MY BOYFRIEND, BUT TRAGIC
I called him Peek-a-boo Street, love bug, baby, Tom Tom Club, Tomato, boy toy, butt man, robo-butt. Our favorite way was to have sex. He was a good cook but serious. His deodorant made me woozy.
This love was my favorite. My other boyfriends had been before. This love was now and it leaked all over. Like since I was in love, so was my apartment. The toilet brush bristled with inspiration! I threw it out because it smelled bad.
This love was big and swallowed reality. I’m not saying the love was merely symbolic. Just the emotions were so massive and bulky, everything else became off-hand. The love wasn’t a big deal. It was love. Like a kiss, it’s distracting. I worked at a store. Tom worked in a place. We lived smack in the middle of everything. Then we moved a little out of the way. These are just details. Tom was my favorite person I had ever met. My girlfriends, they were characters stuck in a phone. They were electronic people I could chat with, but they were not as real as Tom. My life with him was on a charmed track, a toy set kept going round and round and so we smiled.
But then Tom 9-11ed.
I don’t know how to explain this. It’s crazy. What are the odds. I’m still weird about it.
If a love is really good, it gets tragic. God is romantic to a fault. Like a bird is beautiful and then it’s killed. I’m not saying it’s romantic, it makes you shudder. Staring into the bird, mini-revelations glaze over you, this life with all its visual beauty. You are an innocent. You are bad news. Nothing really matters, you kick the dead bird with your sneaker, no one gets mad, god doesn’t care, he was there when the bird died, or he missed it, it doesn’t matter. The winter is strained and uncomfortable. The sun burns my skin. It’s challenging. Tough love, like your boyfriend holding you down a bit pretending and you both get so turned on you can’t stand it, you need to mash his thing all the way into yours. Like if there was a bubble and a butter knife, we’d pierce the bubble with the knife. Its Freudish. If there were a pizza and scissors, we might cut the pizza in long strips. We could cut the pizza into shapes and eat them. But Tom is all done.
He 9-11ed. It hit his upper body and he tumbled. He was in a plane and felt queasy. He stood tall next to his twin and they both caught on fire.
I was inconsolable. My country hurt. It was irritated, but not too bad. I checked my underwear and was unsure. I paid someone to look at it and apparently it was ok. Tom was dead. He was demolished. There were little bits of him, but they were sharp. They were asbestos. My country bonded together. It got racist. It itched and was tested. It wrinkled. It protested.
After Tom, Tom looked like Body Worlds. His arm was an omelet. He looked like an alien. Like throw-up. Like sculpture. He was innovative, avant garde. He was pixeled and low quality.
I do the eating thing, the sleeping thing, but what am I but a crying machine, humming along. Breathing, sighing, waiting. I am an admirer of things, a secret brain of events. Before, I was a responder, a pretty shape, contagious laughing. Now, I am just an animal that can move. An example of a person.
I just want to say it once. Tom was born. He was nice. His parents were nice. He made friends laugh. He sneezed. He wasn’t a dancer, but he did dance. Then, Tom joined the big club of done lives. He does not linger around. All of Tom was in a brain. The heart is just a power plant. The spirit, a tissue you crumple.
Tom was trying to newscast, but it got too smoky. He was commemorated on a plate, but the kind you can’t eat off of. Tom got mushed in a sandwich. He was bankrupt of parts. He was on clearance, then closed. An airplane missed its mother. Someone ordered clam chowder optimistically. Birds had anxiety attacks. A building got embarrassed.
Tom made my calendar cry. He prayed but it felt funny. It was his body, it wasn’t his fault.
DOODLE FACE
Maybe in high school it seemed cool to get your girlfriend pregnant, raise up babies while you were still babies, lean your tiny new person against a peavey amp while you practiced guitar. By college, we knew it was stupid. We stopped picking out names like “Hella” and “Marmaduke.” We realized being young was the only thing we had, so it would be crazy to go and create something younger.
I was hanging with the Daz and we’d lifted a little at the gas station store, just for fun. I did it just to make him laugh. I pocketed a “sexual enhancer,” which was a spray that made your dick feel less so you could fuck more. Once we got on the street, I showed him and he laughed and dared me to spray it on my hand, so I sprayed it on his hand. He sprayed it on my face, then his face. We punched each other as hard as we could, which wasn’t that hard, but the shit worked, we couldn’t feel anything but numb.
Walking across the highway, the cars were inches from our shorts. This kind of glory walk always made me feel like I had just died but nothing had actually happened, that the rules, if there were any, were not going to get me. This feeling was really misleading. All that while, somewhere deep inside a pussy, a sexy place was turning to a health-class place. My sperm had grown some doodly human face. Her egg, smaller than eyes could see, had stretched and puffed and was going to bulge into a whole wrinkly person. When I got my sexy ass into bed, time no longer clicked off. All during the night, the doodly human grew.
The Daz was the only one being real about it. “It’s about time someone had Junior,” Theo drawled and the jokes came too easy. Everyone wanted to babysit it. Muffy had already bought it baby adidas sneakers. A lot of people said it sucked, but I could see they were still excited. They remembered the high school dream-nightmare and would now live it out through doodle face.
Twenty-three is a sweet-ass age. College is over and yeah that feels a little sandy and low, but there are still huge mouthfuls of time before getting old, before getting famous. Life is unfucked by consequence. You always know it can happen, waking up every morning to a pointy fact, the dread slacking your muscles like strings. I thought mine would be murder by mistake. Like I’d be driving with Daz in the middle of nowhere, some kid roller skating up ahead, I look over to skip the spoken word on the Outkast CD, and hit the kid dead. What if the next morning and every one after, the kid wakes me by putting pennies on my eyes. Like the kid is in pale colors. Ghosts is what I mean.
There is a way out of everything. In monopoly jail, you can always roll for doubles; you don’t always have to pay. I sat with her twice, her name on the written-out list. I poked her with the pencils. I whispered jokes I made up on the spot. I tried to give her head in the bathroom. Anything to relax psycho princess, which is what Daz called her to her face. Psycho princess would not be relaxed. The head made her cry. The jokes made her smirk. When her name was blandly called, she got up ran back down the stairs, breathing out in the street again. Standing in the parking lot. The first time she did it she laughed and I laughed too, but it was cause I had nothing else to do and cause it felt like a huge mass of steel and other metals had fallen in my stomach and there was no human way possible to ever lift it out again. The second time I slapped her across the face.
Daz had been coaching me through it all, preaching to me Buddhist things to relax me, buying me beers, talking me up. His big plan was to take me to this mountain up north where his guru was and show me real live monks. We were going to wake up and chant with everyone and then meditate, meditate while walking, then through eating, through dishwashing, and so on. I don’t know how to meditate, but he said it didn’t matter. Then he met this girl and got crazy about her. He says having sex with her is like a shroom trip without the shrooms. He says he’s got call waiting.