व्हेन हैरी फुक्च्केद सैली

22.4.09

Chapter 10

02/28/07

When Harry Fucked Sally

And there I am, hunching over a typewriter, snorting handfuls of Ambien, drowning in a bottle of Southern Comfort. I haven’t slept in weeks and I’m exhausted—you know—the feeling you get when you are too tired to masturbate kind of exhausted. But I find comfort at the bottom of the bottle.
I enjoy alcohol that you can drink straight because anything else seems counterproductive.

They say if you don’t sleep for more than twelve days (288 hours, 1,036,800 seconds)—then you commit a crime—you can plead insanity. It has been thirteen days, seven hours and forty-one seconds, but I feel as if I am getting saner. The days I actually sleep are the days I don't wish to wake up because there is nothing to look forward to. Sleep takes up time that could be better spent creatively.

And I have not felt comfortable in a long time; I don’t even feel complacent in my own skin, only in someone else’s. This lie that is my life is my reason for living, for going on, for not jumping off a goddamn cliff and allowing the sharp rocks to pillow my face.

I am sitting in my New York City apartment, staring at a blank page that is peeking over at an empty liquor bottle that is gazing at an ashtray full of cigarette butts.
And I tipple as if it were my job, but if you are a writer it basically is.

I find myself rhyming prose every time I'm drunk. And I am drowning in my sorrows, just flooding my organs with alcohol. Give me a lighter; I will set myself on fire, spark some sort of drive in me, kindle some sort of desire to be, to exist.

I wash my hands after every cigarette—twenty times in four hours.
I hit the bottle of SoCo against the desk after every swig—thirty-four times.
I snort each line of Ambien, Adderall, Klonopin, Xanax, Lunestra, but not Lithium, with a new straw—the box of fifteen is almost empty.
And there I am, drunk as fuck, feeling nothing.

And now it’s time to understand—
You feel so much throughout your life. You feel pain and happiness, love and heartache, bliss and despair. You feel so much that sometimes you just don’t want to feel anymore. You don’t want to feel anything. Anesthetized.
And Pink Floyd comes on.
Comfortably Numb.
And you’re thinking—
Yes! That is what I want to feel!

And you drink and you smoke and you snort and you inject, and then…well then it happens; for a brief moment, a snapshot of your life, you realize that you aren’t even a part of the world. The moment you feel nothing is the moment you disconnect yourself from reality, from emotions, from life itself. You transcend that which has bound you to this earth. That connection to life, to anything else, is gone. And you are content.
If you pour a drop of alcohol on a scorpion, it will instantly go mad and sting itself to death. Glad I’m not a scorpion.

My keyboard smells of Smirnoff so that every time I decide to type some nonsensical bullshit into my book I need a drink. And I am looking at my collection of scribbles, my clusterfuck of words, and I realize I am out of things to write. I have written about sex so much that it all seems like one big orgy of words, chaotic and frenzied, filled to the margins with four letter words and unnecessary adjectives. And the only distinctive moments are those that have truly had an effect on my life, the things that gave me perspective.
Margaret the adulteress.
Diana the virgin.
Rosa the housekeeper.
Just footnotes in my loneliness.

And I am thinking about love and Deceit and Death and Murder. How can I top that? I need to surpass it, if not for the sake of my book, then for the sake of living. The bankruptcy of my very creativity is what fuels me to instigate. I know I do not have much time left to roam this earth. And I am constantly bedeviled with this despondent disposition because I know that I am destined to write a definitive chapter in your history; I am holding the quill pen tightly between my anxious fingers, but I have yet to make a single mark on the page. If I can't make a mark with the pen, I will just have to settle for the sword.

And I realize what I have to do in order to make me feel content.
First,
Get another fifth of SoCo,
Then,
Go out and find perspective.
And there I am, in my dorm room drunk as hell, in the shade of the night, the darkness embracing my body, wrapping around my thoughts…faking it.
And there she is, riding me like a rollercoaster—up and down and up and down— allowing the night to mask her insecurities, shade her uncertainty…faking it.

And we both realize, at some explicit moment, we are just fornicating to pass the time, but never losing sight of the fact that it is so much better than feeling lonely, than feeling the truth, Pain.

My roommate never says a word about the girls I bring to the apartment, but at times I can see his shadow lurking in the hallway like an apparition, waiting, hovering, as if he is attempting to live vicariously through me. Dalí was a voyeur, but fetishism is so 2004. And despite his apparent innocence, I feel as though he is not as naïve as he lets on to be. This is not the first time I have shared a room with him.

