#2-5 (lilo)
"lilo"
two of two
5. Where Have You Been
6. The Ghetto
7. Broken Compass
8. Going Home
9. Epilogue (Yule)
5.
The red Pontiac Grand Am that belonged to my friend was still sitting in front of Jeremy's house, leisurely gathering more frost on the windshield. There were several lights turned on in the house. I walked the concrete steps up to the front door and heard laughter and I wondered whether or not I should ring the doorbell. I stood there for a moment and watched my breath vapor and fade and listened to everyone's muffled voices; even from that it wasn't hard to tell that they were stoned. So I knocked as hard as I could, several times.
The outside light turned on and I saw Jeremy's anxious face peer through the small window in the door.
"Dude!" he said, opening the door. I smiled the kind of smile that somebody does when they've been out in the cold too long; the skin of my cheeks felt tight. "Wha...where the fuck have you been?"
I hadn't thought about it until just then, but I didn't know if I wanted to tell everyone the whole story. What happened this afternoon was certainly unusual. I wasn't embarrassed about it, but to just leave somebody's house with a strange woman, both of whom I literally had just met in no time at all and returning several hours later wasn't necessarily an expression of my best social graces. It was kind of rude, although as far as this place was concerned, etiquette probably couldn't be considered much of a factor: the place reeks of marijuana and there's empty beer bottles everywhere. So maybe I should just play it cool, and eccentric. But cool.
"Just out getting acquainted with the locals," I say, and take off my coat and throw it on a space of the couch that no one was using. Everyone was so wasted; hopefully that answer would be enough. My friend can ask me later on the way home or something and then I'd tell him. But just not now.
"Fuck yeah, finally we can play Monopoly," Edwin had the board set up on the coffee table and looked very much ready to start building houses and trading utilities. I had to laugh at the fact he must have set everything up hours ago, waiting for me apparently all day long to come back so we could get started. It's true, it's usually more entertaining at least with four people playing instead of three, even though I always lose. Not once have I ever won that game. I looked at my Kansas City friend and he was obliterated, the poor soul, eyes so red they looked like I could light a match just by holding one up against them. Which is weird, he doesn't do that, he's stayed away from it even longer than I. But I guess I'd probably be in the same bad way had I stayed here this afternoon. It was the kind of place where pot was impossible to get away from. I looked at the grandfather clock. Why do they have a grandfather clock? But the bong was still out and despite it being totally dark outside the night was still very young. "What piece do you wanna be? I'm the car. And Jeremy is the dog. And he's going to be the thimble."
Oh...then I guess the top hat, I say.
I sit next to my old friend on the floor and pat him on the back a couple of times. "What the fuck dude we got back from Taco Bell and you were just like...gone. And we were like..." So high he can't make eye contact because eye contact is too intense; or maybe it's me and my happiness surrounding me like an aura that he in his weak state-of-mind can let himself see. Maybe the thought of having to play Monopoly was too much - who knows how much he's had to smoke - all the Monopoly money to have to keep track of and the landing on somebody else's properties and having to pay them rent.
He brought it upon himself. He's so powerless and he's never like that and I couldn't help it, I had to mess with him a little. "So...let me get this right," I looked at him. "Someone could have broken in here, a crazy person like a wild crackhead or something." I kept looking at him. Melodramatic. "Or Bigfoot. Bigfoot coulda broke in and took me. You know he's out here, in the sticks. And held me for ransom. A ransom for crack, dawg. I might've been dead by now. And you just decided to get high? Did you look for me at all?"
"Well it's like...it's just that...shit, I don't know. Are you okay?"
I had to smile at that. "I'm fine, my friend," I said, and patted his back again. "Actually a lot better than fine."
"If I didn't know any better," Jeremy said, sitting down across from me. He didn't look as high as the other two. Not perfect but just not as disheveled. The sparkle still in his eye from earlier. "You really got acquainted with the locals."
I sat there a moment, not entirely sure what to say. How did he know? Jeremy and Edwin were waiting for my answer. My friend sat and stared at the carpeting, holding on to himself like he was bracing for the truth. So instead of trying to keep up a charade, I instead told them the whole story. It isn't often that I get the chance to hold people in rapt attention, telling a story exactly in the kind of pace I care to tell it. I told them about Lilo, not being overly graphic but her image still bright in my mind's eye. The ring of her voice still humming in my ears. They sat in position and stared at me, chuckling at the good parts and smiling at the sweeter parts, looking at one another from time to time to make sure they could all acknowledge that what I was saying was actually real. Jeremy had this look on his face like he was barely able to contain a huge gust of laughter welling up within but was timing himself to let it go at the right moment, some ideal sequence that might infect everyone else in the room with something similar. Edwin didn't stop watching me as he reached in his pocket and pulled out a cigarette, and lit, appearing more intense and actually serious than any other time I've yet seen in him.
"Other than that, I really don't know what else to say, you guys. I'm sorry for leaving without telling anyone." I said, slipping my hands in my pockets reflexively, and meaning it. They were good people, if just not entirely perfect, but nobody is. "I hope y'all ain't mad. It's just sort of hard for me to say no under those circumstances."
"Well I accept your apology, dood," Edwin said. "You seem like a good guy. And it sounds like it was a beautiful thing...and if I was in your shoes I'm sure I'd probably do the same thing. It's just...um..." He was sitting Indian style, like the Sioux I had tried to make peace with, and put an elbow on his knee, his hand cradling his chin. He turned to Jeremy and looked at him in hopes that he would help him out with what it looked like he had to say. This is Jeremy's house; he's the one who bought it. He's in charge.
"It's just that her name isn't Lilo," he said.
6.
Her name isn't Lilo, and Edwin was married even though he actually hadn't seen his wife in something like three years. She remains in northern Mexico, with their son and much of Edwin's family: his Mom, two Aunts and some of their children for Edwin's son to play with. Edwin lives and works in the United States illegally, wiring a Western Union money order to them on the first of the month, every month, sometimes mailing a big package (in Jeremy's name) of toys and other bric-a-brac he bought from the Dollar Store in town. He said he makes something like ten times the amount of money he was trying to make in Mexico, and I suppose I can't blame him. I'm getting older and there's some kind of natural inclination or pull to think more conservatively (maybe we should stick around in Iraq, maybe Big Government is a bad thing), history is still history. The only constant, everything will always change.
Her name isn't Lilo. The scene around me: this split-level ranch house, twenty and ten and even five years ago home to a yet-to-be-foreclosed-upon family, in a neighborhood once clean and vibrant before the railroads became what they were today and Highway 71 expanded, but too far away from the community itself to remain commercially viable, now a den of shady commerce and recreational drug use, and the changes that I've experienced even in my short lifetime rear their head, become that much more pronounced, far more lucid. No one knows what this country is about any longer, or truly cares. It's a crumbling Empire in an abrupt slide; in the confusion there's ultimately no reason why Edwin shouldn't pick up an instrument and join in withthe cacophony, doing his best for everyone back home that he gives a shit about.
