A Day in the Life, with iPod, complete
A Day in the Life, with iPod
I feel like the ending part ("Cactus" onwards) is kinda rushed, but, well, I'm kinda rushed. I have a week to work on it after tomorrow, though, so that's okay. It is, after all, a rough draft.
Comments always appreciated...
My mom got me an iPod for Christmas. It's nice; they call it a Nano. It holds about a day's worth of music and is roughly the size of a credit card. Wonder of the modern age, huh?
I mostly use it as an alarm clock.
Today's opening happens to be "Willie the Pimp." It's an old Frank Zappa track, off the album "Hot Rats." Kinda weird; it has this whole jazz/rock/classical vibe to it, which is even stranger given the lyrics: I'm a little pimp with my hair gassed back, pair a khaki pants and my shoes shined black. I got a little lady, walk that street, tellin' all the boys that she can't be beat...
Time to face the day, I guess.
I sit up and rub the sleep from my eyes. It's one in the afternoon. I get out of bed and grab a pair of jeans and an old CommiChung shirt; they were a band I used to see when I was still in school. I fumble around my bedroom looking for shoes; being a bachelor, I don't really have incentive to keep the place picked up. I eventually find my tennis shoes, which I know I took off about three in the morning last night, underneath a pair of sweatpants that I swear I haven't worn in a week. Things move around when you live by yourself; maybe it isn't fact, but I know it's true.
OK. So. That's one accomplishment down. No work today. Can't think of anybody I want to call up. What am I going to do today?
Twenny dollah bill, I can set you straight. Meet me onna corner boy, and don't be late...
I walk out to the kitchen, which is also the living room- I guess the kitchen's actually kind of a hallway. OK, that probably didn't make any sense. See, you walk in through the front door into the living room, and to the left is this path to the bedroom, which is also where the stove and sink and whatnot are. The bathroom's on the other side. OK? Now you have a basic map of my existence. Two rooms and a bath. I'm not that hungry, and I don't really have anything in the fridge that I'm not afraid of, either. (I need to clean it out someday, before that green spaghetti starts to develop higher brain functions. Not today, though.) Still, I grab a bowl and some milk and pour some Rice Krispies into it. Tasty.
Sinking into the couch with my cereal, I turn on the television, though I don't bother to turn off Frank Zappa. I barely ever watch TV, but today seems kind of pointless, so... Might as well. Daytime TV is a wasteland, though. (I forgot- that's why I don't watch a lot of it...) But Frank is still good, and I get through a good seven minutes of the Christopher Lowell show based purely on Zappa's freaked out lead playing. I shut the TV off about a minute before the end of the song and get up again, having finished my cereal- no real point in watching that anymore.
I hear the shuffle on the iPod switch; the song that comes up is oddly similar to Willie the Pimp, except that the main riff is the bass line. Iggy Pop floods into my ears: I been dirt, and I don't care... Just then, the phone rings. I grab it off the wall; it might be the last non-cordless phone in existence.
"Hello?" I say.
"Hey," I hear. It's Jackie.
Jackie is... Well, she's my girlfriend, I guess. I've been almost kind of breaking up with her for maybe a year now. It's something I'm not particularly good at.
"Oh. Hey. What's up?"
"Not a lot..." There's a pause on the line, and all I can hear is Iggy: I been hurt, and I don't care... "You wanna come over?"
"Your mom there?" I remembered last time.
"No, she's out of town for the weekend."
"Uh..." I wipe my hand across my forehead. I didn't really want to go over to her house. I already knew where that would go. "I dunno, Jackie, I'm real busy today."
"Bullshit," she says. That's the problem with almost kind of breaking up with someone for a year: they get to know when you're lying to them. "Come on. I haven't seen you in a week."
Long pause here.
Do you feel it?, says Iggy. Do you feel it when you touch me?
She sighs. "Jesus, never mind."
"Hey, hold on," I say. "Look- Yeah, fine. I'll be over."
"Look, you don't have to if you're so goddamned busy-"
"I said I'd be over, okay? I don't feel like yelling today."
Just a dreaming... Just a dreaming...
"OK. See you in a bit." She doesn't sound that happy about it.
I hang up the phone and look around the room with pursed lips. Fuck. Oh well. Too late now. I go into the bedroom and grab the iPod out of the recharger next to my computer and take off.
* * *
My car is not what you would call "fit for human habitation." Thankfully I live pretty close to a comfortably shady mechanic who added twenty bucks to the inspection fee and passed it. It's a 1987 Toyota, the color of congealed blood, and lacks any illusions of comfort or luxury. The radio never worked, nor did the cassette player- to say nothing of the air conditioner or the, uh, carburator. But, y'know, it's mine. I've had it since high school, and that's been quite a while now.
