A<\/span>s usual, Rita waited in the car, while I was upstairs talking to an arty redhead in a cramped hallway of a Center City apartment, swallowing the worm.\u00a0 My new friend wore paint-splattered jeans, and a splotch of cobalt blue on her neck might have been a birthmark or a bruise, or just more paint.\u00a0 This was in Philly, years ago, and when I think of those times, I think of the talking that we did, all the talking, talking and talking at parties in long hallways crammed with people, bodies squeezing past bodies, distended, limbs contorted, bodies leaning, sitting, smoking, drinking, everyone\u2019s mouth open and hungry, like one of those horrible Hieronymus Bosch paintings.<\/p>\n

But tonight, in this hallway, it\u2019s just the redhead and me.\u00a0 She\u2019s a girl whose name I will never know.\u00a0 We met just a few minutes ago in the kitchen, huddled by the stove, looking more, I\u2019m sure, like characters escaped from an Edward Hopper painting, glad to be close, glad to be talking.\u00a0 Just two minutes ago, a guy in a leather jacket — a genuine leather jacket, this before every leather jacket was simply a reference to a previous leather jacket seen in a commercial, film, or Gap ad — had come huffing up the stairs, smoking, and asked, \u201cAre you Stewart?\u201d<\/p>\n

When I nodded, he went on, \u201cThere\u2019s a blonde in an Accord parked out front and she asked me to tell Stewart to hurry up down.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hurry up down, I thought.<\/p>\n

What I didn\u2019t know at the time was that Rita\u2019s soon-to-be lover lived just two blocks away from where she sat in the idling car, but that\u2019s another story, and what I was wishing, while I stood there with the redhead, was that I hadn\u2019t called Rita to pick me up just moments before Ray Beckett had stepped into the kitchen and pulled a bottle of mezcal from under his coat like a rabbit from a hat.\u00a0 The bottle had a dead worm floating along its bottom, and Ray, enamored by this fact, had clamored on about it, telling us how it worked as an aphrodisiac, how the Aztecs used it to communicate with the gods.<\/p>\n

At the time, Rita and I lived together in an apartment in Ardmore, out on the Main Line.\u00a0 We were free of the city, finally — or so we told ourselves.\u00a0 But I had no car, and I\u2019d never wanted to leave the city.\u00a0 It was Rita who\u2019d wanted to flee the city, wanting nothing more to do with the crime-ridden neighborhood surrounding the University of Penn where we\u2019d lived for the last three years while I finishing my B.A. at Temple.\u00a0 I\u2019d agreed to the move after Rita had agreed she would pick me up in the city on those nights I was still there after all the parties had ended, or the bars had closed, and the trains had stopped running.\u00a0 This was one of those nights, late Saturday, and I thought that gave me a certain prerogative, but mostly I just missed the strangeness of the city, our life there, the nights watching TV in our underwear, knee-deep into a sixer of Lowenbrau while eating take-out Ethiopian from the Red Sea across the street.\u00a0 Often, watching the local news at night we\u2019d see yellow crime tape in front of a storefront window, a familiar window, we\u2019d think, before the subtitle on the tube announced Murder in West Philly<\/em> and we\u2019d realize the familiar window was from the deli two blocks down, so close to where we lay our heads each night, so close to where we, under the covers, traced each other\u2019s young bodies, feeling at our luck and laughing at the fact that we had found each other so easily and at such a ridiculously tender ridiculous age.<\/p>\n

There were 491 murders in the city the year before we moved.\u00a0 The same story over and over: The owner of a store pulls out a sawed-off shotgun and murders two black teenagers he has mistakenly identified as thieves or two black teenagers murder a Korean clerk for sixteen one dollar bills. \u00a0Each night before the news, I skipped across Walnut Street to the Red Sea and bought a take-out six-pack, seeking my relief.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

So we moved to Ardmore.\u00a0 Made the deal.\u00a0 Now, she was below waiting.\u00a0 I had called from the kitchen phone well over an hour ago, in a lonely moment, a dead moment, when the party was at a lull, a moment before Beckett walked through the door and pulled out that mezcal bottle from inside his trench coat like a street-corner magician.\u00a0 It was just about then that I spotted the redhead, looking at Becket with the same bemused smile pasted on my face.<\/p>\n

