An Inhuman Condition

I: Soul Mate

Daisy wants to go to heaven, but I’m having fun right here. She says she’s worried like she’s doing me a favor: concern over my immortal soul. I always brush it off, give some half-hearted reassurance that her God must have pity on virtuous heathens, but the truth is I don’t know shit about her God. He probably wants me to burn all sorts of horrible hell, but it doesn’t bother me. I’ve got my own shit to worry about right here, this minute, on a tangible world.

Really what “her God” amounts to is just a pile of comforting horseshit passed on to scared children by dead adults as a way to cope with their future emotional and physical death. In the long run, I think it helps to have religion if you don’t plan to succeed. It’s like a backup plan for mediocrity. If life doesn’t wind up interesting for you, at least you’ll have this pretend thing to hold and cuddle for warmth when the darkness sets in.

And maybe “her God” is just a set of rules and rituals that kept her from getting pregnant as a teenager meant to mold her into an obedient wife in the long, denim skirt who always has a hot plate of cookies for her mundane spawn. Like a kinky fuck-dream for the white picket fence, her God is there to make sure there are plenty of sensible, middle-class Americans to continue on in comfortable lives of middle-management.

I’m not looking for a fantasy adventure after life. I assume you just die, decay and fade into memory. I guess it just puts pressure on me to get things right the first time. I don’t assume I’ll have a miraculous mulligan to spend forever with my favorite people on a beam of sunshine while we all eat candy, sing and dance for eternity. I don’t know how to explain heaven in a way that even sounds plausible. Maybe I missed an important assignment in school.

I think, really, her God is meant to keep her away from folks like me. That’s where all this concern is coming from. It’s that nagging, doctrinal acid bubbling in her fear hole. She doesn’t want to spend her life with someone who won’t be around the big ol’ candy bowl with grandma and all her pets. She doesn’t want to be alone in paradise.

Daisy doesn’t see it this way, but it all worked on her: the pitch, the sale. That wire was crossed in my head, and now we won’t be able to love each other forever. Her God is working hard to make sure she finds a lobotomized lover to sip soma with until the kids go to college. I hope she finds him and thinks she’s happy. I know it won’t matter after we die; I won’t be able to smirk and say “I told you so.” She’s just going to find someone average and boring who will never challenge her to be more than what her “God” wants until death do them part.

But hey, bastards and sinners need lawyers, and they tend to leave the whiskey and whimsy for us.

Cheers.

II: Luv Me

Fourteen months later and she still has her claws in my back. I can’t run away from it. Whenever I write down some words, whenever I read, not even the television is safe. Every blonde lead is a doppelganger stroking my nostalgia strings. I’ve tried to move on. I’ve tried to find healthy and good and everything a guy could want, but that’s not for me. I always come back to her.

I haven’t even seen her for a month now. She only comes to town around the holidays and she tends to leave my haunt alone. I still see her though, occasionally. She likes to bring her brother here. He and I have the same name, but he never seemed to like me so much. I guess the few times we all sat around for coffee, he and I never had anything to talk about. Not just in the I’m-sleeping-with-your-sister sort of way. He and I were obviously a different breed altogether.

So when I see her again, I never have anything of substance to add. He’s always there, and he doesn’t seem to want me to get a minute alone with her. It’s like he’s trying to protect her in a way, but fuck, he’s really just protecting me. I know that nothing healthy and good can come from us being alone – even for a few minutes. But that doesn’t stop me whenever she’s around. I feel the lure dangling in front of me, blinded to the hook I want to bite.

I see the sway of her hips, the glint of her lips. I see everything that made me fall for her and none of the rubble around us. She’s buoyant, flirty, filled with bubbles begging to be popped. Selective memory at it’s best. That’s probably why we tried it three times. Hell, I probably would have gone for it again last April if she had let me. I don’t understand how I can be so fucked up over one girl, but whenever I’m lonely, my mind drifts back to her.

There’s no potion that’ll save me. There’s no cure for my mind. There’s no sound advice or second of solace that was made for me. I like to think maybe we were made for one another, that there’s no other way the story can go. Destined to be together, but cursed to be so shit at it. In my delusions, we just need to figure ourselves out, line up the Rubik’s cubes and live happily ever after.

But that’s just a fantasy.