Anyway, like I said, the car was resolutely incapable of playing music, so I had to get creative. By "creative," I mean I velcroed a pair of speakers to the dashboard and plug the jack into the iPod. It sounds really muddy, but it's cheaper than shelling out for an actual radio. I crank it up and put the iPod back on shuffle. First track is a Beatles song, but I don't remember which one from the opening; it's this big, kind of sunny guitar hook. It's nice.
I pull out from in front of my flat. The quickest way to Jackie's house probably involves a highway, but I hate driving on highways, as a rule. So I take Delmar down to Kingshighway, which, despite the name, is just a really big street. It'll get me there quickly enough. It's not like I'm in any great rush.
She said, "I know what it's like to be dead." She said, "I know what it means to be sad." And she's making me feel like I've never been born... Right. She Said, She Said. Good track.
Delmar- this is Saint Louis, by the way- is really a fascinating little street. Most people here only know it for the Delmar Loop, which is just outside the city limits, but honestly, the Loop is about four or five blocks of trendy shops for trendy people and high schoolers trying to seem trendy by proxy without actually spending any money. It's cool enough- I have my share of good memories there (one of the first dates Jackie and I went on consisted of hiding in the dressing room of one of those shops and making out there)- but it's the rest of the street that really has the soul, I think. It's big, but it's empty, and it's got that kind of run-down charm that no suburb will ever steal from the city- the Chinese joint that still has a big sign in need of paint reading CHOP SUEY, for instance.
The old, run down parts of Saint Louis. Only place like it in the world.
I said, "who put all those things in your head? Things that make me feel like I'm mad, and you're making me feel like I've never been born..."
I miss school. I dropped out about a year and a half ago. Couldn't afford it. At least, I couldn't afford it at the GPA I had. I keep meaning to apply up at the community college, but I always forget to do it- something always comes up. "Something" is usually work. Sometimes it's Jackie.
When I first met Jackie, she had pink hair- that's something that stands out, I guess. She's always been kind of that goth/emo looking kind of girl. Listens to a lot of Nirvana. I don't really know what else to say about her- we've been going out for two years or so (so yes, I've been attempting to break up with her for roughly half the time I've been with her), but I don't know what else I can say about her, other than she's been harder and harder to stand being around lately. She dropped out of high school six months into our relationship, claiming she was doing it to- how'd she put it? "Moral support," since I was leaving college at the same time. (She was half a year from graduation. How stupid is that?) I guess it's been going downhill since that.
Anyway. Mostly now it just means about once a week I trek over to her house- she lives down by the Bevo Mill- and we sit around, don’t talk much, and wonder to ourselves why we don’t make out the way we did when we first met.
She said “You don’t understand what I mean,” I said “No, no, no, you’re wrong. When I was a boy, everything was right…”
I turn onto Kingshighway. The magic of Delmar’s gone. Now it’s just a long drive with John and Paul, a long drive on a sun bleached August afternoon.
I said “Even though you know what you know, I know I’m ready to leave, ‘cause you’re making me feel like I’ve never been born…”
* * *
So here I am, knocking on Jackie’s door. She lives in an okay part of town- better than where I live, at any rate- in a one story house on Neosho. She lives here with her mom. Jackie works at a laundromat most nights. She doesn’t make a lot of money, but her mom doesn’t demand much from her, either. It takes a minute for her to get to the door, but it opens, and there she is.
Her hair is wet and kind of scraggly; my guess is she just got out of the shower. It’s a real dark brown now. The laundromat didn’t take too kindly to the whole goth thing before. She bitched for a week when she had to wash out the green dye. She’s wearing a long, flowy skirt and a black shirt for some band called Thrice. I’ve never heard of them.
“Hey,” she says, barely looking up. We walk in and, for lack of anything better to do, flop onto the couch. She looks at me, and I look at her, and that’s about all that happens for a minute. She gets up eventually and turns on the stereo; it’s quiet, but I recognize it. Nirvana. Figures. She’s got a thing for Kurt Cobain, which I think it odd, ‘cause, well... I’m a lot of things, but Kurt Cobain I ain’t.
Come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be…
“How’s your week been?” I ask, awkwardly.
“S’okay,” says Jackie. “I mean, nothing special. Some guy left a twenty in his coat at work. That was nice.” She shrugs. “You?”
“Nothing. Same old Best Buy. They want me to start working more nights.”
“You gonna?”
“Not much choice, I guess. It’s my job.”
We don’t talk again after that, not for a little while. I wish that one of us would do something to break up the silence, turn on the television, something, but we don’t. Maybe we’re scared to.
I turn and look at her again. I never thought she was the prettiest girl in the world or anything, but it used to be that I could look at her and pretend to think that, because she was mine and the love in my eyes could make her beautiful enough to rival Helen of Troy. I haven’t seen her like that in months. She looks at me, her eyes sort of dull, and without changing at all- keeping the same uninterested expression, never flinching- she leans over to me, parting her lips slightly as they come to meet mine. I feel the warmth of her body against mine- she’s a bit of a bigger girl, which I’ll admit was always part of the attraction- and I feel her breasts press close to me.
