Chapter 3

Carl invited me to a rock show, as he is wont to do, and I invited Maria to accompany me, as it seemed like a lovely step in the direction of forming a relationship with her. And, knowing the way that road leads to road, it seemed unlikely that I would ever return to this particular fork again. No one really likes missed opportunities. This particular opportunity also proved that I can’t navigate for shit and had no idea where we were heading, inasmuch as the show turned out to be the sort of rock show in which the music expresses, through shredded guitars that are highly distorted and gutturally roared lyrics and mildly satanic or mythic themes, all of the horror of human existence, the cruelty inherent to humanity, death, destruction, economic disparity, starvation, and the four horsemen of the apocalypse in all their manifestations.
This is a lot to ask of one song, and so the plethora of discontents tends to manifest itself as a tsunami of sonic rage, as a murky amalgam of too great a content in too little space, threads and themes interlacing themselves until all that is visible is a tangle and the audience thinks that they are participating in some sort of undirected, disembodied anger. The members of the band usually take themselves quite seriously, and will talk at great length about the purity of metal and their rebellion and the importance of Satanism in overthrowing the stale clichés with which Christianity has bound us all. They generally seem the sort of people who have read too much Nietzsche and too little else. I suppose that Nietzsche might argue that they represent the Dionysian aesthetic principle quite strongly, but he also transcended intoxication and violence as the means of human overcoming in his later works.
Practically speaking, it seems unlikely that Satanism will ever really catch on, and certainly a species of music that is beloved by a minority of the most misanthropic sort is not the best means of evangelism. This mistake is not their fault, inasmuch as they tend to have replaced a significant portion of their brain with tattoos, piercings, and youthful angst. Their libidinous laxity, general intoxication, high rate of suicide, and frenzied behavior, while wholeheartedly embracing the mythical Silenus’ statement that it is best never to have been born at all and second best to have died young, but it is safe to say that there are few classicists among us anymore, and the more pedestrian segment of the population has little use for aesthetics as a means of higher truth, and condemns that sort of behavior as foolishness and irresponsibility.
I did not expect to take a girl on a date to this sort of show, but tragically assumptions often prove to be unfounded. I had assumed that the headlining band would be the sort of critically-acclaimed, bourgeois-darling sort of ensemble with which Carl is usually associated, a band that was a single point of perfection without much temporal elongation at all in the plastically mutating landscape of trend among a demographic of a certain wealth and education. In short, I expected it to be a one-hit wonder for trendy rich kids.
This was not the case, because Carl had decided that the pigeonhole in which his producing was confined was just a wee bit too confining, and accordingly had begun to produce bands of a much different character than was his habit. Thus, a metal band, which was rapidly collecting laurels from a variety of different music reviews. Carl will never fully escape his upper middle class sensibilities, I suspect, which tend to make him care a little more about critics’ opinions than he probably should.
Carl is in many ways a slave to his upbringing, but also has the potential to be the most surprising of my roommates. Johnny will always be vulgar and always fucking strange, beautiful women. James will always be a drunk and a little bit of an idiot. Andrew will always pompously pursue political correctness. Carl, however, has a tendency to decide that he will take his life in a different direction with little or no warning, and he always seems to do so for arbitrary reasons at arbitrary times. Such was the case when he dropped out of college, an Ivy League college nonetheless, although he has never mentioned which one, after only a single semester.
I am surprised that his parents allowed him to, but knowing Carl, he probably calmly and reasonably explained to them why he was doing what he was doing and then expected them to be completely in agreement with him, a tactic which renders argument fairly ineffective. It’s hard to maintain an argument’s momentum when your opponent calmly explains his side of the story and then elucidates in smaller words and simpler terms if you continue to argue, making it clear that he thinks that the only reason for your continued disagreement is some sort of mental impediment on your part.
Carl is something of an enigma in the house, because he bears the natural social grace and equanimity of one born to privilege, avoiding Johnny’s deliberate vulgarity, Andrew’s overwrought pursuit of social sensibility, James’ general drunken laziness, and my own uncomfortable accommodations with both my proletariat heritage and newfound self-education and wealth. Carl, because he was born to wealthy parents in an island of affluence, and attended schools that, in addition to essentially guaranteeing academic excellence and the ability to attend any university in the world, carefully cultivated a sort of cultured poise and grace that can only be acquired in childhood. He is that often unmentioned capitalist nobility, the child of at least second generation wealth, whose parents were interested in fostering the wasted remnants of Victorian courtesy. So Carl, with his effortless ability to avoid vulgarity and faux pas, remains somewhat separate from the rest of us, who can only badly imitate what comes naturally to him.
