Hi. My name is Alicia, and someone once said I looked like a knock off Megan Fox. Like a plastic Megan Fox doll, where the face is all crooked and distorted and a little melted. One that looks rather masculine, because the cheekbones protrude too much, in a way that wasn’t flattering. A GI Joe Megan Fox. Except I had no man to slap said accuser across the face for me. I wanted to get me an insecure man like Will Smith to at least pretend he was saving me.
I can’t tell you how resigned I had become. This is why girls begin to look at boys like toys. They become so ridiculous in their advances, you can’t help but stop taking it seriously.
And my type? Musicians. I truly couldn’t help it.
I had been attracted to mental instability for a long time. My father was totally a narcissist. You could argue I was a slut, but at least I was self aware. There was something so stimulating about having yourself an insane man–usually you just had to put up with their bizarre sexual kinks, like that one time, which involved a bungee cord and a set of flip flops. I’m not going to go into detail. You think you want me to elaborate, but you don’t.
This is what resignation looked like: a Tuesday night, sitting with my cocktail in a dive bar, as if I was above it, instead, in a parallel universe in a Mandalay Bay casino all because I spent $14 on a drink. I sat at the end of the bar by myself, sipping, watching the band play from over my drink.
I had to tone it down a bit with my music taste. Although I did truly like Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith, those were the only bands I was allowed to be outspoken about–otherwise I wouldn’t be a groupie. You had to maintain a certain IQ level. I couldn’t tell them I liked Frank Zappa. And I did.
Love; the feeling of love, to me, sounded just like Dwarf Nebula Processional March and Dwarf Nebula by Frank Zappa. I heard that in my head instead of butterflies in my stomach. My favorite book of all time was Freak Out! My life with Frank Zappa by Pauline Butcher, who lived with him as his secretary. She talks about all the musicians that would come through, like Clapton or Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful. It really felt like you were there, and that was where I wanted to be.
Why couldn’t I be like Marianne Faithful? Why did I resign myself to just flattering these guys who certainly didn’t need it? I knew I could do it, if I wanted. I had written my own material, mostly stories. But I didn’t want to become like my own father. So, I would just walk the line, observing, like it might help me.
I knew I had had a case of morbid curiosity. I only recently became aware of this. I was a straight A student in school but would come home after 14 hours of class and after school activities and binge LiveLeak because it was thrilling to watch, not knowing if someone would die suddenly, and after enough times, it just turned into a hit of dopamine.
At 13 I was already writing fanfiction about the Michelin Man and the Wendy’s logo and their intense sexual relationship with one another. It wasn’t like he bought her flowers, or anything. At this age, I already separated the romance out of it. Not that I didn’t want that, but it just stopped mattering after the boy who assaulted me at my aunt’s baby shower.
This is normally when one would take a drag on a cigarette. It’s a lot, I know. I know I’m a nice person, but I also recognize that I oftentimes totally lack tact.
I never spoke up about the whole thing because it seemed so out of place that I barely believed it myself.
I unknowingly let him lead me to some bushes. He was an older boy by a few years. Fifteen when I was eleven, maybe. I thought he was so cute at the time–wavy chin length hair covering one eye, those Ecko Unlimited skater boy sneakers that slipped down to his heel every time he took a step. I had been eating a Snickers bar and he said he had never tried one before. I went “you’ve never had a snickers before?!” and he fired back: “Are you calling me fat?!” and I burst out laughing. If a boy made me laugh, that was it.
He taught me how to play the nervous game. You make a pair of legs with your pointer and middle finger and walk them up a girl’s thigh, to her privates, until she gets nervous and says stop. If the boy’s able to make his way back down the other leg, you win.
It was there he was walking his fingers up my white tights. My leg and my heeled mary jane were splayed out in the grass, making me think of Alice in Wonderland. He kept going, “is it a boy, or a girl? Boy, or girl?” The baby shower had worked him into some weird sexual frenzy. I thought of myself as Alice because of course I felt like I had just had a big dose of weird, and I thought of him as the mad hatter, so his behavior had some kind of explanation. He was just as lost, except he had been here longer than me–thus, I concluded I would one day end up in the same mania he resided in, as if we all just regressed with age, back to that primal part of our brain stem.