The kiss is mechanical. I try to make it seem passionate, try to bring that kind of fire that I once had, the kind that made it seem like we would melt into one another. But it doesn’t happen this time. All I notice is that she’s trying too hard to keep hold of me, and that her breath tastes vaguely of Thousand Island dressing. It stops.
And I swear that I don’t have a gun...
“What is it?” she asks.
“Nothing.” My tongue slips between my lips and cleans her trace away.
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” I say. “You wanna watch a movie or something?”
She shrugs. Good enough, I guess. I get up and root through her mom’s movie collection. It’s, well, a lot of crap- Sleepless in Seattle, Pretty Woman, things like that- romantic comedies that achieve neither of their stated goals. Jackie keeps her movies near the bottom of the cabinet. I admit that I don’t like most of them; she’s got this big anime fetish and I’m not a fan.
“Princess Mononoke okay?” I think that Neil Gaiman wrote the dialogue for that one or something, so maybe it’ll be okay.
“Sure,” she says. Her face doesn’t really change. I sometimes wonder if she’s doing drugs or something and I don’t know about it. Sometimes we smoke a joint or two together- well, more accurately, I guess we used to. It’s been awhile.
I pop it in and head back to the couch; she lays her head down on my chest. We watch the movie, which is okay; it has tree spirits and samurai and some Japanese mythology, which I don’t know that much about, but it’s bearable. I get the feeling she’s seen it so many times that it doesn’t even register. But it’s something to do, and we don’t have to say anything while it’s on.
The movie lasts about two hours, and when it ends, neither one of us moves to turn the television off. The DVD returns to the menu screen, flashing scenes of the film past us again. I ignore them.
I feel Jackie’s hand move from her side to my leg. Her fingers tingle as they reach towards my jeans, but I stop her. “Jackie...”
Her hand pauses, as though she’s about to resist, but then she relents. More silence.
“You want to go for a drive?” I ask.
“I guess,” she says, the same monotone that’s been in her voice since I got here.
“OK,” I say, and we get up. I shut the TV off and open the door for her. At least I remember to do that. We go out to the street; her car’s nicer, but we take mine anyway.
“Where do you want to go?” she asks.
“Dunno. Grand?”
“Grand’s alright.”
I start the car; it wheezes, but it starts, bucking as it gets up to speed. I shift it into reverse and pull out. It’s a stick shift. Subtle point about a manual transmission: you cannot safely hold someone’s hand while driving one. Consider that a blessing or curse as you will.
She turns the little dashboard speakers on; I must have left the iPod on while I was inside, which means the battery’s been going the whole time... Cream is on. “Sunshine of Your Love.”
I’ve been waiting so long, to be where I’m going, in the sunshine of your-
“Don’t you have anything new on here?” she asks.
“Define ‘new.’”
“Y’know. Recorded sometime after the 70’s.”
I pondered. “I think there’s some Poe on there. You know her?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Have a look for it. Album called ‘Hello.’”
She searches through the iPod and presses the button several times; soon I hear the reverb of the album’s title song. “When did you put this on?” she asks.
“A few days ago. She’s the sister of this author I’m reading. A couple of her songs talk about the book.”
“Dork.”
Hello, hello; are you out there? Hello, hello; how can I reach you?
“Seriously, it’s like you don’t even pay attention to anything in the actual world you live in,” she said. “I mean, you’ve filled this whole thing up with music from when your parents were kids.”
“This isn’t.”
“Yeah, but you only got it because it’s about some book you’re reading. You don’t actually care about anything new.”
“New things suck. They’re never as good as the old stuff.” We were at a stoplight. I shifted down and waited, foot on the brake and the clutch. “Everything new is just something old with a new coat of paint. I’d rather just stick with what came before.”
“Right,” she says, and drops it.
‘Cause I hit a fork in the road, lost my way home, cut off from the main line, like a disconnected modem- hello? Tap in a code, I’ll reach you below, no one should have to face the underworld alone...
We pass through Gravois and come to Grand. The intersection of Grand and Gravois is one of those weird, unexplainable places: the intersection has, among other things, an old bank that’s now a bunch of expensive condos, a sex shop, a gas station, and a White Castle. That’s Saint Louis in a nutshell. We turn, ignoring the “left only on left arrow” sign just like everybody else, and cruise past the grocery store and the public library. It’s maybe four in the afternoon; not a lot of traffic right now, but Grand’s one of those streets that never really calms down. It just stops, catches its breath, and throws itself back into the ring.
We park in a little lot by an Italian restaurant called Mangia; looking at it reminds me of an old friend who worked there, but she’s moved off to Columbia about a year ago. Supposed to be at Mizzou now; I ought to call her, I guess, see how she is.
