Emma was crying sexy tears like a she was hobbyist thespian.
They made her look hot the way real tears make you look ugly.
She stood in the streetlit summer night trembling in my arms with her hard nipples pressing into my chest—all the way to my heart. And the way her slanted tearful eyes looked so tantalizing and nubile, I don’t know. I fell for all of it.
I wiped the dewdrops from her cheek. “It won’t be that long, Em. We’ll talk every day,” I said. Kissed her.
The image of her face beaming down at me from the bleacher seats the day before at graduation still burned in the backs of my eyelids. Her pride. Her eyes lighting up deep brown when they met mine. Her thick black hair falling straighter than threads on a loom.
I didn’t notice how she was up there all alone. One semester behind.
Now she looked at me with her eyes all full of love and tears. And I thought I had nothing to worry about.
She loves me, she’s loves me, she loves me, I thought.
Even though those tiny fuck-me tears signified the opening of a rift. That things wouldn’t be the same anymore.
The summer.
The fifteen hour drive.
I looked at her one last time. While things were still the way they were. Never thinking she’d forget about me.
And then she left. And we did talk everyday, just like I promised.
I love you, I miss you, I wish I could be with you, etc.
Then she came back to Portlad for a quick visit after a month or so and we fucked all the talking out of each other. It was probably the best time I ever spent with her. But we fucked all the love out of our hearts in five days.
Without obligations. Without cause for independence. With only each other. Something wasn’t enough. Fucking and talking and pretending to be in love wasn’t enough.
In five days, the only time Emma and I were apart was one morning when we had nothing but whole coffee beans left and no coffee grinder. I tried to use two metal bowls to smash them up but it wasn’t working. I had achieved a pile of small cacao nibs out of sweaty effort. So I had to run to the store down the road for grounds. And we were apart for ten minutes.
Other than that, we did nothing but fuck and talk and go out to eat.
We fucked thirty-nine times.
Then she flew home.
And I was lonely again. And I didn’t know what to do with the big empty space my heart that cleared out for her. It was a black hole that sucked and sucked with an unquenchable thirst. It sucked me down to my couch. It sucked up cigarettes and weedsmoke and beer and blue adderall powder. White oxy’s. Sucked the sadness out of Hank Williams yodel, Neil Young’s androgynous whine. It sucked up all of Amy Winehouse’s boozy tears. The phlegm out of Tom Wait’s throat. It sucked every sorrow and soporifc in the world and nothing could fill it back up.
And she roasted me for sending her songs which I felt described the emptiness in my heart. She said they were lame and I was being lame.
Then she said she didn’t see why we had to talk everyday.
It became a point of contention between us.
I didn’t think it was weird at all to want to talk to my girlfriend.
She didn’t have that much she wanted to say to me.
. . .
Out on the back porch of the Cat’s Paw in Portland my friend Reed and I drank tall Rainiers and well whiskeys. Reed smoked. I was disconsolate. I filled him in about the shit with Emma.
“Emma’s a fucking assasin, bro,” Reed said, “lose her. There are way hotter chicks in Portland anyway.”
I shook my head. “I dunno, man. Emma’s fucking cool. We fit so well together. We’re in love.”
“Something’s not right about her, man. She’s got a weird vibe.”
He thought she was cheating on me. Which she probably was. Given that he thought so because her friends had done everything but tell him in absolute and condemning terms that that’s what she was doing.
We finished our drinks and got some more. The bartenders poured stiff shots. Right to the rim so you couldn’t walk away. You had to go down like a hummingbird. We idolized them. Big burly guys with beards and tattoos. Who made us feel so special each time they poured us a shot. Like we’d done something to deserve the extra half ounce.
They were playing Pavement or The Replacements or Dinosaur Jr. or something like that over the speakers. And I was into it. It fit my mood. I watched blue smoke curl under the red heat lamps and listened to the nasal wails and crying guitars. And I thought about how in two weeks I would be with Emma again.
“Yo this bar’s dead, man, let’s go see what’s going on at Joey’s spot.”
“Yeah, I’m cool with that,” I said, and slugged my beer and let loose a gaggy pantomimed burp. “Lemme just close out real quick.”’
. . .
Reed drove his busted old—“snaggletoothed darling”—Toyota pickup, Ruby, and smoked cigarettes and wore these goofy sunglasses that looked like goggles. He always wore them when he drove. Even, like now, when it was nighttime and he could hardly see. He’d just buzzed his hair and he looked like he was right out of Trainspotting.
Reed told me about his dads buddy in LA who chopped the top of his El Camino and drove around wearing a full wetsuit and scuba goggles whenever it rained.
