All I really wanted to do was get all jacked up. Sit in the dark and stew a while. Alone. Maybe play a few games of candle lit solitaire on the front porch table, or maybe listen to some music. Something composed in a minor key would do. Smoke a few fags. Maybe climb the ladder to the roof and stare at the night, or maybe take a drunken drive to the ocean and tread the boards with the other night crawlers, watch the wooden blur go by under my feet as I walked, listening to the waves and the war cries of the amateur drunks trying to prove they could have a good time doing what they thought was cool, and failing. Miserably. Never mind... I opted, wisely, I thought, to just sit there in the old weather worn armchair on the porch, bottle in front of me, glass in hand, and listen to the traffic on the highway, what little there was this late at night, and watch the lights of the occasional traveler down my road, being happy they weren't coming to bother me, but to take the short cut behind the shopping center from the main drag through town to the strip where the bars and the hotel and the run down apartment buildings were, maybe they lived there, maybe the were headed to the last call of fifty cent draft night, maybe I didn't really give a fuck... It was the third weekend of July, and at almost a quarter past one in the morning, it was still warm, although the usual dampness from the bay shore on which the town was built was doing it's creeping through the streets and laying on everything and making it close. It laid on my bare arms and my face and my hair and made me feel like I was wearing a wet wool shirt, and I tried to rub it off my skin and under the damp, all I could feel were the shadows of you. Damn you. Just damn you. If I was going to think about you, I really needed to drink more, a lot more, lots and lots more. You didn't bear thinking of clearly right now, you were beyond that. So was I and I guessed that if I was going to do it, I'd better do it right. I stood up, opened the pitted and dusty aluminum screen door and felt my way through the dark house to the kitchen, and opened the icebox, let the light scream into my face and pried more ice out of the freezer and dropped it into my glass. I shut the door and now, blinder than ever, felt my way to the bathroom and took a leak in the pitch of the night. When I was done I felt happy I hadn't pissed on my shoes or the floor and washed my hands and splashed cold water on my face and when I was feeling around for the towel, the white-yellow slash of headlights turning into the driveway cut around the inside of the house and I stood there, face dripping, saying to myself, "oh, no. oh, no. not now, not now, fuck you..." I wiped the water from my face with my hands and wiped my hands on my shirt and ran my hand on the hallway wall back through the dark into the kitchen to get my glass and saw the orange end of your cigarette in the dark and smelled the smoke and smelled your damned perfume, that musky, herbal stuff you made yourself that smelled like what I imagined what having sex with the earth smelled like, it made me crazy and it made me want you in ways that were beyond the flesh... even now, the hint of it gave me pause, I wanted to scream at you, but I couldn't, I just couldn't. "I really don't want you here right now", I said to her faint outline in the pall, "I don't know what you're doing here, what do you want?" I watched the orange ball on the end of her smoke slowly move up to her lips, she took a drag and the dark orange glow brought out the same color of her hair, only for an instant, like an aura of some wicked, wicked angel. I heard her exhale and she whispered, not so much to me, but to the dark, "I didn't know where else to go. I wanted to be near you, I don't know why, but...", She again lit her aura with another drag and I replied to her, "fuck you. you killed me, now you want to be near me? fuck you". I slowly ran my hand across the table, found my glass of ice, sweating and cold. I picked it up, turned around and started to head back to the front porch. "If you want a drink, you know where the glasses are and you know where the ice is", and I left her in the kitchen, in the dark, right where she left me the night before, right in the same exact spot. I remember thinking quickly that it was somehow poetic but pushed that aside and turned my attention to getting back to consuming bourbon. I wanted to kick the screen door off it's hinges, but just pushed it open and let it slam behind me. "Take that", I thought. I sat back down in my chair, it was almost screaming daylight out here compared to inside the house, the streetlight that was about two hundred feet away cast more light here than I realized and that meant that I'd have to see her, if she actually came out here. I hoped not. But she did. She gently opened and closed the door, walked past me to the other side of the table, and pulled out the old wooden chair, sat down and put her glass on the table. I picked up the bottle and, out of habit, poured her a long one, and another one for myself and nestled back and waited for her to begin. I sure as hell wasn't going to start the conversation, no way in hell... I took a good shot of the iced cheap bourbon. I shook a smoke out of the pack, lit it, leaned my head back and closed my eyes...