So Jackie and I walk. I don’t even notice that my hands are in my pockets until she nervously fumbles for me, until she pulls my fingers into hers. I hold her hand back, though it feels less than genuine.
We never agree on where to visit when we go out. For my own part, I want to look into a used bookstore up near Tower Grove Park; I’ve been reading a bit about Dante recently and wanted to see if they had a copy of the Divine Comedy for a buck or two. She’s more interested in Cheap Trx, a counter-culture kind of place at the other end of the strip. They do piercings, sell what they would euphemistically refer to as “adult novelties,” stuff like that, which I don’t have much use for. It would be handy if either one of us were hungry; at least we both like Italian.
So we’re in Cheap Trx, and she’s looking at something shiny and black- probably vinyl, maybe leather, either way too expensive for her to afford. I don’t even notice, really. Jackie’s chatting with the clerk and I’m standing off to the side. I don’t notice. I guess that I don’t really figure into the transaction. After a moment of talking, she walks back over to me. I see, for just a second, a brief flash of brightness to her face, but it’s gone too quickly.
“You ready?” she asks.
“Yeah. Whenever.”
We walk for a little while longer, window shopping. Sometimes she’ll say something, but I don’t reply; she sees things in the stores that she thinks are cool, or tacky, or whatever, and she’ll say something about how she wants it, or thinks it’s stupid, or-
-and all I can think about is Dante, rotting somewhere in the back of a used bookstore, and how right now I could be in some kind of Renaissance Lit course-
“Hello?” says Jackie. “You there?”
I blink and see her again. I guess, for a moment, I was somewhere between Venice and Hell, and she wasn’t a part of either of them. She grabs my hand.
“Let’s go back to the house,” she says.
“Huh?”
We start back towards the car. “Just drive, will you?”
“OK...”
We get in, and I turn it back on. It shudders at first, and I’m afraid that the carburetor’s flooded out and we’ll be stuck for half an hour while it drains, but I managed to get it started. She turns the iPod back on. It’s a newer David Bowie song, a Pixies cover.
Sitting here wishin’ on a cement floor, just wishin’ that I had just something you wore…
We’re back at her house within minutes; even though it isn’t a far drive from Bevo to Grand anyway, it seemed even quicker this time.
I’d put it on when I got lonely, won’t you take off your dress and send it to me?
She goes inside, and I follow her. I don’t know what she’s thinking, but this is easily the most- well, active- I’ve seen her in weeks.
I miss your kisses and I miss your head, and a letter in your writing doesn’t mean you’re not dead…
“Jackie, seriously, what’s gotten into you?”
She turns around, and before I can do anything, I feel the fire again. She grabs me, and I can’t bring myself to tear away from her, even though that feels like what I ought to do; she mashes her lips into mine, and there’s that awkward clinking of our teeth, my crooked incisors against the straight enamel of her teeth. I don’t even realize that we’ve fallen somehow until we’re already on the floor, writhing.
So go outside in the desert heat, make your dress all wet and send it to me...
Her shirt’s off. Have we even closed the door?
“Jackie- Jackie, wait...”
“Oh, for the love of God, will you just shut up a minute?” She pauses to toss her hair back. She is straddling my stomach, looking down and panting.
“It’s just- well, where did this come from?”
“If all you care about is old things- well, I thought...” She paused, took a breath. “Jesus, why do you need everything explained?”
“Because it doesn’t make sense? An hour ago you were barely looking at me, and now you’re-"
“Can’t you just be quiet and let us make out and fuck like we used to? This wouldn’t have been a big deal before.”
I look up at her. Her eyes are glossy. Maybe it’s from tears, but I can’t see it as anything but the same dull stare she had the minute I got to the door. I go for words, but my mouth’s dry.
Sittin’ here wishin’ on a cement floor, wishing that I had just something you wore...
“Jackie...”
“Look, you...”
“Jackie, we can’t fuck things right again.”
She purses her lips, and I wonder, just briefly, if sometimes those lips could start the Trojan War. But that passes. I know they can’t.
She gets off of me and puts her shirt back on, and without a word, she goes into the kitchen. I can hear running water; it sounds like she’s brushing her teeth. I consider waiting, but I don’t. I’ve already said it.
I get up, go out to my car, and I don’t say a word as I go. For her part, she doesn’t make any move to meet me at the door- something I can be grateful for, I guess.
It’s about five on a Thursday night. I have work in about nineteen hours. That’s okay. That’ll be plenty of time.
I start the car, my beat-up Toyota with the coagulation red paint job, and drive away from Jackie’s house. Gentle sounds of the Rolling Stones glide softly through the car, over the crappy speakers I bought from work with a gift card.
Take me to the station, and put me on a train. I’ve got no expectations to pass through here again...