It was a hilarious image. But it made me sad. Reminded me of Emma. The way the roof came off my life without her.
We blazed down division. Crossed the Burnside bridge. Cut up into the Pearl to my friends place by the fire station.
When we got up the stairs into their duplex the four of them were all huddled in a circle around a coffee table, the lusty amber throat of a bottle of Bulleit Rye peaking over their shoulders.
Joey didn’t turn to look at us. He remained there on his knees bent over the table. Said “you guys better have some fucking money if you’re gonna want any of this.” Then he did turn and exposed the big bag of cocaine and cut lines and rolled bills and such which covered the table in a classic scene.
“Oh yeah, I got some money,” I said.
We dug into the bag for an hour or so, until we ran out of whiskey, and had to go across the street to Paymasters, the local dive. Two dollar Rainier drafts. Massive smoking porch. It was like heaven there. The bathrooms had nice wide flat countertops too.
Reed and I went straight into the bathroom while the other guys were ordering drinks.
Every fifteen minutes or so Joey would give me this murderous wide-eyed look, like a drill sergeant, and say bathroom. Nothing else. We’d all four of us go pack into a bathroom and do a bump. Walk out casually past amused patrons waiting to use the bathroom for its intended purposes and not as a cocaine booth.
We talked about all the insane, stupid, emotional bullshit people talk about when they get wasted and do a whole bunch of blow.
At one point Joey had me gripped by the shoulders. Seemed close to tears. “I love you brother,” he said, “but I gotta tell you what I think about Emma. She’s cute and cool and all, I get it, dude. I get it. Trust me, I really get it. You know I do. But what I’m telling you is she’s no good. She’s got ice in her veins. You’re too nice for her.” My other friends, Reed and Apollo, nodded solemnly behind him, their arms crossed and their heads cocked sideways, and grunted approval.
“I dunno man. I love her. She’s cool.”
He threw his hands in the air. “Alright well FUCK! Do whatever the fuck you want, man! I was just…I want to look out for you because you’re my fucking brother and I fucking love you!”
Apollo had him right away and whispered in his ear, “hey, hey, hey, man, it’s all good, chill out bro.”
“You’re right, you’re right, you’re right, you’re right, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Joey said. He was still kind of shouting.
He looked at me hard and deadly.
“Bathroom.”
We kept at it like that until it was last call, and the bartenders started blasting ACDC or something like that. We fucking loved it.
We had to dance.
Already we’d been wearing sunglasses. When the music turned up we took off our shirts and started dancing on the pool tables out on the porch, smoking cigarettes with our sunglasses on. Poolstick rodeo. The bartenders were pissed off. They 86’d us. Banned us for the whole fucking week.
The rest of the night was classic. We went back to Joey’s shitfaced and gakked out of our skulls. Didn’t have any more blow or any more liquor. So Apollo drove twenty five minutes to Beaverton to his super sketchy dealer, Ninja, who we had begged to bring a bottle with him. It was too late to go to the liquor store. We met in a parking lot and he gave us fucking vodka, and charged us each a hundred bucks a gram. We thought it was bullshit but we were already there so we didn’t have a choice.
Then we went back to Joey’s and drank the disgusting vodka and smoked spliffs and snorted our cocaine until we didn’t have any left and the sun was back in the sky. And we tried to go back to Paymaster’s for “breakfast” and to see if there were new bartenders. There were. But they had been informed of our behavior and we were not allowed in. And we couldn’t go to the other good bar nearby, Yur’s, which I thought had actual breakfast because I guess Joey had been 86’d there too the week before for shouting at a bartender after they’d declined to serve him another drink.
We wandered the streets angrily fixed at seven in the morning for probably an hour before we decided to give up on whatever we were doing and go back to smoke weed until we could fall asleep.
We sat on the roof of Joey’s duplex and smoked huge spliffs and dranks beers and watched the fire trucks come and go across the street under the hazy orange sun.
It was just another night for me to fill up my time and thoughts until I got to see Emma again.
But when I think about it now, I think it could have been one of the best nights of my life.
I remember watching the sky over the Willamette turn a dirty pinkish yellow.
The clouds looked just like peacocks with great wispy plumes. They stood up and started moving. Pecking. Like I was.
I watched them strut around aimlessly.
They looked at me and something about the way they looked made me know that they were only clouds. That I gave them life in my head and that was it. That they didn’t exist.
There were all these things that were only real inside my head.
I looked at Joey to tell him about the peacocks and was blown away by the colorful, abstract designs on his shirt.
“Your shirts sick,” I said.
“My shirts white,” he said.
“I think you did too much blow. You should smoke some more pot, man.”