Best Friends!
By Jason Marion
Three a.m. in a smoke filled bedroom, I stare up at the ceiling trying to read the answers to my questions in the lines of spackling. The smoke is slowly pushed out the window by a box fan that lazily hums away as it turns over and over again. As it turns out, I have more questions than answers, and the ceiling is not a reliable source. My questions are mostly involved with the girl lying next to me, and she always seemed able to sleep. Me, I’m not so lucky.
Why
is sleep such an illusive thing? I used
to be able to sleep for eight to thirteen hours. These days, I seem to just lie awake and think a lot. My mind wanders to what I want to do
tomorrow, next week, next year, the rest of my life. It is always concentrated on the future, something I have never
liked very much. I like now, it is much
easier to work with. The future has
always been something completely unreachable, like that thing on the top shelf
that you’re to lazy to get a chair to reach, you just try and stretch yourself
enough so you can reach it. It seems
very much obtainable, but never within your grasp.
I find myself sitting in her
bed, in the dark, smoking up a storm while I think and think and think. I used to have to sneak outside for a
smoke. One day, I just stopped caring
if my parents knew about my smogging or not.
It was when my car, a restored ’68 Bug with a ’67 engine and the quick
shift, broke, and I was so pissed off because I couldn’t figure out what was
wrong. I smoke to calm down anyway, and
I just lit up and called my dad to help me.
He was cool about the idea, but I think it’s just because he resembles a
chimney anyway.
The smoke seems to sift through
the darkness, and as I stare at it, I remember where I am and put it out quickly. I guess routines and habits follow their own
schedules with no consideration for situations or circumstance. For this same reason I keep lighting up in
theaters, completely forgetting where I am.
I do that a lot, forgetting where I am.
Sometimes I forget who I am.
Mostly because I am looking for a definition of me, and that is a long
and difficult search, one many people give up on early in their lives and just
fall into the common pattern of life. I
sometimes wake up in the early morning, that is when I do finally crash and
burn from exhaustion, with a scream on my lips because I’ve had a dream that I
work in a factory for eight hours a day and then go home for some dinner and
sleep, just to wake up and do it all over again. My nightmare is that I will forever live as white trash in an
apartment, trapped into a routine, and it is just like the future, just in
reach.
The girl next to me is called
Ritzy, her real name being Jennifer.
She gave up her real name in that High school trend called “rejection of
parental authority.” All generations do
it in one form or another. My parents
did it by smoking grass and doing acid, and driving for hours with their
friends. My parents once piled six of
their friends into my pops Austin-Healy for a trip down to some beach in
California somewhere, although I always forget just where. To have six people in a sports car that
holds two, maybe three, was the craziest idea they could think of, and their
parents just hated the whole idea. Just
like Ritzy’s parents hated the idea of her getting her head shaved like that
singer bitch they saw on the television.
This singer bitch was absolutely adored and worshiped by Ritzy in a time
when most girls were admiring that girl who liked to play “Truth, or Dare.”
Of course I mean Sinead and
Madonna, both of which I like, I guess, but Ritzy’s haircut was so important to
her and her ideas that she just begged her parents for it, but they refused,
being the endless source of conservatism that they were supposed to be. She cried for the evening, and then started
to think. Many girls do this when they
can’t have their way. I think it’s
their defense mechanism. We men get
mad, and start beating the shit out of everything; women stop and think how to
get around the situation. This is just
my guess, because a boy’s main hobby is trying to figure out the girls.
So, Ritzy called a friend who
was hip to her ideas and asked him to come over, so I did. I got her, shaved her head at my house, and
we had sex. As if that was my reward
for cutting her hair. It wasn’t as if I
did not enjoy it, it just seemed very methodical, as part of what she was going
to do to get her hair cut.
Sex was something we did often,
mostly because we both never got enough of it.
This time, with the haircut, seemed very much like exercise, not
sex. It was just main course, no
potatoes or strawberries, or anything to start off with, although this was in
her period of “it just doesn’t feel right to kiss you.” I guess I thought I understood what she
meant, but I never really did. Sex
without kissing is exercise.
I really love Ritzy’s shave
head, it goes well with her “tomboy” attitude that has become almost a
trademark with the alternative culture I claim to be a part of. This culture, which is all you can say it
is, is mostly centered around its music and the ideals conveyed there in. That is just a label, as everything in life
is. Labels and labels, I just feel
covered in labels. The worst one these
days would have to be “lonely”. I wear
it like a tattoo on my forehead.
Loneliness has brought me to my knees, and into Ritzy’s bedroom to spend
the night. On my birthday. Happy birthday to me.
Ritzy gave a very wonderful
night of exercise as my gift for turning twenty. I actually enjoyed tonight, and managed a climax, something rare
for me and Ritzy to share. Sex at my
own hand was very easy to reach the climax, but with a partner, it was really
hard. Or, at least, I think so, for
Ritzy has been my only sexual encounter so far. She never complained. Her
orgasm’s were plentiful, and I was always a two hour ride.
True, it has been going on for a
while, even with her other boyfriends.
I could always get sex if I wanted to, and with her, I was safe. Both emotionally, and physically, she
protected me. I guess I have always
figured we would be in love one day and we could, forever, have each other, but
more and more I have begun to feel like a spare tire. Or, rather, a spare boyfriend, and sex fiend. So I sit here and contemplate the future,
which I hate.
“What’s wrong?” I hear from that small, sleepy voice next
to me. Usually she has a voice that
could challenge anyone, or anything.
Another thing I love about her.
“I’m just going for a smoke… actually lit up in
here.” I could tell that she had caught
me pulling on my pants over the thighs I have worked hard to shape.