I’m already thinking about the course catalog on my kitchen counter.
I feel like the ending part ("Cactus" onwards) is kinda rushed, but, well, I'm kinda rushed. I have a week to work on it after tomorrow, though, so that's okay. It is, after all, a rough draft.
Comments always appreciated...
My mom got me an iPod for Christmas. It's nice; they call it a Nano. It holds about a day's worth of music and is roughly the size of a credit card. Wonder of the modern age, huh?
I mostly use it as an alarm clock.
Today's opening happens to be "Willie the Pimp." It's an old Frank Zappa track, off the album "Hot Rats." Kinda weird; it has this whole jazz/rock/classical vibe to it, which is even stranger given the lyrics: I'm a little pimp with my hair gassed back, pair a khaki pants and my shoes shined black. I got a little lady, walk that street, tellin' all the boys that she can't be beat...
Time to face the day, I guess.
I sit up and rub the sleep from my eyes. It's one in the afternoon. I get out of bed and grab a pair of jeans and an old CommiChung shirt; they were a band I used to see when I was still in school. I fumble around my bedroom looking for shoes; being a bachelor, I don't really have incentive to keep the place picked up. I eventually find my tennis shoes, which I know I took off about three in the morning last night, underneath a pair of sweatpants that I swear I haven't worn in a week. Things move around when you live by yourself; maybe it isn't fact, but I know it's true.
OK. So. That's one accomplishment down. No work today. Can't think of anybody I want to call up. What am I going to do today?
Twenny dollah bill, I can set you straight. Meet me onna corner boy, and don't be late...
I walk out to the kitchen, which is also the living room- I guess the kitchen's actually kind of a hallway. OK, that probably didn't make any sense. See, you walk in through the front door into the living room, and to the left is this path to the bedroom, which is also where the stove and sink and whatnot are. The bathroom's on the other side. OK? Now you have a basic map of my existence. Two rooms and a bath. I'm not that hungry, and I don't really have anything in the fridge that I'm not afraid of, either. (I need to clean it out someday, before that green spaghetti starts to develop higher brain functions. Not today, though.) Still, I grab a bowl and some milk and pour some Rice Krispies into it. Tasty.
Sinking into the couch with my cereal, I turn on the television, though I don't bother to turn off Frank Zappa. I barely ever watch TV, but today seems kind of pointless, so... Might as well. Daytime TV is a wasteland, though. (I forgot- that's why I don't watch a lot of it...) But Frank is still good, and I get through a good seven minutes of the Christopher Lowell show based purely on Zappa's freaked out lead playing. I shut the TV off about a minute before the end of the song and get up again, having finished my cereal- no real point in watching that anymore.
I hear the shuffle on the iPod switch; the song that comes up is oddly similar to Willie the Pimp, except that the main riff is the bass line. Iggy Pop floods into my ears: I been dirt, and I don't care... Just then, the phone rings. I grab it off the wall; it might be the last non-cordless phone in existence.
"Hello?" I say.
"Hey," I hear. It's Jackie.
Jackie is... Well, she's my girlfriend, I guess. I've been almost kind of breaking up with her for maybe a year now. It's something I'm not particularly good at.
"Oh. Hey. What's up?"
"Not a lot..." There's a pause on the line, and all I can hear is Iggy: I been hurt, and I don't care... "You wanna come over?"
"Your mom there?" I remembered last time.
"No, she's out of town for the weekend."
"Uh..." I wipe my hand across my forehead. I didn't really want to go over to her house. I already knew where that would go. "I dunno, Jackie, I'm real busy today."
"Bullshit," she says. That's the problem with almost kind of breaking up with someone for a year: they get to know when you're lying to them. "Come on. I haven't seen you in a week."
Long pause here.
Do you feel it?, says Iggy. Do you feel it when you touch me?
She sighs. "Jesus, never mind."
"Hey, hold on," I say. "Look- Yeah, fine. I'll be over."
"Look, you don't have to if you're so goddamned busy-"
"I said I'd be over, okay? I don't feel like yelling today."
Just a dreaming... Just a dreaming...
"OK. See you in a bit." She doesn't sound that happy about it.
I hang up the phone and look around the room with pursed lips. Fuck. Oh well. Too late now. I go into the bedroom and grab the iPod out of the recharger next to my computer and take off.
* * *
My car is not what you would call "fit for human habitation." Thankfully I live pretty close to a comfortably shady mechanic who added twenty bucks to the inspection fee and passed it. It's a 1987 Toyota, the color of congealed blood, and lacks any illusions of comfort or luxury. The radio never worked, nor did the cassette player- to say nothing of the air conditioner or the, uh, carburator. But, y'know, it's mine. I've had it since high school, and that's been quite a while now.
