So there we were, in the hot tub. Amy, a metrosexual Asian boy, another friend and songwriter named Shane, Crash and myself. Big Jim sat outside of the tub, all smiles. Somehow, he always managed to be immaculately happy. I was shitfaced drunk. I had decided finally that I would wait it out and see if I still felt like killing myself the next day. The absurdity and the basic stupidity of my dilemma was not lost on me. If I had felt like killing myself the next day, I knew I would probably try to put it off until the day after that, and that realization stung. "Shit or get off the pot." But I was somehow constipated, despite my inability to live my life the way I wanted it, on my own terms.
It's amazing how a nice soak in the hot tub with a few pretty girls can shift your perspective around. Before too long, my muscles were relaxed. The headaches I had suffered through for well over three years began to subside. The tension I had been carrying around in my jaw slowly melted away, and the alcohol had numbed my brain to the point at which I was only capable of focusing on the warm jets of bubbles caressing my skin and the ache in my bones. Shane was floating around in the whirlpool in his t-shirt, but I had removed mine. This is when I first began to notice that Crash had been eyeing me, eyes that seemed hungry like the wolf, but playful and mischievous.
I looked away bashfully, slipping out of sight under the water. I felt impervious to any female attention. I was in my own world, and it was one built of regrets and botched opportunities. I found myself with a mild hard on, but I ignored it until it went away. I sank under the water, immersing my entire body into its warmth. I floated there for a while, half smiling at Crash and looking away again. The tub felt like a womb.
After a while, I became drowsy and headed back to the trailer. Amy's house was in an old person's corner of Oceanside. They were numerous, as Oceanside had primarily grown to be a base for marines and a place for the elderly to retire. I walked back from the community pool and hot tub in the darkness. Palm trees surrounded me on all sides. Externally, the place could have been paradise to a boy who had lived in the rust belt midwest his whole life. Internally, all I could think about was Katherine. After I had padded through the back door, I dried myself off and laid down on my cot. I called her, and told her that I'd no longer have a need for her in my life. "I place my self worth in me," I had told her. "I was wrong for ever placing it anywhere else." I fell asleep shortly thereafter.
The next day I awoke, not just a bit hungover. Big Jim drove the metrosexual Asian boy and myself to The Dive to search for my wallet, but it was nowhere to be found. After searching for some 30 minutes time, we decided some of the underage marines who had been at the bar earlier the night before had snatched it, possibly before hopping into the back of the stretch limo with the cougar MILFs. I came home to Amy's trailer, where I sat alone and silently cursed myself for the idiocy of the night before. I played guitar. I read. Somewhere near the late afternoon, Amy and Big Jim left for a show. I stayed home. I drank a bit more, but somehow I couldn't get drunk. I had remembered my debit card number, so about an hour after I began drinking again I ordered a bit of food.
Somewhere in this time, while I was talking to a friend for moral support, my phone had spontaneously stopped working. It would no longer hold a charge, and the its screen had gone completely black. I walked back out to the patio where the pizza had been sitting on the table, and Amy's dog Goulash had knocked it off and onto the concrete below, where it was gnawing on the pie with a sort of zealous enthusiasm that made it difficult for me to be angry at him. Nonetheless, I swatted his butt with a newspaper and screamed at him to get away from my now mangled pizza, which was loaded with jalapenos. "Fantastic," I thought to myself. "I will be cleaning the dog's shit this evening."
Hours passed by. I fiddled with recording some songs on a webcam that I played on Amy's acoustic guitar. I laid on the cot and stared at the ceiling and talked politics with Amy's mother. Finally, around 11:30 in the evening, Big Jim and Amy returned with a bottle of liquor and a very inebriated Crash. I had vague memories of her eying me in the hot tub the night before, but didn't expect that the minute she walked through the door she would step within inches of my face and stare directly into my eyes, grinning like a cat that had brought home a dead bird. There was definitively no avoiding it. She was wearing a short skirt and a skin tight t-shirt that bore the image of a woman with a face like a mannequin and eyes like those of a sex doll, conveniently gagged and presumably bound. The face vaguely resembled Marilyn Monroe. Underneath of the image, the words "THE PERFECT WOMAN" were emblazoned on it in bold with glitter font....
There was a tense silence then, and a period of an unwavering reciprocal gaze. I once again felt the beginnings of an erection returning. I found myself wondering why, and then quickly decided not to think about it.
I broke the silence awkwardly by asking how the show was.
"Fantastic," Amy said. Big Jim looked at me with a tinge of disdain, and quickly left the room. Crash remained fixated on me, staring me in the eyes and refusing to unlock her gaze from mine. I made a move towards the back porch where John and Bill sat, smoking a joint in silence. Crash followed closely behind me, bottle of whiskey in hand. We sat together then, face to face. She mentioned her boyfriend was a DJ, I told her I had limited experience of it myself. She mentioned that she was a writer, and I told her that I too had begun to take journalism more seriously as a lifestyle. We eventually left the others on the back porch, and she told me a bit about herself as we sat at the kitchen table sipping Old Crow.
"...And so, I'm a camgirl. To make extra money. I really want to do stand up. I write out monologues in note books, napkins at restaurants. But uh... I mostly write observations. Everything I do is observation based. Like the observation, 'most times, if you're a man wanting to have a good conversation with a woman, you'd have better look talking to a cup of yogurt.' "
She stared back at me blankly, studying my reaction. I glanced at her t-shirt again. She was trolling me.
"Like, men can't understand the emotional cycles of women. It will never make sense to them." Her eyes sparkled.
"I don't think that men don't have emotional cycles. They have periods, you know."
"Yeah, but not like us."
"Alright, so maybe men will never understand women."
Just then, Big Jim walked in and stared at me angrily. "Speak for yourself, SEXIST."
I shrugged it off and kept talking to Crash.
I liked her. She exuded an animal magnetism I found myself attracted to within minutes of first speaking with her that night. She was fascinating. We agreed at some point, towards the early hours of the morning, to walking back to her apartment so as for her to show me some notebooks full of her work.
On the way from the trailer, she kissed me on the lips. At one point, during the walk home, I tried more assertively to kiss her deep and long. She pulled away, and began to cry. She asked me "What is your name, again?" Only then did I realize how drunk she had become. I forgot that she had drank before hanging out with us at Amy's, and had been drinking whiskey straight since the time she had first arrived. I chuckled to myself and told her. And then shit got heavy, and she told me some things that were very personal and traumatic, and became silent. I felt awkward. I could have walked back, but I didn't. I continued on to her apartment.
We mutually decided not to sleep together when she began throwing up violently sprawled out at the carpet and telling me to fuck myself. She would periodically wake up during the night and scream "fuck you", while I laid in her bed with her on the floor and me curled in a fetal position shivering. Since then, she is a good friend of mine and we can now laugh about this. At the time I was horrified.
I woke up the next morning with her curled around me in her bed, spooning. I didn't push her away but we talked nervously on superficial things to break the tension. It broke the ice a bit more when she bought me a burger and a beer for lunch and we agreed to continue to read each others' writing. Crash has since gone on to do stand up now. We still talk. Awkward situations are great for forging long lasting friendships.