I’m damaged, and I need her. I need her to let me go; leave the hook at home. I need her to get married, move to California – anything to get her out of my mind. Because if she’s around, even a little, I will never fix myself. I won’t look for what’s healthy and good, and I will never get what I want out of life. I can’t keep going back to her literally, figuratively, totally. But I can’t back away from the memory. I can’t go back to the world without thinking about her. I need her to push, to put me back, get a full refund. And then maybe I can do it again.

But that’s just another fantasy.

III: Kiss Me

“I’ve got a thought,” he said.
“Yeah?” she replied.
“Kiss me.”
“Get the fuck out. Really?”
“Yeah – not like we’re dating or anything like that. I just – it’s been so long. I don’t miss any of the relationship bullshit. I’m still taking a break from it, but … I don’t know. It gets lonely.”

She gave him a sarcastic, poor-puppy-dog look before rolling her eyes.

“I just miss that feeling, I guess. Kissing someone new has a sort of thrill to it. There’s this unknown air, you know? I’m not saying I want it to mean anything. I’m sure you’ve kissed guys without it going anywhere.”
“Well, yeah. But not like this.”
“Why not like this? I mean you would hug someone that needed a hug, right?”
“Yes, unless they were being a perv like you right now.” She balled up her napkin and threw it at him.
“No, it’s not perverted. I mean, just imagine that someone needs a kiss. It’s not like I want to fuck you, I just miss that level of intimacy, you know?”
“Really? You don’t want to fuck me? Well damn, if you sweet talk like that I’ll bet all the girls want to kiss you. You know, I think I see what your problem is – you’re just too romantic for one gal to handle. You’re like a regular Fabio. My loins are practically bursting for you right now.”
“So you want me to want to fuck you?”
“No, you goon.”
“Well I don’t get why you’re so upset all of a sudden then.”
“Because you saying you don’t want to fuck me is insulting. I mean, I don’t WANT you to want to fuck me, but I don’t want you to NOT want to fuck me. Get it?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“Of course not. Boys don’t get anything. It’s just eat, fuck, sleep – and you’re lucky if they do it in that order.”
“So will you kiss me? Just a short French – five seconds tops.”
“No. You’re making things weird. I’m not going to kiss one of my best friends. What if one of us starts carrying a boner for the other? I don’t want you to fall desperately in love with me and get those sad eyes when I don’t want to kiss you anymore.”
“So you want to kiss me now?”
“Ewww, no. I’m just saying if I didn’t think you were insane and felt like kissing a man who starts the moment off proclaiming how he would never fuck me.”
“God, get over it. I don’t mean that I wouldn’t fuck you. I just mean that that’s not how I think about you.”
“But obviously you’re thinking about kissing me.”
“But just, not as a … I can’t win this one, can I?”
“It’s looking pretty hopeless.”
“Alright, I want to fuck you.”
“I knew it! Now let’s get this over with before my tits wrinkle away.”

He looked her in the eye with a big grin forming on his face.

“So I can grab your tits, too?”

IV: Good Bye

Twelve years later the song sounds so contrived. It was probably always that way, but nostalgia has a way of making the past better. Over the years, the details of a story change slightly – they become alienated from the event and mold into a version of things like a well-worn cushion or forged steel. With every retelling, a memory becomes a new thing like a game of telephone. We are revisionists changing our history into something more meaningful than it was.

As such, I assume I thought the song was good. I was an idiot after all – just a kid in his first year of high school hanging around his first girlfriend: both of them clueless what that really signified. New Year’s Eve marched in like a revolution taking no prisoners. We were on the brink of the year 2000, and I was a fool in her presence. We were all dumb back then. Somehow the people in charge thought computer systems would crash, grow sentience and erase the debt record. Nothing happened, but it sure felt like it could – potential energy.

It’s interesting how easily significance breeds in these unsure moments. Questions find uncomfortable answers, and we’re forced to really examine ourselves. What we find is often even more enigma and anxiety. It’s these times when people look to a god or doctrine to give them direction. Lost in the vacant apathy of the nineties, she was my only comfort. But comfort is fleeting, lives change, and we fell apart in turbulent adolescence. Now she’s just a romanticized version of the past, but this song always reanimates her.

It was one of her favorites. I bought the album and listened to it repeatedly. I would play it as I went to sleep at night, and I can still sing most of it today. But one song in particular brings me to New Year’s Eve 1999, and of course it would. It’s perfect. It simultaneously expresses the emotional void and impotent rebellion of my teenage years while serving as a reminder of how cliché it all was.