His parents belong to that group of people who still fall prey to the fallacy that to be cultured is to participate in an immutable absolute, and chosen as their absolute that wretched undead edifice of manners that dictates that elbows must not be placed on the table and profanity is to be avoided in public. I have always wondered why we still gravitate towards this intricate code of conduct, preferring sterile nuances to the vibrant and dynamic process that is the constantly shifting cultural landscape. There will always be Pharisees among us, I suppose.
Rather than resuscitate the long-dead corpse of these putrid vestiges of ages past, more effort should be spent on the examination of the relationship between our actions and the culture in which we live. There is a mutual influence there, I think, because our cultural landscape is constructed from the consensus of its occupants, and although the occupants bear its indelible mark, they also have the tremendous opportunity to reshape the geography. Because it is the consensus of the many, every individual action reshapes this fabric, and the visage of a civilization is the cumulative product of the actions of its individuals. The shape of our characters is the cumulative product of every single action that we make, and so there is a certain sense in which every action, no matter how minute, must be considered a decision between good and evil, change and stagnation, and infinity of binary oppositions. We all choose whether we are Malcolm X or Gandhi or Pol Pot or Martin Luther or Martin Luther King, Jr., and the decision of the majority is to live lukewarm lives and to allow their orthodoxy to be dictated by politicians and priests and the ghosts of generations past.
I suppose that our fondness for static etiquette stems from the distance that seems to exist between our individual choices and the generally accepted ethics. Minor cruelties are far from pogroms, never mind that they are a pogrom’s progenitors. We are hesitant to attribute to ourselves the potential for greatness because we must also take responsibility for our own mediocrity. It is really responsibility that makes freedom such a terrifying thing, because to create a new face for the world is also to take responsibility for that face, and to expose ourselves to the slings and arrows of the placid rabble who have bound themselves in the adamantine chains of orthodoxy, never mind that fire is no longer innovative and eagles are eating their liver. Things left to sit too long wither and putrefy.
For reasons that are unclear to me, probably because Carl has never explained them, instead preferring conversational minimalism, Carl embraced his freedom and abandoned his socially mandated course towards comfortable wealth and professionalism, and instead spent several years fornicating with a woman who had been his English professor and from whom he developed the love for literature and exquisite thought that he has passed on to me.
On the rare occasions when I imagine the professor and the time that they spent together, I imagine a waif from whom the rounded tones of postmodern criticism, Marxism, and feminism spring in the crisp elocution of educated Queen’s English, Carl listening silently, with the pair cocooned in a Bohemian apartment that begs to be called a flat, the air thick with incense and marijuana. They speak in hushed tones, and there are peals of laughter like church bells cutting through fog on a Sunday morning, and while they lie naked together she props herself on one elbow and leans toward him, her soft Saxon belly folding over itself in three angled folds at the waist. There are hours of conversation between them, and although much of what she says follows the lines of a young academic, the scripted complaints about environmental disregard and sexism and racism, the poorly educated throngs of humanity, the importance of the humanist’s line of work, the superiority of European culture, Carl hears only her passion for what she studies, for the written word, for delicately spun tales of complex emotions, of the nuances of thought, and when their time together ends, that is what he takes with him.
But he has never said, so maybe I’m borrowing scenes from a movie and replacing the actors with people I know.
He spent the rest of his time learning to produce and then actually producing an album for some friends of his. These friends became modestly famous and critically acclaimed, and the work that Carl had done on their album was particularly notable, or so I have been informed, and by reputable authorities, nonetheless. I once found a collection of old music magazines at a barbershop I used to frequent, back before I started shaving my own head, all of which had reviews of this debut album by an unmemorable band. All of the reviews took special care to note the excellence of Carl’s work.
This was the beginning of Carl’s career as a producer of music, which has garnered him much fame and wealth. As I have previously said, Carl primarily produces bands which, in my humble opinion, need an excellent producer to compensate for lackluster lyrics and mediocre musical technique, and which generally have a microscopic life-span, inasmuch as they never quite reach the level of massive, talentless fame that perpetually lurks near the top of popular music charts, but are not excellent enough to gain a cult following, and accordingly inhabit some amorphous limbo between excellence in an artistic sense and excellence in a capitalist sense. They tend to create delightful ethereal soundscapes that connect poorly to human experience except inasmuch as they sound pretty, which I suspect is the reason for their inevitable condemnation to limbo. And sometimes they don’t even sound pretty, but are interesting more as novelties than anything else.