And I am at that point in life where every cell in my body is crying for change. You know, the point where you want to change your life so drastically that you are imploring some higher being for cancer or the bubonic plague. Just to spark things up. Just to get perspective.

Now understand—
Then one day you are walking through some shitty frat party. And when you are at a party such as this, you know that every single guy there is thinking the exact same thing: 'Who is going to be sucking on my dick tonight?' But they all play the same game, they play it so goddamn hard, trying oh-so-desperately to convince the girls they actually give a sinking fuck about how amazing the new Twilight movie is or when blank and blank are getting married, or which new combined-named celebrity couple has adopted another African baby in an attempt to save it from a curable disease called Malaria or the not-so-curable AIDS—which only continues to thrive because we have failed to convince never-perishing indigenous tribes to stop fornicating with orangutans and shit. No, these guys won't waste the tissue paper. All they want to know is whether the dissolute females are drunk enough to allow their DSLs to caress the male's whiskey-dicked shafts long enough for the dudes to bust whatever load didn't make it into their Ralph Lauren boxers during the lovers' scandalous yet obviously uncoordinated dance twenty minutes prior. And when these guys don't succeed they either get so goddamn drunk they don't recall their unavailing attempts or try to play it off as if they really just wanted to meet a "cool" girl they could "chill with". And the two culprits will be friends for months—even years—but then, one fateful night, the girl"friend" will get so passionately hammered that she will invite the dude to the nearest twin size mattress—whosever it may be (God forbid it is an Aerobed)—and they will have the most unsatisfying sex of that girls' life; but the guy will consider it the best thirty seconds of his. And he will brag to all his frat brothers about how he "tore her shit up" because his frathole friends have told the same exact stories before. But while they are giving him hi-fives and cheersing to his "success", the girl will go crying to her friends about how much of a mistake it was, how upset she was after her unplanned visit to Planned Parenthood for an unexpected Hills Like White Elephants quandary and how she is swearing off alcohol forever, even though that night, lustful as hell, she will find some prince charming (most of the time, me) at the same type of party who will wash out any of the guilt that may have rested between her bed-tanned legs. And this is friendship. Don't get me wrong, I am such a malefactor, but I am calling my gender out because we are in desperate need of a new game; shit gets old. We are all a part of the new millennium culture, but we have nothing that is stagnant enough to define us. We are an atom stuck between piety and promiscuity, servitude and salaciousness, bounty and brashness, poetry and pornography. We are searching for truth, but we never question what we find. We are desperately trying to look to the future, but we settle for what is in front of us.

And everyone feels as though they need to go out to some shithole bar or frat party and establish some sort of connection with some person whose name they won't remember in the morning; and they will drink and socialize and bullshit and lie and do whatever makes their ephemeral companions more comfortable as a way to quell their insecurities; no one wants to be the one washout that sits at home with a beer in their left hand and a cigarette in their right, basking in the comfortable silence of their own thoughts. We don't want to be that loser. But the beauty is in solitude. That's the most efficient way for us to get to know who we are. Despite what we may think, there is no need to lie to ourselves when in the presence of ourselves.

And you are walking through such a party looking for someone to pass the time with, and you see her; those beautiful blue eyes haunt you from across the room. Then, Apprehension swoops in, like a vulture, to pick at your insides. And you're tripping over furniture and you're fumbling over your words. And she’s not even drunk.
And you’re thinking to yourself—
Am I ready for this?

And there you are, laughing and talking bullshit about nothing, not a goddamn thing. And you are content. You realize she is just like you in every way, afraid to feel vulnerable, afraid to be afraid. She is full of apprehension. She wants perspective. She fucks her way through life because that is all she knows. It is the only thing that numbs the pain, along with Alcohol and Drugs and Lies and Deception. Beautiful, stunning Deception. And you love the fact that she’s guarded—a tormented soul yearning to find Truth in anything other than Pain.

And there you are, lying in her bed and embracing the darkness, inhaling the night, climaxing for the first time in years, feeling genuine.
And there she is, laying on top of you and squeezing tight her insecurities, her uncertainty, climaxing for the first time in years, feeling genuine.

And your lips collide for the first time, your tongues intertwine and your mouths explode. And she’s biting your lip because she knows you like it. And you’re kissing her neck because you know she likes it. And you feel as if you haven’t met anyone real until now, as if everyone you have ever encountered was nothing more than figment of your mind's eye. But now you can see, truly see, in the stark, deplorable night and nothing seems fake, contrived. I describe it this way because I do enjoy terribly the intoxicating fragrance of a moment. We are two teardrops in a song.
Sex can have integrity, just like a human, and just as seldom.