It was a time in our lives when we thought everything was going to be important. I remember feeling like I was on the precipice of another universe waiting to swallow me whole. I was in high school for the first time in my life spending the holiday with my girlfriend. After this chapter in our lives, things would change. We had graduation, college, work and whatever would come next lingering over us. The year was ending; the decade was ending. We were starting a new millennium. At midnight we were waiting for the fireworks standing alone on her parent’s lawn. There was a foreboding movement in the air as the paradigm shifted, and I caught a glimpse of it lingering for a minute in the winter air. I remember holding her hand, and only one thing comes to mind.

“Maybe we don’t want to live in a world where innocence is so short.”

V: Don’t Tell

She’s avoiding me. I can’t bear the thought of it, but that’s exactly what she’s doing. It’s so hard to communicate with other people that I don’t know why I give a damn half the time. This seems pretty serious; it’s not the usual doghouse, I-fucked-up, kiss-and-make-up kind of problem. I know her well enough to see that some serious shit is going on in those pretty, green eyes. It scares the hell out of me because I want this to work out. The way she looks at me has changed. There’s this deadness in her eyes where there used to be bounding excitement. They were bright, moist and magnificent before and now they’re dry and heavy and pale.

I don’t know what to do. I ask her if everything is alright knowing that it isn’t. I do it again and again because it’s the only thing I can think of. Nothing ever changes. I guess I keep hoping that this time she’ll finally tell me what it is and let me fix it. Where I’m at tonight, growing old doesn’t scare me because I’m already limp and impotent with her.

Why won’t she just talk to me about it? Is it some sort of terrible secret? Maybe she doesn’t love me anymore and doesn’t know how to tell me. Every time I say it, she’s always quick to respond – maybe too quick. It’s not like there’s any feeling in it anyway. Maybe she’s fucking someone else now, and I’ll just have to get over that, move along, and be a decent chap about it.

What is wrong with women? It’s like everything has to be a goddamn puzzle just for the sake of being mysterious. Magicians don’t even guard secrets like women, but I don’t know any female magicians. Maybe they keep their secrets so well that I’m not supposed to know they exist. Either way I’m sick of the tricks.

I used to play a lot of computer chess when I was younger, but I was never very good. I grew tired and impulsive quickly – never thought moves through after the first ten or so. I remember I could never find a balance in the game difficulty. On the easy setting, I would win every time and it wasn’t a challenge. But when I bumped it up two notches, I was obliterated. I could never play at this soul-crushing, dignity-bruising level so I would just quit. I remember playing a whole lot of chess at that intermediate level though. I don’t really remember winning. I think the computer was still much better than me, but it felt like I could win. I lost so much time trying to win against the thing that it seems foolish now.

There are days when I think that’s what relationships are. The easy ones aren’t gratifying, the hard ones make you give up, and in the middle are the challenging ones that keep you playing every day even if you never win. That no-mans land is where love lives, and if you stray away from the warm center, love fades.

It would all be easier if she would just talk to me. It’s difficult now, and I’m struggling so much that I’m losing hope. I feel my faith in this game fading, and I’ll never figure out how to put us together once she saws us apart.

Just tell me already.

VI: Get Real

Beautiful women are like a drug. They make you feel good, and it’s fine every now and then but they can really ruin your life if you get addicted. You ever hear the phrase “I’m a sucker for a pretty face?” It’s a problem with men; we’re all suckers staring at the pretty girls begging to be fleeced. Like camouflaged predators, they wait to lure you in before pouncing.

It starts with dinner – you always pay for the dinner. Then you have to keep coming up with the endless series of trinkets, spending money to get her things or spending time doing things for her. You even “spend” time together. I know you’ve seen the clingy types who latch on and leech away all the other parts of your life until you turn into that guy who needs to ask permission to play a game of cards or go to the car show.

Sure they have guilt and other forms of manipulation to keep reeling you in. Even plain girls can use their tricks to keep a guy in line, but the most dangerous ones are always beautiful. If you find yourself with one of those, you keep asking how you got so lucky. It seems like a small sacrifice to be available for all her needy whims. I mean, you got a pretty one. You should be ecstatic. Don’t fuck that up, and you’ll be happy, right?

If you happen to forget, the word will remind you:

“You’re not getting any younger.”
“Isn’t it about time you settled down and got married?”
“Can’t you just find a nice girl?”
“We want grandchildren already.”

And what can you say to that? You can’t respond with something like “I loved the shit out of the last one, and she left me here in this desolate place where it rains all the time and I can’t seem to keep things together long enough to do it again.” And why would you want to? There’s so much more that you can do without an anchor in your pocket and an albatross around your neck. Why would you rush to fill the role that ate the money and daylight from your days? Semi-regular sex doesn’t seem like enough of a payoff.

