86 again

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The first time I met him he had run out of his house violently angry with his girlfriend. I was at the very end of Peter's bar, as far away from the craziness of the night club as possible, so I could visit with him when he had a moment while he worked. He sat 86 down next to me and ordered him a double one of those seeerious rums. I was fascinated. This man next to me was glowing with a strange light. His eyes were forest in the full moon, with flecks of light spraying gently from them as somewhere universes collided. His hair was very, very short, equal parts black and white, and he hadn't shaved in a day or so. He drank his drink, and then another, and left... having only nodded to me as Peter was introducing us, and, really, just inches from me, had not seen anything at all the whole time he was there. He might as well have been sitting atop Everest.

A couple of years later I was at Peter's again. This time for a political evening with a bunch of famous leftists. There was this tugging behind me, even though no one was near me as I stood listening to the speaker up on the stage. The tugging became more intense. It turned me around. About twenty feet away, splayed in a chair against the wall, he was seeing me with those forest moonlight fountains. Almost got the ground out from under my feet. He'd left her.

She was five years older than he was and so I guess that means she's about 61 now. She's had eyeliner and lipstick tattooed on her. She goes regularly for fruit chemical face peels. She has had a boob job and a tummy tuck and something done to her butt. She's never had a visible means of support, a way to pay for all this, beyond part time work in boutiques, but it turns out she grew dope, lots of it, and so always had the money for cosmetic surgery, fancy wheels, clothes... all the important stuff.

She never stopped trying to get him back.

The portrait of hyper-vanity, someone who acts as though everything she makes is haute cuisine, everything she buys is the epitome of chic, she is also just plain hard as nails. Her emotional development froze somewhere around age sixteen.

I think 86 went back to her after I left him. He was going to quit drinking and move in up here with me, but at the very last moment he gave up to go back to the booze, drink himself to death. No one knows if this is possible, but he was sick enough from it to make me leave, make me do the last thing I could to try to save him. But I don't think he's dead. I think he's back with her so her dope money pays for him while he's drinking himself to death.

I dreamed last night that I was in the face of this beast, this terrible excuse for a woman and my terrible excuse for an ex. I felt again the kind of pain that is so intense you can't do anything but try to burst out of your skin, but I didn't hate her, didn't want him back, didn't try to burst out of my skin.

I just felt it... sort of like being dipped slowly into a lake of lava. I just felt it.
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