Anyway, like I said, the car was resolutely incapable of playing music, so I had to get creative. By "creative," I mean I velcroed a pair of speakers to the dashboard and plug the jack into the iPod. It sounds really muddy, but it's cheaper than shelling out for an actual radio. I crank it up and put the iPod back on shuffle. First track is a Beatles song, but I don't remember which one from the opening; it's this big, kind of sunny guitar hook. It's nice.
I pull out from in front of my flat. The quickest way to Jackie's house probably involves a highway, but I hate driving on highways, as a rule. So I take Delmar down to Kingshighway, which, despite the name, is just a really big street. It'll get me there quickly enough. It's not like I'm in any great rush.
She said, "I know what it's like to be dead." She said, "I know what it means to be sad." And she's making me feel like I've never been born... Right. She Said, She Said. Good track.
Delmar- this is Saint Louis, by the way- is really a fascinating little street. Most people here only know it for the Delmar Loop, which is just outside the city limits, but honestly, the Loop is about four or five blocks of trendy shops for trendy people and high schoolers trying to seem trendy by proxy without actually spending any money. It's cool enough- I have my share of good memories there (one of the first dates Jackie and I went on consisted of hiding in the dressing room of one of those shops and making out there)- but it's the rest of the street that really has the soul, I think. It's big, but it's empty, and it's got that kind of run-down charm that no suburb will ever steal from the city- the Chinese joint that still has a big sign in need of paint reading CHOP SUEY, for instance.
The old, run down parts of Saint Louis. Only place like it in the world.
I said, "who put all those things in your head? Things that make me feel like I'm mad, and you're making me feel like I've never been born..."
I miss school. I dropped out about a year and a half ago. Couldn't afford it. At least, I couldn't afford it at the GPA I had. I keep meaning to apply up at the community college, but I always forget to do it- something always comes up. "Something" is usually work. Sometimes it's Jackie.
When I first met Jackie, she had pink hair- that's something that stands out, I guess. She's always been kind of that goth/emo looking kind of girl. Listens to a lot of Nirvana. I don't really know what else to say about her- we've been going out for two years or so (so yes, I've been attempting to break up with her for roughly half the time I've been with her), but I don't know what else I can say about her, other than she's been harder and harder to stand being around lately. She dropped out of high school six months into our relationship, claiming she was doing it to- how'd she put it? "Moral support," since I was leaving college at the same time. (She was half a year from graduation. How stupid is that?) I guess it's been going downhill since that.
Anyway. Mostly now it just means about once a week I trek over to her house- she lives down by the Bevo Mill- and we sit around, don’t talk much, and wonder to ourselves why we don’t make out the way we did when we first met.
She said “You don’t understand what I mean,” I said “No, no, no, you’re wrong. When I was a boy, everything was right…”
I turn onto Kingshighway. The magic of Delmar’s gone. Now it’s just a long drive with John and Paul, a long drive on a sun bleached August afternoon.
I said “Even though you know what you know, I know I’m ready to leave, ‘cause you’re making me feel like I’ve never been born…”
* * *
So here I am, knocking on Jackie’s door. She lives in an okay part of town- better than where I live, at any rate- in a one story house on Neosho. She lives here with her mom. Jackie works at a laundromat most nights. She doesn’t make a lot of money, but her mom doesn’t demand much from her, either. It takes a minute for her to get to the door, but it opens, and there she is.
Her hair is wet and kind of scraggly; my guess is she just got out of the shower. It’s a real dark brown now. The laundromat didn’t take too kindly to the whole goth thing before. She bitched for a week when she had to wash out the green dye. She’s wearing a long, flowy skirt and a black shirt for some band called Thrice. I’ve never heard of them.
“Hey,” she says, barely looking up. We walk in and, for lack of anything better to do, flop onto the couch. She looks at me, and I look at her, and that’s about all that happens for a minute. She gets up eventually and turns on the stereo; it’s quiet, but I recognize it. Nirvana. Figures. She’s got a thing for Kurt Cobain, which I think it odd, ‘cause, well... I’m a lot of things, but Kurt Cobain I ain’t.
Come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be…
“How’s your week been?” I ask, awkwardly.
“S’okay,” says Jackie. “I mean, nothing special. Some guy left a twenty in his coat at work. That was nice.” She shrugs. “You?”
“Nothing. Same old Best Buy. They want me to start working more nights.”
“You gonna?”
“Not much choice, I guess. It’s my job.”
We don’t talk again after that, not for a little while. I wish that one of us would do something to break up the silence, turn on the television, something, but we don’t. Maybe we’re scared to.
I turn and look at her again. I never thought she was the prettiest girl in the world or anything, but it used to be that I could look at her and pretend to think that, because she was mine and the love in my eyes could make her beautiful enough to rival Helen of Troy. I haven’t seen her like that in months. She looks at me, her eyes sort of dull, and without changing at all- keeping the same uninterested expression, never flinching- she leans over to me, parting her lips slightly as they come to meet mine. I feel the warmth of her body against mine- she’s a bit of a bigger girl, which I’ll admit was always part of the attraction- and I feel her breasts press close to me.
