summer doesn't go anywhere if you stop and think
July 23, 2005 / 10:23 a.m.
Walking half-guiltily through the fresh, delicately constructed nests of harmless little hungry spiders that hang between the bushes lining the walk on the side of my house, sunburned arms intercepting the nests with a slight, distinct crackle that signals the fall of another unseen nest when it’s already too late to turn around and walk back in a different route. Sunburns that add up over a couple of days of pointless wanderings through the city in short-sleeves, nowhere really to go.
Laugh at it, simplify and minimize it, but it’s still a reality. The nowhere to really go part.
Earlier in the day I went to the Human services office on 39th and Powell, to apply for food stamps. Since they have been talked up to me by a friend who has since found a job. The lines were supposed to be horrendous, it was supposed to be a landfill of white trash for as far as the eye could see, but not only did I get out of there in 13 minutes with NO line, but the black lady at the front desk offered me a fresh bunch of organic cherries that the Farmer’s Market Representatives who were in there lobbying for more food stamp coverage for their market gave her before they left.
Did you know that when you’re on food stamps you have to apply to at least three places a week and attend ‘job hunting’ seminars and motivational seminars?
I could use the motivation. Threats of the return to hunger or not.
A concert in Fernhill park this evening, the band with a girl that sounds like a guy, and separately sounds, at times comically, like Elvis Costello. We listened while we ate. I mumbled sarcastically, with a full mouth, ‘Wow, she doesn’t sound like Elvis Costello at all!’
And a bit later, still annoyed: ‘I wonder if she KNOWS she sounds like Elvis Costello.’
And you, Mom, said, ‘Who?’
‘You don’t know who he is?’
A stolen smoke in the off-leash area, away from the concert, and I say ‘let’s stop here and wait’ as we re-approach the lazy Friday night ‘free concert in a park’ aficionados. Guilty feeling for contaminating the fresh air. Quickly stomped out way before the last drag, onto the hard dirt lining the base of a tree in the portion of the park where ‘Elephant’ was filmed. My mom and I go down and sit in the stretched out shade of a tree that is far off but who’s shadow doesn’t fail to reach up the side of the slope where we sit right before sunset. And we sit there and listen to the last couple of songs. The dogs tug. A cute little blonde girl, her parents at the concert, in white underwear and nothing else, with faded crayon or maybe marker writings on her body, wants to pet our dogs as we walk towards the car. The mom, who’s taking pictures of her while frantically following her around when her dad isn’t swinging her violently around in the air and then letting her go and her dropping and scuffing her knees on the grass and looking intently at them on the verge of baby tears, is pregnant and wearing a white maternity dress, very pregnant.
Bella doesn’t like little kids, little girls, but Roxy does, and lets her pet her, or pat her, while I look on and worry that the tennis ball in Roxy’s mouth will be protected with vicious teeth if necessary, when it comes down to anybody putting their hands around her mouth while a tennis ball is present. A possible thief of said ball can hide in no suit or disguise harmless enough to avoid her contempt. Cute little girl or not. Nobody gets their paws on her tennis balls. Pictures were snapped hastily, pats were given with Roxy’s ears pinned back, me still worrying, Roxy not quite so sure what to think of her, this little girl.
We walk away peacefully.
Friday night and nothing to do after this, except go to bed in the basement of an un-air-conditioned house, hoping to wake up the next day, Saturday, with some semblance of energy. Unlike a few nights ago when it was so so, heat-wise, and as a result I decided I wanted to sleep in my own bed, a chance, and I woke up at two in the morning, body literally cooking from the heat. And I strolled down to the cool basement with my covers wrapped around me like I was in a middle-eastern city, like some mummy, with my cell phone clutched in my hand that was holding up the wrapped blanket around my body, to use as a makeshift flashlight in the basement because it’s so forbidden and foreign down there and all the light bulbs are long since dead, and also to use as a clock the next morning when I wake up and reach in mind for what possible time I have woken up.
You are coming back to Portland tomorrow, though, with the corresponding promise of companionship. You are a warm body to me, a beautiful girl, someone who I don’t really know and have no idea or really no worry about what to define us as. What’s the need?
I called you on Wednesday sitting in the park blocks, and you were on a lay-over in San Jose, waiting to go down to Los Angeles, and you were buzzing, you told me, from two separate (expensive) beers older men had bought you, while also on lay-overs, when they heard it was your birthday.
It was funny, you seemed happy to hear from me when you picked up the phone (multiple potent beers or not), and this is funny because I always imagine that when people don’t call me back or fail to talk to me for a while, that they hate me or have decided they’re not to be in my orbit anymore. Never fails. Never mind busy lives, different headspaces or any of that, I always assume assume assume assume the worst. My self-esteem and all.
But you didn’t seem to care. You were jovial. And kept talking at the point when most people usually say ‘Well, I’ll let you go’ or ‘You should get back to what you were doing’.
You asked me to hang out with you the night you got back, before you hung up. Tomorrow night, that would be.
The first drunken night I spent at your house, the first night we met: Thinking how I got to be there as I laid in your bed. Probably has been more than a month ago now since that night. Laying there sweaty, about to fall asleep with your arm over my chest, some of your pubic hair grossly stuck to roof of my mouth. We were in your room, it was hot, there was no air-conditioning, there were vertical blinds closed, and the streetlights squeezed through them into your painted white room.
And then the next time, the second time, I came over, and we started having sex again when we woke up the next morning, and I noticed you were bleeding and said so, and I got up stood over you for a second and looked down, and there was a circular bloodstain on the sheet, the size of a quarter maybe, and you took the empty condom wrapper thrown on the bed and placed it neatly right on the blood stain and said ‘sorry’ and went to the bathroom. And I was dressed by the time you got back and ready to leave soon.
I thought the last few weeks: That was a weird and probably absurd, but expected, way to never see each other again… We’re still basically strangers so why not let it rest. Kind of—barely-- like spilling a beer on someone’s lap that you hardly know, or knocking heads with someone on your bikes as you’re about to ride off in opposite directions.
But you’re the Cutest Girl working in Trader Joe’s to trade smiles with, by far. And wandering around in the library, also.
Found you on Myspace later, embarrassingly enough, because I was sitting behind you and saw you log on and said to myself ‘She’s the type of girl that would be on Myspace.’ Fuck if I’m actually gonna have the guts to approach you while you’re working, in real life, and ask for your phone number or something.
And threw on my glasses, and sure enough, First Fucking Website you logged onto. Saw your screen name when you logged on, and searched for you later, and ‘added’ you, and then pretended like I had just randomly found you when I wrote you. ‘I recognize you From Trader Joe’s and the library!’
‘Hi Lyle, I definitely recognize you, too.’ And then, after a few letters you said, ‘We should get a drink’.
We’ll go to Junior’s on Sunday morning for breakfast. Take the bus there from your house after sleep.
I don’t know who you are.
Is three a lucky number? And do I even care?