And you love that when she drinks she laughs like Meryl Streep, as if it is a rarity. She laughs as if her eyes are clutching between their lids years of pain. Then everything shifts back and creates a fervent tension at the top of her forehead. And we are all just waiting for her to cry. But, in a way, for all of us, it is comforting.
If happiness could talk...

And you love her imperfections. You love her languid eyes, her cleft chin, her boyish smile. She has a deep, unsightly scar on her left leg, but that does not stop you from kissing her with a fervency that dissonantly weeps of beauty and despair.

Yet, you both pull back because you know exactly what is happening here—you are letting go. You are putting your guard down. You are feeling vulnerable.

The thing is, when you kiss someone it is almost as if you can see into the very bed of their being. The way they kiss, their choice of movements, their mannerisms; you can read them. You know exactly what they are feeling at that explicit moment. You can taste the pain, smell the insecurity. And you love it. And for that incalculable moment, you are God; you are looking straight into their soul and judging them for the things that are beyond their control. Their sins, their lies, their deceptions, you know it all. And that scares you, because you are thinking: what if she is looking into my soul right now, as our lips embrace, and she can see all the hideous things I have done?
The Murder, the Lies, the Deception.

She knows you are a fraud. And yet, she persists. And this persists, for days and weeks and months, until you are both staring at an empty bottle of SoCo, an ashtray full of cigarette butts and a blank screen, and you are feeling nothing, together. And Pink Floyd comes on again.
Comfortably Numb.
“Oh, my God. I love this song.”
“Me too.”

And you are both appreciating that intense rush of nothing; you are sharing it together.
And you’re thinking—
Am I in love?
And you’re kissing you partner and you know she’s thinking—
Am I in love?
And for the first time in your life you are sure of something.
But the friction between us causes friction between us.

And there you are, remaining faithful, turning down any other girl that sluts your way. And there she is, screwing any guy she can inch her quim into, feeling nothing with someone. Finally, you feel that Deception, that Despair, that Truth. Pain. And she is our Lady Macbeth, our Jewish Carmen, the steadfast, formidable protagonist in the story of our lives. And now we are the ones in the watchtower; we are the damsels in distress.

And you realize—
When I finally find a girl with whom no other female can compete, I realize that I now have to vie with the rest of the male population for her heart.
And your realize—
This is what I’ve been protecting myself from all these years.
And we realize—
I am that tattered doll searching this haystack of a world for the one needle that can help sew me back together.

But she’s scared, and you’re naïve; and she’s insecure, and you’re afraid—to love, to live. And she is covering up her insecurities with security.
My, how the roles have reversed.

Just as with the gravitational swing of civilization—with our inclinations of conviction and excess, worming our fat naked bodies towards decadence then, without giving two shards worth of thought, racing heedlessly along the lip of catastrophe while looking for the perfect way to bring us back to zero—so is the taste of love.

And at this point in my book of Life, I do not feel as if I am the protagonist, the independent, the one thing that controls and drives everything else. I feel as if I am Lincoln, as if the events in my life are now controlling me. I feel the same way I did when I caught Rosa stealing my mom’s jewelry. Revenge is a bitch. And I am trying to decipher how to regain control over my life. Regain perspective.

And then I am at some high school reunion New Years Eve Bash at some rented New York City three-bedroom penthouse hosted by some affluent freshman who graduated high school a year or two after me. A party where most of the underage attendees have meticulously constructed their sexual creativity by studying the pages of Cosmo or Men's Health, where the disco lights and smoke leak out the genuine glass windows, where every guy sees the striking of midnight and the coming of a new year as the perfect chance to baptize the tongues of the girls they have dreamed about since Sophomore year of high school; and I address each specimen by their characteristics because I cannot remember their names, and the epithets read: Winsome, Charisma, Spunky, Callous, Harpy, Faintly Compelling. And the living room looks like an orgy as douche bags' girlfriends click their heels in junction with the bass of the music activated by some plutocratic kid who spends his time impersonating DJ in his divorced mother's basement and decides to play The Monster Mash for four hours straight during the twin Halloween Party every year, and has a sister who I have been wanting to get my personality into since she acquired a heavy flow four years ago.