I once had a conversation with the frontman for a band that he was producing called the Cerulean Olfactory, and he told me that the band’s goal was to sonically reproduce famous abstract expressionist and cubist paintings. While an interesting proposition in an academic sort of way, this sort of endeavor is nevertheless unlikely to do anything besides alienate basically everyone who might have looked at their name on a concert poster and thought, “I wonder what they sound like?” Sonic reproductions of abstract paintings do not let you mourn the loss of a loved one, recover from a break-up, celebrate love, pass the time, make a drive more enjoyable, or really do anything except for stroke some part of the personality of the band members. The name for this part of their personality is their ego. Their efforts are masturbatory.
The Cerulean Olfactory were something of an aberration in Carl’s endeavors: usually he produces the sort of band that is a few layers removed from the next big thing in music. They hack away at the rough frontiers of the musical aesthetic, and at some point a band will put all of the rough pieces together to form the sort of band that is too good to ever become popular, and this band will inspire a band that renovates the cultural landscape.
Metal bands, however, almost always are largely critically ignored, but inevitably have massive cult followings. Although I cannot claim to have any definitive explanation for this phenomenon, I will nevertheless pretend. Metal bands rarely get critical acclaim because they fulfill the emotional needs of a minority of the populace, and this minority does not pour money into the economy. Thus, critics, whose function is to facilitate the consumer’s purchase of new music, ignore metal fans because metal fans have very little money to spend. The fans themselves make up for this shortcoming by just spreading the word among themselves and sidestepping the filthy capitalist middleman. The shorthand description for this process is “cult following.” Every once in a while, however, a metal band comes along that has just enough pizzazz to get critical acclaim. Or maybe metal because fashionable again periodically. Who knows? In choosing a band with both a cult following and critical acclaim, I suspect that Carl had found a comfortable middle ground in which his deeply instilled trust in institutions facilitating the transfer of money from place to place can make peace with his desire to participate in something that will echo eternally in the souls of at least a segment of humankind.
In any case, we attended the show, and a quick glance at the people waiting in the line indicated that we were going to watch a concert that probably would be ill-suited to traditional romantic practices. It would be hard to imagine, for example, attending dinner at a romantic restaurant, dressed in our Sunday best, myself in suit and tie, Maria in dress and heels, and then proceeding on to a metal show. I resigned myself to failure. Maria, however, upon realizing exactly who it was that was playing, said, “Oh, my fucking God! How do we have backstage passes to a Smoking Lunch-Ladies show? The tickets have been sold out since they went on sale. They seriously only lasted like two hours.”
It appeared that my date might go unexpectedly well.
“Oh, Carl is producing their new album. He got the tickets.”
“This is the best date ever! I’m really fucking glad that I forced my conversation on you at that coffee shop.”
“I’m happy that you’re so excited, but I don’t know if it’s really fair to say that you forced your conversation on me. As I recall, you just sat down and then I bombarded you with questions.”
“Shush. I want to pretend like my own choices are responsible for this good fortune.”
“Fair enough.”

I found myself at the peak of frenzy, trapped within the nugget of tumult that is the heart of a metal show. For whatever reason, I didn’t perceive things the way that I normally do: rather, everything came in flashes, as if there was a strobe light in my brain that chose to flash flailing limbs and blows from knees and elbows and fists and foreheads. I was generally disoriented. Not myself at all. To be completely honest, my sense of individuality seemed to leave me just a little bit every time I touched someone else, which was perpetually. We were packed like sardines in front of the stage, packed so tightly that it was necessary to throw blows just to preserve a space in which to stand, and even then, it was constantly infringed by feet which trod on toes, and also body odor.
There was a rising sense of elation, and the individuality that was threatened was not the banal sort of individuality, individuality as manifested through a few choices and a particular wardrobe and which piece of popular culture I chose to view as the most significant, but rather individuality in an ontological sense, as if my very existence as something distinct from the rest of its surroundings was threatened. It felt like I was ceasing to be a person and starting to become an indistinguishable component of a mob. It was strangely satisfying.
A very large, very tattooed man punched me in the face and shouted, “I fuckin’ love you, man!” so loudly that it could barely be heard over the cacophony of the band. I was sweating, and the pinstriped button-down that I had worn, on the assumption that this would be a more romantic setting, had ripped in several places, and no longer had any buttons.