She really did it when she left. I feel like I’m seeing it all clearly now; the bullshit is gone, and I have the time to do things for me now. It’s like a conman and a mark. If you play it just right, the mark will keep coming back for whatever snake oil you’re selling. If you fuck up and press too hard, he’ll see behind the curtain. Once he knows how much he’s been deceived, you probably won’t con him again. And that’s what she did.

She stole the blush from the rose, and it’s all grey now: an honest, quiet grey.

 

VII: Got Love?

The bride’s brother and the best man are talking loud enough for Jerry to hear. It’s funny how readily people judge each other when they assume nobody’s listening.

“I mean, what the fuck did he think he was doing? How was she really supposed to respond to all that? You can’t just dump that kind of stuff. You need to ease in, be subtle. He’s an idiot if he thought that would work.”
“Well he’s got balls, I’ll say that.”
“Right? It’s just baffling is all. Cam is pissed.”
“Rightfully so, it seems.”

The grains of rice felt like shards of glass under Jerry’s feet – each cut deep, digging in. If this were his movie, he would probably reshoot this scene. The bright light is giving off that overexposed effect and making everything even whiter. That poor cake looks like it saw a ghost, and maybe it did. He sure felt invisible with nobody looking him in the eye, nobody saying anything. It’s the same spirit conjured by Bruce Willis and Patrick Swayze. But maybe that’s what all this was to him, digging up and chasing ghosts. He could hear her crying behind the altar. Her makeup must look like soggy war paint on a blurred albino under these fluorescents, he thought.

Two bridesmaids give some commentary from the bar. Nobody realizes how words echo off the mezzanine.

“Look at fucking Jerry over there by the cake. He doesn’t even look like he’s embarrassed. I tell you, I’d be embarrassed if I were him.”
“So do you think the wedding is really off?”
“I don’t know; Frank rushed out of here in a hurry. He’s probably filling the ol’ tank with tequila and looking for a stripper to suck him off.”
“It’s such a shame. His family flew all the way from Sacramento.”
“It would have been fine if she told that idiot to get the fuck out of her wedding. What kind of answer is ‘I need a minute?’ I mean, does she still want that weirdo? He’s over there taking a picture of the frosting with one of the disposable cameras.”
“Maybe she still loves him.”
“Forget about love; Jerry has some serious issues.”

She pulled the tiara off with one hand and cried into her veil with the other. This felt like it would be the biggest cry of her life. Her friends and family were all trying to comfort her, and she didn’t want it. She didn’t want their advice, their sympathy, none of it. She didn’t even want Frank to come back. They had moved too fast, and she knew it. He wasn’t smart enough to love her, but he was a nice guy. She figured it would be easy enough to start a life with him and raise this goddamn kid. Jerry’s fucking kid.

And it had to be his. Frank wrapped up his snake every time, and three months lined up just right with the drunken night at the end of last semester when she went home with Jerry. He always had the sweetest things to say, but he never listened. He always had to be right like he was proving something. He could never just be content and friendly. It didn’t fit into his grandiose idea of himself. He always had to be better than everybody, upstage the wedding and get his “true love” back. Fuck. It would be easier if he wasn’t so good or at least if he didn’t know it.

Father of the bride approaches Jerry with a look suggesting he should be ashamed.

“Cam wanted me to ask you to leave.”
“So it’s no, then?”
“It would seem that way, son.”
“Do you think they’ll do it again? The wedding, I mean.”
“I’m sure as hell not paying for it all again, but who knows what’s inside young girls’ heads.”
“Will you tell her I’m sorry?”
“I think you’ll have to find a way to do that yourself.”
“Right. Well, I am sorry.”
“You had better be.”

Jerry set down the camera on his way out. He wondered if they would develop the film or just leave it on the cutting-room floor. Either way, it’s where he wrote his apology in white vanilla swirls, and he would just have to hope she found it.

Orson Welles said, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” Jerry’s story ended fourteen months ago, and was anybody happy about it? Not anymore it seemed. If you’ve heard of wedding crashers, he’d be a terrorist by comparison. This isn’t how it worked on TV, in movies, old photo albums. This wasn’t what they etched inside Hallmark cards, and it goddamn didn’t make him happy.

But he did have to admit to himself; he was satisfied. A new story could start any day now.