They call me Licia, without the A. I coined it as my groupie name–not exactly a porn star name. It sounded like ‘delicious’ while being subtle enough that it seemed like it could’ve been candid.
I had my eye on the singer, who I’d been observing for a while. I liked scrawny. The heroin addict look. He had pin straight dirty blonde hair that flopped. A thin lipped smile and blue eyes. The other guys in the band knew what they were doing, having him right up front. It was sad but true: it didn’t matter how tight of a band you were–if you didn’t have the look; if you were over 30–you’d never make it.
He might’ve been the first nice guy I was attracted to. I don’t know if it was particularly because he was nice, either. I was 26 years old and still didn’t know exactly what it was I liked and disliked. There was something there in his core that I could detect; that drew me, and I was determined to figure out what it was.
No, I wouldn’t say it was the whole sensitive artist thing. Clearly that was a front, and I could see right through that.
And no, I wouldn’t exactly say it was “humanity” or anything along those lines–I was not the kind of girl that wanted to fix a guy. I wanted them to stay a mess. I did not want them to change. I was attracted to the instability in a way I didn’t quite understand, but had long ago accepted. The man I wanted was one who had just as fucked up of a childhood at me, otherwise, he just wouldn’t be on my level. There was nothing I hated more than boring.
I was heavily attracted to the men that feared commitment–how much more “hard to get” could you be? And it wasn’t because they were playing a game either–you truly just couldn’t have them.
His name was Richie. It was childlike, in a cute way. There was something boyish about him that attracted me. He always did backflips on stage. That was his thing. It was so out of place that it made me giggle. They were predominantly a blues band. That’s what kept me coming around. No pretentious “pop punk” bullshit, where the singer constantly spits on the audience. That’s how I knew his antics were legit. Then he would get all up close to the mic, both hands, and sing from his intestines–not that he was exactly copying Jim Morrison, but that he definitely had the poster of him hanging on his childhood bedroom–the one where his arms were all wingspanned out. His singing voice was way different than his talking voice. He was like Gregg Allman. You wouldn’t expect that kind of belt from a skinny white boy. Closing your eyes, you’d picture a fat black man from Memphis, a big bowl of soup in his hands.
But I realize this is all telling and not showing, so please, for the love of god, step into my world.
He jumps down from the stage to applause. His hair flops, like it slaps the sides of his head. He does a little bashful kick and shakes his head. When he smiles, he gets creases. I loved the way he moved. You could tell the way his brain functioned was different, which made him such a good musician. Even when he was silent he was always in motion, either looking around, nodding, or stumbling over his words, like he was thinking a few sentences ahead, or with something in between each word I couldn’t see.
In the time I’m thinking all of this I ordered another cocktail. A cosmopolitan. Something pink. I sip it while I lean back and let my one leg, crossed over the other, rise up, like someone’s tipping me over in swing dance. I let the liquid hit my throat and my eyes roll back. Hubba hubba. He was just so damn cute–the high school sweetheart I never got to have.
He’s got his little leather pants and belt on with a denim jacket. He told me once he spent years and years playing the blues with these big black guys in Chicago, playing drums. That was the way to do it, if you wanted to be good. And he was good. He was really, really good, but he didn’t seem to care.
I take another sip, and I love this one because I forget how fizzy it is, making the bubbles go up my nose. I hold my sleeve to my nose and snort.
“Hey, Licia,” he stands before me.
“Oh, god,” I say into my sleeve. “I don’t want you to see me like this.”
“But you look just fine!” He says all sing-songy and smiles because he knows it’s not true. He slips his hands in his pockets. He rarely touches me. Just talks.
I duck my head away and wipe my nose so he can’t see. I’m looking at the bottom of my seat and the corner of the bar, and for some reason, I’m afraid he won’t be there when I look back up, like I bored him or is disappointed I wasn’t at my best.
