As a young man, there were two women that I fell in love with, for worse rather than better. In retrospect, looking back through the years, as I listen to "Too Hot," by Kool & the Gang, which always brings back memories of love, I think I was in love not so much with the women, but more so with the idea of love, being a romantic fool. The individuals were, as it turns out, no better or worse than any other person I might pass on the street at random nor any more attractive. But the cumulative effect of a lifetime of rock-n-roll songs, television shows and movies, books and in particular Jane Austin did have an effect, and I wanted to see what all the singing was about; the women were my mistakes.
Knowing what I do know now of these women, I am glad they are not with me now, because I think they were shrews that would make life not worth living. I look with fondness, not at memories of them, execrable memories, but at the years and distance that separate us, and am more than happy to have been forgotten.
Another reason I remember them at all, besides songs from the Eighties, are stories I wrote that were never published, because like the subjects, they were execrable. Publishers said what I should have said in the first moment of acquaintance. If the DNA ain't right, no amount of effort can breathe life into the sorry lump of clay.
Here's an excerpt that's about as good as any other.
She dropped me off at my home, claiming she needed to run errands by herself. I showered and went to bed, napping four hours. After waking, I called her, and she volunteered to pick me up. I dressed again and went out to the front porch where I waited until she arrived. When she picked me up, I noticed her mood had changed from before. She appeared distracted and gave little input to my attempts at conversation. I offered to treat us to a dinner at a restaurant, which she rejected, or even to rent a hotel room, with the obvious implications, which was also rejected, though not out of any concern over sex. She popped in a tape of Jimmy Buffet and turned up the volume in order to silence me. With no particular place to go, she drove around aimlessly for the greater part of an hour through downtown and then across the bridge to the neighboring city.
Around midnight, she parked in the lot of an apartment complex. I asked her why we had stopped. Instead of replying, she kissed me with passion, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I embraced her. We frenched for what seemed like hours. Sometime in the night, we heard loud voices outside and saw the figures of four young men climbing into a pickup parked beside us. They could see nothing inside her car, because our heavy breathing had misted every square inch of every window. They drove off without comment. I could not resist chuckling, and she smiled too. Our passion had protected us.
I leaned back in my seat, exhausted, but she pulled my shirt up in order to taste me. I reached into her pants, but she pushed me back into my seat and knelt over me, unbuttoning my jeans. Suffice to say, neither of us were in a hurry. At the crucial moment, she sat up in her seat, watching with curiosity as the crisis passed.
She pointed to the time, claiming it was late, and drove to a convenience store, where we purchased sodas. She drove to the old historic district and began driving with no particular place to go. Between an old couple silence is nothing. Between new lovers, thorny questions arise in the silence. I sensed danger. I couldn’t see her face. Only streetlights broke the darkness in her car. There were no other cars on the street. There was no one walking along the sidewalks. The electronic clock in her dashboard read 02:41. We were both tired. I wanted to be in bed. This was all wrong.
She spoke in a tone conveying the gravity of what she had on her mind. “Listen. There’s something I have to tell you. I hope you don’t get mad at me when you hear it. I don’t want to hurt you. I like you a lot. It’s just that there is someone else. I knew him before I met you.”
The him was a her, and she was just dipping her toe in the ocean of heterosexuality out of Catholic guilt and to appease her parents; blah, de blah, de blah, de blah. Her deeds weren't as remarkable as me taking hundreds of precious hours to commit the memory into amateurish prose. That was the truly astounding part, the sitting down at a keyboard to write about something that was worth little more than a dismissive chuckle between hits of ganja.
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