I don’t know why I had worn the fucking thing in the first place: it’s not as thought anyone would be fooled into thinking that I was the sort of person who attended clubs in New Jersey after talking to me for more than one sentence of conversation, no matter how convincingly I dressed the part, never mind the beard and shaved head. To be honest, I was a little surprise when I found the designer jeans in my closet.
The center of a mosh pit is not a location for the faint of heart, nor for anyone who values their health and the structural integrity of their wardrobe.
The longer I spent in the frenzy, the more I could feel myself dissolving into the crowd, into an amalgam of hundreds and thousands of individual discontents that had transformed itself into a palpable sensation, an entity separate from each of us, that hung heavy in the air, titillated by its freedom from the limitations of social convention, the overwhelming imperative to carry on, to make the best of things, to endure the inherent injustice of existence, the inescapable fact that what is and what is desired are very different things.
We pushed away our cares, separated them from ourselves, and when removed from our substance, the pulsating mass seemed foreign and irrelevant. It did not matter. Only our selves as they existed in that moment mattered.
I had entered a chrysalis in which I no longer need to carry on, in which the simmering discontent of a thousand pulled punches for a thousand minor offenses boiled over onto the ambiguous stranger. Within this mob, we all hurt mutually and we spread the mutual agonies of our souls evenly in a tangible form, as if our intangible substance, whatever a soul or cogito may be, whatever our ids and our egos may be, as if this immaterial essence of every individual was lashing out at the material surrounding it, in which it is inherent, to which it is always forced to bow. It was as if Sartre’s unlimited human freedom was lashing out at Sartre’s own fallacy, that consciousness can never escape the biological mandate, can never truly define itself except in opposition to that which it is not.
It was a tangible expression of frustration caused by the fact that human freedom is forever imprisoned in the domineering edifice of humanity, with its economic and social and agricultural accoutrements. We are forever trapped by the need to eat and use a bathroom, the laws of physics and our inability to become the superheroes that we imagine ourselves to be. The voice of this frenzy shouts, screams with veins popping, red-faced and hoarse from its outrage, it shouts, “I want to be free! Freedom!”
But we are chained by the necessity of choice, and our freedom is like water in a bowl, forced from formlessness into the shape of a bowl through no fault of its own. Human freedom hates its slavery, hates the fact that it is always a bound freedom, that like Prometheus it is destined to give humanity the fire of life, the impetus to accomplish its idiomatic endeavors, but it is also constricted by tight bindings to an immovable anchor.
So freedom beats itself bloody against the limits of its existence, learns to hate these limits and it is through this hatred that it truly begins to understand itself, to discern its own shape, its own capabilities. Freedom is usually disguised as the rash caused by the knowledge of what we cannot do.
And we come together for a moment, then surge apart, in tidal chaos, a mob that forms and dissolves as each person reinterprets this ineffable collective outrage, the simmering discontent that has boiled over, and through his or her reinterpretation, changes the substances of the inconstant whole, in one of the few instances in which a moment becomes a perfect infinity, a perfect mutual acceptance that it is we as an individual who construct the fabric of the human experience, until the entire affair achieves a state of almost religious ecstasy, until the pleasure of anger becomes an aching in the bones, until the aching is lost, we rise up together in the intoxicating flood of our elation, we are drunk on our own abandon, and the yearning dissolves into a perfect moment in which everything is right in the world, all of the world’s disparities and iniquities have been remedied, if only for a few hours.
This strange union has forced the howling wolves of existence out of this venue, to prey upon the passers-by and wait for the Dionysian mob to break its trance, to return to pettily grubbing for food and rent money, to work and accommodation and compromise. In the frenzy we brushed against the slightest hint of an unconditional freedom, and though the experience might pass through us unremarked upon, we would never be the same for having brushed our lips against this strange thing.

I stepped outside for a moment to smoke a cigarette, and while standing among the wolves, with my few but overwhelming concerns beginning to nip at my heels, tentative only because of Orpheus’ song floating through the walls of the building, reminding them to fear that which can vanquish them, I noticed a flower. It was a tiny flower that had struggled through a crack in the cement, and for company it had only garbage and cigarette butts, but no other flowers, a frail and bruised thing, bedecked with a forlorn countenance.
There are flowers everywhere, but they are rarely noticed.