But I feel like such an idiot when I turn back and he’s still there–in fact, his head followed mine so he could see the snot from my nose follow my sleeve a good foot from my face.
“Oh my god,” I moan.
“It’s okay. Hold on. Hold still.” He says, and I immediately comply, curious. He’s slow as he brings his thumb up to my face, and my heart starts running away from me. “You got a hanger.”
Before I can react, he grabs the dried booger from my nose with his fingers and flicks it to the ground.
I stay frozen, jaw dropped, which slowly turns into a wide mouthed smile. He just laughs.
What the fuck was that? And oh my god, I hate to admit it, but I feel all filled up. Like he just told me he loved me. It was so familiar. Like we were weird siblings. I’m reminded of how we had known each other for months now. It felt like it hadn’t meant much, since it just consisted of little interactions like these, but something had grown. For one, he always came back to see me.
“Um, I liked your set.” I blink, and instinctively use my drink to hide my face.
“Thanks. We were supposed to go on a little earlier, but Jake realized we left one of the mics in the van, so we had to go looking for that–I didn’t realize you had hazel eyes–and it turns out it was lodged in between the seats, like a damn credit card–”
I gasp and smile open mouthed, then scold myself for being so obvious. I had been trying to focus on him and what he was saying, but I felt my eyes go all wonky, and I scoffed as he kept going without missing a beat. He must have been looking so deeply into my eyes he noticed the bits of brown in them, and the whole time, I hadn’t even noticed him staring.
I actually don’t know what to say. “Wow, that, um, sounds like a real pain in the ass…”
“Can I be honest?”
“Yeah.” I say. People are surrounding us to try to get to the bartender during the intermission. He doesn’t budge as people skirt around him.
“I’m rollin’ right now.”
My heart sinks. I tilt my head and flutter my eyes, like my brain is malfunctioning a little. “You’re on ecstasy?”
He smiles and looks down a little, like it’s a humble brag. “Yeahhh.”
I look away. Son of a bitch.
I don’t feel I have the right to say this aloud, but did anything that just happened mean anything at all? Because that’s how drugs work. They didn’t allow you at all to form strong opinions about a person. All I knew, was that this shouldn’t have been that surprising to me, considering how long I knew him.
“Oh, and Alicia?” I feel like my face is on fire, every time he says my name. This time, I can’t fucking believe it. My full name? I never even told him my full name. How long and hard had he thought about it?
“Yeah?” At this point, I had forgotten about everything that had happened. He was too cute to stay mad at. Now, I was just mildly pissed, with nowhere to put it. Hopefully it would just dissipate.
“Do you wanna come hang out with me?”
I blink.
That was so cute. No “do you wanna have sex?” No “do you wanna come back to my place?” Although, that was definitely where we were going–but just the way he said it…
“When?”
“Now.” Everything around him still moved as he stayed put, never looking away from me like I had been from him.
I set my drink down on the bar and turn to get up. “Okay.”
He yanks his hand out of his pocket and slams a $20 on the counter like lightning. It must’ve been grasped in his hand the whole time, just waiting.
Then he holds out his elbow for me, and I loop my arm through it. We walk out like two gay little old ladies to the outside.
I feel lightheaded. I keep holding my head, feeling like a damsel in distress. Like a fucking schoolgirl. What made it even more absurd was that Richie was four years younger than me.
Girl, you’re just drunk–I kept repeating. Just drunk, that’s all. That’s why you felt all giddy; had those butterflies in the form of that Frank Zappa song, which just increased in volume at whatever the hell was happening before me right now.
He opens the passenger seat of his car for me. Hyundai. He almost does a little dance about it, like he, too, is giddy to finally do the whole thing where he holds the door open for a girl. When I sit down, he closes the door then runs around to the front and attempts to slide across the hood of the car like he’s in a movie, and almost falls, doing a little spin to catch himself. The first thing he does is look at my face behind the windshield. All I can do is hold a hand to my mouth and giggle.
