping every emotional button and trigger I could find, trying to shoot off some sort of sympathetic firework that would suddenly give the night enough significance to make the whole thing still be real in the morning. How depressing that the trigger was what it was.
As she sobs, I finger my keys, the notches, the rings, bringing the whole clump dangerously close to the ignition. Hardly breathing, I eye Heather while lining up the key. It’s so close, and she’s not paying attention, so I slam it in.
Starting the car, I drive across campus, with the radio booming, air blasting, tears dripping, leaving the broken bottle in the parking lot for some sucker tomorrow. Past the gate, past the hitchhiker statue, I pull up in front of her building, the car still running.
The headlights hit the wall. Heather gets out, fast, taking her tote bag, grabbing some of her miscellaneous objects she spots buried in the nooks of my car. There’s more than she first expected and she has a hard time carrying them all. She kicks the door closed with her sneaker, still sobbing, and walks up toward the building, huddling over her items as if they were a child, afraid the air might cause them to catch cold. Silhouetted against the wall by my headlights, she looks like a convict escaping from jail.
I see a skeleton key that doesn’t open anything slip to the ground. Then a pair of movie star sunglasses. Soon, in a cathartic avalanche, her arms go limp and everything piles down around her. In her surrender, Heather appears almost to be floating, unbound, looking up and bawling into the heavens, surrounded by a halo of her items. I just sit there in my tiny car because she’s intangible now. It’s lit up like a movie set on my windshield. She’s so lost out there, bawling behind the smudged glass. So disoriented and so beautiful. Like heather.
Heather, the plant, is beautiful. I would like to smoke that, or rather drink it, as a wine, with little particles suspended inside. I’d imagine it tastes like a soul. The soul, in stemware, would be easy to nurse like wine; but it would be Heather, the plant, which would fill me up, as if making me lighter, with something that could combat this tepid image of life: the freeze-framed wrongs, partially committed, that stare down at me with punk-ass expressions; and the little, now scattered, pieces of garnet colored glass that used to keep me going.
|
|
|
Support NY Review
It's not hard to imagine all the costs associated with maintaining our site and making sure it remains available for free. But we think that we play an important role in giving a platform to writers, artists and thinkers to spark thought, host intelectual conversation and report on socio-politcal happenings in theworld around us.
We are proud that we are able to offer this to our audience free of charge. But, if you are able, we do ask that you make a donation to support the site.
Thanks
::Be sure to change the currency to dollars from the automatic setting of Euros unless youre in Europe::
::Note: Donations to NewYorkReview.org are NOT tax-deductable::
Donate
Once
Monthly
Who's Online
|
written by Tracy on January 29, 2007
But I love him!!
written by Lauren on February 26, 2007
Gary Ferrar is wonderful!
written by Kate T on March 03, 2007
What a tragic and beautiful story...
written by jess on April 27, 2007
every time i read this...