After the show, I rejoined Maria backstage; I was sweaty and disheveled, and she reciprocated the disarray. She had the contented aura of a cat stretching after a long nap in the sun. I imagine I looked equally content. Her hair hung lank and plastered to her temples, and her eyes shone like the sun. “This was the best date ever!” she said, her melodious voice raspy from screaming, and she leaped into my arms and kissed me.
“I’m glad that you liked it: honestly, it was a complete accident. I had no idea what sort of music was playing, much less what band.”
“Ah, serendipity.” Secretly, I felt that some larger force had arranged coincidences perfectly in my favor, as I had done very little to deliberately curry her favor. I have also found that this is usually how I woo the fairer sex as a potential boyfriend: accidentally and through no fault of my own. It would be nice to think that some divine hand was moving people around in my life to arrange true love, but this seems like a petty way for God to spend his time. I would hope that he was devoting his efforts to something a little more important than my love life, in any case.
“I guess, so. Do you want to go hang out with the band? I know that Carl was talking about needing to have a conversation with them after the show, and I think that if we play our cards right, we could probably end up hanging out with them for the rest of the night.”
“That sounds awesome! But don’t be mad if I ditch you and sleep with one of them.” This last was spoken with a grin and a giggle to indicate sarcasm, and I responded in kind.
“That is one of the prerogatives of being in a band. Far be it from me to keep them from the actual reason anyone learns to play guitar.” She laughed again, and took my hand while we walked backstage.
It was backstage that I learned something very important about all of the members of the Smoking Lunch-Ladies, not that I had known anything about them prior to the evening’s festivities. They are enormous. Their sheer physical size is overwhelming in much the same way that the size of the ocean is overwhelming the first time you see it. Not a single one of them was shorter than six feet and four inches, and they had frames that supported spectacular muscle mass, all of which was tattooed in an intricate lacework of the macabre, a sort of hieroglyphic hagiography for pagan demigods. Although I have never been in a locker room with a professional football team, I suspect that it is a similar sensation.
They were simply significantly larger than average. I suspect that the largest of them might have been able to bench press a small car. They appeared to be a grim, leather- and pentagram-clad parody of comic book superheroes, down to the oversized bulge in their collective crotch. I can only imagine what their superpowers would have been.
On stage, their size was inconspicuous, overwhelmed by their elevated position, the frenzy in which I participated, and the suspicion that these prophets of rage had been made literally larger than life by Dionysus or whomever. In person, I felt as if I had just entered a room in which four mountains were seated, drinking shots of whiskey. Carl looked especially out of place, a carefully manicured, professionally dressed man talking softly about mixing tracks and the nuances of acoustics to a man literally twice his size who was soaked in perspiration and hoarse from spending the last four hours screaming guttural lyrics about Satan or human sacrifice or whatever.
He looked like a small, well-dressed boy talking to an adult who earned his living through human sacrifice.
He noticed us enter and said, “Oh, hey guys,” then addressed the band. “Gentlemen, this is my roommate Sid, and his friend Maria. Guys, these are Jonah, Paul, Ryan, and Jake.” They gave greetings.
The one named Jonah, the largest of the four, who I think played the bass, looked at me, and said, “You want a shot, motherfucker?” There was something in his tone that made me think of myself in middle school, the epoch of my life during which I did the stupidest things the most frequently at the urging of my male peers. It was implied that to decline the shot would be to irreversibly undermine my masculinity. It was the sort of situation in which I could not honorably decline the challenge.
“I’ll fucking drink what you give me.”
The rest of the band cackled maliciously, and Jonah poured what may have been a full pint of whiskey into a glass and handed it to me. I suspect that they were an insular group, and my shredded finery had caused them to assume that I, like Carl, was a refined gentleman of the upper classes and accordingly couldn’t drink for shit. This assumption in turn led to a wry challenge in the spirit of harmless fun, presumably at my expense. If I had the drinking abilities of Carl or a preteen anorexic girl, they would spend a little time laughing at the sight of me falling down and vomiting. If I could hold my own, they would probably be a bit friendlier.
The gauntlet had been thrown down, and the stakes were low, as per usual in this sort of situation.
Although I’m sure they would have had a wonderful time laughing at my expense, I am accomplished at drinking, having started practicing in high school and continued my efforts with extreme and unceasing diligence. I am also the sort of person who will rise to a challenge, regardless of its stupidity, especially if the challenge involves drinking. Accordingly, I quaffed the whiskey, ignoring the burning bile that roiled in my stomach, the stomach’s shout that it had been injured by too great a quantity of a toxic substance.