I told him so. The mood shifted after I had told my story. The timbre of the group grew a lot more honest, our various dialogues more heartfelt. We played Monopoly. I lost. A somber Saturday night and the grandfather clock chiming away every hour and when it did, we would stop to listen. We all felt our age but unable to do much about it: Edwin at twenty-seven being the youngest, and all of them in some way to some extent, in slightly different combinations, recognized the pain in my heart. The bong was put away in the closet. I ate the two bean burritos Jeremy had bought for me and were waiting in the refrigerator, but the tortillas had hardened and the beans were too waxy. We were all drinking coffee now and reheated bean burritos won't ever complement coffee.
Her name isn't Lilo, and Edwin and his wife were married while they were very young at an age that would seem obscene to most people north of the border. They didn't have the kind of social luxury that most of us have up here of playing the field. Edwin got his girlfriend pregnant, they're Catholic, everyone is Catholic, they married two weeks later. A few years later and while Edwin knew that he didn't really like his wife, she had grown meaner over time like her mother before her, and took every opportunity to nag at him, but he still cared for her. He still had love in his heart to give but instead of the girl he used to meet on the outskirts of town after his family had went to sleep, that love over time had shifted to their one and only son. But he wasn't making enough money down there because there's never enough money down there, and he could see what his son's future would bring if everything was allowed to stay on its current trajectory. He's a pothead, and defiant of the laws of two countries, but he remains faithful to a very few certain concepts that are close to his foundation, on his own terms. This is why he has never slept with Lilo even though the opportunity, in his words, presented itself more than once.
I showed them the piece of paper that she had written her phone number and e-mail address. "The e-mail address looks like it might be legit," Jeremy said. "I don't know. I've never tried. The phone number isn't, though."
"Do you want her real phone number?"
I thought about it for a moment and, "No…I guess not," I said. "She obviously doesn't want me to have it anyway."
Her name isn't Lilo, it's actually Katrina although she normally goes by just Trina now because she grew weary of hearing joke after poorly-executed joke about hurricanes. Neither Edwin nor Jeremy really confess to know much about her, even though they see her around town all the time, sometimes at the Whistlestop Café when it's actually open, or the donut shop whatever the donut shop is actually called other than the "donut shop", or sometimes at the Dew Drop Inn playing pool, the tiny supermarket or the Taco Bell-slash-KFC, she doesn't like to talk much about herself and her life. But she does actually teach the first grade at the local elementary school. Jeremy has fucked her a few times, his words, and the pain in the pit of my chest and I wish he wouldn't say it like that, fuck, too mechanical and casual even though I'm sure that's probably what it was, even though he has been in a serious relationship for the past year with a woman who worked with him at the old mortgage company. Even though the last time he and Katrina slept together was only two weeks ago.
He thinks maybe his other roommate has been with her a couple of times, too, but isn't sure.
"Where is your other roommate, anyway? Ty, was it?" I said.
"He's still in his room asleep I guess," Jeremy said.
"Oh."
Her name isn't Lilo and in a perverse way this was the moment I had been waiting for, that chink in Jeremy's charismatic armor that neither funny looks nor sly words could obscure. It isn't just Katrina, he admits. Of course his girlfriend isn't aware of his infidelities because she lives an hour away, in Springfield. He doesn't mean to hurt her but he only gets to see her every so often and it's hard to say no when women are coming over to your house with every intention of just borrowing you for awhile. And of course she wouldn't understand. His Achilles heel is starting to hurt, wit replaced with empty rationalizations, it's only excuses now and it's obvious he doesn't want to upset me. But I'm not mad at him and in this sense I'm not even mad at Trina or Katrina. Over time and practice I've learned to see through the dark thundercloud of pain and simply be realistic: why expect her to be chaste and wait for me when she's been alive and absolutely unaware of my existence for over a quarter-century.
Jeremy echoes what's running through my mind. "You know how it is yourself, living in a small town. Not much else to do other than get drunk and fuck."
"Get drunk and fuck man yeaaaah," says Edwin, just about out of nowhere. In hopes of helping everything along, I suppose.
Her name isn't Lilo, and I want to tell them no, that's not true. You only want to think that's true. There's more to do in a small town than any one of us could hope to ever accomplish. If you wanted to you can do volunteer work to try to help out all the poor people around here. You can go to the library and read all the classics that you've always heard about, because they're all just waiting there, collecting dust. There's the quiet to appreciate and meditate on. You can explore the countryside and discover all sorts of interesting things that you never knew were there. There are friendships to make, and preserve, and grow. And the only reason this place is a ghetto is because all of you have decided to make sure it stays one.
Instead I don't, I acknowledge that I appreciated Edwin's outburst with one weak smile and say to the rest of them, yeah, I do know how it is.
7.
Almost one o'clock in the morning I think before I attained a state of restless sleep on an afterthought couch in Jeremy's converted basement. My head resting on a tacky throw pillow, the kind found at places like the Salvation Army with all the tassels; my own coat employed as a makeshift blanket.
I had a dream where I was wandering through a subconscious landscape, a tableau of different locales I had been in real life and some I had never been, minding my own business when suddenly I realized that a group of people were coming after me. They had no names, no faces. I couldn't make out what they were saying but I knew they were angry at me, about something. Because I was guilty of whatever this was, I ran through the parking lot of a strip mall that bled into a cornfield that bled into the desert with an awful feeling that no matter how fast I can run, the crowd was still gaining on me, my legs would soon grow tired and no matter how life-threatening this situation was I would have to stop. There would soon be no other choice.
As if that were a cue my legs began hardening like plaster of Paris and I felt their hands and their hot breath on the nape of my neck, me being lifted and that's when I saw the cliff that plunged down to an impossible depth, into the sea. They threw me overboard as a sacrifice; I knew the undefeatable pull of gravity and the rush of blood in my head as I tumbled upside down, my hands grabbing the air like driving down the road with the windows open, making hand kites. The sea was approaching swiftly and I wondered if maybe I could survive if I could just position my body in such a way, to pierce the surface of the water using my hands over my head like a prayer. And at this point, it was, and I didn't have any idea whether or not I would even succeed at such a distance and speed, the proximity of where I would land in the water, my lack of experience with falling off cliffs.
That's when I woke up with a lurch, and yelled, but I don't think too loud. I rubbed my eyes and it took me a moment to realize I wasn't back at home. I sat up with my knees on the couch and my fingers entwined. My back hurt in stages and plateaus, my head throbbed in a measured beat of dull and hollow and empty pain.
Maybe I'm not frightened of commitment and I never was. The puzzle inside my heart of figuring out why that I had been busy trying to solve for years, after long last, it could just be a matter instead of not needing to know the answer, but simply to understand the question in itself. Without even knowing: I had long ago crossed over to a point in my life where I needed to find someone I could really be able to relate to. The immediate future was a thing of which I was no longer concerned. At the age of thirty-one, it assumed the scope instead of the entire rest of my life. With anyone else, despite how cute and sweet they were and no matter how well we might get along, the loneliness I'd inevitably feel would be so much more so, somehow, than what it would be like to live the remainder of my days alone. Every time I never returned a phone call, or told somebody "we have to talk," I had inadvertently chosen the lesser of two evils.