The kiss is mechanical. I try to make it seem passionate, try to bring that kind of fire that I once had, the kind that made it seem like we would melt into one another. But it doesn’t happen this time. All I notice is that she’s trying too hard to keep hold of me, and that her breath tastes vaguely of Thousand Island dressing. It stops.
And I swear that I don’t have a gun...
“What is it?” she asks.
“Nothing.” My tongue slips between my lips and cleans her trace away.
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” I say. “You wanna watch a movie or something?”
She shrugs. Good enough, I guess. I get up and root through her mom’s movie collection. It’s, well, a lot of crap- Sleepless in Seattle, Pretty Woman, things like that- romantic comedies that achieve neither of their stated goals. Jackie keeps her movies near the bottom of the cabinet. I admit that I don’t like most of them; she’s got this big anime fetish and I’m not a fan.
“Princess Mononoke okay?” I think that Neil Gaiman wrote the dialogue for that one or something, so maybe it’ll be okay.
“Sure,” she says. Her face doesn’t really change. I sometimes wonder if she’s doing drugs or something and I don’t know about it. Sometimes we smoke a joint or two together- well, more accurately, I guess we used to. It’s been awhile.
I pop it in and head back to the couch; she lays her head down on my chest. We watch the movie, which is okay; it has tree spirits and samurai and some Japanese mythology, which I don’t know that much about, but it’s bearable. I get the feeling she’s seen it so many times that it doesn’t even register. But it’s something to do, and we don’t have to say anything while it’s on.
The movie lasts about two hours, and when it ends, neither one of us moves to turn the television off. The DVD returns to the menu screen, flashing scenes of the film past us again. I ignore them.
I feel Jackie’s hand move from her side to my leg. Her fingers tingle as they reach towards my jeans, but I stop her. “Jackie...”
Her hand pauses, as though she’s about to resist, but then she relents. More silence.
“You want to go for a drive?” I ask.
“I guess,” she says, the same monotone that’s been in her voice since I got here.
“OK,” I say, and we get up. I shut the TV off and open the door for her. At least I remember to do that. We go out to the street; her car’s nicer, but we take mine anyway.
“Where do you want to go?” she asks.
“Dunno. Grand?”
“Grand’s alright.”
I start the car; it wheezes, but it starts, bucking as it gets up to speed. I shift it into reverse and pull out. It’s a stick shift. Subtle point about a manual transmission: you cannot safely hold someone’s hand while driving one. Consider that a blessing or curse as you will.
She turns the little dashboard speakers on; I must have left the iPod on while I was inside, which means the battery’s been going the whole time... Cream is on. “Sunshine of Your Love.”
I’ve been waiting so long, to be where I’m going, in the sunshine of your-
“Don’t you have anything new on here?” she asks.
“Define ‘new.’”
“Y’know. Recorded sometime after the 70’s.”
I pondered. “I think there’s some Poe on there. You know her?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Have a look for it. Album called ‘Hello.’”
She searches through the iPod and presses the button several times; soon I hear the reverb of the album’s title song. “When did you put this on?” she asks.
“A few days ago. She’s the sister of this author I’m reading. A couple of her songs talk about the book.”
“Dork.”
Hello, hello; are you out there? Hello, hello; how can I reach you?
“Seriously, it’s like you don’t even pay attention to anything in the actual world you live in,” she said. “I mean, you’ve filled this whole thing up with music from when your parents were kids.”
“This isn’t.”
“Yeah, but you only got it because it’s about some book you’re reading. You don’t actually care about anything new.”
“New things suck. They’re never as good as the old stuff.” We were at a stoplight. I shifted down and waited, foot on the brake and the clutch. “Everything new is just something old with a new coat of paint. I’d rather just stick with what came before.”
“Right,” she says, and drops it.
‘Cause I hit a fork in the road, lost my way home, cut off from the main line, like a disconnected modem- hello? Tap in a code, I’ll reach you below, no one should have to face the underworld alone...
We pass through Gravois and come to Grand. The intersection of Grand and Gravois is one of those weird, unexplainable places: the intersection has, among other things, an old bank that’s now a bunch of expensive condos, a sex shop, a gas station, and a White Castle. That’s Saint Louis in a nutshell. We turn, ignoring the “left only on left arrow” sign just like everybody else, and cruise past the grocery store and the public library. It’s maybe four in the afternoon; not a lot of traffic right now, but Grand’s one of those streets that never really calms down. It just stops, catches its breath, and throws itself back into the ring.
We park in a little lot by an Italian restaurant called Mangia; looking at it reminds me of an old friend who worked there, but she’s moved off to Columbia about a year ago. Supposed to be at Mizzou now; I ought to call her, I guess, see how she is.
