Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Life, the Universe and Everything (Including Kisses)

The blue in the lights burnt low and hard the night I first kissed Flo Vale. There were two silver buckets, of all the things to snapshot in memory these damn silver buckets with thin coat-hanger-wire handles, and they were catching water dripping through the dying roof. It was somewhat appropriately Salvador Dali’s birthday, and I’d been angling for months to make a big night of it. I thought we’d dress surreal, get all pent up and erotic and melt some time away, but it wasn’t to be.

See, dates are important things. Stuff happens on dates. I had a date with this mad new girl I’d met the night before and I sure as hell wanted some stuff to happen. We all had a bit of a date with madam destiny. But this particular one was not only Mr Dali’s birth date, it was also the very morning upon which the world lost Douglas Adams – the British author whom many of us, and I refer chiefly to Soho here – quoted ad nauseum. Death of someone close to you tend to cast a bit of a dampening pallor over the merriment of such things as intercourse, or tigers bursting from pomegranates moments before awakening.

Anyway, it was late, and it was raining hard, and it was dirty and dead. Soho was silently reading Mostly Harmless like scripture, Johnny was spinning pinball without effort or heart. I still have no idea where the others went that night, but I know Mikey was in my apartment the next morning badly scratched and with pockets full of golf tees and scoring pencils. Us writers mourn hard for writers, you see. But then there’s Flo: the buzzing flash; the girl who went through life like a bubble through champagne. I didn’t expect her to get why we were all so flat, and I didn’t ask her to sink on down and join us, I just wanted to be close to someone who could pull me up and out of here. Only of course she couldn’t, but sometimes it felt like that. So we sat navigating our noses around paper umbrellas and tried to talk. It was out of sheer lack of anything else to do, or maybe just because it’s protocol, but we honestly talked on a date. Lame, I know.

I knew someone back in lower high school who committed suicide. Hell, didn’t we all? You know exactly the ones, the ones that you expected to, because they were outcasts, with no friends, and generally shunned people, but who everyone claimed to really adore afterwards. O masses, do you hear how sweet you sing! There was endless talk on the tribute chatroom set up and changed instant messenger names to project how much we all cared onto the other caring mourners. But you know we didn’t. By lunchtime the first jokes were already boomerang-ing and I was more worried about having to pay some 11th grader the money I’d lost betting on which teacher would cry first at special assembly. You know that kinda death. But it ain’t like that.

Flo said her best friend had fallen off a rock face, just meters away from her when hiking as kids, and that it really shook her up. I couldn’t figure out why I thought it sounded like a fake story, but I did, and I let it slide anyway because even the stuff we pretend impacted us actually then does, in a roundabout way. ’Sides, it was obvious something had happened to her friend as a kid. I just wanted to reach out and hold her and explain I knew she was full of shit but that it was so damn beautiful shit. I just wanted to show I got the general hurt too.

Before he died, obviously, Douglas Adams had a lot to say about life and death. “Life is like a grapefruit,” he once wrote. “It’s orange and squishy with a few pips in it, and some folks have half of one for breakfast.” I read that, went out, and bought a grapefruit tree, only it was actually a tangerine tree and I decided the salesman at the plant place was either an idiot, or a genius who realized what a bad idea it was to sell a guy like me the meaning of life. Either way, my life’s a whole lot darker and juicier than most people’s so I figure it all has something to do with citrus. Some of the cocktails me and Flo were drinking sure tasted like the meaning of it all, and it all tasted pretty good.

I can’t describe how good Flo tasted. We were talking in amber waves of lager at each other by midnight or so and we were so drunk, so tight, so connected, it was like our brain cells were giving off death wails in melodic harmonies. I said I wanted to be Ulysses, to set out on some incredible journey and ride hard an epic life, all the while just begging and striving for the long-lost Penelope who loved me above all others and all else. Who waited, while I wandered, yet who in herself was great. Flo put her glass down with liquid still in it for the first time in the night, and sniffed. For a brief blurry second I was sure she was about to break down in tears, and then the rain belted down and music seemed to fade out of consciousness like a movie as we kissed.

Then the lightning reflected off the empty green beer bottle and reminded me of the size of the earth, and Flo and I stared at the silver buckets and cried for all that was broken, bent and lost. And I think I knew then I loved her.

1 Comments:

Blogger Pirateguybrush said...

That was beautiful.

July 04, 2007 11:14 PM  

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