This was my final piece for Creative Nonfiction. Names have been changed to protect the...well just to protect.
Two lovers stand on a street corner. Although the man is not comparably tall in the local culture of stately Finns, he never-the-less must stoop a little to kiss the girl. He envelopes her in his arms and whispers through Camel-laden breath “I love you child.” Street light filters through a soft November snow. Downtown Marquette shimmers. He draws her to his petulant pink lips. He is unquestionably handsome with soft-set childlike features; long dark lashes frame abundant blue eyes yet a prominent and maturely defined nose gives the whole face distinction. The lovers linger in a kiss at the corner, aglow under the streetlight and flames of their affections. Hand-in-hand they walk away from the bar-lined streets where voices drown; guitar chords distort, break, and, fade into oblivion.
A year later I am trying to break into this man’s home, if plotting to walk through the door of an unlocked house in Marquette Township constitutes a break-in. I seek my battered paperback copy of Nerds 2.0: A Brief History of the Internet: A book lent to a friend and lover, descriptions which Alex Larson no longer fits. He remains however, the only other human being interested in reading a brief history of the Internet. I have instant messaged, called and left virtually a hundred virtual messages on his public profile about my book. His keeping it feels like he is keeping a piece of me. Burying my infant brother Maximilian the morning prior left me ill prepared to lose another small remnant of self. Exasperated I reach out across cyberspace to our mutual friend Lilith who lends a sympathetic ear and more sympathetic directions to the Space Aged Bachelor Pad which is how he refers to his house.
I turn to June Bell, a slight, jittery brunette who is more often than not a willing party to my hare-brained schemes. I can’t keep my voice level as I tell her we are going to break-in to Alex’s house. We picture ourselves tough, streetwise hooligans about to commit a crime. We titter at our own badassery entering our daring getaway vehicle: her parents’ hybrid. Ridiculous as it seems the correct brain chemicals surge anyway. Have I ever felt this alive? Have I ever needed to this badly?
“Put on some get-away music!” I say.
June pushes a few buttons on the CD player and the car thumps to an Um Pa Pa beat. An Um Pa Pa beat? I envisioned something louder, dramatic bass, perhaps some violent lyrics. The anthems of revolutionaries, visionaries, or juvenile delinquents! I am left picturing a dance at a retirement community instead.
“I’ve been really feeling Finnish polka lately.” June chirps cheerfully.
“At least turn it up.” I grumble.
Finnish polka is not improved by volume. Hysterical laughter fills the car. We imagine James Bond and Tom Cruise leaping from igneous explosions, fighting nefarious villains in 2/4 time. This music is wholly unsuited for would-be criminals such as ourselves. Soon it is impossible to drive and listen to the CD player synchronously. We finish the drive in silence.
The girl steps deftly through the soggy spring streets ducking into the costume shop on Main Street called Love Notes. Bells atop the glass door painted with two hearts jingle and the woman behind the counter looks up. The girl wipes her muddied shoes on the mat and then walks up to the counter.
“Can I rent a bowler hat?” she asks.
“Let me check,” The clerk asks, “would a fedora be okay?”
“No. It has to be a bowler hat.”
The clerk steps into the shelf-lined back room and comes back with several options. The girl picks a plain hard black bowler hat and leaves a deposit.
“How long would you like it?”
“I’ll bring it back in the morning.” The girl says, smiling.
The man answers his door to find the young girl at his second floor walk-up in a bowler hat proffering a picnique basket. Inside is a bottle of organic fair trade mead, the only two matching floral tea cups she owns, a plate of homemade whole-wheat carob chip protein cookies and the library's copy of Milan Kundera's lyrical idea novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The cookies and mead will have to wait because at the sight of her in his apartment in the bowler hat from their book he pins the girl to the couch and pulls off layer after layer of clothing save for a black bra and panties. And the bowler hat. A piece of paper marks a page in chapter fourteen of book in the basket “She stood before him on her beautiful long legs wearing nothing but panties and a bra. And a black bowler hat. She stood there staring mute and motionless. Tomas did the same. Suddenly he realized how touched he was. He removed the bowler hat from her head and placed it on the bedside table. They made love without saying a word.”
“Shit someone is here…” I groan.