In its premise it sounds selfish but I was probably doing it for the other person's sake, too. Even though I've ignored it, the belief there is that one true love for everyone out there - their soul mate - still remained within me, far beneath the exterior. I tow the line that doesn't care if I end up hurting somebody in the short term but still caring enough to want them to one day find the one that truly is for them, and not to end up saddled to someone who isn't. Of all my numerous sins that would be the biggest and worst of them all, condemning someone to a life of falling asleep every night next to a man who isn't entirely in love with them, only because I didn't think I was strong enough any longer to face the world by myself and keep looking.
I could hear someone moving around, upstairs.
I was in a basement of some guy's house I still didn't know very well and these revelations didn't necessarily make me feel any better. The pang of knowing how long it's been since I had started my search, the crux of what it costs to be me, my heart a compass without a True North, the alchemists searching in vain for the Philosopher's Stone and the conquistadores of yore perishing in lonesome lands in hopes of finding El Dorado. Years after years of wandering through North America, all the sights I've seen and the things I've done, a cold couch far from home and heading very much to nowhere.
The middle of the night and the lack of depth perception but I felt I could relate to Katrina, or Trina, even still. I knew what it felt like for her, struggling against the bleakness of existence and failing sometimes: to wake in the morning and to need to smoke a cigarette or two cigarettes before being able to do anything else, even getting out of bed. I knew how it felt to watch the weatherman on television say how beautiful of a day it was going to be, you should take your non-existent family to the air show, or it's good picnic weather and there's nobody you know that you want to go on a picnic with, so you choose to stay in the apartment instead, all day long, not doing anything, making a mess, growing more sick. Clean clothes scattered all over the living room because what difference does it really make if they're set on hangers in the closet, why put on any airs about it when all the time the only one that's ever here, is you. Eventually they'll be worn, they'll only just get dirty again, the passage of time slipping away and soon enough they'll go out of style and then they're headed to Goodwill. I knew what Saturday at noon felt like when there are no appointments or social engagements of any kind, you think about what it is you're going to do today and decide that all you really want is to just borrow/rent someone for awhile because the ashtray is getting full and the silence assumes a different and sinister sound of its own and you need something that convinces yourself that you're still human, that you're still capable of feeling. Katrina or Trina told me the truth without telling me the truth, she lied without lying; a tightrope she had learned how to balance upon over time and trial and error and I was amazed and impressed and angry and ultimately just too fucking sad to know that someone else out there had actually managed to figure it out.
Pangs of regret and of wanting her near me; like being withdrawn from an addicting drug, invading my consciousness. Just one more time, that's all. Then I know I can move on.
It was Sunday morning now, officially; the first light growing stronger with minute increments through the frosted-over glass of the basement door. Her name wasn't Lilo and I programmed my mind to try and get at least a couple hours' more sleep.
I was certain no one in this house was planning on waking up early today.
8.
The way straight men give each other hugs, if you didn't know already: a sense that it's important in some way to establish camaraderie with the other guy, to the point of affection - although we try not to think about it like that - and that moment of truth when we say to ourselves sure it's kind of gay but what the hell. I'm man enough. A quick impact and a couple of hearty slaps on the other's back, a grunt maybe, and then away from each other just as fast.
Bolstered and pleasantly surprised by Jeremy presenting me, at the very end, with five brand new twenty-dollar bills.
"You might want to make sure the ink's dry on those," my Kansas City friend said, who wasn't tired or stoned anymore, expecting laughter and receiving it.
"I don't do that anymore!" Jeremy said, wild-eyed. "They didn't have enough proof to put me away!"
"You can't handle the proof." Edwin.
"Wow, uh…c'mon," I said, just a good-ol'-boy. "I really ain't worth that much, now..."
"Nonsense. I never would have been able to figure that shit out." Jeremy said, although I'm sure he probably could have. But I'm a hundred dollars richer now and if he said he couldn't figure it out then I should just accept that. But had I known maybe I should have configured their Outlook while I was here, and maybe de-fragmented the hard drives. Oh well. "Now, this week," he said, clasping his hands together. "This week I can really focus on getting this thing off the ground."
Not really goodbye but just see you later. We had made new friends, new contacts. Plans were being made, we were adventurers again, maybe foolish and quixotic but hey, we're going to try and in the end that's the important thing. I say I know some people up in Kansas City he might want to talk to: so e-mail me here in a couple of days whenever there's time. We'll play it by ear. We'll talk about getting a website done and get the ball rolling because yeah, from how you're talkin' this could really work out and be a really good thing. We're sages, we know things that the rest of the world doesn't know yet, and we nod our heads. Smiling all over the place. He would give me a business card but he hasn't made it down to Kinko's-Fed Ex yet. Maybe he'll go down to Springfield and do that today before he sees Melissa.
It felt weird sitting in a car again. The way the cold weather can make a cheap car seem cheaper, the plastic of the dashboard more brittle in below-freezing temperatures. I put on my seatbelt even though he tells me that he doesn't care if I put on the seatbelt, but it's just reflex for me now. I think about how I always used to say that I'd never wear a seatbelt, and I hated that feeling of being strangled, and I wasn't gonna listen to the Man. The memory of Katrina or Trina or Lilo and how she had borrowed that name from some stupid animated Disney movie but pronounced it "Lie-Low" instead. Lie low. And I was stupid enough to be so distracted that I didn't even realize any of this until just right now.
We drive past the street she lives on; I saw her house, a glance at her red Cavalier sitting in the driveway and I wondered what she was doing, whether or not she was up yet. And if so, what she was thinking, if she was thinking about me. Maybe she was blaming herself for another stupid mistake she had made. She should have told me her real name and given me her real number, or maybe it was even for talking to me in the first place. Maybe she wasn't thinking about me in any capacity; maybe she was that kind of person after all. Maybe her feint was in actuality some sort of test in order to establish my worth, and if I try the e-mail address that she had written for me it would be the real thing. That's how she would know I was really interested in her. I didn't want to be tested. There had been too many times I had been tested before. I hated a world where we feel the need to constantly test each other.
I could feel emotion; they were physical things now, expanding within me like shaking a bottle of soda, my throat tightening, hands in my pockets balled tight into fists. My friend and I had nothing to say, the radio was quiet and I just looked out the passenger-side window. We traveled past the city limits, the buildings and houses gave way to cold fields, barbed-wire fences, and that was it. This was over. I would never see Lilo again. No matter what we told our new friends back there, chances were we would probably never come back to their town; the way that everything changes during another's absence, our lives just getting away from us. And she was going to get old and I was going to get old and neither one of us will never know what any of this could have been. I didn't know what else to do so I began to cry.
My elbow on the small ledge where the plastic door met the window's glass, my hand over my eyes, I started crying in a way that I hadn't done in years. I'm not even sure when the last time was but I must have been very young. Maybe when I was a kid but I don't remember even crying very much even then: memories of flying off motorbikes headfirst into thorny briars or falling off a bike and my knees skidding impossible distances over the pavement, hit by stray buckshot and blood and emergency room stitches everywhere, but no crying. It's been a long life and these spare memories, accidents and head-on collisions and the scars to show for it, they were the first steps down a winding path that led all the way to where I was at this moment, and the person I was crying about, and I started crying even harder.
