New Year's Two Thousand Something

    Do you want to read a story? It’s just a little something I wrote a little while back. Just wanted some input, some thoughts on the quality. Just read and we’ll see where we go.

    Perhaps more startling than coming across a golden brick, is coming across a piece of shit, meticulously sculpted with the expert craftsmanship of the ages and painted to look like a gold brick.
    Colin sat in his car on New Years Eve of his twentieth year, listening to Copeland, waiting for his ex-girlfriend to show up at her apartment. His corduroys were a bit too tight and his hair too long in front. He was the more than perfectly painted picture of self-loathing that was encompassing the generation at this time. They found it impossible to move beyond their narcissistic hatred of their Americanism repressed into inexpressible id, reflected poorly through cultural fashion.

    No, not all ids are inexpressible, unconscious yes, but sometimes we become aware of that awareness. What’s truly frightening with these people is that they live in a time when language doesn’t suffice for explanation, they…no, nevermind, this has nothing to do with the story, just keep reading.

    All Colin’s friends had returned to their respective hometowns for the holidays and he spent the majority of time watching re-runs, eating pistachios, and drinking egg-nog. His only activity of limited production was building a puzzle every two to three days. He was the lucky recipient of sexual self-indulgence nearly four times daily, more an act of boredom than anything, but after a few weeks, definitely bordering on fecund addiction. With an estimated number of two million sperm per ejaculation, with an average of four ejaculations for thirty-five days, he submitted to the reckless abandonment of two-hundred eighty million potential children. His spermatic socks became the burial grounds of Stalin-Trujillo-Hitler-Pol Potesque killings. Justification for the self-loathing, hell no, but maybe.
    He had known Angela, his ex-girlfriend, since he was fifteen. They had dated for three years, during every teenager’s most dramatic years, but especially theirs. They suffered parental deaths, the subsequent abuse of step-parents, and the epic woes of George W. Bush, together. Like most girls, she struggled with her reflective personality; her’s, however, exacerbated by the parental onslaught her conscience continually harbored, as well as young age drug and alcohol use. They had the highly romanticized notions of each other as a possible savior-like figure. He called her his unicorn, his mythical, intangible creature; she said he had a striking resemblance to the Superman character in “Smallville”; she watched constantly and hung a poster of him above her bed. Wildly unhealthy romanticization of the other, which in retrospect worked constantly for Meg Ryan, but in the real world, is a constant proverbial recipe for disaster.
    He was her first lover, at the age of sixteen, and the whole time they were together she refused to indulge the usual angst ridden teen forms of inebriation. He held no past motivation for joining her, but the two became the teen’s that drug ads aimed to create. He was a good ol’ boy and always assumed she would be his only love. They held tightly to quixotic notions that they would be each other’s sole lovers, forever dedicated to each other.
    Unfortunately, maybe fortunately, college removes most childhood notions of the world. After their breakup she had gone through a series of downward spirals of sex and drugs. Colin moved in a new direction over eight months, two new sexual partners, and many nights of binge drinking, until Angela gave him a call after not speaking since their breakup.
    -    I need to talk to you. I have done some stupid things.
    -    Ok, you know where to find me.
    After all that time and the attempts at repression, he was utterly incapable of rejecting her. She came and found     him.
    A long walk, seemingly endless tears, and many unanswered questions later, Angela began to elaborate.
    -    Yeah, so drinking.
    -    That’s all, that’s what’s bothering you?
    -    Well, he does a lot a coke, and, but he says he wants to quit, and I’m helping him.
    -    Helping him how?
    -    Don’t do that, I’m looking for a friend, not someone to just to –
    -    I’m sorry, go on.
    The two poster children for Tipper Gore’s campaign on drugs had turned into the faultlessly molded children of contingent language, expression was in the destruction, rolling dice with the wonders that could kill.
    -    So it just happened.
    Colin could think of nothing to say, not wanting to be the hypocrite but knowing he hadn’t been so reckless.
    -    It was too many drinks, just, I don’t know, stupid. But I went in, and I got the pill for it this morning,     but I’m freaking the fuck out.
Despite any heartbreak induced by unrealistic childhood notions of this girl who now found in him, her most trusted confidant, Colin obliged to her every need. He became, after that initial night, her continually spacious basin for regurgitating her continued intake of repugnant people, places, and unadvised consumables. She used his existence as her sole friend not partaking in her life’s exploits, as justification for her continued inability to quit a life that produced so many remorseful tears. However, she coupled this continued justification with a refusal to spend time befriending his companions fearing their judgmental nature, and simultaneously, his potential opinions.