What the fuck’s wrong with me right now?
He gets in with his whole body turned to me, smiling, all teeth, in my face. “Hi,” he says.
“Hey,” I smile.
Then he sighs, his eyes unfocusing, what seemed like the first time that night, off of me, and into space. “I’m feeling kinda tired. But I invited you along. I don’t want to be a drag. I want to have the energy to be myself with you.”
I feel my face go all soft, and let out an “Oh…” But before I can say something as, what I believe to be, equally thoughtful, he slams open the console, takes out a baggy full of something that I can’t see under this streetlamp lighting, takes some of it into his hand, brings it up to his nose, and inhales.
I move back.
He shakes his head awake, jerks his neck back, breathes in, then puts his hands at ten and two. “Okay. Now I’m good to drive.”
Are you fucking serious?
I don’t feel like I have a right to question this–god, it hurts like hell, knowing he’s been intoxicated this whole time. It really does, but I’m drunk. The same can be said for me.
I’m very, very careful with my words: “What was that about?” Vague. Up to interpretation. His interpretation. It might let me know what he’s really thinking.
“Hm?” he says. “Oh, I wasn’t on coke all night. Just right now,” he smiles. “I was just drunk earlier. That’s it, just drunk.”
Just drunk. Right. Does it even out, if we’re both drunk?
“I only save that for special occasions,” he raises his eyebrows at me. He did it for me. He did the coke for me. Meaning, this is my time to just shut up.
He puts the car in drive. We speed 110 back to his house in seven short minutes.
When we pull up, Richie’s blasting Machine Gun Kelly. I thought he’d have better taste, considering he was in a band that played the blues–which made me think, with horror, that to him, it wasn’t so much about the music as it was just pure attention.
I thought we’d talk. I had a whole list of questions I’d wanted to ask him, in case a moment like this ever happened, but the music was too loud. But to be fair, I had forgotten them all. Plus, he was just looking straight ahead. Not in a psychotic way, but with his arm out the window, like he just didn’t care.
He puts the car in park and looks over at me, that stupid grin on his face, seemingly back to normal again.
Of course, there’s powder all over his nose. He had just stuck it into a big pile. I don’t want to explicitly call it out. I don’t know why, because we both know what he did–so I just say: “You smell like coke,” hoping he’d think to look at his nose, but all he does is lean towards me, smiling wildly, and semi-quotes Machine Gun Kelly:
“I am coke.”
We go upstairs.
I can confidently say that I don’t want to recount any of what happens next, but I think it’s important for me to tell you to help me process it.
Let me start out by saying I think this is where things went wrong: I was no longer looking for a man to make me laugh. It turned into anyone I could laugh at. It didn’t matter how they made me laugh as long as they got the job done.
The place is a disaster. The mailbox next to his door just reads “FUCK MAIL,” first of all. As we’re walking inside, he sees me gawking.
“New art piece. You like?”
The couch is a single lawn chair with a gaping middle, like a toilet seat. The kitchen table is covered in rocks for some reason, the floor, scratch marks, not from a dog, but like things had unwillingly been dragged through it, a “Mommy needs her wine” plaque on the wall, a closet with weed under grow lights, opened, defeating the purpose, and the TV turned to the TLC show about midgets: Little People, Big World.
A pit-bull greets us at the door–or rather, him. “Down boy, down!” he yells, as the dog bares its teeth at me. I cringe. There really is just every reason to get out. But I ignore them–for what? Curiosity? Boredom?
“Beer?” He asks as if I’m a fucking guy.
“No thanks. Watching my figure.”
“Your figure could be toned down a notch.” He winks.
I scoff to cover my blush. He’s never been this bold. I try to shove my emotions down because it’s just cocaine talking. Really, I don’t even know why I’m here. Something related to needing to finish every book that I start, whether I actually like it or not.
There’s little knick knacks in his apartment I find myself taking interest in. For example, a fridge magnet with Confucius on it that says “I never said all that shit,” a large poster of a fat man with a long wig laying belly down on the beach that reads “Flabio,” and a heartthrob Justin Timberlake poster. Everything I was seeing had some kind of irony to it. I worried I might’ve been reading too much into it, but there were just too many symptoms. It was surrounding us.