We had been talking in the kitchen, which overlooked the street, when I first heard the faint echo of a car horn.<\/p>\n

Rita?<\/p>\n

When the horn sounded again there was no doubt it was her, so I took the redhead\u2019s hand and guided her to the hallway.\u00a0 This was before Nirvana, before cell phones.\u00a0 Michael Stipe still had hair.\u00a0 No one but us knew of Morrissey, the Meat Puppets, Bad Brains.\u00a0 I was twenty-four.\u00a0 How cocky were you when you were twenty-four?<\/p>\n

Then the guy in the leather jacket came in and told us about the blonde in the Accord.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs that your girlfriend?\u201d the redhead asked, god bless her, this child, this girl, this young woman, this ruby princess, wherever she may be.\u00a0 I imagine her in Denver, a yoga instructor, sipping tea, trying to find her chi.\u00a0 Once at a party just like this one in yet another hallway near another door, I had told a girl I couldn\u2019t go home with her because Rita, my Rita, was waiting for me at home.\u00a0 Why Rita was always at home waiting is a mystery this story can\u2019t solve.\u00a0 She just was.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t drink; she didn\u2019t fool around, she was so serious and beautiful with imperial blue eyes.\u00a0 She wasn\u2019t interested in the foolishness that drew me in, but her body was liquid in my hands, her soft breasts and lovely puss were like epiphanies.\u00a0 I loved to lick and suck her, driving her crazy.\u00a0 She used to pull her legs together and beg me to stop.\u00a0 A virgin when I met her, a girlfriend of hers had to explain those waves she felt in her belly were an orgasm.\u00a0 This other girl at this other party, call her Heather, stroked my face when I told her about Rita waiting at home.\u00a0 She called Rita a lucky girl.\u00a0 I remember Heather well; her red lipstick and black hair.\u00a0 Her thick wool sweater couldn\u2019t hide the wonderful swell of her breasts.\u00a0 She wore a denim skirt and black nylon tights.\u00a0 She was young and pretty and she wanted me, offering herself for one night, but when I said, \u201cNo, I can\u2019t,\u201d all she said was Rita was a lucky girl.<\/p>\n

She didn\u2019t know the story, didn\u2019t know that I had already fucked someone else, only to come home and fuck Rita, two girls within an hour of each other, both young and beautiful.\u00a0 I thought I was God.\u00a0 I was an asshole, yes, but still, after Rita did eventually leave me, do you know how many times I\u2019ve thought of Heather? (To say nothing of Rita.)\u00a0 Can I say this?\u00a0 Can I explain how much all this means?\u00a0 And it\u2019s not the pleasure, it\u2019s not the sweet pain, it\u2019s the possibility, this glimpse into another world where a guy like me might be seen pointing back, guffawing; beautiful women everywhere.\u00a0 I think I was beautiful once.\u00a0 I think everyone has moments.\u00a0 And I think our alternative selves race alongside us, mocking our choices.\u00a0 It\u2019s a 100-yard dash to the finish and we don\u2019t look left or right for fear of falling farther and farther behind what we might become.<\/p>\n

That night in the hallway with the redhead, I told her, yes, that indeed it was my girlfriend waiting below.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d be pissed if someone kept me waiting that long,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t that simple, I explained.\u00a0 I told her about the promise, the deal brokered, and she asked me what I was given Rita in return for her taxi service, and I laughed and said, \u201cMy undying love, of course — to the end of my days,\u201d or some such asinine comment.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know what mattered.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know whom I loved.\u00a0 That night in the kitchen, I think I even put a hand over my heart.\u00a0 I was such an asshole, but really there are millions of guys out there like me, telling the same jokes, living that same life over and over again.\u00a0 Everyone wants to be ________. (Rita, my love, had cheekbones carved from stone, a father who left her at thirteen, and seven sisters who backed me into a kitchen corner the first night I met them, demanding to know my intentions for their sister.\u00a0 I laughed them off and told them Rita\u2019s opinion was the only one that mattered.\u00a0 I was right.\u00a0 They believed me.\u00a0 One of the sisters called me \u201cThe Poet.\u201d\u00a0 Another, whose name actually was Rita, and who dared me one night to drop a towel and jump naked into a pool, a dare I refused fearing that my dick would appear too small in the lamp light reflecting off the pool\u2019s pink-purple surface, once said to me, \u201cMy sister never forgive my father for leaving.\u00a0 She doesn\u2019t forgive.\u201d)<\/p>\n