“Ya’ll wouldn’t happen to have any beer, would you?” This last request was necessary, as the mind can only overpower the stomach’s limits for so long, and that glass of whiskey felt like it was about to eat a hole in my stomach, explode in a geyser of vomit or explosive diarrhea, or some combination of the above. As soon as I finished talking, I clenched my teeth and swallowed the vanguard of a tremendous regurgitation, routing my stomach’s contents back where they belonged. The only thing that makes a man do stupider things that male peer pressure is love for a woman, and the idiocy resulting from the former tends to be more self-destructive than that resulting from the latter.
“Fuck, man,” said Jonah, “You fucking deserve one. I’d be puking my fucking guts out if I’d done that.”
“Pussy,” I said with a saucy grin. “You should practice more. Apparently it makes perfect.”
“Fuck. How much do you fucking drink, dude?”
“Not that much anymore, but I used to drink a lot.” They started laughing.
“I’d hate to see you drinking a lot.” It is a tendency peculiar to males of a certain age and lifestyle to immediately respect anyone capable of drinking foolish quantities of alcohol. This fact has often worked to my advantage, as massive consumption takes little more than patience and a little practice to get the drunken coordination under control. In any case, with the ice broken, we began to drink heavily and socialize about nothing in particular.
As the evening wore on and became comfortably draped in the delicate gauze of intoxication, perception rendered hazy, speech and motion indistinct, oblivion creeping in along the pathways of murdered neurons and the distress of an overtaxed liver, there entered a gaggle of tittering girls who seemed to have tied their libidinous inclinations exclusively to men with the ability to play a musical instrument in front of a crowd. The lust of these girls was bound by the adamantine chains of youthful foolishness to the attributes rather than the character of a man: it was directed at the hobby or occupation of the man rather than man himself in the full bloom of his human complexity. They, like so many others, had sacrificed themselves on the altar of some idea , and there was a synonymy to all of their actions. It was as if their idiomatic mannerisms had been subsumed by this infantile imperative, this fledgling braggadocio, as if they had abandoned their selves to become hollow avatars of some archetypal entity that thirsts eternally for the attention of another archetype, the archetypal rock star, and will thirst eternally, having never tasted the water of life.
There is a certain sense in which we are all Shiva the Destroyer, and the thing that we destroy most often is our self. We take something of infinite complexity and nuance, a vibrant, dynamic life, and we whittle away at it until we exist as some sort of caricature, reflecting the shallowness with which others perceive us. The real tragedy in the case of these girls was not the fact that they had made themselves into so little, but rather that their failing is so common that it cannot be considered a grievous sin.
One of these avatars caught my eye, and I could not avoid noting her movements and tiniest gestures, her erratic orbit around the room. She was beautiful, with lush curves and an artful mane of dirty blond hair, and also a sort of infectious vivacity that made her beauty more than simply the sum of its parts, but it was not her beauty that caught my eye, for she was no more beautiful than any of the other avatars. She was certainly not more beautiful than Maria, who was softly and intermittently kissing my neck, and who had individuated herself to a greater and more attractive extent. It seemed, in my humble and biased opinion, that Maria was trying quite hard to live up to the responsibility of humanity, while this other girl seemed to have subscribed to Shakespeare’s theory that all the world’s a stage, and she could settle for simply being a cameo actor upon it. Nonetheless, I felt compelled to archive the minute nuances of her presence, and was at a loss to explain it.
This archival urge was made intelligible when she turned and saw me. “Sidney!” she exclaimed, “How have you been? I haven’t seen you in so long!” She was in fact a girl that I had known for quite some time, having been introduced through Andrew at one function or another. She was important to me in the way that a high school acquaintance is important to me, which is to say hardly at all, except inasmuch as she lent a little familiarity to the situation.
“It has been a while, hasn’t it? No, I’m doing pretty well, same old, same old. How about you? You look great.”
“Thanks. I am great. I’ve been keeping busy, I guess. I mostly just work a lot, which is probably why we haven’t run into each other in so long. So are you going to introduce me to your friend, or are you just going to keep her for yourself?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Ashley, this is Maria. Maria, Ashley.” Maria had stopped kissing my neck when Ashley noticed me, and begun to bristle like a cat that had encountered another, strange cat in an alleyway. For whatever reason, women are capable of conveying an incredible amount of emotional information to each other through very little conversation. In this particular case, the amount of conversation was utterly negligible, but the tone of Maria’s eyes seemed to be No Trespassing signs, and her body language was as welcoming to Ashley as a bacon cook-off at a Baptist church would be to a Muslim. It is likely that the all-too-common failure of intergender communication lies in the fact that men, like rocks, are insensate to the nuances of this sort of communication.
