Harmless post indeed!

Drew showed up last night, the pungent scent of beer smoky around him. It was obvious that he had come over to inquire the necessity of my personals ad. Doing my best to remain serious, I inquired the necessity of a visit to inquire so. He did not take this joke lightly. Which was unfortunate because it was the type he would toss at me from time to time. His humor was dry and very biting. At times it took a day or two to fully recover from the sting.

He slumped over on my couch, spouting off Vonnegut quotes that resonated but I did not remember in full where they had come from or what could possibly mean in this context. He might as well have been singing beer garden songs; everything was so horribly lost in translation. I was unsure if this was going to mean his intention to come clean about his feelings for me, and in such case, I became a bit excited, even despite my distaste for the present circumstances.

I sat down on the couch next to him, paying attention to his facial expressions as he continued to speak. He was rambling on about how women he dated often ended up in jail, incredulously stating the fact that I was one of the smart ones, that he didn’t want me to end up in jail either—but why did I want to make bad decisions with a stranger when there was a perfectly good friend around who would always be game and never tame? “Never tame,” he said again, leering.

I grimaced at the word friend and its reverberations in my head. Friend. To anyone genuinely interested in someone else, that was the lethal injection. I felt slapped. I said the word again, aloud, querying this time. “Friend?”

He began to rub my knee, his fingers worming their way up my inner thigh. He inched up slowly and got real close, his lager-ridden breath fogging up my already warm cheeks since the final glass of wine in the bottle I had finished only minutes before his arrival. His lips were heading toward mine and I leaned my head back in hopes of escape, just to find the palm of his hand open, fingers outstretched, seizing my hair. He pulled me closer, dampened my lips with a hint of a kiss. He let go of me and stood up.

Stumbling to the kitchen, he opened a bottle of vodka I had chilling in the freezer. Grasping onto the counter, he leaned his head back and took a swig. Inhaling with gusto the moment afterword, he spoke softly and slowly.

“You wanna fuck, little girl?”

I picked up my book, stood up and walked quickly to my bedroom, locking the door behind me. I spoke through the wood. “You can sleep on the couch.”

Some people just don’t understand intimacy.

Hips like Cinderella

I find solace in the end of the weekend. I look forward to Mondays and Tuesdays. They are the days I don’t feel wasteful being so languid and unproductive. I awoke at noon yesterday; twisted, ridden with dreams. I dreamt of the older Guatemalan woman that used to come by in the mornings and pick up around the house. My mother would insist that she dishevel her hair, as she was so consumed with proper appearances. There was warmth about her, as opposed to my mother, that was unworldly, magnetizing.

But I have always been attracted to Spanish speaking women. For the most part, I do not admire women, but there are days I am overcome by the beauty of a humble but proud, olive-skinned woman whose Spanish isn’t the quick and fiery variety, but deliberate, pronounced. Almost like a song. The Guatemalan, she was that way. Much older than I, but she was very beautiful, even if in a matronly way. On my thirteenth birthday, upon her departure, she hugged me tightly, burying my face in her neck and chest, which smelled like cardamom and sunflowers. She kissed me lightly on the lips and as a result, I found myself moistened, enthralled.

But I could never fall in love with a woman because they are too much work.

I’m starting to wonder if I could fall in love ever again. It just seems like such a ruse, reminiscent of organized religion. Sometimes I wonder, while walking through public places, if these couples that surround me are being paid by some secret government officials (or perhaps EHarmony.com?) to inspire the young cynics to keep the population going. It all just makes me feel like I’m being swindled.

But I digress. After a few more kisses and a lot of deliberation, I decided it was in my best interest to give Drew a chance, but he’s been fickle and elusive the past few days. I don’t know if perhaps he stumbled upon my blog and is hiding out now for privacy purposes, or if he really is the loner he claimed he was, in a cloud of booze and heavy conversation. He always has me on the drama. It’s not quite fair. He delivered the “you shouldn’t fall in love with me” speech before I could give it to him first.