The one thing I decided to focus on was one of those little toy monkeys with the cymbals. It was ragged with a few holes, and one eye hanging down. It looked like it had been through hell. It sat on an end table next to the couch, all on its own, like it meant something.
“What’s that?” I point. I’ve sat down on a large wicker chair, the one Morticia Addams was always in–although it was in the center of the room, surrounded by thrown clothes and scattered books (not the intellectual kind. One was a children’s book I remember, called The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Odd Tales). The idea was a good one, but the execution was terrible.
“What?” He looks right at the monkey, where I’m pointing. “What are you looking at?”
“Right. There.” I continue pointing. I don’t understand why he’s denying it, but he deliberately is.
“What?” he says again, then he seems to recompose himself and begins: “Yeah. That was a gift. Well, not really a gift. Well, kinda. My old dog found it down a stream and brought it to me when my family was out picnicking. He brought it to me. My mom, dad, sister and I were all sitting next to one another, and he specifically gave it to me.”
And there I go, imagining him like James Dean in the intro to Rebel Without a Cause, laying on the street with his collar popped to his chin, watching the wind-up monkey make its way forward, tirelessly–and I almost shake my head back into reality. I’m not supposed to idealize. It doesn’t work. It never works. It always ends in disappointment.
And I don’t know what’s wrong with me–I took a personality test once that said I was dangerously low in politeness, which essentially is your relationship to authority, but since we don’t have conquerors or tribal leaders anymore, it just showed itself in the form of sarcasm and offensive jokes. I say: “And he’s dead now?”
He had been messing around with his keys this whole time, religiously, and it isn’t until now that I realize he was just attempting to look like he was doing something but wasn’t actually doing anything at all–flipping them all forward and back again, one by one, like prayer beads.
He lets them limply fall to the couch and starts doing what I later figure out is a character, which I call The Tyler Durden. He begins to pace, gesturing while he talks with his hands, like he’s constantly unraveling. He doesn’t look at me once.
“Yes. And to be honest with you, I haven’t loved anything since then.”
This is where I would normally snort milk out of my nose, but I keep listening.
“There was a point where I stopped trusting people. But I can’t tell you when that moment was. It could’ve easily been over the course of time. Maybe I just wanted it to be definitive so I could feel like I was living in a movie–”
I raise an eyebrow.
“I stopped taking everything so seriously. I think it just hurt that much. That’s why I’d never get my kids a dog before they’re physically able to form memories. Because it just actually feels like a part of you’s died when you got a dog that’s older than you. When you’re six and he’s twelve. Plus, it was a human that did it. The ol’ hit and run. I saw it, too–” here, he brings his fingers up to his lips like he’s going to take a drag, but quickly corrects himself and just slides his finger down his chin. It’s a little sexy.
“Don’t say you’re sorry,” he interjects himself. “You probably don’t know what to say. It’s fine. You don’t need to offer an insincere apology to an incredibly cliche story.”
I sit there, suddenly realizing how good I am at sitting. My legs and arms are crossed. I did the same thing at the bar, like I was in school, instead of a ratty apartment with cockroaches that thought you couldn’t see them if they hid behind the leg of a chair. And of course, I realize I knew nothing about this man at all. He was definitely scaring me, but at the same time, I thought it was cute–the way he clearly had been exposed to too many movies as a kid too, which I’d never do to my child either.
All of this was coming out of nowhere, but god, I really liked it. He was smarter than I thought. Maybe this was what I had been detecting from him all along. He was hitting the nail on the head. I wanted to start raving about how I finally found someone who understood me, but somehow I knew he wouldn’t give me a chance for me to show him how much we had in common.
I didn’t feel special for being told all this. It seemed more like I was just a vessel for getting this off his chest. It didn’t matter who I was, as long as I was sitting in this ridiculous chair, like a mock-queen.