“Hi, it’s nice to meet you,” said Maria. It has always amazed me that girls can be friends at all, because they lie to each other so flagrantly and so frequently. In any case, Ashley noticed Maria’s less than warm reception, and reacted accordingly.
“Well, I’ll leave you two kids alone. You take care of Sidney, Maria. He’s a real sweetheart. Bye, Sidney! Be sure and give me a call sometime!” She threw me a conspiratorial wink, the sort that said the she knew exactly what I was up to and wished me luck, and then she returned to the fray.

I went outside to smoke a cigarette, and had an unexpected moment alone with Carl, who finished a phone call as I lit up. Moments like these are little gems, because Carl is so busy that it is hard to find much time to talk to him, but the things that he says are usually pricelessly useful.
“Thanks for these tickets, man. This was the perfect date.”
“I’m glad it worked out. This new girl seems nice.”
“Yeah, I really like her.”
“That’s good. I haven’t seen you with a girl that you actually liked in a while.”
“They are few and far between.”

Eventually, we returned to my house and had sex, an unexpected boon tagged onto the end of a surprisingly excellent date. Thank God that things had worked out, because it would have been really unfortunate if my own lack of attention to detail had caused things to fall apart with Maria. She was the sort of person that turned spending time with her into an end in itself, rather than a means to some higher end.
Maria’s limbs wrapped around me, enfolding me into herself, clutching me desperately as if she wanted to somehow unify our substances, her nails raking my back, teeth nipping my neck and shoulders, her mouth sucking voraciously to burst capillaries, leaving that small but embarrassing placard on my neck that would announce the previous evening’s activities to anyone who saw them, the sort of advertisement that would have necessitated a scarf or turtleneck were I to try and camouflage their existence. Fortunately, I don’t have a day job that requires any pretense of decorum at all, and so I would not have to camouflage anything.
On the whole, it seemed that it was fornication with an ulterior motive, laden with possessiveness, as if she were branding me and planning on surveilling my activities in case rustlers tried to make off with her cattle. A small portion of my mind wondered if this heralded mild doom to the relationship, but mostly I enjoyed her fervor and savored my stinging back.
When we had finished, we lay intertwined in a sweaty, post-coital stupor, our limbs and the bedding tangling into a lacework of simple, physical union, and Maria initiated the inevitable conversation, that inescapable epilogue to the physical act of love making. This conversation is of preeminent importance, because it is the attempt to extend the physical unification into higher realms. The sexual act is, generally speaking, little more than an instinctual urge, and although this conversation occurs after casual fornication, it is a tepid and anemic thing, lacking any force or importance, or else it becomes tragically lopsided because one party looks at the evening’s activities as being the first step to a long and happy future while the other party views them as a lucky night and nothing more.
But when it occurs within the framework of a relationship, or a potential relationship, its visage is transformed into one of vital importance, and its potency lies in the fact that it attempts to conjoin two separate instances of humanity. Physical union is simple, requiring only the correct equipment and a little motivation. The unification of two human beings in their entirety is a far more difficult feat, one which may never actually be accomplished, because it is an attempt to synthesize habits, hopes, likes and dislikes, and plethora of minutia which form the whole of a human being and which must, in a successful relationship, be forced to come to terms with the collection of minutia that is the other member of the relationship.
In any case, this conversation uses physical congress as the pivot around which to whirl separate lives, habits, hopes, dreams, aspirations, separate emotional vulnerabilities, separate rough edges into some semblance of unity. It takes advantage of a purely physical nakedness to make more comfortable a baring of souls, uses physical intimacy to press forward into a degree of emotional and intellectual intimacy that would be difficult to broach in other circumstances. It uses one giving and taking to facilitate another, more important giving and taking. The initial overtures of the conversation were essentially small talk, but Maria soon got to the point.
“Ashley seems nice. How long have you known her?” I immediately lit a cigarette.
This question was not the simple query that it seemed, but rather a long succession of queries using a particular occasion as a focal point for what was essential a temporally extended delving into the entire potentiality of the relationship. Implied in and inherent to this simple question was also the question, “Have you had sex with her?” as well as, “Will you cheat on me?” as well as “How jealous will you let me get?”