"What the…" my friend said, in the driver's seat. "Hey."
I was no longer in control of myself, I hunched over and put my face in both my hands and I wasn't crying any more, but sobbing from a secret place that had bottled up successfully for thirty years. We never had any money when I was a kid. My dad used to get drunk and beat the shit out of me. I was molested by my next-door neighbor. I was always the smartest in my class and the most alienated because of it; a few years of not saying a word in school for fear of further repercussion. The sting of unrequited love that maybe never goes away, the candle that never quite goes out. Growing up and dropping out of college and disappointing my entire family. Having to work shit jobs for years that I knew were a waste of my talents. So many beautiful moments now bittersweet with hindsight. Not having the chance to say goodbye to so many people who were now gone. Her wild blonde hair and the funny way that she dressed and the way she cooed when I kissed her ear and the wrong phone number she intentionally wrote on a slip of paper. One tear for every time she touched me, every last lie told to me by anyone or told secretly to just myself, every last stab in the back.
I felt a hand. "It's all right. Hey, c'mon. It's all right." My friend.
"She's just a small-town whore…I mean…shit. I'm so sorry, Jay."
Maybe it was because of that or just a coincidence but at that second I felt like I was all cried out. I don't know how much time had passed but I pulled my head back up and could tell we were approaching the entrance to the freeway. I coughed, and wiped the last of the tears away from my face. "I'm sorry too," I said, and a small ahem. "I never meant for you to see me do that."
"That's all right," he said. "You're my friend. I'm there for you."
I thanked him and told him that of course I was there for him too. The car approached a Sonic and he decided to turn in. "Let me buy you a cherry limeade or somethin'. That sounds good, doesn't it?"
"Yeah, okay."
"Actually…what the fuck, you're the one who made a hundred damn dollars this weekend, dude. You should be the one buyin' me a limeade."
"Least I could do for you Sir, havin' to see me bawl like that."
"And you got some. Do I have to remind you? You totally got some. Actually you owe me two limeades."
"If I bought you two limeades you'd have to pull over to take a piss every ten minutes, Senor Prostate. I'd like to get home before midnight."
"What do you think those wide-mouth cups are for…"
"Heh," I say. "That'd probably be like spittin' in a cave."
"Ha ha," he says. "Bitch."
There's always way too much crushed ice in a Route 44 limeade from Sonic, which is the reason why they probably cost so little. All it took was about three pulls on the straw before that old familiar sound of sucking air. The silly-sounding whistle of scraping against the plastic lid and piercing through the layers of ice produces maybe a few more sips of more syrup than fizz, and then of course the maraschino cherry once you've had it with that business and just open up the plastic lid already. I've heard that if you tell them "no ice" you could end up drinking cherry limeade for hours, literally, that you would have enough well before the soda was actually gone, but every time I go to Sonic (which isn't often) I forget to tell them.
My friend comments on the carhop's ass and how he'd like a piece of it, and I remind him she's probably old enough to be your daughter, sex offender.
"You're the sex offender. Sex Offender."
But I am feeling better. I look away and see another billboard for the Precious Moments Chapel and I imagine what it must feel like to even get married at all: standing in a church in a tuxedo, my best man with the ring I bought from Zales or Tivol, or Tiffany's, the organ playing and my bride approaching in a white dress with a long train, the gravitas of that which is about to happen. How strange the whole thing seems, a ritual from another entire culture and as the years overlap and cross over the chances of it happening to me probably fade and diminish deeper into nothingness, nil. My buddy shouts at the carhop to come over here because he forgot to give her a tip. I smile because I have to smile. There's no other choice. I smile because I guess I must have been born under a peculiar star.
9.
To: chekovlk@mo.k12.us.edu
From: jasonouderkirk@gmail.com
Subject: Hi
Dear Lilo,
I just wanted to know if last Saturday actually happened.
Jason
I checked my inbox fifteen minutes later to see if the e-mail hadn't been returned as undeliverable and there were zero new messages. I check again five minutes later and there was one; a "Happy Holidays" e-mail from Netflix. They had decreased my monthly fee yet again. It was a very nice thing for them to do and I briefly considered paying an extra dollar more so I could maybe get four-at-a-time, unlimited, but I thought about how much time I'd have to spend just to sit around and watch movies in order to get my dollar's worth, and even though I have loads of free time I'm not sure if I have that much free time. I would like to have that much free time.
Refresh.
Refresh.
Inbox (1).
To: jasonouderkirk@gmail.com
From: chekovlk@mo.k12.us.edu
Subject: Re: Hi
Jason,
Yes it actually happened. Jason I enjoyed getting to know you but I can't do a long-distance thing. I tried it once before and it just didn't work. You would break my heart. But if you ever move to Springfield you should look me up!
XOXOXO
Katrina Chekov
PS: I'm sorry.
I stared at that message for a very long time and I decided that I would rather be homeless than ever move to Springfield and walked away from the computer.
Just me in Excelsior Springs with an ancient little dog. My Mom and Curt and Zoe decided to go to Cozumel for Christmas, in part to get away from Curt's annoying son from a previous marriage that nobody can stand and also to get away from the cold temperatures and frozen surfaces that are common in Missouri this time of year. They asked me to dog-sit poor old Ruff because they couldn't stand to have to put him up in some kennel, which by this point means very little other than taking him outside to go to the bathroom two or three times a day, feeding him a quarter of a can of moist Mighty Dog in the morning and a 1/2 cup of dry food at night. The rest of the time he simply lays in the living room and looks out the window and sleeps. Sometimes I have to look close to see if the dog is still breathing. And if their house burns down, try to save Zoe's birth certificate and medical information, if I can, and call the hotel. I don't mind doing any of this because I know that my family is happy.
It's enough for me. It doesn't matter; Christmas is just another arbitrary day and other than the need to get Zoe a present, I don't even think about it. I guess I just appreciate Winter for the sake of it being Winter, anymore, the staying inside and drinking hot chocolate and the way the world goes to sleep a little earlier because it gets dark around dinnertime. The way I feel now, there isn't any reason for me to follow a tradition that means nothing to me on a spiritual level just because that's what everyone else is doing. My old friend Paige is coming back into town for a few days, faithful and reliable Paige, and maybe her brother Joe too and that's enough of a Christmas present for me: maybe go eat Chinese, catch up on what's happened during the past year, giving them hugs and a peck on the cheek. Just getting to look at them again.
I've never been able to fully understand my connection to them but it isn't for me to understand; I'm just thankful for it. Even though I don't talk about it often I'm actually thankful for so many things. I like the way I've managed to grow comfortable in my own skin and not worry about what everybody else thinks. I like the guy my Mom married after Dad died, silly and good and honorable. I'm thankful for Zoe getting straight As in middle school this semester, growing up. All of us sitting around at dinner, passing the mashed potatoes, telling jokes. How I finally figured out what to do with all the extra hot dog buns, because you always run out of hot dogs before you run out of buns. The way I've managed to simplify my life and turn it into something peaceful and softly enjoyable.