It’s difficult to wrap my mind around it. Just a few days ago, I was ready to forget him altogether. I think he knew that. I think he exploited that. I think he’s smarter than I originally gave him credit for.

Which promptly leaves me in a state of quasi-longing and complete confusion. In an attempt to keep busy and stop agonizing, I posted a Craigslist ad yesterday, much to Vincent’s chagrin. He’s certain that the only people that put themselves out for the public eye to peruse and judge are of the desperate type, insecure, needy, requiring coddling to. But his opinion is constantly changing. One day he thinks I could meet a nice young man in my bar; the next, it’s a dive where he and I are the only worthwhile folks that ever grace its stools. I believe it depends on what influence and how much of it he’s under.

I despise ‘meeting people.’ It seems like such a generic, childlike activity. It reminds me of the first day of school where your teachers force you to do icebreakers with your classmates in order to ‘get to know each other better.’ I have, and am never going to be the woman who is offering my hand, asking someone’s name, inquiring professions, hobbies, movie tastes. This goes double for my bar. It’s true; I’ve often been deemed a snob. It’s not something I take offense to. I’ve never had a problem being a recluse. Spend time with those you enjoy; life is too short to waste your time otherwise. It didn’t seem too far off base to put an ad out, observe what the cat drags in…

Again, I’m escaping my point.

It’s amazing how many people responded. Although the ad had been pretty literal, almost immediately I regretted making it so suggestive. I think I received about twenty cockshots. There were quite a few responses that caught my interest, but I really haven’t had time to respond properly to anyone yet. Perhaps tonight I will take aside an hour or two to sift through them again.  

Maybe I’ll just turn my phone off, drink a bottle of wine and finish Ask the Dust. Thanks Robb.

“Snow can wait, I forgot my mittens…”

It’s rather cold today. I have anticipated this change of pace, as the heat begins to bore me. Every year around this time I look forward to cloaking myself in darker colors, closed-toe shoes, my precious peacoat. Bear in mind that the summer is of course my favorite time of year; oh how I do so relish beer, baseball games and barbecues (and alliteration, haha)! But there is a redeeming quality to autumn I can’t quite put my finger on. I don’t know if I make the correlation because it’s generally when people are going back to school or work, but there is a ‘fresh start’ feeling that completely washes over me toward the end of summer. It’s then that the heat begins to aggravate me, makes me scratch at my skin. It is then that I yearn for dark clouds, stout drizzles of rain. The drafty chill that lingers today, however, will suffice for now.

I went to the library this morning. It had been a few years since I read The Idiot, and as of late I have been on a Dostoevsky kick, so I checked it out, along with a few others: Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Tropic of Capricorn, and a collection of Carson McCullers’ stories. I remember once on an airplane I read a short story by Carson McCullers about a young girl who constantly watched the man who lived across the way from her through her window, fell in love with him this way. These kinds of stories always make me nervous, because the world is full of voyeurs. But they excite me just the same.

There is an older man that lives across the way from me whose window I can’t see completely in as it is higher along the wall than mine. But to consider that, I must also consider that because my window is so much lower, he almost definitely must be able to peer inside the confines of my bedroom when the blinds aren’t closed. Sometimes I feel like wearing nothing but a costume mask and dancing around the room in silk scarves and ropes, if only for the feeling of taunting a man. 

It has been a while since I have taunted a man. Vincent begs to differ, exasperatingly explaining that all I ever do is taunt him. But he knows better, he knows me like nobody else does. I feel free to be myself with him. Sometimes I feel like we are the only two people in the universe. But in that case, his accusation proves false. For if we were the only two people in the universe, to taunt would mean more than torture. And I love Vincent and would never wish to torture him.

Drew tortures me. We have spent just a few days together, but they have been amazing. He has the power to whittle away at me with his eyes. I can’t remember when I have laughed as hard as when I do in his company. He makes me feel childlike, but in only good ways. But alas, nothing is easy; nothing comes for free. Only yesterday I discovered that Gemini, the lead singer of my old band, Screams from the Balcony, is a former lover of his. This shocked me at first, but after a moment, I resigned from this opinion. In retrospect I now remember her speaking of Andrew in a nonchalant, wishy-washy manner, as if she were trying to convince herself that she wasn’t falling in love. But we knew better.