This last was in itself a much more complex question, as it was actually demanding a reciprocal accommodation of both of our emotional needs, in which she realized that she would probably be jealous for no reason from time to time, and regardless of any factual illegitimacy, her jealousy would nevertheless be necessary for her emotional health or else reflexive. I would appropriately resent this causeless jealousy, but the manner in which I handled this resentment was important. Would I be a callous to her emotional needs and ridicule this jealousy, or would I commit the equally lamentable sin of allowing myself to be walked upon like carpeting in a heavily trafficked hallway? Or would I rather accept a healthy compromise? And it covered not only the issue of jealousy, but all of the compromises necessary to successfully coexist with another person.
The question really was the trellis upon which the imagined future of our relationship grew, and my answer would change the shape of our relationship’s potentiality, until the trellis was insufficient to support the weight of her hopes, or the relationship grew into a healthy and actual vine, with perhaps a few unexpected twists and turns that added character to its lush and fruitful verdancy. Really, every single moment, ever word spoken and every choice made within a relationship is temporally elongated into the relationship’s potential future: every moment is a prophecy of the future. Every moment exists with the question, “will this be a healthy relationship?” hidden within it, begging to be asked.
Earlier in the evening, I had made the decision to turn what was essentially a casual acquaintance into an attempt to synthesize two separate entities into a single entity greater than its components, a decision which was made almost entirely on a bit of conversation and a perfect aesthetic moment. I don’t know if anyone else experiences these moments, where it seems like the entire universe has conspired to create a circumstance to profoundly and fleetingly beautiful that you cannot help but raise your opinion of whatever it is that you’re viewing at the time, a moment that encapsulates all of eternity and projects itself forward into all subsequent moments.
It seemed like the tumult of the crowd froze for a second, and in freezing it left a path for my line of sight that led directly to Maria. She was dancing on the periphery of the crowd, swaying in time to the music like a rush cradle on the Nile bearing within it the harbinger of freedom and prophecy, the key to people unfettered by the mores of their neighbors but who rather fall into a particular identity, a self defined through its covenant to something greater than any one person, to an omnipotent and omniscient love, and she was too frail to participate in the madness closer to the stage.
A smile flickered across her face, unselfconscious, unnoticed, perfect. She was shrouded in an unfolding phantasmagoria of shadow and stage lights, veiled by backlit motes, and the light caressed her.
She undulated as though returning the caress, she turned her head to one side to reveal the curve of her neck and one hand wiped sweat from her brow, and it seemed as though she expanded to take everything within her fold, as if there was nothing that was not her, as though the entirety of creation was transubstantiated within her.
Her face was composed into an icon of ethereal joy, her eyes awash with everything that I felt as I flailed wildly, and for a moment, it seemed as though she was beauty incarnate.
Then the moment passed as moments do, but it had irreversibly shaped my opinion of her. Forever after I would be able to think of her and think of perfection at the same time. Perhaps this is a frail thing from which to base a relationship, but on such trivia are the choices of men and gods made.
I lit a cigarette in response to this question that was so pregnant with implication, because while I had committed to this new endeavor, it was a fledgling choice that stumbled forward on toddling legs as yet unvindicated by experience. It is a heavy burden to accept, to attempt to accommodate someone else, to bare your breast to their knife or their lips and hope they reciprocate your sentiment. Relationships are a pain in the ass.
“I’ve known her for a few years.” She turned to face me more directly, and in the darkness, only the barest edge of the curve of her cheek and her bright eyes were clearly visible. “She kind of comes and goes with no rhyme or reason, but we run into each other from time to time. We tried dating once, but it was one of those dates where everything that possibly could go wrong did, so now we’re just friends.”
“Oh?”
“You’re jealous, aren’t you?” At this question, she withdrew from me slightly, separating physically, I think so that she would have at least the physical space to pad too strong of an emotional rebuff.
“No, I think she’s a nice girl.”
“Oh, you’re totally lying. No, it’s okay. It really was just one really, really bad date, and it was a long time ago. You don’t have anything to worry about. And anyway, I don’t have any reason to pursue any other girl when I could just date you. You’re pretty fucking awesome.”
“Are we dating?” She asked, but as she asked, she snuggled closer.
“We are if you want to. You’re more or less perfect, so…”
“Flatterer,” she said, “How do you know that I’m not just waiting to burst into jealousy and insanity as soon as I have you roped in?”
“I don’t know. But it seems worth the risk.”
She wrapped herself around me once more, and the world seemed to disappear for a while, and when we had finished, it seemed like the world was an entirely different place than it had been before.
It’s nice how women can do that to you, sometimes.