Elsewhere in the ominous apartment, other drinking companions disentangle from hand-woven blankets, tell stories about trips they've never been on or sexcapades they've never had, come, toot noisemakers in spite of the other occupants, smoke cigarettes they don't even enjoy the taste of, piss on the rim of the toilet without ever putting down the seat, shout obscenities to girls they'll never fuck, sing snatches of songs whose tunes they never remember yet lip-sync as if they do and only shout louder as the chorus rumbles, drink, steal butts of liquor from glasses that have been forgotten, pass out as an invite for freehand penises and four letter adjectives to pay a visit to their visage, vomit off twenty story balconies while making new years promises they'll never keep—'I'm never going to drink again', come, drop roofies into idle glasses as their greedy male friends begin to feel weak, text biddies to come to the bitchin party, drink, spill their clandestine secrets to girls who won't remember them in the morning, roll three gram blunts for anyone who is looking to escape from the monotony that vehemently wrestles the chaos in this room; yet, I do not understand how such desired disaster—which every irrepressibly discontented person is crying for—can become so mechanical.

And as I accidentally enter the only bathroom in the apartment, I notice a girl from two grades below fixing her hair and makeup non-pretentiously, almost routinely or self-consciously. She does not sense my presence and every now and then she glances at the bathroom clock hanging quietly above the toilet through the reflection from the mirror. And spying on anything through a mirror when you're under the influence is like looking at your life through a magnifying glass; everything you see seems to be a grandiose story tale, as if it were contrived by some god/author (same thing) locked up in a library room, or some artist painting a mural in a cave. And for some reason, the way she fixes her hair reminds me of Hera, my lovely. So I decide to say something Haydenesque, "I wouldn't change a thing." (Again, this doesn't work on sober, older girls—unless they're desperate.)

"Why, thank you," she says as she pats down her recently straightened brown locks. "Hayden, right?"

And this is where it ends. The night climaxes with us copulating in one of the three obnoxious apartment rooms—her, loving it, me, faking it, thinking about how she isn't my lost lover as anxious lusters obnoxiously knock on the door with the hope of using the room as a temporary brothel, as other drunkards knock on the door with the hope that it's the bathroom, as the host knocks on the door in an attempt to cockblock or futilely protect her 700-thread silk sheets. And while my faux-lover is asleep I think about Hera, how her pale face is complimented by her naturally red lip and lack of makeup, how she is properly insecure and how these condoms pertinaciously suffocate my freedom.

Now understand—
Then one day you get a call; it is your seraphic lover and she’s crying. And you feel as sympathetic as you did for those people who cried when John Lennon or Bonham or Marilyn Monroe died (even though you weren't born yet), but not as much as when Mr. Miyagi passed away. And you are trying to calm her down because she is incoherent and annoying and you don’t have time for this emotional bullshit. She tells you she is pregnant and that she wants to keep the baby; she doesn’t care if you decide to be in the child’s life or not. Is he mine? And you get offended, because you feel as though she is calling you out, questioning your manhood, your commitment to responsibility.
I’m responsible; I pull out.

And that comment just doesn’t make sense anymore. And your life comes crashing down like a comet from space, burning a hole in your artificial sky, ripping through the very fabric of your life, and exploding into a million little pieces that scatter across the surface of your existence.
Extinction.
And God powders his nose every time life gets bland.

And you are feeding her lies, telling her that everything will be all right, that you will be there to support the child...that you will give up your life so that he or she can have one. Everything your parents did for you. And she says goodbye, and hangs up.
I liked ‘Goodnight’ so much more than ‘Goodbye.’

But she doesn’t feel better because she knows you, you are the same person, and she knows you. She knows she will be lucky if the child even receives a gift from you on Christmas. Blue eyes.

Switch perspectives.
And I finally muster the strength to add her to my Excel spreadsheet: The Only Girl I Ever... And it takes me half a bottle of Southern Comfort, two and a half milligrams of Xanax and a few shakes of my dick to type the last word: Loved.

And nine months pass. Nine months of me copulating with random girls that remind me of her (but not really), constantly trying to fill voids, seal gaps, in my life and theirs. Nine months of me crying late at night, pouring my eyes out in shower stalls, in elevators, in cars and empty classrooms. Nine months of me drunk as hell at a typewriter with one sentence on a page—

I just want to feel again.

Because when it rains, it pours. And my cardboard cutout has landed on a chute.
Now, I find solace in Southern Comfort, Nietzsche, and this theory of perspectivism. I find myself reading the same line from The Will to Power over and over again.

“It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm.”

And I find Truth in perspective; and I am dying for a new one. I am dying to live, not in the sense of self-preservation, existing to exist, but rather I want control as an artist and as a human being. I don’t want to be hindered by this fear that I will get a hold of the truth too soon. I want to be strong enough, hard enough, artist enough. I want to invent rather than find.