The old dog lifts his head and looks up at me. I look back.
two of two
5. Where Have You Been
6. The Ghetto
7. Broken Compass
8. Going Home
9. Epilogue (Yule)
5.
The red Pontiac Grand Am that belonged to my friend was still sitting in front of Jeremy's house, leisurely gathering more frost on the windshield. There were several lights turned on in the house. I walked the concrete steps up to the front door and heard laughter and I wondered whether or not I should ring the doorbell. I stood there for a moment and watched my breath vapor and fade and listened to everyone's muffled voices; even from that it wasn't hard to tell that they were stoned. So I knocked as hard as I could, several times.
The outside light turned on and I saw Jeremy's anxious face peer through the small window in the door.
"Dude!" he said, opening the door. I smiled the kind of smile that somebody does when they've been out in the cold too long; the skin of my cheeks felt tight. "Wha...where the fuck have you been?"
I hadn't thought about it until just then, but I didn't know if I wanted to tell everyone the whole story. What happened this afternoon was certainly unusual. I wasn't embarrassed about it, but to just leave somebody's house with a strange woman, both of whom I literally had just met in no time at all and returning several hours later wasn't necessarily an expression of my best social graces. It was kind of rude, although as far as this place was concerned, etiquette probably couldn't be considered much of a factor: the place reeks of marijuana and there's empty beer bottles everywhere. So maybe I should just play it cool, and eccentric. But cool.
"Just out getting acquainted with the locals," I say, and take off my coat and throw it on a space of the couch that no one was using. Everyone was so wasted; hopefully that answer would be enough. My friend can ask me later on the way home or something and then I'd tell him. But just not now.
"Fuck yeah, finally we can play Monopoly," Edwin had the board set up on the coffee table and looked very much ready to start building houses and trading utilities. I had to laugh at the fact he must have set everything up hours ago, waiting for me apparently all day long to come back so we could get started. It's true, it's usually more entertaining at least with four people playing instead of three, even though I always lose. Not once have I ever won that game. I looked at my Kansas City friend and he was obliterated, the poor soul, eyes so red they looked like I could light a match just by holding one up against them. Which is weird, he doesn't do that, he's stayed away from it even longer than I. But I guess I'd probably be in the same bad way had I stayed here this afternoon. It was the kind of place where pot was impossible to get away from. I looked at the grandfather clock. Why do they have a grandfather clock? But the bong was still out and despite it being totally dark outside the night was still very young. "What piece do you wanna be? I'm the car. And Jeremy is the dog. And he's going to be the thimble."
Oh...then I guess the top hat, I say.
I sit next to my old friend on the floor and pat him on the back a couple of times. "What the fuck dude we got back from Taco Bell and you were just like...gone. And we were like..." So high he can't make eye contact because eye contact is too intense; or maybe it's me and my happiness surrounding me like an aura that he in his weak state-of-mind can let himself see. Maybe the thought of having to play Monopoly was too much - who knows how much he's had to smoke - all the Monopoly money to have to keep track of and the landing on somebody else's properties and having to pay them rent.
He brought it upon himself. He's so powerless and he's never like that and I couldn't help it, I had to mess with him a little. "So...let me get this right," I looked at him. "Someone could have broken in here, a crazy person like a wild crackhead or something." I kept looking at him. Melodramatic. "Or Bigfoot. Bigfoot coulda broke in and took me. You know he's out here, in the sticks. And held me for ransom. A ransom for crack, dawg. I might've been dead by now. And you just decided to get high? Did you look for me at all?"
"Well it's like...it's just that...shit, I don't know. Are you okay?"
I had to smile at that. "I'm fine, my friend," I said, and patted his back again. "Actually a lot better than fine."
"If I didn't know any better," Jeremy said, sitting down across from me. He didn't look as high as the other two. Not perfect but just not as disheveled. The sparkle still in his eye from earlier. "You really got acquainted with the locals."
I sat there a moment, not entirely sure what to say. How did he know? Jeremy and Edwin were waiting for my answer. My friend sat and stared at the carpeting, holding on to himself like he was bracing for the truth. So instead of trying to keep up a charade, I instead told them the whole story. It isn't often that I get the chance to hold people in rapt attention, telling a story exactly in the kind of pace I care to tell it. I told them about Lilo, not being overly graphic but her image still bright in my mind's eye. The ring of her voice still humming in my ears. They sat in position and stared at me, chuckling at the good parts and smiling at the sweeter parts, looking at one another from time to time to make sure they could all acknowledge that what I was saying was actually real. Jeremy had this look on his face like he was barely able to contain a huge gust of laughter welling up within but was timing himself to let it go at the right moment, some ideal sequence that might infect everyone else in the room with something similar. Edwin didn't stop watching me as he reached in his pocket and pulled out a cigarette, and lit, appearing more intense and actually serious than any other time I've yet seen in him.
"Other than that, I really don't know what else to say, you guys. I'm sorry for leaving without telling anyone." I said, slipping my hands in my pockets reflexively, and meaning it. They were good people, if just not entirely perfect, but nobody is. "I hope y'all ain't mad. It's just sort of hard for me to say no under those circumstances."
"Well I accept your apology, dood," Edwin said. "You seem like a good guy. And it sounds like it was a beautiful thing...and if I was in your shoes I'm sure I'd probably do the same thing. It's just...um..." He was sitting Indian style, like the Sioux I had tried to make peace with, and put an elbow on his knee, his hand cradling his chin. He turned to Jeremy and looked at him in hopes that he would help him out with what it looked like he had to say. This is Jeremy's house; he's the one who bought it. He's in charge.
"It's just that her name isn't Lilo," he said.
6.
Her name isn't Lilo, and Edwin was married even though he actually hadn't seen his wife in something like three years. She remains in northern Mexico, with their son and much of Edwin's family: his Mom, two Aunts and some of their children for Edwin's son to play with. Edwin lives and works in the United States illegally, wiring a Western Union money order to them on the first of the month, every month, sometimes mailing a big package (in Jeremy's name) of toys and other bric-a-brac he bought from the Dollar Store in town. He said he makes something like ten times the amount of money he was trying to make in Mexico, and I suppose I can't blame him. I'm getting older and there's some kind of natural inclination or pull to think more conservatively (maybe we should stick around in Iraq, maybe Big Government is a bad thing), history is still history. The only constant, everything will always change.
Her name isn't Lilo. The scene around me: this split-level ranch house, twenty and ten and even five years ago home to a yet-to-be-foreclosed-upon family, in a neighborhood once clean and vibrant before the railroads became what they were today and Highway 71 expanded, but too far away from the community itself to remain commercially viable, now a den of shady commerce and recreational drug use, and the changes that I've experienced even in my short lifetime rear their head, become that much more pronounced, far more lucid. No one knows what this country is about any longer, or truly cares. It's a crumbling Empire in an abrupt slide; in the confusion there's ultimately no reason why Edwin shouldn't pick up an instrument and join in withthe cacophony, doing his best for everyone back home that he gives a shit about.