She began writing more; darker, more gothic pieces that the rest of us just couldn’t connect with. She stopped letting us contribute toward the writing. It was common knowledge that she had started taking methamphetamines and almost stopped eating completely. My mind raced to our last show together, at Blake’s in Berkeley, where she began screaming at us to play “faster, faster, FASTER!” Well I had been playing bass about five years then, and I was playing as fast as I could, the speed of which actually impressed myself. But when she collapsed on the stage shortly thereafter, nobody saw us as rockstars. They saw us as drugged-up wannabes, dolls designed in Courtney Love’s image. She humiliated us. We prided ourselves on being professionals, having fun, feeling what we were playing, feeling the positive energy we received in abundance.

We were spent. There was no good that came from us anymore, at least as a unit. I left the band shortly thereafter, Sage and Lolita quickly followed suit. Last I heard from them, they moved in together and started a boy/girl indie pop group, sort of ala Belle and Sebastian.

It made me sad. It made me miss the music. Now I’m doing nothing but tending bar, trying to write, playing bass by myself, sometimes, and beginning something new with the cause of Gemini’s downfall. The entire reason our band fell apart. This news made me uneasy. Drew assured me he was through with drugs, that it had been a hard patch for him, a hideous bout of manic depression that he had fought through shortly after the breakup. But it’s a tough sell.

Vincent thinks I should cut my losses. And most of the time, I’m convinced he tells me that for his own selfish reasons. But now, I’m not so sure.

A clever ruse?

He’s not much at the first glance. But he’s someone who has yet to fail to disarm me. This much I would never have guessed by the barren conversations that we had previously, at the bar on those infrequent occasions. I am not sure yet if he hints at depth he does not contain, or if it is so overwhelming he must hand it out sparingly, little tastes now and again, fat worms on a shiny hook. He consistently speaks in riddles and I struggle to catch up, which is both irksome and enticing.

I went home with Drew on our first date, but we did not sleep together. After my bar, we went to another one, and nightcapped at yet another one, which wasn’t close at all to the first or second, so I suspected that it was closer to his flat, which ultimately meant further from mine. I stuck to Guinness however, so as not to lose my head, as we sometimes can in the company of people we deem attractive.

Even so, I found my eyes lingering on his too long, his lips even longer. I tried to converse more, learn about him as we had been on a date for a few hours and while my comfort level had certainly increased after the whispering we were forced into in the noisy bar, the personal anecdotes we’d shared about bad dates in the quiet bar, and the familiarity of home in my bar, he still felt like a stranger.  He was humorous in an evasive way, always changing the subject back to me if it stayed on him for very long. I wasn’t sure if that was to remain mysterious or in his best interest to learn about me. 

Toward the end of the evening, I found myself sharing a small leather couch with him. I was doing my best to be coy but I don’t think it was working as well as I had anticipated. I moved around restlessly, fidgeted, looked around the room as he focused on my empty pint. “I think I have some Guinness at my apartment,” he finally said softly, smiling.

“I suspect my apartment is pretty far from yours,” I said confidently, throwing my purse over my shoulder.

“But mine is pretty close to here.”

I became pensive then. He had tap danced around me all night, and though it had been fun, I’m not the dancing type. I like to see what I’m getting. Like hell I was going to go home with him.

The time it took for his hand to land on my knee dragged, felt infinite. I would hate to say that I’m easily swayed, that I let my guard down, but I suppose that night I reveled in my atypical behavior.

He certainly did have Guinness in his apartment. We had a pint and sat on his patio, silently, listened to the cars go by below. He called me a vixen, waited a good thirty seconds for impact and kissed me. It was inoffensive, welcomed, life-altering.

I didn’t know if I was discovering a diamond in the rough or being duped by a game-show host. And six beers in, I didn’t much care.