June and I pull up to the house. Greenery touches it on all sides. It's so different from his downtown loft apartment. His iconic green Ford escort is parked in the driveway. Another car I can’t place is there too. Perhaps it belongs to his roommates Ryan or Richard although I can’t imagine when either became enlightened enough to get a “Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History” bumper sticker. The front door is also open save for a screen to let in the breeze.
“Should we leave?” June asks.
“I think we've been seen. Let’s just get my book. Remember if he asks why we know where he lives remind him last year’s Rocky cast party was here.”
“Right....but what if he thinks we're stalking him?” June asks cautiously.
“He won't.”
To this day June feels it’s bad form to be considered a stalker during the execution of a B&E.
Another life ago, it’s the night they met, the night before the Argonne National Laboratory Undergraduate Symposium in Chicago. Although they are in the same department at the college, and have taken a class together they never met until the van ride that morning. Remember, Remember the fifth of November. She can't forget the fifth of November, the anniversary of a sexual assault. Here marks one year, 365 days and hundreds of miles from where the assault happened. She begins to shake in her empty hotel haunted by physical memory like ethereal apparitions pulling at her body. Being alone makes it worse. Her friend from class is sharing a room with the handsome man down the hall. During the excessively long ride down to Chicago from Marquette they invite her to visit their room. Trembling she heads down the hall, with the DVD copy of V For Vendetta her girlfriend put in her bag before the trip. The DVD remains unwatched. The girl, the friend and the man watch bad wedding shows on Lifetime. She still has not learned to put up reasonable barriers, believing still that the world is mostly good and kind.
Her relationship back home fails after the conference. She continues chatting online with the handsome man from her trip. Text is an area in which she excels; she need not worry about placement of her hands or making eye contact. Her words speak for themselves. She tells him about her days as a sophomore computer science major, her fumbling social interactions and her intrusive family. For months they seldom meet in person, conversing in instant messages or over Livejournal. Her messages to him take on a whimsical flirtatious tone. She types of exotic locales and he supplies what he would do with her in each situation. He begins a new relationship and she is distraught but cautiously continues chatting every night for a few months.
Now here she is in his apartment. His cool apartment. Freshman and sophomores are verboten from more spacious campus housing, confined to claustrophobic dorm rooms or socially awkward bedrooms at home. He lives on campus as a born-again intellectual, beginning college at 25, he now prepares to graduate at 29. His guitars are lined neatly against the wall. She sits on the battered couch. This is cooler than she ever imagined.
“Would you like a beer? I only ask because I’m having one.” He smiles warmly.
“Sure.” She says, she’s been 21 nearly two months and beer still tastes illicit. “I can’t believe you’re graduating.”
“Yeah. I guess it’s time.” He says sitting next to her on his battered couch.
“I knew I liked you when I asked you what you wanted to do after graduation, and you said travel with your band. It struck me as the most irresponsible thing ever,” she says.
“Ah. Well I guess I won’t be able to dodge responsibility forever.”
“I don’t want to. I want to make that one big mistake that makes you grow up. I want things to fall apart.” She says.
“You want drama!” he laughs.
“No, I want to make a mistake that changes everything.”
He leans in and whispers. “I hope I’m not that mistake”
He kisses her, sets her beer on the floor and soon they are in a pile on the couch. Hands from her dreams are now on her. He is dangerous. The same way books and ideas and fledgling adulthood are dangerous. The concept of him is dangerous to her fast held beliefs. He picks her up and carries her into his bedroom.
“Tell me what you like,” he whispers.
She says nothing. No one has ever asked before. The incompetent boys her age poked around and shrugged off guidance. What does she like?
We knock on the screen door and Alex comes to answer it looking puzzled but not upset. I wince when we get in the door and see a pants-less girl is sitting on the couch with a blanket as a DVD menu for Citizen Kane lingers on the T.V screen. I wouldn’t have pegged Citizen Kane as a pantsless film. A speedy double take reveals, while she is indeed pants-less, it is because she is wearing a skirt. He greets us with hugs and actually lifts me off the floor. I hate it when he’s been going to the gym and his arms are thick and strong and….distracting from my mission. I forgot that when he is happy to see someone he shows it with his whole body as if the energy of it cannot keep him still.