I told him so. The mood shifted after I had told my story. The timbre of the group grew a lot more honest, our various dialogues more heartfelt. We played Monopoly. I lost. A somber Saturday night and the grandfather clock chiming away every hour and when it did, we would stop to listen. We all felt our age but unable to do much about it: Edwin at twenty-seven being the youngest, and all of them in some way to some extent, in slightly different combinations, recognized the pain in my heart. The bong was put away in the closet. I ate the two bean burritos Jeremy had bought for me and were waiting in the refrigerator, but the tortillas had hardened and the beans were too waxy. We were all drinking coffee now and reheated bean burritos won't ever complement coffee.
Her name isn't Lilo, and Edwin and his wife were married while they were very young at an age that would seem obscene to most people north of the border. They didn't have the kind of social luxury that most of us have up here of playing the field. Edwin got his girlfriend pregnant, they're Catholic, everyone is Catholic, they married two weeks later. A few years later and while Edwin knew that he didn't really like his wife, she had grown meaner over time like her mother before her, and took every opportunity to nag at him, but he still cared for her. He still had love in his heart to give but instead of the girl he used to meet on the outskirts of town after his family had went to sleep, that love over time had shifted to their one and only son. But he wasn't making enough money down there because there's never enough money down there, and he could see what his son's future would bring if everything was allowed to stay on its current trajectory. He's a pothead, and defiant of the laws of two countries, but he remains faithful to a very few certain concepts that are close to his foundation, on his own terms. This is why he has never slept with Lilo even though the opportunity, in his words, presented itself more than once.
I showed them the piece of paper that she had written her phone number and e-mail address. "The e-mail address looks like it might be legit," Jeremy said. "I don't know. I've never tried. The phone number isn't, though."
"Do you want her real phone number?"
I thought about it for a moment and, "No…I guess not," I said. "She obviously doesn't want me to have it anyway."
Her name isn't Lilo, it's actually Katrina although she normally goes by just Trina now because she grew weary of hearing joke after poorly-executed joke about hurricanes. Neither Edwin nor Jeremy really confess to know much about her, even though they see her around town all the time, sometimes at the Whistlestop Café when it's actually open, or the donut shop whatever the donut shop is actually called other than the "donut shop", or sometimes at the Dew Drop Inn playing pool, the tiny supermarket or the Taco Bell-slash-KFC, she doesn't like to talk much about herself and her life. But she does actually teach the first grade at the local elementary school. Jeremy has fucked her a few times, his words, and the pain in the pit of my chest and I wish he wouldn't say it like that, fuck, too mechanical and casual even though I'm sure that's probably what it was, even though he has been in a serious relationship for the past year with a woman who worked with him at the old mortgage company. Even though the last time he and Katrina slept together was only two weeks ago.
He thinks maybe his other roommate has been with her a couple of times, too, but isn't sure.
"Where is your other roommate, anyway? Ty, was it?" I said.
"He's still in his room asleep I guess," Jeremy said.
"Oh."
Her name isn't Lilo and in a perverse way this was the moment I had been waiting for, that chink in Jeremy's charismatic armor that neither funny looks nor sly words could obscure. It isn't just Katrina, he admits. Of course his girlfriend isn't aware of his infidelities because she lives an hour away, in Springfield. He doesn't mean to hurt her but he only gets to see her every so often and it's hard to say no when women are coming over to your house with every intention of just borrowing you for awhile. And of course she wouldn't understand. His Achilles heel is starting to hurt, wit replaced with empty rationalizations, it's only excuses now and it's obvious he doesn't want to upset me. But I'm not mad at him and in this sense I'm not even mad at Trina or Katrina. Over time and practice I've learned to see through the dark thundercloud of pain and simply be realistic: why expect her to be chaste and wait for me when she's been alive and absolutely unaware of my existence for over a quarter-century.
Jeremy echoes what's running through my mind. "You know how it is yourself, living in a small town. Not much else to do other than get drunk and fuck."
"Get drunk and fuck man yeaaaah," says Edwin, just about out of nowhere. In hopes of helping everything along, I suppose.
Her name isn't Lilo, and I want to tell them no, that's not true. You only want to think that's true. There's more to do in a small town than any one of us could hope to ever accomplish. If you wanted to you can do volunteer work to try to help out all the poor people around here. You can go to the library and read all the classics that you've always heard about, because they're all just waiting there, collecting dust. There's the quiet to appreciate and meditate on. You can explore the countryside and discover all sorts of interesting things that you never knew were there. There are friendships to make, and preserve, and grow. And the only reason this place is a ghetto is because all of you have decided to make sure it stays one.
Instead I don't, I acknowledge that I appreciated Edwin's outburst with one weak smile and say to the rest of them, yeah, I do know how it is.
7.
Almost one o'clock in the morning I think before I attained a state of restless sleep on an afterthought couch in Jeremy's converted basement. My head resting on a tacky throw pillow, the kind found at places like the Salvation Army with all the tassels; my own coat employed as a makeshift blanket.
I had a dream where I was wandering through a subconscious landscape, a tableau of different locales I had been in real life and some I had never been, minding my own business when suddenly I realized that a group of people were coming after me. They had no names, no faces. I couldn't make out what they were saying but I knew they were angry at me, about something. Because I was guilty of whatever this was, I ran through the parking lot of a strip mall that bled into a cornfield that bled into the desert with an awful feeling that no matter how fast I can run, the crowd was still gaining on me, my legs would soon grow tired and no matter how life-threatening this situation was I would have to stop. There would soon be no other choice.
As if that were a cue my legs began hardening like plaster of Paris and I felt their hands and their hot breath on the nape of my neck, me being lifted and that's when I saw the cliff that plunged down to an impossible depth, into the sea. They threw me overboard as a sacrifice; I knew the undefeatable pull of gravity and the rush of blood in my head as I tumbled upside down, my hands grabbing the air like driving down the road with the windows open, making hand kites. The sea was approaching swiftly and I wondered if maybe I could survive if I could just position my body in such a way, to pierce the surface of the water using my hands over my head like a prayer. And at this point, it was, and I didn't have any idea whether or not I would even succeed at such a distance and speed, the proximity of where I would land in the water, my lack of experience with falling off cliffs.
That's when I woke up with a lurch, and yelled, but I don't think too loud. I rubbed my eyes and it took me a moment to realize I wasn't back at home. I sat up with my knees on the couch and my fingers entwined. My back hurt in stages and plateaus, my head throbbed in a measured beat of dull and hollow and empty pain.
Maybe I'm not frightened of commitment and I never was. The puzzle inside my heart of figuring out why that I had been busy trying to solve for years, after long last, it could just be a matter instead of not needing to know the answer, but simply to understand the question in itself. Without even knowing: I had long ago crossed over to a point in my life where I needed to find someone I could really be able to relate to. The immediate future was a thing of which I was no longer concerned. At the age of thirty-one, it assumed the scope instead of the entire rest of my life. With anyone else, despite how cute and sweet they were and no matter how well we might get along, the loneliness I'd inevitably feel would be so much more so, somehow, than what it would be like to live the remainder of my days alone. Every time I never returned a phone call, or told somebody "we have to talk," I had inadvertently chosen the lesser of two evils.