    Really? That’s not at all how I read him, maybe unexcitable, but not that.

    So, they spent months occasionally together, in which she repeatedly confessed a desire to quit her current spiral, and yet would again and again reject his offers to spend more time together, for her presence was requested at particular locations to which she could not grant him access for his lack of years, despite her being a year younger than he.
    The days following such evenings would unfold in her insistence she consumed only one drink, sometimes two, and that the night was not worth discussing. He would tentatively accept her stories as true, but ultimately, many of their engagements would turn into feuds with him demanding the truth and she incessantly insisting she was honest. Of course, the re-kindling of their intermittent sexual relationship did little to help the situation. The attachment of the initial sexual partner pulls people in questionable directions to begin with; but when joined with the brooding nature of unwavering, disenchanted lovers, the results cause tears captured only in the few poets capable of touching, if only briefly, the ineffable. Colin’s perpetual judgment, coupled with desires for a past life, built upon the clouds of childhood dreams, simply functioned as a catalyst in the blind digging of their mutual pitfall.
    So with great pleading as to his lack of available friends with whom to celebrate on this most festive of holidays, he was hesitantly invited to accompany her to a New Year’s Eve party. They discussed how this would be the perfect chance for her to prove that she had maintained friendships with these less than reputable people, while giving up the various vices which brought about so many tears. Angela’s agreement stipulated that she had an afternoon picnic scheduled with some friends, but if he wanted, he could meet at her apartment at seven. She insisted she would drive, as further proof that she could maintain sobriety at her own will.

    Forced! What would you have me write, that by some chance coincidence they both chose to attend a Sonic Youth New Year’s Eve concert, at which Colin is accidently busted in the eye by the large carelessly flung elbow of the man in front him. In the concussion laden frenzy to follow he stumbles around the venue, bouncing off people until a clearing appears, through which he goes half-running, half-falling, until he seemingly dives head-first into the crotch of a girl turning to leave the bar, dousing both head and groin in the stench of Jack Daniels. Happenstance leads to the girl being none other than his long lost love, Angela. His concussed state and her injured groin lead to both of them being taken to the hospital, where she is reprimanded for being a minor under the influence, thus allowing Colin the sweet taste of being of head-strong use, providing requisite need to the girl he once loved.
    Would that sound more legitimate, less forced? Real life happens in cliché.

    I’m sorry, I appreciate the sentiment, and I’ll think it over.