I was a pretty dumpy looking
fellow, until I met Ritzy; only she was Jennifer then. I wanted to look better for her on the hopes
that she would dump the abusive dick she was dating, and fall in love with
me. It didn’t work. I think the working out just help put me in
the “spare tire” category. I couldn’t
complain about that: she did take my virginity…
We were
both in the band, I playing on the rebel line of trumpeters, while she played
in the flute section. The band was the
tool of meeting between her and I.
After a while, we started to become close friends, even when I found out
she had a boyfriend, because I couldn’t stay away from her. Her abuser of the time saw me as no real threat,
and I wasn’t. To this day, nobody has
dumped their boyfriends to be mine. I
think it’s because I relate to girls better than guys.
Most guys I know talk about cars
and pussy, and lie a lot about the two.
I never really got off to that.
I know my way around a car, and could fix any problem it had at three
a.m. in the morning, and I could draw a road map of a vagina, the rest of the
body, and even draw in the most stimulating area’s to concentrate on to really
drive the girl straight through the wall and cause her to scream and moan, but
guys aren’t interested in that stuff when their fucking. Yeah, all they do is fuck; not sex. Just exercise. That’s probably what bugs me the most when Ritzy does the same
thing, just fuck. It’s like she’s trying
to satisfy one of the boys, and not me, or just mistaking me as just one of the
boys, like I’m sure she does with her boyfriends. It’s one of those things I have never been.
In band, though, I was at least her friend, and that
gained me enough closeness to satisfy me, I guess. We would share, and respond with true feelings for each
other. Once, I took her out to a movie
behind her boyfriend-of-the-moment’s back, and we had so much fun, I kept
praying that the nigh would never end.
Of course the night ended, but it was love in the purest form there is,
only I think she was afraid of it.
Doesn’t that sound crazy, but it’s the only excuse I can cope with. Lord knows I don’t want to hear the truth.
I saw it
on “the Love Boat”, at three a.m., during one of my smoke breaks at the Village
where I worked grave-yard security, and it was the truth. It was an episode where Gopher and Julie
fell in love, but for some reason it didn’t work out. None of that is important, right now, but one line in the whole
show spoke the truth of what I felt for Ritzy, and where I thought we should
be.
“How do you find such a serious, wonderful love?” Doc
asked.
“You start off with a friend!” was all Gopher had to say,
and my tiny contribution was: “Well, Shit!!”
Wasn’t that obvious?
The next
thing I feel is a hard whack on my back.
Just Ritzy pounding me out of a blank stare that helped feed the
thoughts I was just having.
“Let’s go, asshole, before you forget where you are again
and make my room smell completely like smoke.
Wouldn’t my parents just love that!”
I couldn’t help but watch as her naked body slinked to the corner and
put on her pants and boots.
Whenever
Ritzy and I go out for a smoke, it usually meant that we were going to walk
around in the woods behind her house.
These were very tame woods with a lot of paths worn there by little kids
and their BMX bikes. These woods were
very calm for this time of night. This
part of the morning, rather. I couldn’t
help but trail behind a little so I could see Ritzy in front of me. I knew I was hopelessly in love, again…
still, since the 10th grade.
“Your trailing behind, slowness!” She sort of whispered.
“Your silhouette, before the full moon… its just the most
beautiful thing I have witnessed in a long time…”
“You know just what to say to make me feel warm
inside.”
And on this she was right. I had a talent for making other people feel
good about themselves, mostly because I haven’t felt good about myself in
years. Making others feel good was
always the only reason I thought anyone hung around me.
“Are you going to go back to college this fall?” She had just graduated from High School, but
I had already spent a year in college pretending I liked it for my parents’
sake.
“I doubt it. The
scholarship is gone. If I want to go to
college, I have to pay for it, and I just don’t have the money. Besides, the time will do me good. The future is before me, beautiful, but I
don’t know what I want from it.”
“I think you know exactly what you want, you just won’t
tell me about it. You don’t tell me
your dreams anymore, like you used to.
I think it’s because you don’t dream anymore, it’s like your brain
dead. You don’t sleep, you work
graveyard shifts at a fucking retirement village pretending to be a cop, and
you smoke like there’s no cancer, or no tomorrow. What do you want, Jack?”
She was yelling at me, trying to wake me up out of the daze that had
been over me for the past four months, but all I could do was feel shocked, for
up until now I had forgotten that my name was Jack. Even forgot that I had a name.
What
could I tell her? What dreams remained
that had not been smashed in the reality that no one really gets to have what
they want? And you, my dear, are
exactly the painful proof to me that this is such a truth. What could I share with her, now? What did I have left, other than a growing
cocaine habit, and some far away dream of being a musician? I picked a nice dead log and inspected it
for small, crawling friends.
“All clear”, I thought, and had a seat. My cigarette was down to the filter, so I
discarded it, and lit a couple more, handing one to Ritzy.
“Your right, I have no idea what is in store for me in
the “future”. I wish I did. Right now, all I want to do is make sure
that you are gonna be there, with me…”
“I will always be here, you can’t escape me…” she said,
making a very threatening face that mocked her previous seriousness. “You just need to be held more.”
“Only by you, Fer-fer…” I said, calmly, and she held me
there by the creek, and helped me feel just a little bit better about
myself. Not too many answers were
solved here tonight, but in the nights to come I would look over my future, and
what she would be in it. I kept hoping
that she would finally fall in love with me.
As if I could have possibly known better.
I woke
up again, sweating, half near crying.
When I looked over, I was happy to see that I was not alone in this
bed. She was still here, by my side,
for, at least, the moment.
“Let’s get married.” I said to her, and she opened her
peepers and smiled…
“Okay…” was all she said, then went back to sleep…