In its premise it sounds selfish but I was probably doing it for the other person's sake, too. Even though I've ignored it, the belief there is that one true love for everyone out there - their soul mate - still remained within me, far beneath the exterior. I tow the line that doesn't care if I end up hurting somebody in the short term but still caring enough to want them to one day find the one that truly is for them, and not to end up saddled to someone who isn't. Of all my numerous sins that would be the biggest and worst of them all, condemning someone to a life of falling asleep every night next to a man who isn't entirely in love with them, only because I didn't think I was strong enough any longer to face the world by myself and keep looking.
I could hear someone moving around, upstairs.
I was in a basement of some guy's house I still didn't know very well and these revelations didn't necessarily make me feel any better. The pang of knowing how long it's been since I had started my search, the crux of what it costs to be me, my heart a compass without a True North, the alchemists searching in vain for the Philosopher's Stone and the conquistadores of yore perishing in lonesome lands in hopes of finding El Dorado. Years after years of wandering through North America, all the sights I've seen and the things I've done, a cold couch far from home and heading very much to nowhere.
The middle of the night and the lack of depth perception but I felt I could relate to Katrina, or Trina, even still. I knew what it felt like for her, struggling against the bleakness of existence and failing sometimes: to wake in the morning and to need to smoke a cigarette or two cigarettes before being able to do anything else, even getting out of bed. I knew how it felt to watch the weatherman on television say how beautiful of a day it was going to be, you should take your non-existent family to the air show, or it's good picnic weather and there's nobody you know that you want to go on a picnic with, so you choose to stay in the apartment instead, all day long, not doing anything, making a mess, growing more sick. Clean clothes scattered all over the living room because what difference does it really make if they're set on hangers in the closet, why put on any airs about it when all the time the only one that's ever here, is you. Eventually they'll be worn, they'll only just get dirty again, the passage of time slipping away and soon enough they'll go out of style and then they're headed to Goodwill. I knew what Saturday at noon felt like when there are no appointments or social engagements of any kind, you think about what it is you're going to do today and decide that all you really want is to just borrow/rent someone for awhile because the ashtray is getting full and the silence assumes a different and sinister sound of its own and you need something that convinces yourself that you're still human, that you're still capable of feeling. Katrina or Trina told me the truth without telling me the truth, she lied without lying; a tightrope she had learned how to balance upon over time and trial and error and I was amazed and impressed and angry and ultimately just too fucking sad to know that someone else out there had actually managed to figure it out.
Pangs of regret and of wanting her near me; like being withdrawn from an addicting drug, invading my consciousness. Just one more time, that's all. Then I know I can move on.
It was Sunday morning now, officially; the first light growing stronger with minute increments through the frosted-over glass of the basement door. Her name wasn't Lilo and I programmed my mind to try and get at least a couple hours' more sleep.
I was certain no one in this house was planning on waking up early today.
8.
The way straight men give each other hugs, if you didn't know already: a sense that it's important in some way to establish camaraderie with the other guy, to the point of affection - although we try not to think about it like that - and that moment of truth when we say to ourselves sure it's kind of gay but what the hell. I'm man enough. A quick impact and a couple of hearty slaps on the other's back, a grunt maybe, and then away from each other just as fast.
Bolstered and pleasantly surprised by Jeremy presenting me, at the very end, with five brand new twenty-dollar bills.
"You might want to make sure the ink's dry on those," my Kansas City friend said, who wasn't tired or stoned anymore, expecting laughter and receiving it.
"I don't do that anymore!" Jeremy said, wild-eyed. "They didn't have enough proof to put me away!"
"You can't handle the proof." Edwin.
"Wow, uh…c'mon," I said, just a good-ol'-boy. "I really ain't worth that much, now..."
"Nonsense. I never would have been able to figure that shit out." Jeremy said, although I'm sure he probably could have. But I'm a hundred dollars richer now and if he said he couldn't figure it out then I should just accept that. But had I known maybe I should have configured their Outlook while I was here, and maybe de-fragmented the hard drives. Oh well. "Now, this week," he said, clasping his hands together. "This week I can really focus on getting this thing off the ground."
Not really goodbye but just see you later. We had made new friends, new contacts. Plans were being made, we were adventurers again, maybe foolish and quixotic but hey, we're going to try and in the end that's the important thing. I say I know some people up in Kansas City he might want to talk to: so e-mail me here in a couple of days whenever there's time. We'll play it by ear. We'll talk about getting a website done and get the ball rolling because yeah, from how you're talkin' this could really work out and be a really good thing. We're sages, we know things that the rest of the world doesn't know yet, and we nod our heads. Smiling all over the place. He would give me a business card but he hasn't made it down to Kinko's-Fed Ex yet. Maybe he'll go down to Springfield and do that today before he sees Melissa.
It felt weird sitting in a car again. The way the cold weather can make a cheap car seem cheaper, the plastic of the dashboard more brittle in below-freezing temperatures. I put on my seatbelt even though he tells me that he doesn't care if I put on the seatbelt, but it's just reflex for me now. I think about how I always used to say that I'd never wear a seatbelt, and I hated that feeling of being strangled, and I wasn't gonna listen to the Man. The memory of Katrina or Trina or Lilo and how she had borrowed that name from some stupid animated Disney movie but pronounced it "Lie-Low" instead. Lie low. And I was stupid enough to be so distracted that I didn't even realize any of this until just right now.
We drive past the street she lives on; I saw her house, a glance at her red Cavalier sitting in the driveway and I wondered what she was doing, whether or not she was up yet. And if so, what she was thinking, if she was thinking about me. Maybe she was blaming herself for another stupid mistake she had made. She should have told me her real name and given me her real number, or maybe it was even for talking to me in the first place. Maybe she wasn't thinking about me in any capacity; maybe she was that kind of person after all. Maybe her feint was in actuality some sort of test in order to establish my worth, and if I try the e-mail address that she had written for me it would be the real thing. That's how she would know I was really interested in her. I didn't want to be tested. There had been too many times I had been tested before. I hated a world where we feel the need to constantly test each other.
I could feel emotion; they were physical things now, expanding within me like shaking a bottle of soda, my throat tightening, hands in my pockets balled tight into fists. My friend and I had nothing to say, the radio was quiet and I just looked out the passenger-side window. We traveled past the city limits, the buildings and houses gave way to cold fields, barbed-wire fences, and that was it. This was over. I would never see Lilo again. No matter what we told our new friends back there, chances were we would probably never come back to their town; the way that everything changes during another's absence, our lives just getting away from us. And she was going to get old and I was going to get old and neither one of us will never know what any of this could have been. I didn't know what else to do so I began to cry.
My elbow on the small ledge where the plastic door met the window's glass, my hand over my eyes, I started crying in a way that I hadn't done in years. I'm not even sure when the last time was but I must have been very young. Maybe when I was a kid but I don't remember even crying very much even then: memories of flying off motorbikes headfirst into thorny briars or falling off a bike and my knees skidding impossible distances over the pavement, hit by stray buckshot and blood and emergency room stitches everywhere, but no crying. It's been a long life and these spare memories, accidents and head-on collisions and the scars to show for it, they were the first steps down a winding path that led all the way to where I was at this moment, and the person I was crying about, and I started crying even harder.