“So how did you know where I lived?” Alex asks casually.
June freezes mid-step, a cornered criminal, and blurts, “Lilith told us! We weren’t stalking you!”
Ladies and gentlemen, June Bell. Worst. Spy. In. America.
“We were just in the neighborhood and I remembered you had my book.” I say sweetly.
While he retrieves my book from his room I must mention there is nothing in Marquette Township. Nothing. Not even a liquor store. Alex’s house is behind a car dealership. The only other feasible explanation would be that June and I were looking at financing options on a new mid-size sedan. He lets our premise slide.
“Sit down, can I get you anything?” Alex asks.
The girl on the couch offers to make us White Russians. June asks just for tea. When the girl moves from the couch to the kitchen I turn quickly to Alex and speak quietly.
“Oh I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had a girl here…look if we’re cock blocking…” I say.
“Oh no,” He says, “It’s not like that at all.”
He slouches on the couch so our heads are level, looks at me with his expansive blue eyes and gives one of his devastatingly reckless smiles.
In another time the phone rings.
“Yes?” he says in lieu of hello.
“I just…I just wanted to know…what happened….between us.” She says holding her breath at the end.
“There was never an ‘us’. We were just fucking. I don’t know how you got the impression it was more than that.” He seethes.
The rest of his words gush on top of her, she barely gets a handle on what he says before slipping back in the current. He calls her crazy for thinking they were in love, accuses her of trying to get pregnant. Her mind reels trying to make sense of this character assassination so she cannot be sure how they’ve ended up here.
“We can be friends, but no more boinking.” He proclaims.
“Oh okay. Thank you.” She says and hangs up.
She collects the pieces of her heart--casualties of youth--and begins to harden the wall around them. This marks the end of that silly naive girl at the undergraduate symposium who chased after a man with a girlfriend for a year and a half. A year and a half that just effervesced into nothing. He did not say it was over, but worse that it had never happened. But hey at least we can be friends. Crazy girls who try to get pregnant and make up fake relationships make great pals!
I do something many of his exes did not. I choose not to be friends. To harden my resolve I make a playlist on my ipod, of the Magnetic Fields “Meaningless” on repeat.
Back on the couch…
“I could start my memoir I saw the best minds of my generation all sleep with the same…guy.” I say. The actual word I told my friends was fuckwit but this hardly seems the time for accuracy.
“They were not the best minds.” Alex laughs.
Couch Girl shifts on the couch and frowns.
“I heard Alice had a baby with a juggalo.” I say.
Alex takes out his phone and pulls up Facebook pictures of his pretty, blonde nineteen-year-old ex-girlfriend and a grisly made up demonic clown. Insane Clown Posse fans call themselves juggalos and are known for their theatrical clown make-up. It wasn’t cool in the 90’s and passé posse looks ridiculous now.
“Be glad you guys haven’t slept together.” I tell Couch Girl with a smile.
“Oh. You think we haven’t slept together.” Couch Girl says cooly.
With my foot firmly in my mouth, I look at Alex and back at the girl. Alex’s leg is very close to mine. I feel the heat coming from him. The first word I always think of when I hear is name is warmth followed closely by strength. I feel something like longing and an absence of hatred, Fondness even. The girl is targeting lasers on me from her eyes. Alex and I have been so busy catching up, thoughtlessly recounting our shared history that I failed to consider he might not have been entirely forthcoming about them. The girl gets up off the couch and storms off in the wrong direction retreating into Alex’s bedroom, rather than leaving. Alex asks us to leave. While I wasn’t there I heard a recounting a bit later where the girl from the couch stated her contempt for me, and Alex said “Yeah I really don’t like that girl.” Lilith was there and both she and Couch Girl responded “YES YOU DO.”
It’s my most recent birthday. June, Lilith, Alex and I are at the Upfront and Company, a recently defunct bar with a night clubish feel to it. I have been moved for a year when my relationship with my boyfriend collapses. Suddenly I need my mom, I need my friends, and I need most urgently to inebriate. A former coworker’s punk band called Two Holes of Man is playing. For some unknown reason the girl from the couch is there with her friends too. Alex dances with Lilith. On the dance floor he owns his awkward grace. His dance is never replicated being dubbed “as little torso movement as possible”. Arms flail. Legs wiggle without disrupting the stoic placement of the hips. Lilith and I have seen him perform here before; on stage he's a different beast. Precise. Intentional.