    With little else to do that day but partake in the usual self-indulgent activities of spermatic release, Colin was overly excited and showed up to Angela’s apartment around six-thirty. He didn’t see her car in the parking lot but decided to try her apartment anyway. No answer at the door, so now back to opening scene of our story, where he waited, exhausting a few albums, using the language of others to help him discern his own emotive wanderings . He sat in the parking lot, drove circles around the building, and called her every fifteen minutes from seven until eight-thirty, grinding teeth with the passing minutes. The series of emotions he consumed in the two hour wait up until that point encompassed his generation’s over-emotionalism, covering the entire stages of grief, culminating in his acceptance that he had run fully ashore of the great island gullible. Colin steered his car home, accepting that he had once again fallen flat before given a chance.
    Leave it to the cruel nature of stories to let him get a mere two hundred yards down the street when his cell-phone ring becomes barely audible over the blasting of Darkest Hour. And yes, oh the irony, the cliché, the perfection of such seemingly staged coincidence. Yet, he can’t deny her, and answers attempting to sound angry, to induce guilt.
    -    What?
    -    Where are you?
    -    Driving home, I’m tired of waiting to be fucked over even more tonight,
    -    What?
    -    Nevermind. I’m, I’m just driving home. Have fun with your friends, you obviously don’t want to hang out with          me.
    -    That’s not true. I’m calling you aren’t I?
    -    After ditching me outside your apartment for a fucking hour and a half.
    -    I’m sorry, I was playing a game with some friends, I just lost track of time.
    -    What kind of games?
    -    Does it matter?
    -    Are you drunk?
    -    Just go back to my apartment, I’ll be right there.
    -    Whatever.
    He of course, like a good boy, turned around and proceeded to wait another fifteen minutes before the lights of her Corolla pull up behind him. She gets out but he sit in his car until she beckons; he wants her to want him. However, he grudgingly obliges after she waves for him to follow once and then looks away, uncaring, for she knows he’ll get out and follow. He follows her up to her apartment; she needs to let her dog out before they can go to this party, otherwise it will shit inside. He doesn’t say anything to her except one word answers and grunts until they’re outside. The dog walks and shits. She pretends she’s done nothing wrong.
    -    What’s your problem?
    -    Really?
    -    I said I was sorry. What more do you want? I’m not drunk, and if I didn’t want you to come I would have not          called and didn’t have to come get you.
    -    Sure
    -    If you’re just going to be a little bitch all night than I’m not taking you.
    -    I just hate being a friend of convenience.
    -    It’s not like that and you know it. I fucking want you to come.
    -    Well I wanted to go, but you’re going to have to give me time to get over-.
    -    And I’m supposed to just be quiet until you’re feeling better?
    -    No. I’m fine. Let’s just go. Are you sure you can drive?
    -    Shut up.
    They took her car, like she suggested and drove maybe twenty minutes feigning comfort with each other. It was clearly New Year’s, as the cops were out in full. The house was an obvious place where a party was happening, way too many cars, music audible from the street, cliché.
    They were greeted with the boisterous and pervading scent of a fine mixture of weed, alcohol, and too many people in close contact. The scene inside matched every expected smell, the unquestioned pervading social identity abounded. And so what use in explaining in detail the next few hours, a simple view of any teen movie containing a party scene will suffice to elucidate the finer points of a party in white suburbia. Of course a film would be an over the top notion of a party and so feel free to take this mental image and supplant any known social clumsiness, any forced conversation, and un-satiated libidos you find necessary or humorous. I highly doubt most mental images are far from accurate.
    Angela stayed right at his side, both of them enjoying a drink, her introducing him to these figures of her stories. He had the joy so many seek, of finally meeting the objects of fiction, those characters to which he had given face and personality. She relieved his tension with her amicability, her willingness to be by his side, like releasing that bubble that builds in the sternum with a frighteningly unsure love.
    -    This is Greg.
    -    Hey, what’s up?
    -    Hey.
    -    Come play with me?
    -    Yeah, definitely.
    Suddenly she was gone; suck the bubble back in, the great un-equalizer, the perpetual inability to just say no, we need each other too much. She thus left him in the awkward situation of encouraging the normal social formalities with a group of people highly inebriated and previously existing only as pieces of her tear-filled stories. He did manage to make a few subtle acquaintances that were quickly forgotten and most not seen again.
    So the finer points of the evening included him bouncing from seat to seat, casually enjoying a drink, and heading out back to sit on the couch in the backyard to smoke a cigarette. It seemed like for those few years they were all smoking cigarettes, the smoke gave them one more mask and allowed them one more destructively tacit voice.
    Throughout the night he would see Angela on the arm of multiple guys, a different drink at all times. She pretended Colin wasn’t there; he was an ignorable ghost, a passive past.
    The party’s final scene for Colin took place on a couch in the basement, casually flipping through a book of Thomas Kinkade paintings. He wanted to spill his drink on the book, to throw it at the owner of the house, to tell him how much of a fucking idiot he was. From his lonely seat on the couch, Colin watched the party begin to diminish, but Angela came awake in a way he never witnessed before. She played INXS, she played “Baby’s got Back”, she danced behind the bar, she poured everyone who passed her way shots, she gathered a crowd, she tried being Jennifer Love-Hewitt, the head turning center of the world, and instead encapsulated the stupidity and whorishness of Tara Reid; a moment when a person can be proud of their past lovers.

    Have you now? I think most of us have at one time or another. I can only think of once and thank goodness it wasn’t in front of my brother. How weird was that for you?

    I see, so now were past the "cliché is boring comments"? We’ll, I think the modern house party first got its image from movies. The mid-nineties post-John Hughes films were capable of doing so much more as far as creating culture rather than showing it. Freddy Prince Jr. created a generation, not the other way around.

    After about an hour, when Angela could no longer stand straight, Colin suggested they go home, and she complied with as much consciousness as possible when one drinks to forget. Their pact broken, Colin helped her stumble to the car, and took his place as the new driver. Less than one hundred yards away she needed him to roll the window down. She spent the whole ride less than gracefully, intermittently puking out the window as he got lost, found the way, and hoped to anything potentially holy that a cop would not pull them over.
    He wasn’t sure what to do. He wanted to cry, he wanted to scream. The most horrible thing was perhaps that he felt an unconditional need to help her, so he just drove. The drive took nearly forty-five minutes due to his ineptitude and slow movement from helping Angela keep her head outside. The only sounds were the wind rushing by her window and the occasional muffled regurgitation and the resonance of associated fluids upon the door. At the time a particular group would have claimed if you listened hard enough you could also hear the sound of broken hearts.

