Pink Socks
I signed the lease for the apartment above my favorite bar. Pencil on legal pad.
Got the key. Went inside. Opened Tinder.
I looked around at what I thought would be the battlegrounds of my sexual redemption. Where I would be reborn. Rise up from the ashes of my heartbreak.
Everything would be moved inside and organized in order to fit this ultimate vision of me bringing girls there. So that I could find someone exactly like Emma but prettier and cooler and nicer to me.
The next day, I was lying around with all the windows open trying to find a girl to come over. And then an innocent little breeze swirled in. It didn’t mean me any harm. It was actually kind of beautiful the way it ruffled the curtains and stirred the pages of the books on my coffee table. But it carried something ominous with it. A sound that I thought must not be real.
I ran for the window, and I saw to my horror that it was in fact real. My ex-girlfriend was sitting outside. I was hearing her laugh.
She was there the next day too.
And then the day after that.
She’d only been to The Muddy Rudder for a drink one time before. The first time she told me she loved me. And she told me she didn’t like it very much then. My choice.
Now it was hers.
I lived upstairs and she liked to drink downstairs.
Weeks went on and she kept coming by. Not every day but often. And always outside. So that when the windows were open I could hear her laugh floating into the house like a birdsong coming out of the trees. And I would wonder if I was imagining things.
It got to be that I would close the windows in an attempt to shelter myself. And then I would fear that I wouldn’t know if she’d come and gone already if they were closed.
So I always kept the windows open.
Sometimes I could hear her laugh and she wouldn’t be there. Other times, there she was under my kitchen window.
Sometimes she was with a friend. Or with a guy. Or sometimes she would call up to me to have a drink with her so we could fuck afterwards.
It made me want to go hide somewhere I couldn’t be found.
Emma and I were ritually broken up as of about one week before I moved in. We still talked and fucked pretty much just like we weren’t broken up. A slow transition. Except she really did intend to be done with me. She was playing with me and she liked to rub it in my face.
I was helpless. I was heartbroken. She could have me any time she wanted me.
That’s how my fantasy apartment turned into the heartbreak version of a Saw trap.
. . .
I laid in my bay window with all the windows in the place open and I watched this big black bumblebee flying around. I pretended to study the arcs of his flight. And waited to hear her laugh in the trees.
The bee flew around in wide arcs above me.
“Parabola,” I said.
I held an empty can above my head and patiently let him fall into the trap. He did. He came over like a big bomber and landed on the rim of the can.
I took a long drag and filled my mouth with spliff smoke. I remained as still as I could. Then I blew a big mouthful all over the bee.
“You’re fucked,” I whispered.
He didn’t move so I did it again. And again.
Then I think he didn’t like it so he got up and flew away.
I watched him fly so I could see if it had worked.
And then I didn’t want to look anymore. I felt guilty. Suddenly, I understood that little bumblebee. Like me, he could only idle under the illusion of safety and control. Like me he had this crazy foolish faith. That he could fly and live again. That there wasn’t somebody ready to destroy him at any moment.
My phone buzzed and I saw Emma’s name.
U free latr?
I responded immediately.
Yeah, I’m free.
She wanted to fuck. She already knew I was free. I was always at my apartment.
The only place I ever went after Emma had dumped me and started to emotionally torture me was to my job cooking at this cafe a little ways across the Willamette. I’d ride my friend Peter’s 25cc baby blue scooter, the Buddy, in the rain every day with the brakes hardly working and the wheels about to fall off. This was a vehicle which could only be ridden in total desperation. I’d be getting honked at the whole way going ten miles an hour under the speed limit hanging on for dear life in the ruts on Macadam. I thought it was great. A lot of days riding the Buddy to work was the best part of my whole day.
The job itself was pretty okay. We mostly just had to make avocado toast and it still paid seventeen bucks an hour. I tried my best to make it work out. I really did. But I couldn’t handle the monotony. The intensity my meth head friend, Leonard—who got me the job in the first place—and the coke-addicted manager, Spenser, brought into the environment. I was sad and lonesome and they kept trying to fight me every time something went slightly wrong with the avocados or the toast.