He intermittently bounces over to converse with Couch Girl touching her hair and rubbing her shoulders and then back to the dance floor to be with Lilith, but, he’s leaving with me. Happy Birthday to me. We have an agreement…No, less of an agreement and more of a riot act. When I am with him, I am the favorite. He needn’t bother to come out if he not taking me home. We are not platonic friends; that relationship will never work for us. Not even the term friends with benefits is accurate: we’re fuck buddies who make social appearances.
At the table we have drinks and Disney Princess cupcakes Lilith brought and she gives me a Ken doll that repeats whatever you say to him back. He has some preposterously anti-feminist name like “Perfect Boyfriend Ken.” She’s wrapped it in leftover Christmas wrapping paper, but she’s taped it upside down so it reads orgasmically “OH OH OH” instead of “HO HO HO”. At the conclusion of the evening Alex says good-night to Lilith and Couch Girl.
Couch Girl asks if he is heading back with her.
“No, I have to give Maria a ride.” He says. I am never quite sure if this was an unfortunate phrasing, or deliberate declaration of intent.
She looks crushed and sort of high but I remind myself he is a free agent and climb into the Ford Taurus. Alex acquired the title ages back as "King of Marquette” for the depth of his local knowledge. He puts this skill to use as he turns off the road onto a secluded snowmobile trail. I am staying with my parents and Alex’s finances have temporarily landed him in grandparents basement. Neither of us misbehaved in high school, so sneaking around feels like being delinquent. Global Warming assures there will be no interruptions from actual snow mobiles as there is no snow on this oddly warm January night. We manage stomp the “OH OH OH” wrapping paper into the wheel well during our intimate encounter under the stars where Lilith and Couch Girl saw it the next week. I learned months later that Lilith had been having at least an intellectual affair with him. The crushed wrapping paper in the wheel well really hurt her.
A few months later, back in Kalamazoo I read-aloud from my Facebook chat to Lilith.
“I guess my ex said ‘Maria and I would work,” I read “if we lived on an island and just ate pineapple and fucked all the time’.”
“Wow that’s kind of like saying you’re awesome.” My roommate Justin offers. “Who doesn’t want to live on an island and fuck all the time?”
“It’s saying it’s unrealistic though, who can live on pineapple?” I ask.
A favorite adage of Kundrea comes to mind, Einmal ist keinmal, or “once is never.” It means whatever happens only once, is as meaningless as if it hadn’t happened at all. What good is an island you can’t live on?
The road lies infinitely before them, for an hour anyway. She is on lunch. She sniffles and breathes little quivery hyperventilated breaths. She’s having a bonafide break down. Alex is not skilled in the presence of female waterworks but perfect in his plot to distract her.
“W-where are we?” She asks.
“Let me see if it's here. It wasn't for a while.” He says scanning the road.
Still unsure as to what he's looking for, they pull over next to a seemingly empty stretch of county road. She follows him out curiously. She didn't see anything worth stopping the car to investigate. He's standing by a post holding up a historical plaque.
“It's a sign,” she says lamely.
He beams and bounces at the sight of the large brass plaque.
“The highway center-line started here. Right here in the UP. My dad used to bring me here.”
This is indeed what the sign claims. It bold brassy letters it says “Highway Center Line Invented Here”. Below the heading there is a bit about this monumental addition to history by Edward N. Hines. She's happier with Alex's reaction than with the sign. He doesn't know what to do with her so he has taken her to a sign at the beginning of the highway center-line. It’s an overtly well-meaning but completely misplaced gesture.
There is Kundrea’s weightlessness here; there's no frame of reference for where they are headed. No possible meaning to devise from the moment just the pure lightness of being together in the present. A series of beautiful accidents lead them here. The accident of their meeting on a trip. The accident of an awkward one night encounter consuming a year and a half. The accident of feelings between two unalike, unavailable people. The meaning is strictly self-imposed by two self-important people who feel the accidents much have meaning. Must have weight. Must serve a purpose.
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