I was taken aback, once again, at his unpredictability. I felt like it was time to surrender. I had no idea what to expect. He was changing by the second. I didn’t know exactly what to do. So I bring up this homemade video on my phone by Kurt Cobain of a bunch of his little wind up monkeys, all clapping on top of one another. He watches over my shoulder, his neck protruding, his eyes popping out, and his jaw dropped.
I watch him more than I watch the video. He gently takes the phone from my hands so he can hold it closer to his face. Then he does something unbelievable–it’s like the time I did magic mushrooms, where I was under the impression that I entered into a different dimension a hundred different times while remaining in the same room.
Although he’s still coked out, his movements are suddenly catatonic. He walks a few paces away from me to the middle of the carpet and slowly sits down into an Indian style position. He hunches over my phone, inches from his face, which he brings down to his lap, instead of just raising the phone up. I wonder if he’s mildly autistic. My little Indian man. I feel like he’ll never give the phone back. I want to go over and hug him, but I don’t want to shatter his moment. This is, I think, when I realized, I didn’t belong in his life.
Because of the drugs, it was like he was all alone and I was just a fly on the wall. For that reason, I felt like I was seeing things about him nobody else could ever know. It was probably the most intimate I’ve ever felt with a person in my life, watching him, watching that video, like he was finally understood. I felt this, but simultaneously, like I was losing him. It was the peak of our relationship.
“What?” he says.
“What?” he says again. It takes me having to repeat myself twice for him to finally take his headphones off. It’s Electric Feel by MGMT, sounding tinny.
Sex is like a natural segway in my life at this point. A large portion of men believe that sex is the end all be all of most encounters, and I’ve learned to go along with it. Why? Because these were musicians and I’d expect nothing less. Now, that’s not the moral of this story. No, I see those girls, right up front of the stage, dancing in that sultry way where they swing back and forth, rustling their hair, totally off beat, because what they’re doing has nothing to do with the music and everything to do with getting the guy’s attention who’s three feet in front of them but doesn’t look at them once. That’s why I sat in the back. It took effort to walk all the way over there. I thought it was a good tactic, but even then, sex has proven itself to be the inevitable.
I’m not playing victim. I could’ve said no, but would that have changed anything? Nope–so why not? It was like having that last potato chip before calling it quits.
“I said, ‘can you at least take the shades off so I can see your eyes?’”
He raises up his Pit Vipers to look at me, down by his stomach as he lays on his bed, pillows adjusted accordingly around his shoulders. “They’re closed,” he says. “It won’t make a difference.”
“I just–” I stop myself before I start going off about how ‘I just don’t feel like you’re here with me right now’ so I don’t get throttled.
He gestures with his hands to say ‘Well?’
“You could play the music out loud. It doesn’t have to be through headphones.”
He rolls his eyes. “What are you, my girlfriend? Jesus Christ.”
It was hard enough for me to bring myself to give that particular criticism. There were so many–the fact that he was vaping non-stop, the Pit Vipers, the music blasting through his head, and how anytime I’d take a breather he’d lazily gesture for me to keep going. If I commented on all these things, I’d seem like I’d be nagging him–but that was my only option.
They say personality makes a person even more attractive, but once he took his shirt off, Richie seemed even worse. Not that he had a bad body–it was because at the same time he took his shirt off, he had done more coke, and continued morphing into this Tyler Durden character where he would act like he was spouting wisdom without saying anything at all, which somehow, at the same time, revealed his true self.
In all honesty, I wouldn’t find his body at all attractive if it weren’t for those little interactions that I still clung to. He had absolutely no body hair whatsoever except around his nipples.
He must notice me zoning out, or dissociating, rather, so he actually says something that I pathetically take as sounding fatherly in my desperation.
“Honey, I’m sorry, I think you’re great, but the music stays on.”
I look at him, still holding his dick like a popsicle. “Okay.”
He lets his headphones slap against his head and once again arrogantly signals for me to keep going without even looking. I can hear the music because of how loud it is, and it’s that song When You Die, also by MGMT, and just as I’m about to start going again, they sing that line:
Go fuck yourself.