I know this now.\u00a0 I understand.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you do?\u201d my new friend asked.\u00a0 The way I remember it she had impossible green wolf eyes, this before colored contact lens, before fake boobs, before instant replay in football, before organic food.\u00a0 Aids still a death sentence.\u00a0 The world just about ready for Kurt Cobain, but really I thank god there were no cell phones that night because certainly Rita simply would have called mine and I would have answered, of course, fhaving forgotten to turn it off, and the vibe of this conversation would have been broken, stopped short, this whole story sucked down and away into some smirking tech-savy black hole.\u00a0 I would have been in the car on my way home by now, and possibly none of this would have happened.\u00a0 Rita wouldn\u2019t have been still waiting in the car, waiting and fuming, plotting her departure from my life, our life.\u00a0 Who knew?\u00a0 Not me.\u00a0 I smirked and answered my new friend.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a writer,\u201d I said, \u201cI\u2019m trying to write about my generation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat generation?\u00a0\u00a0 We don\u2019t have a generation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cExactly.\u00a0 That\u2019s exactly it.\u00a0 Those bastards from the 60s stole it all away.\u00a0 Stole everything.\u00a0 We\u2019re still living in the freaking shadow of the hippies and how lame is that?\u00a0 That\u2019s the thing, that\u2019s what I want to write about.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut no one believes all that crap.\u00a0 Peace, love and understanding? I mean be real.\u00a0 They don\u2019t even matter anymore\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah.\u00a0 No, that\u2019s what I\u2019m saying, exactly, but I think the hippy aesthetic is coming back.\u00a0 There\u2019s going to be another Woodstock.\u00a0 I can feel it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnother Woodstock? Are you serious?\u201d<\/p>\n

We were on the verge of the great ironic age, a time when it would become impossible to simply state how you feel, to say, \u201cI love you,\u201d or\u00a0 \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong?\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m scared,\u201d or \u201cHelp me.\u201d Those words are all gone now, but they lingered in the air, mixing with the cigarette smoke.<\/p>\n

Speaking of irony: A month after this night Rita would leave me waiting alone all night in that apartment in Ardmore until the morning when she rushed in eyes wide with heat, telling me she was moving out.\u00a0 I would learn later that the man she left me for had the other guy\u2019s apartment at 19th and Chestnut.\u00a0 In all likelihood she had already started it up with this guy (at least on a flirtatious level), and, I\u2019m sure, while she waited for me she must have debated to herself the merits of leaving right then, at the peak moment of my ridiculous power, and to drive those two blocks, park her car (and why she never simply parked the Accord and came up and got me is the second mystery this story can\u2019t solve) and buzzed her new man.<\/p>\n

Now, another guy, not in a leather jacket, came up and told me the same story about the angry girl in the Accord.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t know her,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

Smirk.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re bad,\u201d my new friend said.<\/p>\n

We moved closer.\u00a0 We kissed, our one smoky kiss, before I would leave her forever, this girl leading me nowhere but to the next chapter of my life, allowing this part of my own little story to unfold as Rita sat below waiting, deciding our fate.\u00a0 And this is the truth because this is what she told me, what Rita told me that morning she came home and said she was leaving me for a man named Vicose.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou fucker, I knew I was going to do this the night you made me wait on Chestnut Street for an hour.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cForty-five minutes,\u201d I corrected her.<\/p>\n

She said this.\u00a0 I said that.\u00a0 It\u2019s the truth.\u00a0 This really happened.<\/p>\n

And I really did go then, after the kiss, I went back to the kitchen, the\u00a0 window there, opened it and leaned out like I was watching a parade, leaned out to give Rita a signal, to buy myself just a bit more time — just five more minutes, maybe one more kiss.<\/p>\n

But she was already gone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

She\u2019s a girl whose name I will never know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1957"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2162,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957\/revisions\/2162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}