One time, it was like eight in the morning on a Sunday and I was the third guy in so I was just showing up. My tweaker compatriots had already been there for an hour or two getting fucked up on their respective stimulants of preference.
When I came in there was a pretty big rush going on.
Everything in the kitchen was in complete disarray.
“Check out the new system,” Leonard said from the line.
I looked around in horror. At the bubbling contents of the steam table, which was cranked to high. At the scrubbed and bleach-stinking cast iron panini press. The senselessly reorganized shelves and racks everywhere. I was too afraid to look in the fridges.
The guys were both scurrying around like tester mice making avocado toasts and things like that but they were acting like they were on Hell’s Kitchen and they were real fucking chefs.
Spenser, my manager, was fully in the zone. He was hunched over a thick slab of toast. Knees slightly bent. Wrists cocked. Forehead dripping sweat directly onto the toast. He lifted a hand over his shoulder like a crack-presenting mechanic requesting a tool. Said, “avocado.”
I said, “scalpel.”
He shouted, “avocado!” And I realized that he was talking to me.
Fuck that, I thought. Go get your own fucking avocado. I haven’t even clocked in yet.
“Get me a fucking avocado! Now!”
He thought he was Gordan Ramsay because he went to culinary school. I hated when he went Michelin in the cafe like that.
But I still went back to grab the thing.
Only I couldn’t find any avocados anywhere. On account of those two tweakers having rearranged the entire back of house in the one hour before I arrived.
I searched around tables and under counters in the back and in boxes and baskets and tubs and in fridges. But I couldn’t find any avocados.
I pulled out a step ladder and looked on top of the fridges. No avocados. Checked inside, under, behind the ovens. Still no avocados.
I dragged aside the dry good shelf and checked under the stairs. Under the office desk. Behind the Guatemalan prep cooks’ beer stash. In the safe. There were no avocados.
After a few minutes Spenser came back with his face looking like a big veiny red balloon.
“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!?”
I laughed. He looked like a humongous baby in basketball shorts. Like the giant disgusting talking baby in Spirited Away. He was bald. And I wondered if Emma’s bald fetish (which had haunted me since she told me about it) was so bad that she’d still want to fuck a guy this dumb and ugly just because he was bald.
“Dog, I’m just looking for avocados like you fucking asked me to do,” I said.
“What did you say to me?” he said. Quieter now, colder.
“I said I’m doing what you fucking asked me to do. I can’t find the avocados because you bastards hid them somewhere.”
He turned into a statue, a cherubish gargoyle frozen in time with this stupid furious look on his face.
Finally he said, “you cannot speak to me like that. I am your chef.” He was white like the cocaine that fueled his rage.
“Spenser. We make avocado toast and you do coke at work everyday and try to get me to do it with you. Forgive me if I speak too casually.”
“It’s not casual. It’s fucking disrespect. We need to talk outside. Now.”
I just looked at him. I thought it was bullshit. Everything about that place was bullshit.
“NOW!” he shouted. He pointed over my shoulder at the door.
I was pissed off and turned too fast, and bumped right into Leonard’s meth inflated chest.
He immediately shoved me into one of the fridges.
“Back the fuck off, bro! Don’t you ever fucking touch me! I’ll fucking kill you bitch!”
Genuinely startled, I looked up into his addled face. And saw little of Leonard left, of Leonard who had been a good friend to me the past four years, of Leonard who had been debate captain and class senator and who had introduced me to Thomas Pynchon and Yaeji. I only saw the amphetamine fever. The perimeters of his eyeballs. Real hatred. And I saw myself reflected in his red-rimmed bloodshot eyes. The frightened look on my face. And I saw myself for the shit friend that I was. We all thought it was dumb and funny when he’d started smoking that shit. I had laughed. And now he was a meth fiend.
I walked outside without saying anything and got on the Buddy. Rode home against the wind.
I got home and laid down on the couch. Finally safe. But then I heard Emma’s voice asking for a glass of wine. I looked out the window. Saw her smile pointed up at me.
“Can I come say hi?” she said.