So Jackie and I walk. I don’t even notice that my hands are in my pockets until she nervously fumbles for me, until she pulls my fingers into hers. I hold her hand back, though it feels less than genuine.
We never agree on where to visit when we go out. For my own part, I want to look into a used bookstore up near Tower Grove Park; I’ve been reading a bit about Dante recently and wanted to see if they had a copy of the Divine Comedy for a buck or two. She’s more interested in Cheap Trx, a counter-culture kind of place at the other end of the strip. They do piercings, sell what they would euphemistically refer to as “adult novelties,” stuff like that, which I don’t have much use for. It would be handy if either one of us were hungry; at least we both like Italian.
So we’re in Cheap Trx, and she’s looking at something shiny and black- probably vinyl, maybe leather, either way too expensive for her to afford. I don’t even notice, really. Jackie’s chatting with the clerk and I’m standing off to the side. I don’t notice. I guess that I don’t really figure into the transaction. After a moment of talking, she walks back over to me. I see, for just a second, a brief flash of brightness to her face, but it’s gone too quickly.
“You ready?” she asks.
“Yeah. Whenever.”
We walk for a little while longer, window shopping. Sometimes she’ll say something, but I don’t reply; she sees things in the stores that she thinks are cool, or tacky, or whatever, and she’ll say something about how she wants it, or thinks it’s stupid, or-
-and all I can think about is Dante, rotting somewhere in the back of a used bookstore, and how right now I could be in some kind of Renaissance Lit course-
“Hello?” says Jackie. “You there?”
I blink and see her again. I guess, for a moment, I was somewhere between Venice and Hell, and she wasn’t a part of either of them. She grabs my hand.
“Let’s go back to the house,” she says.
“Huh?”
We start back towards the car. “Just drive, will you?”
“OK...”
We get in, and I turn it back on. It shudders at first, and I’m afraid that the carburetor’s flooded out and we’ll be stuck for half an hour while it drains, but I managed to get it started. She turns the iPod back on. It’s a newer David Bowie song, a Pixies cover.
Sitting here wishin’ on a cement floor, just wishin’ that I had just something you wore…
We’re back at her house within minutes; even though it isn’t a far drive from Bevo to Grand anyway, it seemed even quicker this time.
I’d put it on when I got lonely, won’t you take off your dress and send it to me?
She goes inside, and I follow her. I don’t know what she’s thinking, but this is easily the most- well, active- I’ve seen her in weeks.
I miss your kisses and I miss your head, and a letter in your writing doesn’t mean you’re not dead…
“Jackie, seriously, what’s gotten into you?”
She turns around, and before I can do anything, I feel the fire again. She grabs me, and I can’t bring myself to tear away from her, even though that feels like what I ought to do; she mashes her lips into mine, and there’s that awkward clinking of our teeth, my crooked incisors against the straight enamel of her teeth. I don’t even realize that we’ve fallen somehow until we’re already on the floor, writhing.
So go outside in the desert heat, make your dress all wet and send it to me...
Her shirt’s off. Have we even closed the door?
“Jackie- Jackie, wait...”
“Oh, for the love of God, will you just shut up a minute?” She pauses to toss her hair back. She is straddling my stomach, looking down and panting.
“It’s just- well, where did this come from?”
“If all you care about is old things- well, I thought...” She paused, took a breath. “Jesus, why do you need everything explained?”
“Because it doesn’t make sense? An hour ago you were barely looking at me, and now you’re-"
“Can’t you just be quiet and let us make out and fuck like we used to? This wouldn’t have been a big deal before.”
I look up at her. Her eyes are glossy. Maybe it’s from tears, but I can’t see it as anything but the same dull stare she had the minute I got to the door. I go for words, but my mouth’s dry.
Sittin’ here wishin’ on a cement floor, wishing that I had just something you wore...
“Jackie...”
“Look, you...”
“Jackie, we can’t fuck things right again.”
She purses her lips, and I wonder, just briefly, if sometimes those lips could start the Trojan War. But that passes. I know they can’t.
She gets off of me and puts her shirt back on, and without a word, she goes into the kitchen. I can hear running water; it sounds like she’s brushing her teeth. I consider waiting, but I don’t. I’ve already said it.
I get up, go out to my car, and I don’t say a word as I go. For her part, she doesn’t make any move to meet me at the door- something I can be grateful for, I guess.
It’s about five on a Thursday night. I have work in about nineteen hours. That’s okay. That’ll be plenty of time.
I start the car, my beat-up Toyota with the coagulation red paint job, and drive away from Jackie’s house. Gentle sounds of the Rolling Stones glide softly through the car, over the crappy speakers I bought from work with a gift card.
Take me to the station, and put me on a train. I’ve got no expectations to pass through here again...
I’m already thinking about the course catalog on my kitchen counter.