Oddly enough, as I was reaching the precipice of pubescence, I used to think frequently about whether I would get married. Technically, marriage was just a contractual obligation mandated by the State back in the times when women were property. And marriage still exists because the terms have not changed.
But I am a slave to the earth, which has given me this beast of burden yet would rather slowly commit suicide than give me my forty acres.

So the bottles pile up next to my aged desk and I develop an unshakable cough. And I have not really slept or eaten in nine months; and at six foot one, I am down to an unhealthy one forty-seven. Skeletal and emaciated, I begin to lose my appeal, my charm—everything that had originally made me irresistible. And I feel...depressed; sleepless nights are the worst when you're sleeping alone. The moment between inebriation and annihilation becomes a very brief one for me. And I drink to how much it hurts.

Meanwhile, there is a distant memory that continues to prod at my artless brain. When I was eleven, my friends and I went to visit a palm reader; her derelict, cobweb-plagued apartment was located above the candy shop in downtown Englewood. I recall having sucked on one of those impossible-to-finish lollipops previously so my hands were sufficiently glutinous, but the irrefutably ugly woman read my palm anyway. And she apprised me I have warm, kind eyes and a charming smile (as if I did not know that already). She told me I would be loved, that people would remember my name forever. But, then, she paused for a moment, constantly rubbing one of the creases on my palm. She told me in a somber, melodramatic tone that only through failure would I succeed, that my enemies would be those closest to me, that someone who I knew as a child would capitalize on my endeavors. And at that moment I remember hating the world for the first time. I remember telling myself I would do everything in my power to prevent any of this from happening. But she continued. She told me I should bear a son who would do great things, things that would make me proud to be his father if I could only been alive to see them. Alive? I would die before my twenty-first birthday. And this is what she told me. And now, while on the brink of insanity and the precipice of depression, I tell my roommate everything about myself, every single detail. I tell him about Rosa and her daughter, my family, my friends, my deepest darkest secrets—about all the sheets of loose-leaf paper with color-coded names of people I was supposed to encounter (blue: fuck, yellow: betray, green: violate, black: dominate, pink: impregnate, red: murder). Each note coming from the same source: Uncle Al's Cabin. I tell him everything so that in case I die anon my experiences will survive. And people will remember my name forever.
And, just like Holden, I'm starting to miss everybody.

And I hand him a piece of paper with his name written in red. And, to my dismay, he shuffles through a small pile of papers on his aged desk and hands me the same. Oh, Uncle Al, you are quite the rabble-rouser. So my accomplice and I devise a plan, mapping out every detail with ballet-like precision, every particular the fruit of arduous training, elegant and poised as only a sociopath's wetdream could be. So here it is. Our lives will no longer be defined by names and colors on a page, but as a response to them.

And sometime that night I turn on the radio; Donna Lewis is singing 'I Love You Always Forever' and it reminds me of my first girlfriend (one of two), one I had at the age of eleven—when every sort of "love" was just an offspring of the affection showered upon you by your parents and was meant as a replication or a replacement for that love or lack of it—and how she meant everything to me in a superficial, almost ecclesiastical way. She was my first kiss, but my second religion; she was all I had. And I remember how after we broke up (for reasons I will never understand, because I am a man, you see.), I listened to this song, on repeat, on my Sony Discman for hours and hours, days and days; and this was the first time I ever thought about suicide, because that was 'the romantic thing' back when Shakespearean devotion was a veritable beauty and all we wanted to do was live like Romeo and Juliet in some postmodern, retro sort of way. I was a helpless romantic back then. And, despite what you may believe, I may still be today.

Then I get a call; it is four thirty in the morning and my lover is crying. And she tells me it’s a boy; he is six pounds, seven ounces. And his name is Dante.
Dante Ian Santiago—the son of a sinner. His eyes are brown.

And that is when I start to cry. My dirt brown, peasant brown eyes begin to pour. And she hears my whimpers and hangs up with a bang because she thinks that it is the best thing to do. I take out the loose-leaf paper with another name on it: Hera Montranit. The words are written in pink. And I rip the paper feverishly into a hundred little pieces—the tiniest ones putting up the most fight—and wipe the tears from my culpable eyes. I turned twenty today.
"And I threw a party in my name, but the hours crawled by and no one came..."

And I begin to write, lines and lines, sentences and paragraphs, just throwing phrases together and letting the words pile up until my work becomes one gloating, pretentious mountain of literary bullshit. And I end it with—

I feel it now, that Truth, Pain.

If happiness could talk...it wouldn't.