Boys Life

I’m gone for a week. In another city working. There is a girl throwing herself at me all week and I ignore her advances. I’m holding onto this ideal of purity. That weekend Veronica calls me in a panic. She is going to a wedding. Driving from Long Island to god knows where and back again. She is filled with anxiety about the trip, and the wedding, and everything. I have down time and I talk her through every step of the way, every freak out and ferry crossing. Finally. Purpose. And something minuscule has happened and we’ve edged closer together.

After I’m back we are fooling around in her bed. Rubbing the excitement from her cunt onto me during our first date was the bait and switch of the summer. That day I figured second date, third at most, and we’d be having the sex everyone dreams about. Here we are thirty or so odd days later, awkward on thousands of miniature cotton roses. I take my fingers from inside her, and I take them to her mouth. My index finger hits her two front teeth. Looking down on pursed lips and my offering is not only rejected it’s disgusted. At the time I was just dumbfounded. Amazed at the rejection of what I considered rudimentary foreplay. Also amazed that I just kept going, that I didn’t stop and say, OK, this is not the right person for you; shut down the operation and go home. Stop blasting this mountain side, there is no fucking gold here. I kept going, kept on pushing for us. This haphazardly conceptualized us, ground broken without blueprints. Me, wide eyed architect of chaos. 

I’m starting to go insane. The up and down is too much for me. One night she is right there the whole way, the next in her own universe where I don’t exist. I consult friends. The underlying tone in all their voices: what the fuck are you doing? They give me good advice and support, but they reveal my insanity with darting eyes and subtle tones. I make up my mind. Ultimatum time. I am not the guy that takes this bullshit. Chips fall where they may, I won’t be treated like this. 

September 2004. Blue skies have turned grey and drizzle is turning grey streets black and fall is around the corner. Smoking weather. Hoodie weather. I’m not even thinking about Fashion week, all I’m thinking about is what she’ll do when I put our fate in her hands. We walk down the street from her apartment. Finding a comfortable stoop, we stop and sit. I light up and stare at the sidewalk. I focus on a black patch of prehistoric gum, not Veronica, and begin. I tell her I think she’s fantastic. That I want her to see me and only me. That we might have a chance for something. That as much as I like her I won’t be treated haphazardly. That there has been too much push and pull, and I don’t know where we stand from one second to the next. I pour Marlboro smoke down my throat as quickly as I can, and up from the other side comes my plea. She thinks I am special too but it’s too much too soon. She is overwhelmed. She’s just ended something recently. She’s not ready. She wants to work on her acting, to be single, have fluidity. I don’t cry, but I do smoke. I tell her I can’t be part time, commit to me full time, become my girlfriend, or I’ll be moving on. Scraps are not a meal and I’m starving. Lonely. Self destructing. Again she says she’s not ready. She can’t.  

I’m walking home on St Marks and it’s over. I delete her number from my phone and there is a tiny shift in my world. I’m back. Battered, sure, happens to the best of us, but when that number disappears I feel myself begin to return. I call one of my female friends, and when I tell her what’s happened I feel it in my words and I know it’s real, that I’m free. I think about lining up the girl from Black and White, and about Suicide Girls, and Joan Jett haircuts, and, the one I keep seeing with the three lines buzzed into the side of her head, and that I saw her at every cool party and she was everything I ever wanted. I think about everything Veronica was not, and I’m fucking back. 

Three days later Veronica has sought me out on a Saturday night. She is wearing a hideous tank top. I mean it’s basically fucking bedazzled and an unsightly shade of violet. She looks like a girl I’d see leaving the frozen yogurt store on 31st and 3rd. My boy from Jersey City and I would skate the low ledges there, trying to figure out the intricacies of the back tail. And these type of broads would be everywhere; cute girls with shitty gear. Gear that said nothing to us. No hints of music taste or scene associations. Sweats and Uggs and pony tails through the backs of ‘B’ hats. Maybe they are happier without the baggage of superficiality, of being cool, but I didn’t, and still don’t care. I’m not looking for happy, I’m looking for her. And Veronica suddenly looks like one of them. For a second, I think, this is a bad idea. I think about the fingers hitting her teeth and the night after Joe’s.  

I’ve not even had sex with this girl. Lets be honest she was a fucking nightmare. Just leave it be.  

“I deleted your number give it to me again.” 

“You did what!” 

“I told you I meant what I said that day, I deleted your number on the walk home. Don’t do this to me if you’re not serious. Don’t be here looking for me if you’re not down for us.” 

“I was out with friends and I was thinking about you, and everything, and I just could not imagine my life without you in it.” 

She gives me the number, we kiss, and it’s done. 

Epilogue 

Looking back I have nothing bad to say about Veronica and I have nothing bad to say about our experience together. We never did build on the spit of land between our oceans. We plodded around looking for the rich soil of common ground, and we finally found some. It was oddly shaped, not really suited for a lifetime, but we tried to settle anyway. We’d argue about the blueprints constantly, what went where, brick or stone or wood or steel. And nothing much got built. I’d piss on the carpet occasionally, conjuring the puppy from the night we met, and I’d be scolded and building would halt. We’d wait for things to dry and start again; fledgling contractors making it up as we went along. And I retreated into work now that I had someone to call my own, because, well, she wasn’t enough. I needed success now that I had her, and then I got that and that wasn’t enough and still nothing got built. Eventually we drifted apart and wasted a year pretending that we still had blueprints, plans, materials. We didn’t have anything. We broke up over the phone after four years. I was sitting in my friend’s store, gave my boys a little shush, and we split. Afterwards I was ecstatic, this was the happiest day I’d known in ages. 

BL