“Yeah, come up whenever,” I said. I put my head in my hands.
She came upstairs to fuck me. And of course this is what I wanted and I loved it. It made me feel good that she wanted me.
But she’d been doing this thing where she said loved me whenever we had sex. And then after she’d tell me she only said it because I had my dick in her and it didn’t matter.
Every time it was like getting stabbed in the stomach.
And I’d think that maybe next time I could fuck her so good she’d actually believe herself.
We fucked. Said we loved each other. Came together like we’d never left.
She wiped herself with the old Sublime t-shirt I kept for the purpose. To scorn the band. Said, “my ex used to play that record when we fucked.”
“Everyone listens to Blonde when they fuck, Emma,” I said. Not that I ever would again.
“You wanna get some food?” I said.
“Ughhh, I would love to eat a peach,” she said. “I think I’ll just go home though. I don’t think we should go out to dinner anymore.”
“How can you do that? You do it every time. You say you love me and then you say you don’t mean it at all after. And you act like you can’t get out of here fast enough.”
She was putting her clothes back on and trying not to look at me. I watched her face her boobs away so I couldn’t see them when she pulled her shirt on.
“Huh?” I said. “Can you please just answer me?”
“Because I love fucking you,” she said with her back to me. “But I kinda hate you in general.” She whispered the last part as she pulled up her underwear.
I pretended not to hear it. Didn’t say anything.
There was nothing in the world shittier than watching the girl you loved put her clothes on like that.
“Kaaaay, see ya.” She walked out the door and left me there naked in bed holding the covers up to my neck.
I was miserable because I knew that if she could like this now it could never have been love before. Even though I knew it had to have been.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t real. Is what I told myself.
It was some horrible fiction.
All those velvet mornings in between time in her big brass bed in the yellow morning light. When we could stay there until noon fucking and listening to music and drinking coffee. And talking about things we thought were beautiful. I liked to hear the way she thought.
One thing we talked about was love. We both really believed in a fairy tale type of love. We talked about that one time. I can’t remember when. Real love though. That’s what she said she believed in. The kind where you just get swept away in each other.
“I want to get married young, like really young,” she told me.
I didn’t know she wasn’t talking about me.
“I would love to be a young bride. So we can fall in love and then just keep falling in love more and more and more. And when we get sick of the things we loved about each other at first we’ll have already found new things that we love just as much.”
“Don’t you think though that if you get married too young, you won’t know yourself well enough? Like you’ll never get a chance to really get to know yourself?” I said.
“No, not at all,” she said. “Because I think being in love is the best way to get to know yourself. Through someone else’s love, I mean. Like a really true love.”
“I kind of think that the best way to get to know yourself is being on your own. Doing exactly what you want to do the way you want to do it. And then you figure out what you want. And you know, you deal with your own mistakes. Shit like that.”
“Yeah, maybe. But I think being in love shows you the kind of person you want to be. Not who you are. You get to see yourself the way the person who loves you see you. All these tiny little things they love about you. Like the tiniest little details that you didn’t even know about. You learn about yourself and you get bigger inside and you see the kind of person you could be, like the very best versions of yourself. And it feels so good.”
I thought she was talking about me.
She was smiling her big smile that made her look like a little kid. And I got all entranced thinking about ideal love and Emma.
There was always this kind of storybook quality to Emma’s life that made me feel like I’d landed in a dream I didn’t have to wake up from.
I thought for a while and then I said, “do you think you can fall in love with the idea of being in love?”
“I dunno,” she said.
“Me either,” I said. But I was starting to think that you could.
Like being hypnotized by yourself. Or by the person you imagined yourself being.
There were so many things about Emma I wanted to be in love with. Things which I envisioned making my life feel like a story.
There was the big Klimt print on the wall above her bed and the mole by her belly button and the little ruffles on her pink socks that made it so easy to take them off.
And the way she kept butterflies around her. In books, and little picture frames on the wall. In poses in the windows, and on strings that hung from the ceiling. In the mirror next to the bed. So that it always looked like there were butterflies flying around me when I was in her bed with her.