Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2002-04-27- 7:06 a.m.

To All The Sweethearts That Ere I Had

The trouble with drugs is that I can remember it all so clearly, but don't really have the slightest clue about when it all happened. It was more than a year and a half and less than two years ago, if that helps. I was in a place I never should have been, with people I shouldn't have known when I first met her.
Someday in the future, we'll all be giving our children exotic names. We'll stop naming our sons John and our daughters Jennifer. We'll name them all Bethany and Antoine, or spell their names Kaytee and Stephin. We'll give our children names meant to signify just how individual and special they are. Her name was Betty, the sort of forgettable name that belied the experience.
We're a generation raised on movies, on television shows and dime novels marked up to $5.99 at Barnes & Noble. We're irrational and impulsive children in this respect. Each one of us has sat down and made our decisions about fate. We all claim to disbelieve in God and in love at first sight. And then something happens, and we wonder. If there is fate, we are her fool, and if not, our solace is that we are merely following the Pied Piper of our own delusions.
For one night that I can't place in time, she was my piper.
I can't describe exactly how it happened. She was beautiful, I noticed that from the start. She was the sort of stunning that you don't think it is even possible for you to meet. And worse still, she was a model of Manhattanite chic, all high heeled boots and leather pants with one of those dangling Chanel belts that looks flawless on the mannaquin in the window but you can't possibly fathom how a person would ever go about putting one on. We made small talk at first; it was a crowded and loud room, but I remember her looking at me. She looked at me as if I was naked and worse. I felt my very skin was transparent.
And then she read my palm.
Each of us have these things, these things we believe, that we know about ourselves and do not dare to say aloud. Things I wouldn't tell my best friend, things I wouldn't tell my therapist, things I wouldn't dare write down unless I clouded them in a fiction piece. And she knew them, not simply some of them, but all. I don't believe in palmistry, in fortune telling, in hocus pocus. But it was all there. A total stranger knew me as intimately as I knew myself, perhaps even more so.
It was indescribably awful.
The movies, the television shows and pulp novels, they lead us to believe that it would be a wonderful thing to meet the person who knows you, inside and out, from the moment you meet. They tell us that kismet is a wonderful thing. The truth is far different. You need that distance, you need to keep something to yourself. It isn't a question of mystery, though to be sure no one would like to be an open book. No, the truth is that it is simply unbearable, because we all see our faults far more clearly than our virtues. Who could stand to be around any of us if they saw us the way we see ourselves?
Sitting on a red velvet couch in the rear lounge of some bar whose name I couldn't hope to remember, Betty said to me, "You can't even look at me anymore."
In need of defense, I struck back. I didn't pretend to have the skill of reading palms, but I looked at her eyes and read her anyway. From the first thing I said, I knew I had struck bone, and I didn't stop there. I vivisected her in the back of that bar. For one night, the two of us knew each other. When I was finished, I saw her brush tears out of her eyes.
For the rest of the night, it was easy. For that short time, we were now soulmates, laid bare by one another and passing back through again. We made plans to help each other, to do things by ourselves to overcome our most base fears. We talked and stayed fucked up until well past dawn, and we emerged around ten-thirty on a weekend morning. Our eyes stung like our retinas were composed of angry wasps, and we became that typical Sunday morning sight, wrapped in weekend going-out clothes with sallow faces and our eyes hidden behind sunglasses. We kissed on the sidewalk, shameless in front of joggers and early-risers, and she opened her top and slid my hands against the bare breasts beneath. We shared a cab home, exchanged numbers, and kissed goodbye when it was her time to get out.
At the end of the working week, there is always a large contingent of people who go out for a drink when the day is done. I'm not a huge fan of the practice. My personal philosophy is that I see these people for seventy hours a week, and that no matter how much I may like them, I'd rather spend my rare moments of free time with the people who I see because I choose to. But that isn't a good thing to say to your co-workers. It is reasonable, but hardly what one might describe as endearing.
So lately, I've been going. It is a pretty tight group on this project, and I'll be with it for a long time, and I want to be liked. It's pretty stupid, I know. So after we wrapped, I piled my gear into the trunk of Davey's car, and we went to FUBAR. It's on 50th Street, which on the east side is one of those neighborhoods that doesn't really have a name. Too far north to be Murray Hill, too far downtown to be the Upper East. And I'm having a beer, thinking I'll just have one and go, because I'm beat and sick of all these faces, when who comes up and says, "Jay?" but Betty.
It's been a little more than a year since I saw her last. The thing about a night like that, and this will sound like a terrible cliche, but you can't capture lightning in a bottle. I had terribly mixed feelings about ever seeing her again. What if whatever magic existed that night was only there that once, and it all got clouded by the pedestrian qualities of boy meets girl? Or, worse yet, what if it stayed like that? Who could abide that sort of perception in anyone else? So it was simply a couple of run-ins, and then she fell off the edge of my earth.
She was as lovely as I remembered, and as Manhattanite perfect too. And when I asked her how her year had been, she was filled with the shocking beginnings of what must be amazing stories. She was in an institution for four months. She was arrested! She was engaged! She was on Sex and the City! She was living with five guys and a girl! She is moving to Miami Beach on Tuesday! I can't remember the last time I felt so pedestrian. I worked over the past year. I paid the rent. I'm happy with my girlfriend. I rented some videos. If her sentences ended in exclamation points, I felt like mine should have had something far duller than a period to indicate they were done.
She still looked at me they same way; as if while she was seeing everything else happening around her, I was the only thing she was looking at. And she was just as beautiful. But it had become what I had feared. It was awful. I couldn't wait to get away, yet I lingered as if at a car wreck. If she was what my life would be like if I was less pedestrian, I'd work on being as dull as possible. That sort of kismet people write books and movies about, it isn't love, it is infatuation. Infatuation is what takes away your peripheral vision and shines a spotlight straight out. And more and more, I'm believing that it is the little things on the edges that really matter.
I spent a long time of my life that way, following my heart hither and yon. When you hear a beautiful song for the first time, when you glimpse a fantastic vista as you are passing by, your heart flutters as if on a string. It is the same with women, with people. But the love I want is the love that you keep in your back pocket. The love I want is a comfort, a nice blanket and a comfy couch on a rainy afternoon.
I took a cab home. I like my old sweethearts where they are.

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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02

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