You heard me right.
I start nervous laughing. He pulls his headphones all the way down to his neck in one swift motion. “You don’t need to be here, you know. I can suck my own dick.”
I think back to that fatherly tone from a moment ago. It was so fail-safe. It made you feel like everything was going to be alright, no matter what was going on. I knew myself well enough that a guy had to do that only once for me to keep coming back.
I know it was a bad time, but I started thinking about my father. He had been a soldier in Vietnam. A really, really brutal man who I was both afraid of and simultaneously admired. I watch Richie from where I am, who was clearly trying to simulate some kind of POV type thing in reality–and by that, I didn’t mean sex. Mastrubation–nothing more.
My only thought was: my father trained for years, went over seas, and put his life on the line, all so guys like this could watch porn on the toilet.
“Richie,” I start. I’m about to snap. I have to get some kind of dig in, even though I’m heartbroken. “Who the fuck takes all their clothes off, but leaves their socks on?”
I look down at his bare legs for a split second. He has on the worst kind of socks: black, mid-shin.
He chuckles like he’s so proud of what he’s going to say next. “Doesn’t count if the socks are on.”
I feel my face go hot. This was a new low even I wasn’t used to. I wasn’t just another body to him. I wasn’t one at all. How did I become to meaningless?
“You know I could rip your dick off right now?” I say.
“But you won’t,” he says, almost pitifully.
I straighten up, pulling myself away from him. “What was all that at the bar? For all those months?”
“I just don’t want anything serious,” he shrugs.
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“It was just casual flirting.”
“Richie. I’m four fucking years older than you. I know the difference between casual flirting and actual connection.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he takes a drag of his vape.
I stand up, straightening my clothes out. “I’m not leaving until we figure this out.”
“Cool–leave? I heard you say leave. Walter!” he yells. Who the fuck is Walter?
Seconds later, the large pitbull who wanted to kill me at the front door barrels into the room, and now, immediately from what I can tell, wants to kill me in the bedroom too.
“Attack!” Richie yells.
“Huh?” I gasp as the dog attempts to throw itself at me. I dodge, and thankfully the floors are wooden, so he slips, his weight causing him to slide into the wall.
I scramble into the door frame and down the hall, looking to Richie on my way out, looking for any kind of emotion in his face because nothing is making any fucking sense, but he just calmly watches as Walter collects himself so he can come barrelling towards me again.
I throw the door closed, although it bounces off the hinges and opens again. It buys me some time as I run the fuck out the door and pull it shut–hard.
I back away from it, locking eyes with Walter through the glass as he growls at me, his mangled ears pointed back. I feel the life drain out of me as the adrenaline wears off.
Then the tears.
What stops me from absolutely bawling are the keys in my hand. This isn’t your girl’s first rodeo. I made sure to take his keys on the way out. He was my ride, whether he liked it or not.
I don’t see him emerge from his room down the hall. Chances are, he put his headphones back on and fell asleep from all the weed in his vape.
I walk slowly down his driveway, in no rush, just like him, and start his car. This is Ohio, we’re in. I realize that there’s nothing I want to do right now except visit James Dean’s grave which isn’t too far, yet I’ve never been. It’s dark. Nobody will be around. I don’t have to worry about mileage. I’ll get a hotel. I had no one back home who cared about me–just a few fish. I wanted to visit a real man–I had just been trying to find knock offs of guys like these. That’s why my expectations were rock bottom.
Oh, it didn’t even matter what the reason was for any of this anymore. I would get there, sit on his grave in the same way I sat in any room, smoke one of the donated cigarettes, and fall asleep next to him. That’s the best it would get.
Those grave diggers were usually nice old men. Maybe one would wake me in the morning and make me coffee at his bed and breakfast, thinking I was just lost instead of somebody who had straight up lost it. Then I’d drive this fucking meth-mobile off a cliff just like Jimmy, because I was sick of being blamed for the things I didn’t do wrong.