"What the…" my friend said, in the driver's seat. "Hey."
I was no longer in control of myself, I hunched over and put my face in both my hands and I wasn't crying any more, but sobbing from a secret place that had bottled up successfully for thirty years. We never had any money when I was a kid. My dad used to get drunk and beat the shit out of me. I was molested by my next-door neighbor. I was always the smartest in my class and the most alienated because of it; a few years of not saying a word in school for fear of further repercussion. The sting of unrequited love that maybe never goes away, the candle that never quite goes out. Growing up and dropping out of college and disappointing my entire family. Having to work shit jobs for years that I knew were a waste of my talents. So many beautiful moments now bittersweet with hindsight. Not having the chance to say goodbye to so many people who were now gone. Her wild blonde hair and the funny way that she dressed and the way she cooed when I kissed her ear and the wrong phone number she intentionally wrote on a slip of paper. One tear for every time she touched me, every last lie told to me by anyone or told secretly to just myself, every last stab in the back.
I felt a hand. "It's all right. Hey, c'mon. It's all right." My friend.
"She's just a small-town whore…I mean…shit. I'm so sorry, Jay."
Maybe it was because of that or just a coincidence but at that second I felt like I was all cried out. I don't know how much time had passed but I pulled my head back up and could tell we were approaching the entrance to the freeway. I coughed, and wiped the last of the tears away from my face. "I'm sorry too," I said, and a small ahem. "I never meant for you to see me do that."
"That's all right," he said. "You're my friend. I'm there for you."
I thanked him and told him that of course I was there for him too. The car approached a Sonic and he decided to turn in. "Let me buy you a cherry limeade or somethin'. That sounds good, doesn't it?"
"Yeah, okay."
"Actually…what the fuck, you're the one who made a hundred damn dollars this weekend, dude. You should be the one buyin' me a limeade."
"Least I could do for you Sir, havin' to see me bawl like that."
"And you got some. Do I have to remind you? You totally got some. Actually you owe me two limeades."
"If I bought you two limeades you'd have to pull over to take a piss every ten minutes, Senor Prostate. I'd like to get home before midnight."
"What do you think those wide-mouth cups are for…"
"Heh," I say. "That'd probably be like spittin' in a cave."
"Ha ha," he says. "Bitch."
There's always way too much crushed ice in a Route 44 limeade from Sonic, which is the reason why they probably cost so little. All it took was about three pulls on the straw before that old familiar sound of sucking air. The silly-sounding whistle of scraping against the plastic lid and piercing through the layers of ice produces maybe a few more sips of more syrup than fizz, and then of course the maraschino cherry once you've had it with that business and just open up the plastic lid already. I've heard that if you tell them "no ice" you could end up drinking cherry limeade for hours, literally, that you would have enough well before the soda was actually gone, but every time I go to Sonic (which isn't often) I forget to tell them.
My friend comments on the carhop's ass and how he'd like a piece of it, and I remind him she's probably old enough to be your daughter, sex offender.
"You're the sex offender. Sex Offender."
But I am feeling better. I look away and see another billboard for the Precious Moments Chapel and I imagine what it must feel like to even get married at all: standing in a church in a tuxedo, my best man with the ring I bought from Zales or Tivol, or Tiffany's, the organ playing and my bride approaching in a white dress with a long train, the gravitas of that which is about to happen. How strange the whole thing seems, a ritual from another entire culture and as the years overlap and cross over the chances of it happening to me probably fade and diminish deeper into nothingness, nil. My buddy shouts at the carhop to come over here because he forgot to give her a tip. I smile because I have to smile. There's no other choice. I smile because I guess I must have been born under a peculiar star.
9.
To: chekovlk@mo.k12.us.edu
From: jasonouderkirk@gmail.com
Subject: Hi
Dear Lilo,
I just wanted to know if last Saturday actually happened.
Jason
I checked my inbox fifteen minutes later to see if the e-mail hadn't been returned as undeliverable and there were zero new messages. I check again five minutes later and there was one; a "Happy Holidays" e-mail from Netflix. They had decreased my monthly fee yet again. It was a very nice thing for them to do and I briefly considered paying an extra dollar more so I could maybe get four-at-a-time, unlimited, but I thought about how much time I'd have to spend just to sit around and watch movies in order to get my dollar's worth, and even though I have loads of free time I'm not sure if I have that much free time. I would like to have that much free time.
Refresh.
Refresh.
Inbox (1).
To: jasonouderkirk@gmail.com
From: chekovlk@mo.k12.us.edu
Subject: Re: Hi
Jason,
Yes it actually happened. Jason I enjoyed getting to know you but I can't do a long-distance thing. I tried it once before and it just didn't work. You would break my heart. But if you ever move to Springfield you should look me up!
XOXOXO
Katrina Chekov
PS: I'm sorry.
I stared at that message for a very long time and I decided that I would rather be homeless than ever move to Springfield and walked away from the computer.
Just me in Excelsior Springs with an ancient little dog. My Mom and Curt and Zoe decided to go to Cozumel for Christmas, in part to get away from Curt's annoying son from a previous marriage that nobody can stand and also to get away from the cold temperatures and frozen surfaces that are common in Missouri this time of year. They asked me to dog-sit poor old Ruff because they couldn't stand to have to put him up in some kennel, which by this point means very little other than taking him outside to go to the bathroom two or three times a day, feeding him a quarter of a can of moist Mighty Dog in the morning and a 1/2 cup of dry food at night. The rest of the time he simply lays in the living room and looks out the window and sleeps. Sometimes I have to look close to see if the dog is still breathing. And if their house burns down, try to save Zoe's birth certificate and medical information, if I can, and call the hotel. I don't mind doing any of this because I know that my family is happy.
It's enough for me. It doesn't matter; Christmas is just another arbitrary day and other than the need to get Zoe a present, I don't even think about it. I guess I just appreciate Winter for the sake of it being Winter, anymore, the staying inside and drinking hot chocolate and the way the world goes to sleep a little earlier because it gets dark around dinnertime. The way I feel now, there isn't any reason for me to follow a tradition that means nothing to me on a spiritual level just because that's what everyone else is doing. My old friend Paige is coming back into town for a few days, faithful and reliable Paige, and maybe her brother Joe too and that's enough of a Christmas present for me: maybe go eat Chinese, catch up on what's happened during the past year, giving them hugs and a peck on the cheek. Just getting to look at them again.
I've never been able to fully understand my connection to them but it isn't for me to understand; I'm just thankful for it. Even though I don't talk about it often I'm actually thankful for so many things. I like the way I've managed to grow comfortable in my own skin and not worry about what everybody else thinks. I like the guy my Mom married after Dad died, silly and good and honorable. I'm thankful for Zoe getting straight As in middle school this semester, growing up. All of us sitting around at dinner, passing the mashed potatoes, telling jokes. How I finally figured out what to do with all the extra hot dog buns, because you always run out of hot dogs before you run out of buns. The way I've managed to simplify my life and turn it into something peaceful and softly enjoyable.
The old dog lifts his head and looks up at me. I look back.