    I know, I know.

    By the time they reached her apartment she was soundly passed out. After some rousing shakes and escalated words of encouragement, he got her out of the car as she promptly proceeded to douse him with a bit of gastrointestinal splash back. As she added unconscious insult to injury, he let his feelings fly free and didn’t hold back his distaste at being now more than her vocal receptacle. He got her to her apartment, then her bedroom, a difficult task as the dog got in the way time and again. In attempted gentlemanly fashion he got her a trash can and propped her on her side.
    Colin closed the door to keep the dog out and sat on the couch. For a while there were no words. He couldn’t quite fathom the disappointment, the pathetic anguish he let engulf him. He contemplated watching a movie, decided no; he contemplated music, decided no; he simply sat, occasionally venturing into her room checking for heaving breasts. The rise and fall of Angela’s boobs were a signal of life; necessary for him to realize that his excessive masturbation had done little to his libido, his raised pole was a flagstaff indicating the continued requisite nature of her being to indicate his own vivification.
    At some point Colin briefly drifted off on the couch, cursing this girl whom he could not escape. He woke less than an hour later to the putrid stench of dog shit, that fucking mutt, of course making his life easier. He was torn. Should he leave it and teach her a lesson, should he go home and let her wonder about what happened, force her to call him up in the morning, guilt ridden? Of course not, a pushover never does. He picked up the dog shit and threw it off her balcony; he couldn’t leave and he couldn’t stand the smell. Besides, his being there left no doubt of the truth.
    He checked on Angela every twenty minutes, maybe. Every time, his emotions swayed. He wanted to crawl into bed and hold her, he wanted her to wake and see that someone loved her, unconditionally, could never abandon her. He wanted her to see the potential, the ever-growing beauty the world could offer. Mostly, he wanted to believe. He needed to know that in the end love could win. Fuck winning, he just wanted to know that it was something. They were a generation raised to know love as nothing but a failure, a lie. They didn’t believe in storybooks, they believed in flee-ridden babies and dirt roads, mom and dad yelling, stranger’s orgasms.
    So he wanted to strangle her throat, break her fucking neck, reach down her esophagus and pull out her bloody heart. He wanted to fuck her in the ass harder than she had known and have her bleed, to wake feeling dirty and pain, just like him. It would be easy, he had carried her this far unconscious. Just roll her over, slide down the pants and just pound until it went in somewhere, bruise her so she couldn’t even sit, aggravated condyloma causing painful sensationalism. He wanted it to be inexplicable so she would wake and wonder and he could tell magnificent lies about she acquired a bruised ass and the ensuing mucous membrane. He wanted the sun to rise and shine through her, but she was lost, having sold her soul to a jinni she was now part of the lost harem of the underworld, and he could plunge her deeper.
    But no, he wanted the sun to rise, he knew enough evil, he wanted sunshine on his shoulders. He spent the night on the couch in a bed of tears, fighting myself. He found a book, By the River Piedra I sat down and wept by Paulo Coelho. He turned the pages and laughed. Pablo was a dreamer; people ate him up because they wanted what he gave, but the ending wasn’t real. Everybody wanted to ride off into the sunset, but they were a generation of babies who only knew unrequited love.
    Colin spent the night on the couch, checking on her time and again. When Angela woke he was still on the couch, with red eyes and cheeks, a pitiful ball of conflicting emotion, certain that was all a human contained. She looked at him through hazed eyes and said nothing. It was time to go.
    -    Your dog shit on the carpet. I cleaned it up. Goodbye.
    He stood and walked out. She said nothing, made not even a feigned attempt at stopping him. After he left, she found the book open, face down on the table. She opened the book and found a group of simple underlined sentences, something about following love until it tells you to go away, but loving anyway, because nothing else is possible.
    That was the last time he saw Angela Jawarski voluntarily. But until he died she was his ghost, his unicorn, his unattainably mythical creature, his soul lost to her in the childish giving of unconditional love, the only kind of love for them, unrequited and un-requiring.

    Abrupt. Yeah maybe, but that seems to be how love is. We see so much coming but do nothing, so it only seems abrupt.